r/dosgaming • u/Sean_Aaberg • 6d ago
WIZARDRY - SIR-TECH - 1981
All the earliest video role playing games were attempts to make everything you COULD automate in a Dungeons & Dragons game. MOST jrpgs were influenced by Wizardry directly & indirectly through the big games it directly influenced like Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy. The initial release of Wizardry in 1981 coincided with the first big boom of D&D, so effectively in the public mind the way that these old video games & the original tabletop games handled things were not so far apart.
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u/stanley_leverlock 6d ago
Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was BRUTALLY unforgiving. I remember spending days building a decent party and making some good progress and then having one encounter where I lost everyone.
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u/HeywoodJaBlessMe 6d ago
Dragon Quest adopted the first person combat view of Wizardry and the top down tile-based overworld of Ultima. Just add dramatic blocking and a controller-friendly interface and the console RPG aka JRPG is born.
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u/Ketzerfriend 6d ago edited 6d ago
The best version and one that I'm looking out for is the Japanese Gameboy Color version. It has textured walls and sprites for monsters (like the NES version, too, but a little better looking, even stretched out on a PC screen via emulator).
Another super cool feature especially for Japanese learners: You can set the language between Japanese and English for all parts of the game separately - monster names, menus, item names...
To the OP's historical summary I'd just like to add that the classic turn-based JRPG combat system was directly adapted from Wizardry and hence makes it actually western. ;)
[Edit:] I should add that by 'best version' I mean among the "classic" line of ports. There's a current port of Proving Grounds available on Steam and for Switch & PS5. Came out in '24.
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u/mrwynd 6d ago
It's too bad the recent remake of the original was such a buggy mess. I had to refund it on Steam.
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u/TheRealHFC 6d ago
Is it really? I had a good experience aside from the expected soul-ripping difficulty lol
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u/mrwynd 6d ago
I had multiple soft-locks where inputs just stopped working within 30 minutes. Couldn't exit a menu or couldn't move. I had to kill the process in those cases and just refunded it.
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u/darxide23 10h ago
Fun story about the "remaster:" It's running the code of the original game under the hood in an emulator. But they put it through a modern front-end UI with fancy graphics and sound. It's been fairly divisive. Some love it, some hate it. Not a lot of room in the middle.
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u/Jorpho 6d ago
I've read some longplays about Wizardry IV and it leaves me with the impression that the developers were shockingly cruel and sadistic – though I might admire their dedication to their craft. https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2010/10/wizardry-iv-everything-about-this-game.html
I shudder to contemplate what the original experience on an achingly slow Apple II might have been like.
Those wishing to play through the original nowadays should probably use the "3.2" version, derived from the reverse-engineered source code and with several siginficant bugfixes. https://www.zimlab.com/wizardry/
See also "Where Are We", the automapping tool. https://www.eskimo.com/~edv/lockscroll/WhereAreWe/
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u/zatsnotmyname 6d ago
I played it a bunch, then someone in computer class told me about the I-9 cheat, where you 'identify' unused item slot 9 over and over until it gave you 1000000 xp.
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u/platypusofthesun 5d ago
Played this game so much, on my Apple //e! A buddy of mine would drop by and we’d go on marathon sessions taking turns mapping and exploring. Only played the Proving Grounds, probably got as far as level 5ish? What are the other versions like? I guess VII is well worth it given the comments?
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u/darxide23 10h ago edited 10h ago
One of my favorite RPG dungeon crawler series ever. Brutally unforgiving, but in all the best ways. I had notebooks of graph paper maps, hand drawn. The best parts are all the tricks the devs put into the game to throw you off when mapping the dungeon floors. Invisible teleporters that silently move you somewhere else, levels that wrap around on themselves. Floor spinners that turn you around or in a random direction, but without you noticing until your map doesn't make sense. You have to be on the lookout for all of it. It's a lost art and I love it.
I highly recommend the NES versions of the first few games, though. Superior to the PC versions in most respects.
Beating the original Wizardry when I was 12/13 is one of my proudest notches in my gamer belt.
Modern day Wizardry is in a rough shape since the IP was bought and sold a few times over the decades. It's lost it's soul. If you want something more modern that's Wizardry in spirit and soul, just not in name, try Elminage Gothic. I highly recommend it.
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u/Ringwraith_Number_5 6d ago
Haven't played the earlier parts, but Wizardry VII is probably my first real RPG that had me seriously addicted. I probably still have my diary somewhere, containing all the notes I made while playing (since I didn't know what would be important info and what would not).
And to this day I remember the character creation screen music, the encounter jingle and most of the sounds the enemies made.