Wizardry 8

They just don't make games like this anymore.
By IGN Staff

Twenty years ago, I bought the very first Wizardry game, so I'm feeling a little wistful and nostalgic about having to review what is in all probability the last in this long-running and genre-shaping series. It would've been easier if I was unconditionally enthusiastic about Wizardry 8, but honestly there are enough flaws in it to keep it from being the perfect capstone on a long and honorable career that it otherwise could've been, as I'll try to demonstrate.

But, first the story.

Telling the Story

The story in Wizardry 8 is a science fantasy mish-mash, a tale of alien races pursuing cosmically-powered artifacts on what's otherwise a fairly typical, quasi-medieval, fantasy world. Fantasy purists aren't going to enjoy having robots, Wookiees, and handguns jammed into a swords and sorcery milieu, but despite the presence of spaceships and other high technology, these sci-fi elements don't completely dominate and overwhelm the feudal, barbarian world.

Wizardry treats technology as just another kind of magic, but is that a very sophisticated way of integrating science and magic in a roleplaying game? Presumably it takes years to master the mystical, arcane arts of a wizard, but almost anyone can learn how to fire a gun -- but not here, and for no good reason, either. So this game world remind me more of some badly-printed, early 1980s D&D supplement (like the Arduin Grimoires, where you could find a shotgun in a dungeon), than the RPGs of today, with their emphasis on state of the art world-building and roleplaying design -- worlds like H¿rn, Ars Magica or the White Wolf games.

More interesting is the story behind Wizardry 8 itself. This game has been years in the making, and it's been almost ten years since Wizardry 7 came out. The company, Sir-Tech, struggled to keep Wizardry 8's development on track and to find a publisher. Ultimately, they ended up self-publishing the game themselves through an exclusive deal with Electronics Boutique.

But is that really surprising? Sir-Tech and Wizardry are a throwback to a bygone age of computer gaming, when developers were tiny little companies that made games because that's what they loved to do. There's something breathtakingly na¿ve and refreshing about a company that's willing to fix saved games for players who e-mail them in, something unheard of in an era in which long-standing franchises and historic game development houses are bought, sold, and trashed by an endless parade of clueless conglomerates.

The fact that a company like Sir-Tech can barely get something released in today's gaming market is the real, tragic story behind this game.

Saddling Up

But enough of the doom and gloom. Let's get into the game itself.

Character creation is a pivotal part of any roleplaying game, and it's in this department that Wizardry 8 truly shines. Making characters is fun because there're just so many options to choose from. The races range from your typical human, elves, and dwarves to more exotic options such as lizard men, faeries, draconians, cat people, and some hairy bipeds you'd have to call Sasquatch or Chewbacca.

There's just as much variety when it comes to classes, with the standard fighters, rangers, and mages, to more varied fare, such as samurai, ninja, Valkyries, bards, and alchemists. Since you can only have six characters (two slots are reserved for NPCs you'll meet along the way), narrowing down a party to a good mix of races and classes is a long, agonizing, heartbreaking process -- which is as it should be. In the end, I settled on a lizardman warrior, a dwarven cleric, a Mook ranger, a faerie mage, a gnomish gadgeteer, and a rogue.

Stats, skills, and leveling up are all pretty standard stuff, as most of the game mechanics are a just an elaboration of first edition AD&D, and some of the more story-driven characteristics, like alignment, have been dropped. I was also disappointed by the 'paper doll' portraits on the character screen, as they don't do much to reflect changes to clothes and inventory. That wouldn't be a major drawback, except that's really the only part of the game where you get to see all of your characters, not just their faces.

On the other hand, the team did a good job giving you a fair number of portraits to choose from (though I couldn't find an import your own .bmp option), and they also provided a huge number of voices that you can choose for your characters. That kind of detail should be a mandatory for a game like this, since the voices do so much to help personalize your characters and endear them to you.

Overall, the Elder Scrolls series probably has a more in-depth character creation system, but you only have one character to worry about there, whereas this is a party-based game.

And of course, if you're one of those eternally hopeful and extremely well-organized electronic packrats who somehow managed to save your Wizardry 7 party on a floppy disk for ten years, well, go right ahead and import them.

Sallying Forth

So there I was. I'd made my party, I clicked and switched and fiddled around until I had just the right portrait, voice, personality, and profession for every member of my team, and I was ready to rock and/or roll. I fired up the game engine, and entered the world.

And stepped back into 1997.

Look, I don't consider graphics more important than gameplay. I still play X-COM: UFO Defense and some other old relics because they remain great games. But my first reaction, when some mashed-down little crab scuttled up to my party and clicked its clackers at me, was outright laughter. These are horribly dated, butt-ugly graphics, folks, and anyone who says anything different is profoundly ignorant as to the state of gaming technology today. But that's what happens when you leave a game too long in development.

Yes, it's true that RPGs take longer to develop, and graphics can suffer as a result, but they shouldn't look this bad, and a lengthy development time isn't a valid excuse. Look at the early stuff for Morrowind, or even at EverQuest, which is a fairly old online RPG but still looks worlds better and beyond this.

Rolling for Initiative

Once you've committed yourself to playing Wizardry 8, you're in it for the long haul, and after a few hours, your eyes will become accustomed to the dated graphics (as long as you don't stop and take a Halo break every so often). Instead you're left to grapple with the interface.

For the most part, the interface is functional and competent, if not exactly a work of art -- clicking on buttons makes sense, items go into bags fairly easily, choosing a character or a combat target is fairly intuitive. The default keyboard settings could've been a lot friendlier to people who are used to playing 3D games with a mouse and keyboard, though. I'm sure at least 75% of computer gamers have played a first-person shooter before, or even Daggerfall, but Wizardry 8 has cluttered up the template with a bunch of useless commands right on the W-A-S-D keys -- a sacred group of keys which are used for movement, not switching weapons around, etc.

Of course you can alter the defaults, but for some infernal reason, I was incapable of getting the game to remember my changes from session to session, resulting in all manner of unnecessary angst and frustration. This is compounded by what is possibly the slowest mini-map ever put into a computer game. It would take a minute for the stupid textured screen of paths to load on my game and I ultimately gave up on using it except in extreme duress. You're better off drawing your own maps.

Choosing an Opponent

Now we come to what I think is the biggest flaw in the game, and it's not the engine, it's not a problem with the graphics, it comes down to a fundamental question of game design.

These days, computer RPGs tend to work in one of two ways. I'm generalizing a bit, but bear with me. There are first-person games in which you control a single character and see the world through their eyes (Daggerfall or Deus Ex, for example). Then there are party-based games like the Baldur's Gate series that let you control a bunch of characters, but in order for you to properly visualize where your characters are in relation to each other, the monsters, and the world, these games (sensibly, I think) put the game in a three-quarters, isometric view.

Well Wizardry 8 does neither of these things. You are controlling an entire group of people but you do so from a first-person point of view, which means you never actually see your characters in the game! Imagine trying to play Icewind Dale without sending a thief creeping ahead through the shadows to scout ahead or lure monsters back to an ambush.

Your first reaction might be, just how bad are these programmers? What kind of crappy game has a tactical combat interface where you can't even see your damn squad on the map? But I have to believe what happened was that, somewhere along the line of this game's tortuous development, someone decided to stick to the very old, very archaic style of RPG design in which the first-person party point of view was the acceptable way of doing things, and you always knew where your characters were because they were in "rows" -- front, middle, back -- and facing was not really a problem, because the world itself was a grid.

All the old classic RPG games did this: Might and Magic, Eye of the Beholder, and in fact, I believe it was the very first Wizardry, the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, that invented this perspective. So what we're dealing with is almost a legacy design element.

Now you might be asking yourself, well if it worked in those old classics, why doesn't it work now? Because as I already alluded to, in the old classic games, the world was a grid and you could imagine your party as a block on that grid, with the individual characters taking up slots in that block. Turning them, moving fighters to the front and wizards to the back, it's not a problem.

But in true 3D, with freedom of movement, the world is no longer a simple grid and monsters can come at you from any angle. This means that getting your party faced in the right direction is of paramount importance, and since you can't see where in the hell your guys are actually standing, it means you're at the mercy of the game's interface.

Wizardry 8 handles this problem with something it calls the 'Party Formation Editor' but which I have come to call the Circle of Death. This is an ungainly circle that you can click on to organize your party (putting guys in the front, back, center, or the flanks). Okay, it's an ugly cludge and a poor design element (why oh why couldn't they even have managed a cheesy looking Star Trail combat grid?) but what's most maddening of all about it is the lack of visual cues as to which direction your party is allegedly facing. No compass indicates which you're direction you're heading. No monsters appear on the Circle of Death indicator. Figuring out a character's position in combat in ANY game should ALWAYS be a matter of simply glancing at the screen, but here you're bedeviled by useless layers of abstraction.

If I had a dollar for every time I started pounding on my monitor because my idiot characters were wedged into some godforsaken hallway with a couple baddies flailing away (seemingly at random) at everyone and anyone in my party while my stupid Lizard-Man fighter with his stupid Baby Huey voice was telling me, "I can't reach!" the opponents (meanwhile he's bleeding copiously from a dozen wounds they've managed to inflict on him), why then I'd be a very rich man and I could go start my own game company and hire someone to design something that wasn't such a classic textbook example of how to so thoroughly strip the life and joy out of tactical dungeon combat simulation.

Moving On

Unfortunately, if you don't particularly enjoy the combat in Wizardry 8, you're pretty much out of luck, since 95% of the game is about travelling around, fighting wandering monsters, and leveling up your characters. There's little to no story to speak of here, and a sense of grandeur or other-worldly wonder simply never materializes.

On the other hand, if you love huge, old school roleplaying games in which you fight monster after monster, gaining tons and tons of experience points, new spells, new magical items, new skills, this is the game for you. Wizardry 8 is huge and you will certainly get your money's worth, every penny, as you could spend forty or fifty hours playing this game (I lost track).

And you may well find the combat interface and the dreaded 'Circle of Death' to be not nearly as bad and unwieldy as I've made it out to be. More power to you, then. The phased combat in Wizardry 8 really is very sophisticated and you can't mindlessly hack at everything -- you have to know your spells, know your enemy's spells, and really think to get through an encounter. That's great. You also have to know when to run away, too -- which is great as well. This isn't Diablo, it isn't RPG lite, you can't just sit there and pound the stupid attack button over and over. That's great. The game is also incredibly difficult too, requiring you to save and save and save. That's all good stuff too, too many games these days are way too easy.

But in the end, while I enjoyed creating characters for the game, I found the combat interface too unwieldy and dated to be taken seriously, and that hindered my enjoyment of the game too much. And while over time I came to appreciate the vastness, complexity, and sheer amount of love and labor poured into this project, I never fell so in love with the game that I could overlook its flaws.

Still, with all that said, I am a little sad to see Wizardry 8 go. A game like this is the last of a dying breed. They just don't make games like this anymore.
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