It seems as though game season is back on the menu. Next week, we’ll be seeing Diablo 4’s Season 7 (January 21st at 10am PST) as well as Diablo 3’s Season 34 on Jan 24th (Friday 5pm PST). While I am looking forward to Diablo 4’s Season 7, I probably won’t be doing Diablo 3’s Season 34 until probably much later (if at all). I pretty much lost interest at one point during Season 33 because of how awful the Challenge Rifts had been. Ultimately, I simply gave up and decided to pursue something else. Since then, I’ve been playing mostly Masters of Orion 2 and a sprinkling of Baldur’s Gate 2. Ultimately though, I’ve become a bit bored just because neither have really sparked much more than the occasionally time wasting day. However, today I finally got what I’ve been wanting off of GoG which was several key discounted games including Wizardry 6/7, Baldur’s Gate I: Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition and Wasteland.
The main game I’ve been itching to-replay for sometime now has been Wizardry VI. I’ve written about it a while back and talked about the systems that I thought were good. However, in playing this on my Mac, I have come across quite a few frustrations which are strictly isolated to my own opinions. First let me talk about the party:
- Male Felpurr Samurai
- Female Elf Monk
- Male Dracon Ninja
- Female Human Valkyrie
- Female Elf Bishop
- Female Elf Bishop
Creating this party was a painstaking process. I said it before how the character creation process has to be one of the most tedious old school style things I’ve ever experienced. I honestly don’t know why anyone would have thought the method used for creating just one character was a good idea because it’s an extremely roundabout way of generating a character. The way it works is:
- Create a character (using a mouse to choose the option)
- Naming the character
- Choosing the race
- Choose the gender, which then assigns the base bonus points to add/distribute to your race’s base attributes
- Choosing a class based on whether or not you’ve managed to hit certain minimum attribute values
- Getting points to assign to a skill
- Then selecting whether or not you want to save the character
There’s no easy way around any of this and the bulk of the problem is due to two poorly conceived random number generations that occur for a character’s bonus points and later the remaining skills. While it is possible to theoretically roll any class, the amount of time it takes to get a reasonable bonus is purely infuriating. There’s no logic to the way this number is produced outside of a bad randseed with no bad luck protection built in.
On top of that, you get a limited number of bonus points to assign to whatever skills you want. The actual UI is slow when you use your cursor keys to put points into a skill as an obnoxious bell tone occurs each time. And if you press the key too many times, the command bus merely continues to try and add points despite reaching a maximum.
None of this would be an issue if there was a simple method to just toggle back and forth between the gender choice which initiates the random number bonus pick. Or better yet, if you simply could pick the class you wanted first then decide whether you’d want to keep it based on the remaining bonus attribute points. This alone provides such a high unnecessary barrier to entry for a game that’s unmerciful from the moment you step into the dungeon.
Now, I ended up creating an Elf Monk, which seems odd but it happened out of serendipity. Originally, I attempted to generate a Mook Monk because I forgot which race I originally picked in my old game (I think my monk was a Rawulf). I managed to secure a 17 point bonus that didn’t allow me to make a Monk and that drove me off the deep end. Then while I was rolling a Bishop, I saw that I had a similar high bonus attribute amount that allowed my Elf to become a Monk. Figuring that there was no good reason to drive myself nuttier, I kept it. But this was merely a major lesson in futility and horrible UI/UX.
With my new party, I ventured forth and am still within the castle. Part of the issue I realized is that you’re so weak, you need to spend significant time grinding out shitty mobs to get a few levels before actually doing the main content. Worse yet, you have the tedious issue of how levels are handled where once again your power gains are almost all randomized. To fully accept just how fucked you are in this game, you’re encouraged to save frequently, especially after each combat. This is highly recommended early on because of how vulnerable you start off at and almost all encounters in this game are random and can fuck you.
More than that though, you save your game to hopefully prevent a bad roll from happening upon leveling. This part is exceptionally annoying because when you have multiple characters leveling at the same time, a few might hit the right combo of attribute increases as well as getting a good number of new skill points to allocate. So you have to decide whether to save after a fight, especially if you’ve received a decent item or ditch the level(s) in the hopes of a better encounter and leveling experience. For myself, I felt that early on, getting the number of points would seem important but you’re too fragile at that stage. For instance, you might overcome a brutal encounter, receive a fair amount of gold and even items (especially precious keys!) but the level you get might seem disappointing in terms of the stat gains. Some min/maxers might keep reloading their saved games until they receive the precise rolls they want but I think it’s just better to move forward. Items like keys are hard to come by so I’d prefer to take the lower rolls after a victory level rather than give up the keys at that stage.
Speaking of rolls, I forgot just how RNG dependent this game is. It’s brutally bad in a large number of ways. Besides the god awful character creation process, leveling and encounters, there’s a ridiculous number of locked doors early on the first level. Supposedly, you’re expected to save before trying your hand with unlocking them but you can jam them if you don’t manage to pick them. As a result, there’s a chance you can effectively halt the progress on your game right from the start if you have no idea what to do, which is incredibly discouraging. No wonder this idiot company went out of business in the early 2000s!
I’m not sure just how long I’ll keep playing this game. I do enjoy aspects of it but it’s quite painful especially running on Dosbox where optimally you use fullscreen which prevents you from employing other windows unless you tab out (where you need to option + return to shrink it). Right now like Masters of Orion 2, I’m playing this game on my Mac because it would be an absolute waste to play it on my main gaming machine. The problem is finding any utilities. Since this was a Dos based game, the utilities made by fans over the years are designed to run on a PC. I’m sure there is a way to use them on a Mac but it feels pointless.
Also, I found a way one can hand edit their character files. I still haven’t figured out where those damn files are on my Mac but the point here is that you can modify stats, etc. through some hexadecimal changes. Honestly, I think it’s far too much of a hassle unless you get into a situation where something gets borked beyond belief.
Unfortunately, the game simply does not have much support anymore. I have seen some later patches that fix certain bugs but this is one of those games where whatever you get is what you have to deal with. I really wish that at the very least the character generation process was better. I know one of the editors/patches helps curb the low bonus rolls but I think it’s mostly used for the PC version. I would love to see some Mac support since you can play this game through Dosbox on the Mac.
We’ll see how far I’ll continue though. The grinding parts of the game aren’t bad themselves and when you do level, it is very satisfying. But the dopamine rushes feel far and fewer between compared to most modern games like Diablo 4. Also, I wish that you could find more keys or that the locked doors and traps were scaled based on your progress in this game.
One comment about the GoG version is that it is bundled with Wizardry 7. To be frank, I never cared for that version of the game. At one point, I just gave up and didn’t bother to finish it. It felt too goofy and tried to do too much world building on top of having all the previous game’s frustrations while compounding more of its own. Transferring your saved game characters from Wizardy 6 is such a letdown too because most of your power evaporates to make the new game feel “balanced.” From memory, you start off at level 5 from your saved game (that is if you’ve gotten to the point I did which was at a high level) and many items are removed. All that work you put into the previous game just vanishes. Why even bother at that point? Why not just tell players to start from scratch?
What’s funny is that there’s an interview with the lead designer. He comes off like a typical arrogant geek prick you’d find back in the day, full of hubris and not realizing that his shit stinks. Obviously, he designed the game for himself rather than make something for other people to really enjoy because it’s really all him. And while there are some interesting concepts like the spell pool related to the school, swapping classes, the various trainable skills, etc. in the end there really wasn’t a lot of groundbreaking feats here compared to say Ultima at around the time. Maybe something like the odd sounds that you get from an old school pre-Soundblaster enabled PC were interesting. But the game engine itself has aged quite poorly and I think a lot of it is the limitations on the UX and expectations for a hardcore type of mindset without respecting the player’s time. Like if you made it to a point but missed out on a quest item because of lack of inventory space or whatever, what can you do? Again, the game was made pre-internet so if you discovered a game breaking bug that prevented progress that was it.
While the Wizardry series in general can be considered part of the old school CRPG classics, they never really felt revolutionary on their own. I kinda feel they were more niche gaming products in a category that already was considered a niche in the gaming industry. That might’ve hurt the company down the road especially as larger corporations could broaden their appeal or simply had better designers.
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