A beautiful, but unfaithful remake.

[Jere]

In 80s, when people were cutting their teeth on this game, and learning how graph paper was their friend, a core component that made this game playable was the ability to not accept awful RNG.

Everyone who grew up on this game had backups of their backup saves. People spent *hours* just rolling one character, over and over, until they got some decent stats. No one played (and won) this game in an Iron man setting. The current version of the game *punishes* players with back to back to back 1 hp level ups. No control over the save states, means no ability to undo a series of "bad luck." Which is something we did, back in 80s. I'm sure the Devs who grew up on this game did the exact same thing -- get +1 hp level ups on all of your characters? No. Na-uh.. RELOAD THAT.

Is this cheating? Yes. Absolutely. But to ignore the fact that EVERYONE who continued to play Wizardry OG used backups to prevent awful RNG roles from killing their progression, well, it makes this unfaithful.


This game is beautiful. The music is solid. The interface is great. VIM could use more explanation in the console versions. RNG for the most important stat in the game -- HPs, you need to either allow people to have manual saves, like Wizardry had, or add a quality of life option to boost / smooth HP gains. In it's current release, I cannot recommend this game to any fan of ye olde dungeon crawlers.

There are too many other things you can do, that are FUN, than get yer teeth kicked in by continuously bad RNG HP gains.

[Keidot]

I agree on the +1 hp on level up disaster. I wish there was an option for hp gain be dependant on constitution and class.

[Army of Optimists]

You can go to the main menu and copy your save into another slot if you want to back it up. It's literally built into the game.

The +1 HP thing is actually a benefit. The way HP growth works is that every level your total Hit Dice are rolled. If you beat your current total HP, that becomes your new HP. If you don't, you get +1 HP as a consolation. That's why you'll can get a couple +1 HP levels, then suddenly gain 20-30 HP all at once. You also get +1 HP per die for every point of VIT above 15 and that's included in the calculation.

ex. You have a Fighter. Fighters have a 1d10 hit die. A level six Fighter with 40 HP and 16 VIT levels up. The game rolls his new hit die pool, 7d10. The roll comes out to 37, plus 7 for the VIT bonus, which equals 44. This beats his current 40 HP, so he gains +4 HP this level.

Chances are, if you're getting a "bad RNG" string of +1s, it just means you had an early high roll. It's exceptionally unlikely that you'll hit that many below average rolls, but that's also part of old-school gaming. It doesn't take that long to get to level 6 or so - if a character turns out to be a dud, just go recruit another one.

This is also why class changed characters tend to get nothing but +1s. You keep your old HP total, so it's very unlikely to beat it until you're near your old level again. Unless you've changed from Thief or Mage to something like Fighter.

[Abscondrel]

Originally posted by Jere:

No one played (and won) this game in an Iron man setting.

false. not only did i beat this game repeatedly with no back-up saves. so did my friends. we also did something called taking our lumps. losing parties. failed characters. days of time lost. perhaps even more relevant, i'm doing it again. i don't use the modern weakness toggles. it does feel easier this time. i think the danger has been nerfed a little.

[Wizardsmana]

Originally posted by abscondrel:

Originally posted by Jere:

No one played (and won) this game in an Iron man setting.

false. not only did i beat this game repeatedly with no back-up saves. so did my friends. we also did something called taking our lumps. losing parties. failed characters. days of time lost. perhaps even more relevant, i'm doing it again. i don't use the modern weakness toggles. it does feel easier this time. i think the danger has been nerfed a little.

Yep, ditto on that. Back then I had no backup copies and just took all the bad and tried to make the best of it. I lost some of my best parties and characters to teleportation into solid rock, being lost to failed resurrections, being slaughtered and lost forever in the maze, dying of old age after too many class changes, getting ambushed by lvl 10 mages and frozen to death (multiple madalto) before they knew what hit them, etc. Needless to say, when I finally defeated Werdna, none of the victors were from my original party. I had many lumps back then from this game but I was a lot more appreciative of the victories and tougher for for it.
I still play all my games hardcore style! :)

[Ninth Hour]

For my part, I "took my lumps" but never got anywhere when I was 10. Not having learned my lesson, I went on to play Wizardry 3 and took the same beating, after which I shelved both games and went on to play Bards Tale, the Ultima series, and Wasteland (which I still think is the best of those classic games, next to Ultima 4, 5, and 6).

It wasn't until 37 years later that I finally "beat" the first Wizardry and that wasn't even "legitimately" but through the easy save-scumming afforded by emulator.

This remaster (I will not call it a remake because of how little it actually changes) makes save scumming more time consuming and does force me into a level of vigilance appropriate for the classic game. I actually run from battles now. So mission accomplished, I guess.

Still, I do wish that certain cruel and nonsensical features, like losing all your stats on class change, had been altered, so that one is actually encouraged to engage with the so-called "elite" classes.

[Caz]

Originally posted by Jere:

In 80s, when people were cutting their teeth on this game, and learning how graph paper was their friend, a core component that made this game playable was the ability to not accept awful RNG.

Everyone who grew up on this game had backups of their backup saves. People spent *hours* just rolling one character, over and over, until they got some decent stats. No one played (and won) this game in an Iron man setting. The current version of the game *punishes* players with back to back to back 1 hp level ups. No control over the save states, means no ability to undo a series of "bad luck." Which is something we did, back in 80s. I'm sure the Devs who grew up on this game did the exact same thing -- get +1 hp level ups on all of your characters? No. Na-uh.. RELOAD THAT.

Is this cheating? Yes. Absolutely. But to ignore the fact that EVERYONE who continued to play Wizardry OG used backups to prevent awful RNG roles from killing their progression, well, it makes this unfaithful.

I wouldn't call it cheating. Like XCOM, that 90% chance to hit that happens over and over across all the maps...? Nah, save scumming exists for BS like that. I could accept a miss on a 90% 1 out of 10 times, but when I have five characters all miss with a 90% chance to hit... That's not acceptable. I fully understand that RNG can roll like that legitimately, but it's a well known thing that the formulae in XCOM favors missing shots (even tho mathematically it actually doesn't).
To put it another way, if the game's systems are designed in a way that makes the player feel like they're getting shafted, over and over again, then it's not cheating for the players to take steps to counter what is clearly bad game design.

[Army of Optimists]

It's really not a "well-known thing" that XCOM favors missing shots. The newer XCOM games actually cheat in the player's favor on most difficulties, rolling two times and taking the more favorable result. It's just that our brains remember negatives far more than positives, so we forget all the times we made those 90% shots and fixate on the few times we missed them.

There's a whole meandering discussion about RNG's importance to game design. I'd counter that it's often required to make things interesting, though. Without the RNG, this whole game basically falls apart and becomes a very dull number-cruncher. The random setbacks and desperate retreats from the dungeon are what you're here for. There's no deep story or interesting builds to play with. There's not even a considerable amount of strategy, if we're being honest. Fighters attack and the casters stand by until something threatening enough pops up that you need to burn spells to deal with it.

If nothing ever went wrong, you'd just grind and head to the end in an uneventful steamroll.

[Remnar]

I think if you bother to remake a game to current standards, you don't replicate bad design. Sounds like the stat system should have been redesigned to something enjoyable, instead of repeating something so annoying that people cheated to get around it.

[Crusadertsar]

Originally posted by Remnar:

I think if you bother to remake a game to current standards, you don't replicate bad design. Sounds like the stat system should have been redesigned to something enjoyable, instead of repeating something so annoying that people cheated to get around it.

Thats what happens when you take a game from 1980s and slap better graphics on it but keeping all the rest "faithful". There is a good reason why games have changed and gotten better in the last 40 years. They build upon and improved on the bad design of older games. Sure I love some retro games. Some have aged very well like Baldur's Gate 2 and Wizardry 8 but others just didn't.

[Robin_WH]

Yes, I think that a little of redesign should be considered at least as an alternative switchable option.
For me, I wish to see a level 1 town portal spell, to leave dungeon quickly when your luck is bad.

[Abscondrel]

games have changed and evolved with the marketing plan of creating more gamers. it worked. now there are more people playing games. games are designed to be inclusive and capitulate to weak-mindedness. now the weak-minded believe that makes a game better. if you want easy go play Mario kArts. stop trying to make a real game turn itself into a handicapped parking space for you. every complaint about the difficulty is a declaration of pudgy, lazy, infected, WEAKNESS. be weak silently. avoid the embarrassment.

[Minneyar]

Originally posted by abscondrel:

games are designed to be inclusive and capitulate to weak-mindedness. now the weak-minded believe that makes a game better. if you want easy go play Mario kArts.

Dude. Being willing to save scum does not make you a better person than anybody else. This is just sad.

[Abscondrel]

Originally posted by Minneyar:

Originally posted by abscondrel:

games are designed to be inclusive and capitulate to weak-mindedness. now the weak-minded believe that makes a game better. if you want easy go play Mario kArts.

Dude. Being willing to save scum does not make you a better person than anybody else. This is just sad.

a live stream of wizardry success is what is missing here. it would be long and boring but it would stop the idea that winning requires loading saves. i'm not "better" and i don't need saves. whats sad is that weakness is louder than strength.

[Doom monkey]

as a kid, were limited on our backups by how many floppy disks we had (which was usually one we'd scavenged from some other game). I made a mistake in my current run, and my main (only good) party is on lvl 9 pretty far from the teleporter (we got surprised by a group of wizards and killed before we could act). My first rescue mission made it two doors away. My next one made it one away before they decided to try and save the first one.

by then one of my characters had been turned to ash, but I couldn't drop them to pick up someone else, and we died right after that to another encounter.

If I want to save the original party, i think I basically need to get a party that's as good as they were or better, or at least get a mage that can teleport out.

The game is really great. The nostalgia is real. anyone else just have muscle memory of how to navigate all the dark areas? But not being able to go back after a TPK is just absolutely brutal. Sure we cheated, but we were kids having fun. As an adult, am I having fun? I will be once I finally get Smashy the Gnome fighter back!

[Doom monkey]

I just figured out that you can easily "copy your floppy" you can copy a save game into another slot. So you can definitely bank your progress, although it's not obvious that you can do this, I sort of appreciate the humor in replicating the need to copy a floppy disk.