![]() ![]() Reviewing prices and stats, I made this shopping list: Next stop, Boltac’s! My characters had 805 gold between them, not enough to buy Bolcac’s good stuff, but enough to get some starting gear for everyone. You might have opted to let your level 11 samurai freelance himself to any player that wanted a powerful escort, but you might have also password-protected him to prevent your reckless siblings / classmates from getting him killed or worse.Ī full party recruited at Gilgamesh's Tavern You can password-protect your characters so that only you may use them not really something we would value nowadays, but back in 1981 you might have shared a computer and your single copy of Wizardry with your family or even your entire school. You have to visit Gilgamesh’s Tavern, where you add available characters to your party. Owing to its PLATO multiplayer roots, you don’t just start the game with a party of characters you rolled. Odds were less than 1% this would happen! Still not enough to start as a Lord though. My last character, without intention, hit the points jackpot. Odds are a bit less than 10% that this happens I re-rolled each character until I got 17-20 points. When rolling new characters, you get a random number of bonus attribute points to assign, usually 7-10, but there’s a slight change of getting 17-20 points instead - and a very small chance of getting 27-30 points. I’d also never had any Lord characters before, so I decided I’d make my party good, except for the thief, who would have to be neutral. To that end, the gnome seemed like the best race for multiclassing, as it doesn’t have any particularly low stats. Learned spells, HP, and some amount of SP are kept when changing classes, so a character who has been a high level fighter, mage, and cleric will have lots of HP/SP and know all of the spells, and can still change into a class with intrinsic abilities. I had never really taken advantage of Wizardry’s class change system before, so I decided that this time, I’d abuse it as much as possible. There's no list of monsters and weapons as there were in Moria and Oubliette, but there is a complete list of spells and their effects, which is probably the most PLATO-like part of the manual.īooting into the game, there’s an elaborately-animated intro sequence: Re-releases of the Zorks, Ultima, and to a lesser extent Akalabeth would get similar treatment in the future, but Wizardry alone came right out the gate with this kind of quality, which could very well be owed to Wizardry's PLATO roots, but the overall style anticipates later DOS RPGs more closely than it does the PLATO helpfiles, front-loaded with overviews rather than nitty-gritty details, and gameplay concepts are described broadly except when specifics are absolutely necessary (such as the controls). A far cry from Akalabeth's dot-matrix printings on a series of cocktail napkins, this is 27 pages of well organized and useful gameplay instructions, with silly illustrations by Will McLean, one of the O.G. We take it for granted now, but as of 1981, this is, by far, the best paper manual I've seen in a computer game. I tried and failed to beat Rogue this way, but I’m pretty sure I can do it in Wizardry, thanks to its slower pace, lessened reliance on randomness, and option to do things like rest in town or grind. I’ll be sticking to my rule about saving only after 30m of play. Second, I’ve never actually played the original Apple II version – even the DOS-based Ultimate Wizardry Archives represent the state of the game in 1998 rather than 1981, so the original may yet have some game experience that I have yet to untap. In fact, I’ve already done a good amount of data analysis already in preparation for my replay – that’s how I discovered something was funny about the disk images. ![]() For one, there just is so much data in this game to extract and analyze. Sometime after finishing 7, I learned that the first five games had Japan-only 3D graphical remakes on the PS1, and I imported copies of them so I could play them again with all of the 32-bit bells and whistles.įast-forward to now, and Wizardry is an excellent candidate to replay for Data Driven Gamer. I played through the first seven over the course of a few years, and as of this writing, haven’t yet gotten around to playing Wizardry 8. I didn’t get very far, but soon decided to play through the DOS-based Ultimate Wizardry Archives versions instead. My first exposure was the “Story of Llylgamyn” trilogy on SNES, played on an emulator, sometime around 2004. I’ve played through Wizardry several times already.
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