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Sir-tech Canada Releases Wizardry 8
NichG writes "Sir-tech Canada has finally released
Wizardry 8. This has been long awaited by fans of Wizardry 7 (1992) and the series of games which precluded it. It should be available at Electronic Boutique. For those not familiar with the Wizardry series, they are first person, turn-based (more precisely, phased) RPGs, which grew from pure dungeon crawl to RPGs with plot and characters with whom to interact." This, the Bard's Tale series, and the first four Ultimas together were where most of the late 1980s went for me.
Now everyone will finally understand why I named my kid Werdna
I may very well owe my geekdom to Wizardry (I). It was the first game I ever played on my friend's Apple IIc. I can remember plenty of floppy disk switching, and punching holes to make single sided disks double sided.
I just got to play "Day of Defeat" last night. Man how things have changed!
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
i alwayst felt that 6 and beyond were dreadfull. there are lots of fans of wiz gold, etc but post maelstrom + werdna, etc, they totally lost the plot.
4+5 imo are the best of the trilogy and i especially liked playing Werdna and starting at the bottom of the tower.
the wiz series was also the first to my knowledge to award your characters for winning the game, and taking that into the next game, so when you won you got a chevron. quite cool.
the best bit was that from 1 to 3 required you to have played and passed characters along, so you could only play wiz3 by playing wiz2 and wiz1!! (although it limited market share i guess)..
nice to see an old school title come back. pity it has no old school charm.
no sig for you
Don't hammer the server too much, though. There're limited login spaces, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Gameplay movies:
MPEG file
Zipped File
The demo is available from here..
3dgamers [download link]
or here
FilePlanet [download link]
No accusations re: Karma, please. I'm at the cap. And Wizardry 6 and 7 were the best RPGs I've ever played.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
Hell yeah. I've played 7 since '95 and I still haven't beaten it! I got around to beating Wizardry 6 though ;0. It's great to see that one of the greatest games ever is up to 8. I had the baddest party too, untill my drive got formatted. Level 35 characters who could kill fiereos, demons and such in one shot! Never quite got around to beting the game though :( I need to see if I've got an old savegame SOMEWHERE to import into 8, which is way overdue by the way. On my CD, I have a Preview for Wizardry 8 that says it's out in summer of 99! I sure hope the extra time means they did things right. Man, I think I'll have to play 7 tonight.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
Here you can download the original Apple II disk images and an emulator for windows/dos. There are also links to the SNES ports.
In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.
*Excelsior!*
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
17 hours 53 minutes.... That was my first all night graphic RPG. My friend and I waited weeks to pick up our copies.. We then "signed-out" a couple schools Apple II+'s for a weekend of gaming. Halfway through the session we had to crack the covers and have cooling fans blowing across the mobos to cool em off.
:)
It's been YEARS since I've played them, but it's kinda neat to remember lahalito, dilto, Montino, Mahalito, and the all mighty Tiltowait.
Also just a bit of trivia....
Wernda and Trebor are the names of the programmers who wrote it backwards..
yeah yeah everyone should know it, but I thought I'd repeat that for people new to the old school game thing
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
Bard's Tale, that takes me back. I used to test for EA back then (and Infocom) and spent countless hours (thank god they're countless) on the first two in this series on a Commodore 64. They made as much on selling the solution booklets as they did on the software. Speaking of flashbacks, anyone else out there do an Infocom "Marathon of the Minds"? I'm listed in the middle there. But both teams did NOT deserve to win, dammit. We finished the game (Hollywood Hijinx) half an hour before they did, but because of a glitch in it (pre-release version) it didn't tell you it was over and that the bad guy was supposed to escape when you saved the girl, so we kept playing. I still bear the scars...
I bought Wizardry (I) when it first came out, and I loved it. I remember diligently making maps and even trying to sell them to computer magazines - an editor from Computer Gaming World offered to pay me $100 to publish the maps, when I was about 11 years old. Of course I never got paid, and I have no idea whether the article even got published, but I digress...
I'm sure I wasn't the only one who did this. In those days Wizardry ran on Apple Pascal. You loaded two discs. In those days, if you had two disk drives, you were golden, and I had two. Anyways I quickly discovered that if something untowards happened, you could flip the latch on the drive really quickly and prevent the game from writing your death to disk. The Apple would make that familiar grinding sound, but you could safely reboot, and find yourself more or less back where you were before. Made advancing through the levels *real* easy.
Anybody else remember practically crapping your pants when the computer went "beep-beep-beep" and you say *W*E*R*D*N*A* for the first time ??
Those were good days. I can't say I've ever truly loved a game as much as that one.
The trick of opening the drive door when you got killed was a classic...
Really playable, truly enjoyable game. Simple, yes - but it had all the necessary elements and it played fast without superflous graphics and glitz.
Ahead of it's time, IMO.
Now only available for the PC! Well, at least right now, hopefully. :(
But this appears to be the last of the sir-tech games..
If i remember correctly, Sir-Tech's publishing arm went out of business around 15-18 months ago.. Their development house struggled for a while afterwards, finished wizardry 8 and one other title I don't remember..
Wizardry 8 languished, finished, for a while.. They didn't have a publisher.. I think somewhere during that period they shut down operations (Or at least laid off a LOT of people)
And now wizardry 8 is out.. An extremely depressing moment for computer gaming.. One of the longtime companies and founders of PC gaming is gone..
Sure sir-tech had some big stinkers.. Virus, Druid.. But they also did some of the truly great games. Jagged alliance, Wizardry..
With Interplay foundering, sir-tech gone, Origin DOA, SSI on its last breaths.. Well the old school rpg makers are gone.. Sorta depressing if you ask me..
BUT! Its not all lost.. We've got new blood on the horizon.. Mostly in the shape of those rascally canadians, Bioware.. And even the longtime scapegoat.. Bethesda..
So we've lost the old school.. Which is depressing from a historical standpoint.. But we've still got RPG developers building games that we couldn't have even dreamed of 15 years ago..
This might be the last in the series, Sir Tech is in financial trouble, and the balance rests on the sales of Wizardry.
If you are a fan, go purchase the game.. if it sells well, sir tech might be able to pull out of their slump and bring us Wizardry 9 in a few years.
Wizardry was one of the original computer RPGs, but my hopes for this latest title are very, very low, almost to the point of not caring.
The Ultima games--kindred spirits to the Wizardry games--had the same spark to them, way back when. But it has been shocking just how much the series has degenerated. Ultima VII was so horribly bad that Richard Garriott publicly apologized for it. It was a Mario-style game in the guise of Ultima. Ultima IX was an embarassment to everyone involved. In the process of making the game fully 3D everything else was sacrificed. When the demo first shipped, it was laughably bad. Why did they even bother?
Is there anyone out there who managed to beat Wiz7 w/o the help of the hint book? That game is so unbelievably complicated to beat! One of my housemates, with the book open the entire time, still took 4 months to play through.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
As long as you're not wanting GameCube-like graphics (the 3D world compares to EQ), this is a good game. The sophisticated plot and character development is a welcome change from the likes of Diablo.
But don't take my word for it, there's a free demo available from the official site. I also run one of the larger Wizardry fan sites - check it out for more information on the series (maps, walkthroughs, etc.).
Wizardry 8 isn't widely distributed (part of the game's delay in release was finding a distributor), but it's available at your local mall's Electronics Boutique (full retail is 50 bucks) and there's also a few cheaper prices online.
Someone better mod this post based on my user name alone.
People will KNOW why... but very few will understand.
http://windows.scares.us
Hopefully I'm within my fair use rights as these are just excerpts and the authors, as they are, are attributed
It is. I was playing it last night. I've found that the game keeps the same level of complication (enough to keep you interested) while making it accessable enough for anyone to learn to play.
And if the first dungeon, which I haven't gotten out of yet, is any example, this game is huge.
Now, if I can just convince my characters that they need to hit the monsters in order to kill them....
EFGearman
--
Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
Do you know that in Japan not only movie-filled FF-like RPG games are popular, but also Wizardry series are as popular as them and have cult fans? Why Wizardry got so many fans in Japan is I think because those versions released in Japan for PC and NES are with beautiful monster graphics... though old fans prefer wireframes. There are even Japanese-original Wiz scenarios. For GameBoy there were 5 or 6 Wiz titles, and some others were released for SuperNES, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and Windows PC. They are based on old-style, no spaceships involved, swords/sorcery background as original scenario 1-5. Only new classes and races are introduced, without losing balance. And now, original Wizardry world ceased at 8, while Japanese studio Atlus released new Wizardry title "Busin" for PS2 in Japan, called "Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land" http://www.atlus.com/Wizardry.htm outside Japan.
It worked like this- when you were in the tavern resting up, the program went to the drive to read the level advancement tables. If you pulled out the normal Wizardry disk and put in a newly formatted blank disk at that time, it would read that the experience points needed to advance to the next level were 0, so of course you would advance. Repeatedly. Of course, when you put the right disk back in, you would need a ton of points to advance to the next level, but that could be fixed by getting intentionally "level drained" by a vampire or somesuch undead to get you down one level= to the midpoint of one level below your current one, which would actually add tons of experience instead of draing it (if you had done the "advance with nothing" strategy above.) Those were the days... Contra-dextra avenue, tiltowait, oh boy!
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days? Wizardry was truly revolutionary... Andy was a student at Cornell in the early 80s but I don't know what happened to him after that...
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school. For homeboys of that time and place, I owned a Level 63 boxer (Samurai) name "Sarge" and a Level 63 Valk named "Pandora". It all came down over a 300bps link to one of those funky orange plasma PLATO terminals and, man, did it kick some serious ass. With parties of individual players from all over the country, that exprience turned me on to the power of networking. A typical night lasted from midnight to 4 or 5, when the system went down for maintenance. A couple of hours of serious dungeon-diving, followed by a couple of hours of "Empire". Man, those were the days... Out!
The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected. -- Will Rogers
I remember meeting one of the founders of Sir-Tech. They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry". O.K. people too!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
From the website: Hear your characters come alive with the revolutionary new Personality system.
I'm scared.
Personally, I think W8 will be good even if it sucks. I'm so desperate for a full-party RPG in the old 1st person mode that I'll take anything!
Don't get me wrong, Baldur's Gate is the finest D&D computer game ever written (to date), but it's always fun to try out other tactical simulation rule (TSR) systems!
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I have seen mentions of the Ultima and Bard's Tale series, but what about the Might and Magic series from the 80's (I am of course deliberately neglecting the ones released in the past couple of years). Anybody have fond memories of trying to crack the inner sanctum?
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
As we're adding a map-editor and a script compiler to the Exult project, it will be possible to 'enhance' Ultima7 (with EA's permission, of course), or create new games in the same style.
As one of the original authors of Wizardry, one of the nicest rewards of writing the game is reading comments such as these.
/. so I'll let him reply himself.
..do the identify..
Does anyone know where Andy Greenberg and Robert Woodhead are these days?
You can find out what happened to me (Trebor) at the family website, MadOverlord.com. Andy lives in Florida with his wife and two children, where he "hacks the law". He reads
In wizardry I, don't forget the really good Bishop cheat. Create a Bishop (need right mix of stats), and then identify item 9 until you succeed.
This was caused by a simple bug in a check statement:
if (ch >= "1") or (ch <="8") then
It should have been an "and", of course. So you could type in any character, and since we'd disabled boundschecking on Apple Pascal, it would twiddle bits at various offsets. Someone once sent me a list of what every typeable key would do.
When we did the IBM PC version (which also ran Apple Pascal, btw), we deliberately left the bug in, for reasons of tradition. Thus we confidently lay claim to originating the concept of "It's not a bug, it's a feature" that later made Bill Gates billions.
We wrote Apple Pascal interpreters for the PC, a bunch of japanese machines, and the C64/128. Wizardry 4 was written on a NEC 9801 machine, it would boot into PCDOS, then you'd type a command line and see "Welcome to Apple Pascal" (and yes, we bought a copy of Apple Pascal to run on it).
I can't remember whether it was Trebor or Werdna (or both) who wrote it, but there was a game on the PLATO network (circa '79 or '80) called "Oubliette" that nearly caused me to flunk out of law school.
Both Andy and I were active on the PLATO system, which was a tremendous influence on us. PLATO had email, chat, newsgroups, multiplayer realtime game, and much more, all starting in the early 70's. The multiplayer dungeon games were particularly good. Pretty much all of the basic concepts of multiplayer gaming were developed there.
Wizardry was in many ways our attempt to see if we could write a single-player game as cool as the PLATO dungeon games and cram it into a tiny machine like the Apple II.
They had close ties to the SCA Group Northern Outpost, and I was at an SCA event when I saw the white Corvette with the tag "Wizardry"
That was mine. I was never a member of the SCA, however. But they were active at Risley Hall at Cornell, where Andy lived. I don't recall if he was a SCAdian. PS: I'm not nearly as dorky as I was back then.
i have wizadry I (proving grounds of the mad overlord), in the box
IIRC, Wizardry was the first home computer game, and possibly the first home computer program, to be sold in a box. Before that it was all ziploc bags and binders.
Best
R
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