System played on: 4.77mhz 8088 PC with ATI CGA card, 640kb of RAM, PC Speaker
Year: 1981
I recently completed (or re-completed) Akalabeth, Ultima 1 and Ultima 2, games that hail from some of the earlier days of Computer RPG’s. This made me take notice that in the great scheme of things I’ve really neglected some of the early CRPG’s in my completion quest and I would like to rectify this. Among the games in my cross hairs, Might & Magic, Bards Tale, Temple of Apshai and of course Wizardry.
Now I have a confession to make. The thought of actually playing Wizardry scares the hell out of me. I’ve known about this game series for as long as I remember but I’ve always shied away from it dreading the day that I may feel compelled to tackle it. Hailing from 1981 (my birthdate) the archaic interface, the ancient hardware required to play it in its pure form the permanent death and brutal difficulty all weighed heavily on me as I finally decided to give this legendary first game in the series a go.
First off was the challenge of how to actually play the game. Originally the game was released as a PC booter on 360kb floppy. If your a reader of this blog you know I like to play these games on original hardware if I can and I have a great working 8088 based Commodore Colt computer with both a 360kb 5 1/4 floppy drive as well as a 720kb 3 1/2 floppy drive and 32MB hard drive. Now on some occasion convenience and fear of losing hard earned save file will allow me to bend my original hardware rule. case in point, Wizardry. Now I don’t own the original game and it does tend to be a little hard to find and pricey but what I do own is the Wizardry archives which I bought new way back in 1998. Now the cool thing is this collection has Wizardry I – VII on CD and obviously at the time this was aimed at Win98 machines BUT they cool thing is the games play just fine on original hardware and better yet they have been modified to play off of the hard drive. Transferring the game was a simple matter of booting up one of my Windows 98 PC’s and transferring the Wiz1 file onto a 720kb formatted floppy disk. from there I just made a file on the hard drive of my 8088 machine and transferred off the floppy onto the drive. It was really as easy as that. Now granted you do lose a little bit of the experience of playing the game off of floppies (the modified files from the archive do not support being played off of the floppy disk) but in return you get a faster and more reliable experience as disks are prone to fail randomly. The games have also been modified to automatically advance through prompts where disk swapping would of been required.
The game does tend to hang a bit on a 4.77mhz machine but this was the CPU expected for the game to run on at the time. There is a noticeable delay between inputting commands at times and them actually happening on screen. This doesn’t effect play for me but I can imagine more impatient players being annoyed. I tried hitting my turbo option and bumping the CPU up to 7.16mhz but this made some of the text bubbles such as the one displaying won XP disappear to fast to read. a NEC V20 at 4.77 may be ideal.
On booting the game up I was presented with this screen.
Now, you may be asking what is wrong with that screen but when every screenshot of Wizardry you’ve even seen on the internet looked like this.
You start to wonder whats wrong with your CGA card. After a bit of research it turns out my hardware was actually outputting the correct default CGA palette for the game and the reason all the screenshots I saw used the alternate palette is because they were taken via Dosbox. Personally I much prefer the default palette as its much easier on the eyes and just looks better all around.
I kind of started playing late at night on a whim and didn’t expect to get far but to be honest Wizardry drew me in like few games recently have. Before I knew it it was very late into the next morning. Sitting hunched over the keyboard with the glow of the Tandy CGA monitor I really felt like I could be back several decades ago playing this game in a time that it was new. Most of the fear and anxiety I had over this game melted away as I became more comfortable with its workings and gameplay.
Character creation is very straight forward and As I understand this is one of the first CRPG’s to be group oriented. You must first navigate to the training grounds using a fairly easy to understand system where the letter you press takes you that corresponding section.
Your max group size for exploring the dungeon is six members but you can make many more and keep them as backup party members in the castle. I knew ahead of time this was a tough game that could require a lot of characters so I made eighteen characters making up three parties. Creation is easy with picking name, alignment and race followed by distributing points into various attributes like strength and intelligence and then choosing a class like fighter or thief. There are even advanced classes such as samurai and lord that can be attained by having exceptional stats though only one of my eighteen qualified to be anything and that was a bishop, a sort of red mage capable of mage and priest spells. The game is basically first edition Dungeons and Dragons broken down and directly translated to a PC format. Well, at least as well as early 1980’s technology would allow.
The first thing I like about this game that in my eyes elevates it over titles like Ultima is that its far more focused. You have one town and then a big as dungeon to explore. Its a straight forward task. The “mad overlord” of the castle encourages adventurers (you) to explore the giant dungeon under his castle as a sort of test. The main goal being to retrieve a talisman of great power from a evil and powerful wizard on the lower level. No vague story or random wondering about a world map not knowing where to go next. Sure the graphics are simpler but the focus on task at least for me makes it much more suited to the technology of the time. Now you may be thinking “but Akalabeth is kind of like this and you hated that game.” Yes but where Akalabeth feels like a high school effort while Wizardry is a refined and enjoyable experience. Maybe it’s my background with D&D that struck a cord with me and Wizardry but I do feel at least initially that this is the better game. I can put it like this, think of doing lap around a race track, once with a riding mower and once with an f1 race car. Your basically doing the exact same act but the mower is so boring and unexciting you may as well walk…or just go home. The f1 though makes the experience exciting and enjoyable and that is Wizardry, that is if your into early CRPG dungeon crawlers.
Upon equipping my “A Team” party and entering the dungeon one this I very happily noticed was the lack of the common early CRPG dungeon conventions of hunger/fatigue/light sources. But you may be thinking “but wouldn’t you like these little details that help make the game world feel so much more alive and realistic?” and I would say NO! Maybe some of those things are fine with later games such as Eye of the Beholder where the effect wasn’t so bothersome thanks to spells and abundant rations but with early games where your already fighting with a archaic interface things like keeping track of hunger of fatigue is just well…fatiguing. Things like hunger honestly just feel more like annoyances in these types of games to me as does always having to bother with keeping a torch or some other light source available. The lack of these annoyances actually make Wizardry flow much smoother. Now there is a system where your character will age and eventually die by spending to much time healing at the Adventurers inn but I found a way around that by simply having a priest heal hp in a dungeon and then resting for free in the stables to relearn spells. you don’t have to worry about aging this way.
This all isn’t to say Wizardry lacks details because it doesn’t. There are light spells that allow you to see secret doors although I haven’t found any except ones to empty rooms. There is also a very interesting battle mechanic where sometimes you don’t immediately recognize the monsters your facing. I’m not sure what determines this but many times you enter an encounter against something generic such as “small humanoids” and it isn’t revealed until the battle progresses that these are Kobolds or perhaps Orcs
Speaking of battle as I first ventured into the maze I discovered that certain rooms are fixed to usually create an encounter that ends with a treasure chest being found (more on that later). While you can also come across random encounters as you traverse the wire framed maze. Sometimes you will even encounter friendly monsters and are given the choice to fight or leave. If your a good alignment character and choose to fight a friendly monster you run the risk of becoming evil, something I found out the hard way. Evil and Good characters will refuse to party together.
That’s….unexpected
Combat works by only the first three members of the party can physically attack while the back three members are relegated to flinging spells or just standing around. I’ll talk about that treasure chest now. On winning a treasure chest you have to make sure you inspect it to see if its trapped. Obviously thieves are better at this task. next you have to choose to disarm the trap if you find one and then you have to type in the type of trap that your inspection discovered and hope its correct (spelling counts). Its kind of feels clunky and overly complex at first but it works. I certainly know the correct way to spell “poison” now.
Knowing the reputation of this games difficulty and the permanent death of slain characters as well as lack of saving and going back to previous saves I proceeded very cautiously. I did loose a few characters which I usually just deleted and then created new ones but it wasn’t as hard as I expected. The fear of death in Wizardry is actually quite tangible and lends itself to the game. I really do wonder every time I delve into the dungeon if all my characters will come back or if I have enough gold to chance a resurrection at the castle temple.
Mapping is a must for this game and if its not obvious from the release date this game has no automapping feature so you need to do all your mapping by hand. A task I’m notoriously poor at. Take a look at my sad effort to map out the first dungeon level.
I never can tell where to make my starting point and the maps routinely go off the edge of the paper and force me to mishmash of sections across the paper linked by letter codes. I found the first level fairly simple but I’m sure worse traps and terrors lie ahead. I actually spend a very long time leveling up on the first level and had three groups of about level six before I even dared scout out level two.
The stat adjustments upon leveling is still one aspect I don’t quite understand. You seem to gain and also lose points in attributes at random when you level up. Fighters do tend to get more HP them say a mage but there are times a fighter will only gain 1 HP on a level up. Other times stats seem to be reduced without reason like a mage losing IQ or a fighter strength. Nothing seems to correlate with this. For instance its not caused by a fighter not fighting or using physical attacks and it all seems completely random. It is especially annoying when it seems like at times you lose more state points then you gain at a level up.
Most of level one was pretty empty with the exception of the stairs to level two and a section where I was unable to see around me. You really need to map to be able to navigate this area and found two interesting rooms. One was a strange wizard that teleported my party back to the castle and the other was a elevator which stopped at floors one through four. I found this a little odd as I’m not sure if anything is stopping a player from just leveling up South Park style on level 1 and just taking the elevator down and skipping floors although I can see how this can be very convenient for higher level characters to skip floors. Unless there are specific items that must be attained on other floors but so far I haven’t found anything unique.
At this point I’ve mapped out most of level two but will probably gain a few more levels before daring level three. Caution seems the best policy in Wizardry so far. I have encountered a few interesting rooms on level two where I cant progress such as a door that states noone in my party is strong enough to open it as well as two rooms that envelope my group in mist and force me to retreat from the room. I’m unsure if these rooms are just for dramatic effect or if I will need to find an item or solve a puzzle to access them.
I’m so far enjoying Wizardry much more then I anticipated I would and am looking forward to delving deeper into its depths.
Random Battles: my life long level grind 