Brenda Brathwaite: Why I Blew Up The Universe in Wizardry 8
In a new blog article, Brenda Brathwaite writes about why she blew up the entire universe in Wizardry 8. And no, it wasn't because they knew it would be the last of the series. And she compares her mindset then to her perspective now, and talks up the evolution of the industry now and how it compares to things then, and back in 1982. And she dispenses some valuable game design advice in the process:

Blowing Everything Up: From AAA to Freedom

An excerpt: "You don’t make RPGs for money. You make them for love and to break even. They are the most time-intensive games to create with the largest confluence of systems. When I hear people brand new to game development saying that they want to start with an RPG, I want to simultaneously hug them and warn them."

Labels: Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:51 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Wizardy 8 Part XVIII: Parting Shots
So my adventures in Wizardry 8, the "last of the (mainstream) old-school RPGs," has come to an end. It's a good thing that a game doesn't have to be new for me to enjoy it. Plus, I no longer need to kick myself for missing out on it.

One of the many reasons I love RPGs is because, at the end, I don't feel so much like I've won the game so much as I got to live it. At least if its good. Wizardry 8 was definitely one of those experiences. At some points - particularly late-game when the combats seemed interminable - I felt more like I was enduring it than living it. But with the benefit of hindsight, I think I can appreciate a lot more of what the game accomplished.

Now that I have a full play-through of the game behind me, I've been pondering some of the design successes and issues. This is mainly an exercise for myself as I'm attempting to improve my own indie game-designer chops. But for the three people who might be interested (and, more importantly, share their own thoughts on it), I thought I'd open up my ruminations to the public (scary!) and see where it takes me.

Introduction
The game starts with your party surviving a crash-landing out in the middle of the boonies next to an old monastery now overrun by monsters. RPGs tend to start one of two ways - you either have the big tutorial in your home village, or you are thrown immediately into the action as a full-fledged adventurer. I really prefer the latter, truth be told. While you do end up killing requisite vermin and some slimes right off the bat, which aren't exactly foes of heroic proportions, starting in a "bunny slope" dungeon is preferable to starting in school. It feels like you are accomplishing something instead of just churning away at the tutorial.

Combat
Combat is pretty central to most RPGs, and Wizardry 8 is no exception. Wizardry 8 uses turn-based combat, which I generally prefer over the more popular (nowadays) arcade-style combat.

On paper, Wizardy 8's combat sounds perfect for me. It is very tactical. Positioning, party formation, facing, and movement is critical. Ranged attacks, terrain, spell resistances along spell 'school' lines, buffs, enemy spellcasting, summoning spells, and mixed group of monsters with different strengths and weaknesses promise - and often deliver - a great "thinking man's" RPG combat experience.

There are, unfortunately, a couple of glaring issues that continued to bug be me with combat:

First of all, the differences between monsters were often not particularly noticeable. Instead of having strengths and weaknesses, at higher level monsters typically had strengths and bigger strengths. This was especially noticeable with upgraded "versions" of monsters, or different classes of monsters. The defense were relatively predictable, and there wasn't much of a feeling of "gotchas" or of the enemy working together to form a particularly interesting tactical puzzle most of the time. Boss encounters were an exception, and I felt the earlier stages of the game were better about monsters hitting the party with "signature attacks" than in later levels. It feels like they maybe ran out of ideas later in the game.

Maybe it was simply my own lack of creativity, but that seemed to be a problem for me.

Another issue was that the turn-based combat system did not scale very well for larger combats. Against a half-dozen opponents, the combat system worked great. I didn't even mind waiting for them to move into position prior to attacking. But when facing a dozen or more opponents (which seemed to be MOST OF THE TIME after leaving the first dungeon), there was simply too much time spent waiting on the enemies to begin their action (there was always a pause, probably to allow for the camera to pan over to them), move, launch their attack animation, and oftentimes wait for the projectile or spell particle effect to arrive. Maybe I spent too much time fighting at range, but 30+ minute long combats soon became the rule, not the exception. Using a cheat program to make the enemies move almost instantaneously into position helped somewhat, but it was still pretty slow. It was particularly bad when the combats lasted long enough that additional wandering monsters joined the fight.

Some possible solutions for this issue would have been:

#1 - Make combat more intense, so that they lasted fewer rounds. Cutting everyone's hit points in half would have helped.

#2 - Don't penalize movement so heavily - it encouraged players and AI to stand in position to launch spells and missiles rather than closing to more interesting range.

#3 - Rely less upon large swarms of monsters, instead emphasizing fewer, stronger monsters. This is a valuable thing to consider whenever doing a turn-based game.

#4 - Have enemies attack in "waves" of more manageable numbers rather rather than as a monolithic massed army.

Environment
The world of Wizardy 8 may not be the most elaborate or well-thought-out world in the history of CRPGs, but it definitely has personality. Many of the locations were extremely distinctive, from the giant tree-city of Trynton to the underwater halls leading to the island of Bayjin, to the Umpani's mountain fortress and the maze-like castle of the Rapax. (Get it? Minotaurs? Mazes? It does make sense...)

The game starts with a hunt for a long-dead hero named Marten. This was a very clever way to get the player interested in the back-story of the planet. I compare this to the Elder Scrolls games, which bombarded me with backstory which I really tried to be interested in, but it didn't work. But because the history is tied in with the current quest in Wizardry 8, all that fluff became USEFUL to me - and therefore interesting. Whether accidental or deliberate, I think it was a stroke of game designer genius. And it helped make the world come alive for me.

Quests
The quests in Wizardy 8, like most RPGs, ran the full range from the pedestrian and downright boring, to the outstanding and memorable.

One thing I appreciated was how so many of the quests allowed alternative approaches. Even the alliance between the Umpani and T'Rang was completely optional - though extremely satisfying. And I managed to muscle through it without first completing the apparently pre-requisite Al-Sedexus quest. I came back and did it later, just 'cuz I could... but I liked that the game was flexible enough to allow this.

I also think it's sad that this is noteworthy. Not that this sort of thing is in notoriously short supply. I think it pretty much made Oblivion for me. But I think we've all played those games where objectives must be completed exactly as the designer intended - though sometime with one or two variants, sometimes... usually with lame "total jerk" and "neutral apathetic" options.

I liked the inclusion of a variety of different styles of puzzles and quests - from logic puzzles, to riddles, to adventure-game style inventory puzzles. Sometimes they were infuriating, and I was glad to be living in the age of the Internet to look up the solutions to the ones that stumped me. Like how to get into the retro dungeon.

And admittedly, having your own demonic daughter attack you near the end of the game was something of a first for any game I've ever played. Kudos to whomever came up with that optional plotline. And I hope said designer has since received psychiatric help.

Characters
Some of the characters in Wizardry 8 were better fleshed out than others. Vi Dominae, Z'Ant, Yamir, He'Li, Marten (now a ghost), Sparkle, and even the Dark Savant were pretty well done. The Dark Savant's voice acting sounded more like it was played for comedic effect than being an actual ultimate bad guy. Still, I thought it made him sound a bit more human, so I guess it worked for me.

Another thing I liked was how the party members often had something to say during particular events. One thing I always disliked about older RPGs of this style was that your party members were pretty static collections of stats. It wasn't much, but giving them some amusing or at least interesting things to say really helped bring them to life.

What worked for me, for the characters mentioned above, is that they all had some kind of "hook" that made them stand out and come alive for me. Probably because that stand-out feature encouraged my brain to attribute all kinds of stereotypical or archetypal features to them that weren't necessarily part of their script. This is more of an example of "engaging the player" and enlist their aid as a storyteller.

A Belated Farewell to Wizardry!
Wizardry 8 was, in effect, a swan song for an entire style or sub-genre of RPG - a style which Wizardry 1 was in many ways responsible for creating and popularizing. At least as far as mainstream games have gone. However, you don't have to look very far to see the influence the series (and it's descendants) have had on computer RPGs since then. And - yes, even console RPGs.

The features of this sub-genre that stand out for me include the turn-based combat, the requirement to use teamwork and complimentary skills between multiple party members, the first-person perspective, and the "old-school" emphasis on puzzles and problem-solving rather than just hitting the required marks to complete a quest. I don't know if it was all good - there were definitely some moments in the game when I got stumped and frustrated. In the days before the World Wide Web, that might have been enough to make me quit.

It was a more cerebral RPG than we usually get these days. And it definitely put the "hard" in "hardcore." The extendo-combats were definitely to its detriment from my perspective. Due to my schedule, I rarely had more than 20-30 minutes at a sitting to play games, which made me rule out a Wizardry 8 session on many occasions - especially over the holiday season.

But overall - it was a great game. It is disappointing that the evolution of that style ended with Wizardy 8. I think there was a lot of room to grow and evolve from there. I guess my attitude is unsurprising, since I'm working on a game that's kinda-sorta in that sub-genre myself as an indie project.

But I'm really I hunted this one down and played it. I think I paid more for it through E-Bay than I would have for a brand-new copy (with documentation!) when it was new. But you know what? It was totally worth it. Good and bad, it was a worthy and significant computer RPG.

Labels: Game Design, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:35 AM (Permalink) 11 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XVII: Luke, I Am Your Daughter...
Wizardry 8 was the final episode in one of the longest-running computer RPG series of all time, spanning twenty years from 1981 to 2001. I missed the game when it was initially released, and recently got a chance to play through this classic of "old-school" style roleplaying gaming. This series has been a chronicle of my adventures.

Pee Wee
Scorpia, after reading my previous report and realizing I was about to hit Ascension Peak, emailed me with a cryptic warning: "Pay the Trynnie; life is easier that way. You'll know when you get there." It's nice to get some helpful hints from other players. I guess that's one advantage from playing a game that is several years old.

As it turns out, her warning was because said Trynnie had a pet: a level 30 giant-sized stone golem by the name of "Pee Wee." He extorted what amounted to highway robbery from my party, but I figure he's trying to recoup his investment --- and I don't imagine anybody travelling up Ascension Peak is going to be that short on cash. He even told me that Pee Wee would aid me in my battles.

Well, that wasn't quite the case. As it was, Pee Wee blocked my path, so I HAD to get him involved in a combat just so he'd move out of my way. His combat skills were largely useless - he'd hit maybe one turn in six. When he'd hit, he'd do a respectable amount of damage - but I was seriously considering just getting into a fight with him for bonus XP. He was a wimp.

We made it to some temple, where the robot Altheides appeared and asked us some questions. When we got the answer right, he let us through and we were able to go through a teleporter and place one of the artifacts (the Destinae Dominus) on its pedestal. The room shook, and we took a teleporter out - which took us back to a prior area with some statues.

Meet the Brat
We followed another road, fought some battles, and came to another temple where Altheides appeared again and asked some more questions. We went through the doorway, placed the second artifact (the Chaos Moliri), had another little earthquake, and teleported back to the statues.

On the third path, we met an army of Rapax, led by the Rapax Prince and some demon-gal who resembled the demon-goddess Al-Sedexus. Except this crazy demon-woman's name was Al-Shakka. I thought that was a pretty cool name. After all, my gadgeteer was named Shakka, kinda close. Yeah, the gadgeteer who ended up... uh... with Al-Sedexus....

Oh. Crap.

The prince denounced us, and introduced us to his "sister." Al-Shakka spoke up and removed all doubt that indeed she WAS the love-child of Al-Sedexus and my permanently psychologically scarred gadgeteer, and now she was going to kill us all and stop us from whatever it was that we were doing on Ascension Peak.

Ah, kids. They grow up so fast these days.

Al-Shakka, the prince, about 18 other Rapax (plus six more summoned later), and seven wandering monsters that happened to be in the neighborhood suddenly launched their attack.

This was the most vicious and lengthy battle I'd yet experienced in the game, which is saying something. But in the end, my group killed Shakka's brat daughter, the Rapax Prince, and everything else within about a half-mile radius, including another group of wandering monsters that jumped into the fight when it was almost over.

The Cosmic Forge
We went through a third temple, answered more of Altheides' questions, and placed the third artifact (the Astral Dominae) on its pedestal. Big earthquake, and we left --- now what?

After getting lost and wandering around a bit, we followed another path, encountered a bunch of giant monsters, and got to another structure where we found the Dark Savant. He was pissed off at us. He told us we could watch the entire world burn, while he made his way to the Cosmic Circle all by himself to have his revenge. With that, he tried to set off his world-destroying bomb in the tower in Arnika. Yeah, the one we'd disabled. Nothing happened. Now the dude was REALLY annoyed.

The Dark Savant jumped into a convenient teleporter, and a friendly gargoyle, Bela, whom we'd met before egged us on to chase him. We followed, and found ourselves in some mystical platform in outer space. Vi Dominae urged us forward, and we tried to pursue the Dark Savant.

In the meantime, the Savant got to the central circle and found the robot, Altheides, already there. The two argued for a while. The Dark Savant was really annoyed that the other gods - the Cosmic Lords - weren't there. He wanted his revenge on them. Altheides explained that their time was over, and that they had left. It was time for new gods to step in. Already in a bad mood, the Dark Savant killed Altheides.

By that point, we'd arrived at the scene, and found ourselves in front of the artifacts that control the universe - the Cosmic Forge. In front of us was the book of the entire universe. Whatever was written there - or erased - would come to pass. With it, we could destroy the Dark Savant, and even undo what was already done.

The Dark Savant - Revealed!
We frantically looked for where the Dark Savant's information was written, and discovered the page of his life...

And learned that he was none other than the kind, benevolent god worshipped by all the peaceful and good fuzzy-wuzzy beings in the universe - Phoonzang. For pulling a Prometheus and trying to share the secrets of the universe with mortals, he'd been cast out by his fellow Cosmic Lords and made a mere mortal. For a while, he was a contented old man doing good, but eventually succumbed to anger and frustration so that he "borged out" and became the Dark Savant.

And since Vi Dominae's family had been the guardians of the artifacts he'd created as Phoonzang, he needed her genetic code to use them to get back to the Cosmic Circle. All he needed was her eye, so he'd plucked it out. That explained her piratey-look in the last couple of games.

The Dark Savant appeared himself to help fill in some of the details. I really appreciate it when the Ultimate Bad Guys begin monologuing.

The Fate of the Universe
So now we had a choice: Join the Dark Savant, because he really deserved to have his revenge; Tear out the pages from the book of the universe where Phoonzang had become banished, became the Dark Savant, and all that; or try to write the Dark Savant out of existence.

I really wasn't much of a fan of the Dark Savant, so I wasn't about to join him. As a blogger, I realized that creative writing under so much time pressure (and someone trying to kill me) wasn't going to result in my best work. So I decided to rip out the pages from the book.

I succeeded. Mostly. The original Phoonzang appeared, before he'd developed anger management issues. But he wasn't truly there, and the Dark Savant wasn't totally gone. So we had another fight on our hands. Bella and Vi Dominae joined me in a big fight, and the Dark Savant summoned a bunch of henchman to even things up a bit.

The battle was nowhere near our most difficult. In the end, we kicked his cyborg butt.

So there we were - us, Vi Dominae, Bela, Phoonzang, and the Cosmic Forge. But we had a problem. Tearing out those pages about the Dark Savant also destroyed a good bit of the universe that we'd known.

Oops. Sorry about that.

No matter. Phoonzang said he'd help us out as we restored the universe by writing in the book. And so we got started, pouring out what we knew onto pages and watching them take on reality. We had become gods. That was cool.

Except for Phoonzang critiquing our writing style. An eternity of THAT could get a little annoying.

Design Notes
I'm going to have a bigger set of notes in another post, since this one is ginormous already.

The Al-Sedexus plotline ... with the child of one of my party-members... was a very fun little surprise. Sorry if I spoiled it for you here, but the game is like eight years' old already - the statute of limitations on spoilers has to have expired by now. But naming her after my character was a really cool and clever addition that really made things rock.

The final battle against the Dark Savant wasn't overly difficult, but it was very satisfying. Battles do not NEED to be overly long, drawn-out, or challenging in order to be fun and satisfying.

But the big win here for this game was this: How many RPGs end with your characters becoming GODS? Only two that I've played - this one, and Baldur's Gate II. As rewards for a job well done go, it is a little hard to top that.

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:35 PM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
The Most Influential RPG I Never Played
The original Wizardry (full title: "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord") was published in 1981 for the Apple II, written by Andrew C. Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was definitely one of the most influential computer RPGs of all time, and it was certainly a big influence upon me. And yet, I never played it.

Okay, "never" isn't entirely true. But I didn't have a machine that would even run it for many years. I played it a little on friends' computers when I could - particularly the gimped IBM port on my buddy's IBM Peanut - but I never made it past the third level.

But I read about. Oh, did I read about it. It was the single game I wanted most to be ported to my platform of choice during the mid-80's (by the time it was finally ported to the Commodore 64 - in 1987 according to MobyGames- I had moved on). I read about it and its sequels in magazines. I talked to friends who played it.

In 1983 I bought a book entitled "The Survival Kit for Apple Computer Games," which I still somehow have in my library. Not that I had an Apple. But back then, books on computer games were still pretty rare. And there was almost nothing for the C-64 out yet, though I knew many developers were frantically attempting to port their libraries to this new system. So I picked up the book in anticipation of seeing some Apple II classics hitting my beloved machine. I was especially interested in the Adventure games and RPGs (which they called "fantasy games" in the book).

I read and re-read the chapter on Wizardry. This was the game. The Cadillac of RPGs. Later, it would be dethroned by Ultima III: Exodus, which enjoyed a much speedier port to the C-64 and would totally blow my mind.

The cool thing about the book is that authors Ray Spangenburg and Diane Moser would not only include some hints and tips for playing the game, but would offer some prosaic paragraphs highlighting interesting or key locations in each game. In so doing, they would inject a little bit of their own imagination into what was otherwise pretty rudimentary, workmanlike in-game descriptions.

So in my mind, I envisioned Wizardry as a glorious masterpiece of programming and game design virtuosity. Sure, I understood its limitations as a self-taught programmer, and I expected nothing that was technically unfeasable or outside the obvious bounds of the design. But I did envision a narrative thread and event-handling that was far more detailed and complex than really existed. At least, I think it was more detailed and complex than really existed - having never completed the game, I can't be certain. But the Wizardry in my imagination was probably closer to what was eventually realized in SSI's "Gold Box" D&D games (with a touch of Zork) than what less hardware-disadvantaged players were enjoying.

But that imaginary Wizardry became my goal as I continued to improve my coding chops and trying to envision where computer RPGs would be in coming years. I was tilting at a pretty awesome windmill.

I ended up with one "playable" game that in a proud creator's blinded vision might vaguely resemble Wizardry. It was a party-based game. It allowed you to create characters,which meant accepting random stat rolls, picking a class, and giving the stat-block a name. You'd travel through a randomly generated maze in search of an "orb" - a very original goal I came up with all by myself. The upper-left corner would display basically one room's worth of walls and doors, and you could turn and move in pseudo-3D. I had maybe a dozen different monsters that would attack, with a little six-note musical fanfare that would play when combat began and ended. I started out by making the dungeon ten levels deep (with 10 x 10 rooms), but ran into memory issues and had to scale it back down to six. I don't believe the goal of the game - the "orb" - was ever actually possible to find, but some friends and I had some fun playing my little game together one weekend.

Later, I taught myself assembly language and wrote a routine to display a more complex bitmapped world several squares deep, similar to what you'd see in The Bard's Tale or the SSI Gold Box Games. It was a simple painter's algorithm thing that could display fountains and trees and stuff in addition to walls, floors, and doors. I failed to think far enough to realize I could render the whole scene in an off-screen buffer FIRST and then copy to the screen - so as you walked you could catch a split-second glimpse of whatever was behind the nearest walls. That project was never more than a tech demo, though. But hey - the visual display was cooler than that of Wizardry!

But it was the design possibilities that really got me thinking. As I mentioned last week, I'm all about exploration in RPGs. And I struggled not only with the technical issues involved in scripting a world big enough for my imagination, but also just coming up with a world as full and exploration-friendly as I wanted. I wanted a world with all kinds of meaning and story.

I'm still tilting at that particular windmill.

Labels: programming, retro, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:48 AM (Permalink) 13 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XVI: Return of the Demon Goddess
Continuing my adventures playing the final game of the classic series, Wizardry. Wizardry 8 was originally released in 2001, but I only acquired it recently via E-Bay. So far, I've found it has stood the test of time fairly well. I've been blogging my progress throughout the game (which took a pause during the holiday season), and discussing some notes I've made on the games' design, which many consider to be the last "old-school" style mainstream Western RPG. They just don't make 'em like this anymore... except for the indies.

Once again - I think I'm pretty close to the end of the game, but I'm not quite there yet. But on my way to Ascension Peak and my dark date with destiny, my party took some time to flirt with a topless demon-goddess. We're such a naughty group of adventurers!

When the Rapax Get Bored with Battle, You KNOW It's Gone On Too Long...
If you may remember from my last Wizardry 8 post, I'd just mowed through a hundred Rapax Templars to expose the secret plot of the Rapax King, who had allied with the Dark Savant. This was after killing hundreds more Rapax in the Rift and in their own castle. I'd used this information to get the Umpani and T'Rang to ally with each other, and used that combined intelligence and firepower to blow up the Dark Savant's ship.

Making my way to a previously-discovered path to Ascension Peak for the final showdown, I found that the Rapax had blocked it off with a massive landslide. A bunch of low-level Rapax were patrolling the area, and mocked me with their announcement of how they rocked, I sucked, only they can go to Ascension Peak, nyah-nyah-nyah. I sent them to the Ascension Peak in the sky, and decided to head back to Castle Rapax to see if I could find out how they were planning on making it to the peak after causing the landslide.

Once I got there, it was once again nearly non-stop combat. At one point, I had so many Rapax lined up to fight me (six groups averaging six or seven Rapax each) as they chased me into a dead end that THEY actually got bored with the fight and left.

I'd maneuvered myself around a corner to reduce my exposure to ranged attacks and spells, but the line to beat on me went all the way around yet another corner. As the saying goes, "Out of fight, out of mind..." - or something like that. Anyway, many of the Rapax at the tail end of the mob got bored and wandered off. They didn't go far - once the fight was over, I bumped back into them and the conflict resumed.

I decided I'd like a little more RPC (recruitable PC) help, so I teleported back to Arnika to see if Vi Dominae would like to join us. She said she'd love to, and she always enjoyed getting together with "us guys." That lasted for about ten seconds, until we teleported directly back into the castle. At that point, we discovered that Vi Dominae could really, really gripe and complain in a nearly constant stream. She complained about being there, about always hooking up with losers, etc.

But she was able to materially contribute to the slaughter. She may not have been fighting at her peak, but she proved she was still able to kick some Rapax butt. Eventually, we killed enough Rapax that we could wander about unmolested near the throne room and feast hall area for about three minutes.

Let's Not Bicker and Argue Over Who Killed Who...
As it turns out, while the Templars now hated me along with all the rest of the Rapax, the offer made to me by the demon goddess Al-Sedexus still stood. I wandered into a Rapax Guard above the throne room who did not attack me - instead, he demanded to know who sent me. He snorted at any answer I gave him. I found another door that he was not protecting, however, and wandered through. Eventually I came to a Rapax named Al-Adryian who asked me if I was ready to become initiates in the church of Al-Sedexus or something.

Yeah, sure, why not? I had nothing better to do, except to save the world 'n stuff, but that could wait.

The initiation was no worse than your average frat-hazing. We had to acquire three pieces of clothing, answer three riddles, and kill a bunch of elementals. Oh, and dress one of our party members - the gadgeteer - in said clothing.

And I'm not sure - but I think he had to have sex with the topless demon-goddess in an altar room when we summoned her. I don't know for sure - she slipped us something in our drinks or something, and we all fell asleep to ecstatic sounds from Al-Sedexus the Demon Goddess. Afterwards, we found our poor gadgeteer quivering in the corner in the fetal position, refusing to talk about what had happened while the rest of the group was passed out on the floor for hours.

What's more, he was now under a curse. He couldn't leave the castle and rift area without suffering constant, slow damage. No magic would undo the curse. On the plus side, all the Rapax in the castle decided to let bygones be bygons and no longer attacked me. Nevermind the entire castle was stinking with the smell of hundreds of dead Rapax that had fallen under our blades - now that we'd let the demon-goddess have her way with our poor gadgeteer, all was forgiven.

A little bit of exploration revealed a portal to Ascension Peak! Huzzah! We went through the portal and arrived on the mountain road. All was well.... except for the gadgeteer, who was now taking constant damage.

Payback Time
This wouldn't do. Our gadgeteer has finally gotten to the level (after a flirtation with multi-classing that I wish I'd never tried) where he could use some seriously powerful gadgets a couple of times before passing out from exhaustion. We didn't want to lose him. Besides that, he sucks up some hits in combat that would otherwise hurt our spellcasters. And apparently he makes good bait for demon goddesses. So he's a valued member of the team that we couldn't leave gimped like that.

So I set a teleport location there in Ascension Peak and decided to go back to Rapax Rift to have a talk with Al-Sedexus. Unfortunately, this required us to go back through the castle, and Vi Dominae left the party immediately. Since I didn't want to clear out my other two portal locations for my other two casters (one goes directly to the inn in Arnika, the other to the Umpani fort), I figured I was on my own for a while.

The Rapax were very gracious and nice to me as I walked through their castle into the rift. Once there, it was only a walk around the corner into Al-Sedexus's temple. The demon goddess was there. I clicked to talk on her, and she told us she'd heard we were planning on leaving her. Since we could only do that feet-first, she immediately attacked us. On her first round, she summoned a bunch of templars to aid her in the fight.

We focused our attacks on her. As tough as the Rapax generally are at over 500 hitpoints each, Al-Sedexus had about twice as many hitpoints. The gal was no pushover, in spite of being armored with nothing more than an occasionally writing snake. In the end, we triumphed and grabbed the bag of goodies she left in her wake. We hadn't yet killed any of the templars, and I decided to experiment by running away rather than fighting them to the bitter end.

Mysteriously, the castle is still quite friendly to us. Apparently killing their demon-goddess isn't all that important to them. So long as I let the templars live, I guess.

With that, I bought and sold some stuff with the blacksmith there at the castle, and teleported out to the Umpani stronghold and to Arnika to pick up supplies (ammunition, mainly) and two of my favorite RPCs - Vi Dominae, and Sparkle the Trynnie Ranger. Upon teleporting back to Ascension Peak, we found Vi Dominae has no problem being with us there. Sparkle, on the other hand, has begun whining. Incessantly. Asking when we could go home. It's like baby-sitting a whiney-but-cute eight-year old.

An eight-year-old who can insta-kill with arrows at a hundred paces.

Design Notes
Faction systems are an interesting thing in RPGs. Wizardry 8 is no exception. From what I can tell, if I'd have killed the six Rapax Templar guards summoned to aid Al-Sedexus in a remote cave temple with nobody watching, I'd have hurt my faction with the Rapax. But by leaving them ALIVE to tell their story of how I came in and killed their goddess and fought with them, my relationship with the Rapax is unharmed.

Does that make any kind of sense?

I'd really love to see an RPG where faction is handled in a realistic, organic fashion. I realize that this would be difficult to pull off, as most combats in RPGs are to the death, and bodies tend to magically vanish over time. And there seems to be an infinite supply of potential opponents in the world, so it's not like anybody might NOTICE that their factional population has dropped significantly since the player characters came to town.

I can see the simulated conversation between randomly generated NPCs now:

"Hey Bob, I've noticed a pretty high turnover in respawns since the group of adventurers started wandering our zone."

"Those guys coming towards us right now?"

"Yeah."

"Interesting observation. Maybe we ought to mention that to someb... ARGH! ICK! My torso! My precious torso!"

Well, okay. Maybe that's not just something you could drop into an existing game - you'd have to build the game around it. It'd be cool, though, huh?

The initiation quest for the Templars was, unfortunately, not the best. Though answering riddles was kinda fun and different (not for this game - there are a lot of riddles - but it's not something you see much of anymore). But otherwise it was pretty much just an ordinary run-the-gauntlet, kill-the-guardian-monsters thing.

The most amusing part of this experience is that I clearly did things out-of-order. Fortunately, it didn't break the game, though it's unclear to me if I could have found my way through the portal without going through the initiation process.

Labels: Mainstream Games, retro, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:47 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XV: Can't We All Just Get Along?
Wizardry 8 was originally published in 2001. It toom me several years to get around to it (and a great deal of effort to finally score a copy from EBay), but I'm now reporting on my adventures in the final game of the classic series. And with this fifteenth installment, I feel I'm getting close to the climax. Close measured in lots of combat.

If You Can't Join 'Em, Beat 'Em...

After some searching, I found an encampment in the wilderness where the Rapax Templars were staying. I was supposed to join these guys - well, the demon-goddess wanted me to do that. Why I'd want to follow the wishes of a bloodthirsty demon-goddess, I don't know. As I got to the encampment, however, the templars there warned me to leave. I'm apparently not yet a member of the club.

What do I do to join the club?

I don't know. And at this point, after fighting through tons of combat in the castle, and figuring that sooner or later I'd need to take these guys on anyway, I decided to see if I could break the game by taking these guys out now.

Unfortunately, the front area was swimming in Templars. Tons. A small army. However, since I'd been fighting those kinds of odds in the castle for days, I could take 'em. Plus, I was close to an exit out of the "zone." Using my l33t "dungeon break-in" skillz honed by years of playing Everquest, I whittled the Rapax down.

Summoned elementals came in very handy. Especially fire elementals, when they weren't distracted into hurling fireballs of their own. The Rapax are all but immune to fire, so fireballs were nearly useless, especially when they'd throw on an Element Shield spell. But the elemental could punch pretty hard, and would ignore the zillions of fireballs these guys would fling.

And yes, they'd fling the fireballs. That many Rapax meant that, at least at first, I could go on a bathroom break when the combat started, and when I returned there'd still be particle systems hurtling across the landscape towards me while my characters patiently waited their turn.

I gamed the system at this point. I'd go in, and MAYBE take down one or two of the Rapax before being forced to flee. Since most of my damage-causing spells would do next to nothing, once the defensive spells and the summon had been fired, I'd concentrate on insanity and Asphyxiation. Once in a blue moon, out of about two dozen Rapax and about six casts of Asphyxiation (a mass instant-death spell), ONE rapax would get unlucky and die outright. It was a terrible waste of spell points for that 0.5% chance of killing an enemy, but since nothing else was having much effect either, I gave it a shot. After all, they weren't exactly dying quickly on us as it was.

Once we'd score a kill or two, things would be looking hairy, and we'd be forced to flee. We'd rest up outside the zone, heal up, get spell points back, cast persistent buffs, and jump back in. The remaining Rapax would likewise be healed and have spell points back. Combat would begin almost instantly when we zoned in. By a strange twist of programming logic, if we'd been forced to abandon an elemental there in mid-combat, the elemental would still be there, saving us the casting of a summon spell at the beginning of the fight.

After spending pretty much an entire night doing this, we finally cleared the entryway enough to proceed further into the encampment. We found the King's tent in short order. Compared to everything else we had fought recently, the king and his two bodyguards were pushovers.

Strange Bedfellows

Several large guard patrols and one remotely-opened gate later, we found a couple of prisoners stuck in cages at the top of a bluff. One was an Umpani named Rodan, and the other was a T'Rang named Drazic. Strangely enough, we got both of them to join our party, and they told us their story. They began as mortal enemies trying to kill each other, even in captivity. But upon learning that the Rapax King was in league with the Dark Savant - making the Savant's allied forces stronger than anyone else on the planet - they realized that their own causes were doomed unless they could band together against a common enemy.

You see, the Umpani reportedly have a gun that is capable of taking out a starship - like the Dark Savant's ship. But the Dark Savant's black ship is cloaked and invisible to Umpani sensors, so they can't find his ship. The T'Rang have a tracking device which - with the help from my visit to the starport in Arnika and a black box recovered from a wreckage in Bayjin - can track the Dark Savant's ship. Rodan and Drazic asked us to take them to their respective leaders to make the case for an alliance between the Umpani and T'Rang. Curiously enough, since I'd been playing both sides, my party was in a prime position to give them aid.

Even better, we had teleport locations set not too far from the Umpani fort and Marten's Bluff, the base for the T'Rang. We portaled out of the Rapax Templar encampment, made our way through the swamp to Marten's Bluff, and met with the T'Rang boss, Z'Ant. He was skeptical, but willing to listen. He gave us an alliance document for the Umpani to sign, and the tracking device.

The Umpani were just as skeptical, but after hearing Rodan and Drazic's story, they also agreed. And gave us access to their "Big Gun."

We made our way to the top of Mount Gigas, and found that the "Big Gun" was actually a missile launcher. With a single missile. While there might be spares in some storage room somewhere, it sure did look like we only had one shot at this. Too bad. It would be nice to aim that sucker at the Rapax Castle. I wonder how many experience points I'd net by blowing up the entire castle filled with infinite Rapax?

We placed the tracking device in the computer at the base of the missile. The missile launcher locked onto the black ship in orbit around the planet, moved into position, and fired.

That black ship, she shur blows up pretty! The distant explosion was clearly visible from the mountain top.

The party launched into a self-congratulatory round of discussion and back-patting, and began speculating whether or not the Dark Savant was actually on the ship when it exploded. The consensus seemed to be that no, life is rarely that kind, and we'd probably meet him when we got to the top of Ascension Peak. Which, everyone tells us, should be our next step.

The end is near! Maybe.

Design Lessons Learned

While combat remains tedious, the plot was really kicking into high gear at this point. I HOPE that I have not ruined my game by taking the brute-force approach to dealing with the Rapax Templar encampment. ideally - as is apparently the case in many parts of the game - both approaches should be equally valid.

This is good RPG design. In fact, I'd go so far as to say this is how things SHOULD be, in all RPGs. Yes, I mean you, you delightfully linear plot-heavy Japanese-style console RPGs!

If I recall correctly, Richard "Lord British" Garriott once said that he'd make sure there was always at least one good way to achieve any goal in the Ultima series, but that he wouldn't go out of his way to prevent other approaches from working. If the players figured out a clever alternative, he was fine with that.

While a few more recent games have seemed to at least give nods to this idea (The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines come to mind, and I suspect Fallout 3 falls into this category as well), it is too often missing in many modern RPGs. While I've not played it yet, Shamus Young has recently excoriated Fable 2's plot for gross negligence in this reguard, forcing the player into some really bizarre, idiotic, needlessly complicated and punishing paths to accomplish what appears to be otherwise straightforward goals.

And even Oblivion seemed ... well, oblivious... to the fact that I'd accomplished one Thieves' Guild quest without actually killing anyone as I was assumed to have done. Those blind monks never even knew I was there, dang it!

Part of the problem, I suspect, is the script-based approach to handling "quests" or missions. I'm struggling with the same issues in Frayed Knights. To make things interesting, the entire sub-story and path to accomplish the quest is scripted out in advance, and any alternative approaches have to be similarly designed, tested, debugged, re-written, polished, and perfected.

But is this really necessary? Couldn't the Lord British approach still be applied to modern games? So you've got the glittery orb quest item stuck in some room. Is it really necessary to dictate how the player obtains the orb? Must all events and approaches be deliberately scripted into the game, or is it possible to set up a more generic event system and let things proceed more as a simulation? Would it be just as exciting? Just as interesting?

Yet even as I say this, I loved the hand-scripted resolution to the subplot where I acquired an alliance between the Umpani and T'Rang, and nuked the Black Ship. I'm a junkie for hand-crafted, well-designed plot and story development.

I'm sure I chose the most tedious, least interesting path to freeing the two prisoners, so would I be wrong in criticizing the game for allowing such tedious gameplay? Wouldn't I have enjoyed the game more following the nicely-scripted path?

Is there a happy medium between these two extremes?

Labels: Game Design, Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:04 AM (Permalink) 5 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XIV: Storming the Castle
I've had a bit of a hiatus, and I apologize. More on that in the next installment. For those still interested, here's a bit of a summary of my continued explorations of the "old-school" RPG, Wizardry 8. It's a fairly hard-to-find title these days, as the publisher has long since ceased to exist as anything more than a legal entity. But their memory lives on... as do game CDs on a PC.

The Demon Goddess
I made a lot of progress since Part XIII - and somehow thought I'd blogged it all, but evidently I had failed to do so. My bad. And now I have to go from memory.

We used the beckoning stone to summon a gargoyle named El Dorado. He exploded nicely under our combined firepower. Following that, we made our way to the demon-goddess Al-Sedexus. She seemed to debate a bit about what to do with us, but then gave us a quest set our faction so that we would no longer be attacked by Rapax Templars. Go us.

A bit more hunting led us to the courtyard of Castle Rapax.

Storming the Castle
The courtyard started out okay. There were archers along the wall which rained arrows down on us and were hard to kill. That was annoying. Pushing forward a bit more resulted in us getting surrounded by Rapax and attacked by an ever-increasing throng of Rapax.

The main floor of the castle was largely the same story - infuriatingly long combats. Rapax are minotaur-looking beasts which have some of the most infuriatingly boring combat in the known universe. They are - tough. Very tough. Most magic barely touches them. They hit like a ton of bricks. They have hundreds of hit points. And I usually end up fighting them a couple dozen at a time. I blow through most of my magic in each combat. Usually the best spells are buffs, heals, and insanity spells - since if even one or two Rapax berserkers go nuts and begin wailing on their comrades for a couple of rounds, It can shave precious minutes off of an hour-long fight.

The only thing interesting the Rapax have going for them is that they have classes. Which means you have some spellcasters going at it. This usually means putting up an element shield in the first round, as I'll be sitting through about six to eight fireballs every round, plus the occasional Crush.

After literally hours of practically non-stop combat, I made my way to the upper floors. I embarrassed the prince, who I caught in his harem. He fled, and sicced his concubines on me.

Yes, his concubines.

Eventually, sheer tedium and frustration made me flee to the upper floors which were much more interesting - though I had left some halls of the main floor unexplored. The upper halls and the cellar had a lot of interesting things going on, and most of the Rapax were not hostile to me. I guess they were aligned with the templars.

An adventure-game-esque sequence followed. I found myself going through a zoo, hitting the cellar and jail areas, participating in a barroom brawl, discovering that the Rapax King and Queen seemed to be running counter to each others' purposes (in fact, it looks like the King was trying to arrange the death of his dear wife... I do not know whether or not he succeeded). After finding a lot of secret portals and bizarre items with strange uses, I managed to open up a teleporter near the King's chamber that opened up a portal to the inside of the Dark Savant's tower back in Arnika.

Dah Bomb
Among other things, the Dark Savant's tower houses a bomb capable of destroying the entire world. For such a big deal, the tower was kind of a let-down. There wasn't much there - just robots serving the Dark Savant, and a combination lock to deactivate the bomb.

At this point, I teleported back to the Rapax Castle, and fought a few gazillion more Rapax, before getting bored and leaving back the way I came.

Reflecting on Design
The castle sequence is a major set-piece to the game, but it is fatally flawed on the main floor by some really tedious combat - not unlike Rapax Rift and the Bayjin Shallows. The designers wisely set it up so that the upper levels (and cellar) were not nearly so bad - but it does make you wonder how you could slaughter something like 400 Rapax on the main floor (and how does the castle HOLD that many???) and almost nobody bats an eye about it one floor up.

But I really did enjoy myself a lot on the upper floor. The combats were few but a little more interesting (the zoo animals were largely creatures I'd fought before, but at least they broke up the monotony a bit). And the locations and notes gave a lot of clues as to what had been going on for the last few years. It helped make the world come alive.

The Savant Tower was something of a letdown. Here's a hint to game designers: When you introduce something early in the game that's clearly a major goal for later, you really ought to put some more effort into making it cool. Visually, it was cool, but from a gameplay perspective, there wasn't much to do there. Unless I totally overlooked something.

I have already whined enough about how boring the Rapax are to fight. But this illustrates something about enemy design at which I have personally failed many times in the past. It is EASY to make a bigger, tougher, harder opponent. Beef up their armor and hitpoints, throw in a solid claw / claw/ bite attack (an old-school D&D reference), crank the magic resistance up to 11, and viola! A super-challenging monster!

And a super-boring one, too. Oh, sure, if used sparingly, they can be fun, and even interesting in their own way. But ultimately, what makes enemies interesting to a player are the same things that make them nightmarish for a programmer - unique behaviors and abilities (or combinations of the same).

If you look at some of the most popular (and feared) monsters in Dungeons & Dragons, they usually fall into this category. Dragons are not only ultra-tough, but also have the classic breath weapon and flying ability (and, often, spells, an aura of fear, and other special abilities). Mind Flayers with their uber-nasty psionic blast and the whole brain-eating thing. Beholders with their ray-shooting eye stalks (and the anti-magic cone from their primary eye). Vampires and specters with the level-draining ability. Medusas (yes, in D&D, Medusa is an entire race, not just an entity) with the gaze that turns adventurers into stone. Mummies with their mummy-rot and fear aura. Dopplegangers who can assume the form and behavior of friends. Harpies with their charm powers. And various kinds of demons with their spell resistance and other special abilities.

Those special abilities are what makes them interesting. Wizardry 8 is no exception. The psionic abilities of the Rynjin were infuriating, but it made them stand out... except for the fact that practically everything in the Bayjin area was also psionic. Nessie - I still haven't taken HER down yet. But she was not boring. Creatures that swallow my party members whole are rare, scary, but definitely not boring.

Giving the Rapax some character classes and abilities in Wizardry 8 was definitely a step in the right direction. Frankly, after killing hundreds of these things in a row, they'd be getting pretty tiresome no matter how cool their design. Persona 3 did a great job of doling out strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities amongst opponents - and the expansion did an even better job of putting them together in interesting combinations that took some (minor) tactical planning to work through. And those still got pretty boring after a while.

So take my criticism with a grain of salt - or a small Siberian salt mine...


More Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School
Part VII: Ratts!
Part VIII: Dances With Rhinos
Part IX: My Duplicity Has a Price
Part X: Missing Men and Mutant Frogs
Part XI: Swimming With the Psi-Sharks
Part XII: Desperately Seeking Marten
Part XIII: Lucky Thirteen, Unlucky Rapax
Part XIV: Storming the Castle

Labels: Mainstream Games, retro, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:11 AM (Permalink) 16 comments links to this post

 
Persona 3 versus Wizardry 8
Harry asked in the comments a previous post if I would rate my experience with the console RPG Persona 3 FES as above or below that of the classic (but aging) computer RPG Wizardry 8 - which is still incomplete (though I did play it a little tonight).

The two games are only barely in the same genre. Apples and watermelons, here. But for the sake of argument (because I do so love a good argument), I thought I would offer a point-by-point comparison of the two, so you can draw your own conclusions. So here goes:

Style
Wizardry 8: Classic party-based Western RPG. They don't come any more classic.
Persona 3: Party-based "Japanese" style RPG, mixed with elements of dating sims, Pokemon, Japanese anime shows that even die-hard fans are too embarassed to dub for a U.S. release, and whatever else the designers could come up with during their week-long session around a bong.
Winner: Neither. Come on, uber-stalwart-old-school or freaky-weird-innovation... do you really think I'd pick one over the other?

Combat Duration
Wizardry 8: Bring a sack lunch to each one, especially later in the game.
Persona 3: Ranges from trivial speed-bumps to appropriate length. Boss battles reasonably long and dramatic. Final boss battle requires you to call in sick for the next week, and you may want to and make sure your console is hooked up to a UPS in case of a power outage.
Winner: I'm gonna go with Persona 3, here. I'd actually call the battles "too short" for the most part, but it's better to err on that side than on the side of "too long," which Wiz 8 does even with the monster speed-up patch.

Best Robot Companion Combat Quote Pop-Culture Reference
Wizardry 8: "Exterminate!"
Persona 3: "Hasta La Vista!"
Winner: As a Doctor Who fan, I'm gonna have to go with Wizardry on this one.

Epicly Cool Settings
Wizardry 8: While it's a more traditional sword & sorcery world, it mixes science fiction elements, some very well thought-out races, history, and an entire city set inside a giant tree.
Persona 3: The game is so heavily dominated by the Japanese setting and culture (from school schedules to New Years in Kimonos at the local shrine) that they didn't bother to hide it when they localized it - which is a treat for Western audiences. The weird Twilight Zone-esque circumstances with the flow of time is just out there.
Winner: I might feel differently if I lived in Japan, but I'm gonna give the point to Persona 3 on this one. Just barely.

Sheer Quantity of Controversial Material
Wizardry 8: Ummm..... you have some pretty chunky deaths, as enemies tend to explode on expiration. Some mild profanity, I think...
Persona 3: Profanity. A shower scene (suggestive, but reveals nothing). The summoning of demons and angels from Catholic / traditional Christian theology. Lots of occult references (especially the tarot). Children being crucified. Half-naked personas. Personas with extremely suggestive anatomical features. Multiple references to inappropriate teacher / student relationships. A rather phallic persona (in the expansion). Oh, yeah, and a whole game about kids shooting themelves in the head.
Winner: Duh! Whether that makes Persona 3 a winner or a loser is subject to personal taste and belief-systems.

Best Use of Sex As A Weapon During a Boss Battle
Wizardry 8: You douse a horrible-looking rapax mannequin with sexy rapax perfume, and use it as bait for a devious and deadly trap. When the assassin breaks cover in hopes for a romantic interlude in the middle of hostile territory, you squish him. Or I guess you could fight him directly.
Persona 3: The "Lovers" Arcana boss teleports you and Yukari into a hotel room, with Yukari in the shower, both of you afflicted with a foggy memory while it tries to convince you to give in to your desire. Unfortunately, being noble and resisting temptation just gets you slapped anyway, with a warning from Yukari to never mention anything about it to anyone.
Winner: As icky as the very thought of Rapax Love might be, Wizardy 8 wins handily due to its being a dynamic, truly interactive puzzle sequence rather than a cutscene with circular dialog choices.

Least Tedious Monster Grinding
Wizardry 8: The more powerful you get, the more powerful and numerous (and, generally, tediuous) the monsters get. So there's really no point in leveling up. Unfortunately, its hard to avoid, as there are fights whenever you are trying to get from point A to point B. Even in town in some places.
Persona 3: The bosses keep getting harder, and arrive on a schedule. It's up to YOU to keep up with them. But you can choose not to go to Tartarus if you feel ready to deal with the upcoming boss, and the non-boss fights are not too difficult to flee and avoid entirely.
Winner: Persona 3, hands-down.

Goofiest Ally
Wizardry 8: Hmmm.... Madras, the Trynnie gadgeteer?
Persona 3: Koromaru, the wonder-dog who wields a dagger in his fangs and summons Cerberus. At least he's less annoying than Ken.
Winner: Persona 3 loses here by winning.

Most Interesting Non-Combat Activities
Wizardry 8: A great amount of gathering, exploring, puzzle-solving, and conversing is possible. Building faction, questing for craft items, and
Persona 3: Plenty of fairly lame "quests" from Elizabeth, breeding and improving personas, building relationships, and making yourself more desirable to the opposite sex. Oh, and overstaying your welcome in a hot springs pool, and participating in "Operation Babe Hunt."
Winner: A tie, actually. Persona 3 has a broad scope of repetitive activities you perform regularly, plus some unique activities in certain parts of the game. Wizardry 8 has less of a scope of regular, repeatable non-combat activities, but ultimately has a lot more unique activities, quests, and things to discover - plus a lot more interesting adventure-game style puzzles.

Most Fun Boss Encounter
Wizardry 8: You have to defeat a mutant frog that swallows party members whole in order to rescue a kidnapped comrade.
Persona 3: Though I never played this part, I've seen the videos on YouTube of fighting Elizabeth, the "secret" Persona 3 boss. She is a butt-kicker of godlike power that puts Death to shame. So why didn't she save the world? Besides the fact that she's definitely twisted.
Winner: Brekek the mutant frog of Wizardry 8. Simply because the storyline leading up to him is immensely amusing. And he's a mutant frog.

Most Challenging Sub-Quest
Wizardry 8: So far, trying to rescue Glumph from Bayjin, by way of the Gigas Underwater Caves and the Bayjin Shallows. Rescuing him is easy, surviving the trip both ways is hard.
Persona 3: Trying to max out the social links for all three women (and a robot!) from the same dorm. I finished the game barely getting Fukka to talk to me again at school (at only social link level 5-ish), and then probably only because the world was supposed to end the that week.
Winner: Persona 3. Because there's no apparent option to "just be friends." Those sick designers.

Best Opportunity To Impersonate Deity
Wizardry 8: The party gets to become gods.
Persona 3: The main character gets to become a Christ allegory.
Winner: I want to get to decide who lives and who dies. Wizardry 8 ftw!

Most Unrealistic Inventory Item
Wizardry 8: A Port-O-Potty. Made from a porthole and a hinged pot with a lid, it casts a Noxious Fumes spell in the hands of a gadgeteer.
Persona 3: Bikinis and French maid uniforms which grant better armor protection than bulletproof vests.
Winner: Tie. A delicious, insane, wonderful tie.

Overall Winner:
Since a big part of the reason Wizardry 8 is incomplete is Persona 3, if you held a gun to my head and forced me to pick which game I enjoyed more, I'd probably have to go with Persona 3 - probably because of the characters and story. But if that gun was instead an evoker, I'd summon Chi-You and go all Vorpal Blade on you!

However, compared to the 'expansion' for Persona 3 FES ("The Answer"), Wizardry 8 is far and away the better game. The Answer, at least for me (so far), is pretty much the most boring mechanics of the game (the monster grinding) with most of the cool parts from the original campaign ("The Journey") ripped out. Its story isn't much on its own, but it's intriguing as a tie-in to the original.

I could also note here that I got Mass Effect at about the same time as Persona 3 FES, and it has hardly been touched. Technologically, it is vastly superior to either game, but so far it has not left me too thrilled.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:36 AM (Permalink) 7 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XIII - Lucky Thirteen, Unlucky Rapax
This is a continuation of my experiences delving for the first time into the now-classic computer RPG, Wizardry 8. I expected this series to go about nine or ten posts, but we're now on post thirteen. So here we go:

Fifty-five minutes, fourteen seconds.

That's how long this particular random patrol encounter took. I thought my complaining about the excessively long combats in Wizardry 8 might have been exaggerated. I wasn't really sure how long these fights were taking - I was more focused on winning than keeping time. So I timed this one.

The battle was an encounter with a patrol - consisting of, as you can see, twenty-nine enemy ... uh, Rapaxes. Rapaxi? I have no idea what the plural of Rapax is supposed to be. I started the stopwatch function on my watch when the battle began, paused it when I had to pick up my daughter from her play practice, and resumed it when I sat back down to finish the battle.

The battle took nearly an hour. That would be an unpardonably long boss battle. But for a run-of-the-mill fight against wandering monsters several levels below me? Ye gods! No wonder turn-based combat gets a bad rap.

I nearly lost the battle about forty minutes in. Having to replay that much of the game (since you can't save in mid-combat) would have probably made me quit for the night. That's happened before. Fortunately, the monsters decided to attack my water elemental at that point (or each other, succumbing to the effects of insanity I kept hitting them with) long enough for me to resurrect one dead party member and to "heal all."

Almost worse than the loss of health was the entire party running out of stamina very quickly during the battle - and both of my primary casters having to take a quick swig of Magic Nectar to restore magic points about two-thirds of the way through the battle (just to have enough mana to cast Rest All to keep everyone from taking a nap at the same time!)

The screenshot to the right is from about that point - right after the resurrection, when I managed to fear enough rapax (I think I'll use that for both singular and plural) to thin the crowd so I could actually stage a comeback.

So that's my excuse for not having enough progress to report this time, and I'm sticking to it. Too many combats like this one!

So I finally found the wilderness section and Rapax Rift. That was a feat unto itself, especially when facing fire-breathing flying snakes in groups of four that are several levels higher than me. 25th level flying serpents or some such nonsense. While they may have been the same level as Nessie, they weren't nearly as tough, though they were hard and exhausting to bring down. I could usually manage two fights in a row before needing to rest, but resting in the wilderness was nearly impossible.

Since I have three characters who can now cast spells to set and return to portals, I would have one character set a portal at my current location, and then have my other caster teleport us directly back to the tavern in Arnika - right in front of Vi Dominae, after she left us again when we approached Rapax Rift. I keep coming back and waving to her, just to prove to her that we're still alive and let her know what a chicken she is. Then we rest up, and teleport back to our previous location. It saves on long, nasty, brutal combats that end up with us dying because we don't have any magic left when enemies stumble across us in our sleep.

Yeah, the game can be a little brutal.

Rapax Rift is a land of deadly lava floes. Besides patrols of high-level Rapax berserkers, warlocks, initiates, priestesses, and archers, there is a temple complex and some occasional groups of "fire ants." Which aren't like real world fire ants at all. These fire ants are literally on fire, walk through lava, and are the size of dogs.

The other scary monster here is the Lava Lord, who is (or should I say, was) sort of an unholy enforcer-sort summoned by the priestesses to take human - or, rather, Rapax - sacrifices on behalf of some priestess / demoness / goddess named Al-Sedexus. We found several prisoners who were pretty much past usefulness, dreading the moment when they would be made the sacrifices to this Lava Lord guy.

We found another prisoner, long on information and short on spirit, who was in the process of becoming the next sacrifice. He'd had a mark placed upon him by the Staff of Ash by Al-Sedexus, which would allow the Lava Lord to eventually just burn him from the inside out. The only way to remove that mark was to use that staff to erase it. We unlocked his door, but he refused to budge without having the mark removed, as it would only hasten the inevitable. On our way out, the Lava Lord materialized from a river of lava, walked over to the prison / sacrificial area - walking right past us - roared a bit, and then returned from whence he came.

Much blundering about and re-fighting patrols led us to a spot where the supports of a cave next to a lava-puddle were weak and sagging. Knocking out a brace let the roof tumble in, which covered the lava-puddle and providing us with a step up to the other side, taking us inside a nicely-carpeted temple area. We battled rapax patrols and priestesses to the top with some teleporters. And a key.

One of the teleporters us to the central island with force-fielded area which was unlocked by a wand which looked mysteriously like a key on the end (as noted in the description!). However, unlocking the barrier field also summoned the Lava Lord, who in turn summoned a trio of fire sprites (which looked like fire elementals to me), and the whole group then began playing whack-a-mole with our heads. However, liberal use of Banish and Dehydration (I didn't know you could dehydrate fire and lava...) saw us to a pretty easy victory. Honestly, while tough, this boss wasn't as tough as some of the random patrols. Then we went back to the formerly-force-fielded spot, and retrieved the staff of ash and a rift key that this guy had been protecting.

Next, we took another route to a trapped lava trap. Fortunately, I saved first. While I avoided dying to the trap, I found myself well-and-truly trapped with no exit, walking around the edge of a depression which had filled with lava. I restored, found the secret mechanism to deactivate the trap (which was itself trapped!), and mad the area navigable. Proceeding forward, I ran into the high priestess, a delightful Rapax who kept us entertained by casting instant-death spells on us while her minions kept healing her (and each other) and hexing us. We killed her, and found something called a beckoning stone.

We returned to the guy who was going to be sacrificed, who took the staff to remove the mark, let us know to go north to Rapax castle, and let us know how to use the beckoning stone (I think) to summon a beast that would let us into Al-Sedexus's lair.

That should be fun!

Taking Design Notes
The puzzles and fixed encounters in this area were actually pretty neat and well-designed. The non-interactive sequence when the Lava Lord first appeared was perhaps a little heavy-handed, but it served to make him seem impressive and scary. There's a lot to like.

But really, there's only one story here, and that is the length of combats. Now, I happen to be someone who likes a good, meaty, turn-based encounter. And I'm a fan of games with big tactical combat components, like the X-Com series, where a battle (which is the focus of the entire game) can take a couple of hours. But this is way, way too much in an RPG, and an achilles heel to what was otherwise a pretty awesome game. It reminded me of the final fight with Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII, where he'd invoke a spell with minute-long non-interruptable cinematic every other round. Kinda cool once, kinda making you want to throw your controller through the TV screen the twentieth time.

If I find myself opening a door and finding four groups of 99 berserkers in this game, I'm going to be really, really disappointed.

More Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School
Part VII: Ratts!
Part VIII: Dances With Rhinos
Part IX: My Duplicity Has a Price
Part X: Missing Men and Mutant Frogs
Part XI: Swimming With the Psi-Sharks
Part XII: Desperately Seeking Marten
Part XIII: Lucky Thirteen, Unlucky Rapax
Part XIV: Storming the Castle

Labels: retro, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:17 AM (Permalink) 13 comments links to this post

 
Wizardry 8 Part XII: Desperately Seeking Marten
I originally thought that this Wizardry 8 play-through series would only take ten to twelve posts. This is number twelve, and I'm not there yet. Wizardry 8 is proving a bigger game than I anticipated. Not to mention time-consuming. Combats are often taking ten minutes or longer to resolve, as I often face twenty or more opponents at a time. Since I've been doing a lot of running back and forth to different areas, I regularly find myself taking a twenty minutes or more crossing a zone due to fights. The camouflage spell (Shadow Tincture) doesn't seem to help very much - if you are in tighter confines (such as many areas of the road, or the Mount Gigas water caves), there's just no dodging half the combat.

Flush with more experience points from some travelling around and my discovery of the location of the Dark Savant's ship, I figured I'd take a crack at the Bayjin Shallows around Nessie and another rescue operation in Bayjin. I didn't get too far. This time, the water caves below Mount Gigas were filled with "Death Rays" - Manta-Ray looking creatures that, true to their namesake, had insta-death attacks that would sometimes land even through my magical defenses. And, since they are virtually immune to water spells and mental attacks, and fire spells don't work underwater, my biggest area-effect attacks were largely useless against them.

Those fights sucked.

Eventually, after being clobbered in the same fight four times in a row, I gave up and teleported back to Arnika. There was, I remembered, another possible enterance to Bayjin, guarded by Rayjin, in the swamp. I have a teleport location back at Arnika, so I keep returning to the city. Most of the times I leave, I get met by a large group of Rattkin who issue me advice or dire warnings. This time, after teleporting back from the water caves, the Rattkin leader tipped his hand, and said there was a price on my head, and he would be coming to collect the next time we met.

Who put a price on my head? The only leader Rattkin I've found was the Don, who was still holding the Astral Dominae hostage for 100k gold. At least that was my excuse. We went to the tree, and got in a fight with the Don. It wasn't easy. But we won, killed the Don, and retrieved the Astral Dominae. It felt a little anti-climactic after spending all of Wizardry 7 seeking after the darn thing (which I still haven't actually finished), but I was glad to have two out of the three artifacts needed for the inevitable end-game.

We continued off to the swamp, defeated the Rayjin, and found the land-based entrance to Bayjin. Much combat ensued. Much combat. We killed some aquatic faeries and found a bunch of loot in the hills in the center of the island, and battled what appeared to be endless streams of crabs. Usually four to ten at a time. We'd kill two groups, rest, and immediately fight one or two more. We made our way into the Rayjin village, and slept inside their huts while the patrols and crabs marched in swarms outside the door. Good thing they don't actually go INTO these huts when they are occupied.

We found some prisoners, including Glumph, the Umpani prisoner we were supposed to rescue. We also found a Helazoid woman who died while telling us she came from Wizardry 7. Glumph complained most of the time we had him - which was far too long. Many more battles ensued as we tried to retreat from the island, taking the water way back. Yes, I was going to risk more Death Rays. And Nessie. I wanted to see what else was hidden behind Nessie.

We didn't actually kill her. We moved quickly around her, sucking up her attacks and floating on bubble-streams up to caves we hadn't visited yet. In one, we found a really kick-butt, but cursed, battle-axe. After my warrior had spent nineteen levels with her newbie axe, she was ready for an upgrade, curse or no curse.

One cave took us to a new zone - the Sea Caves. Exploring the island area, we came across a rope and a hook, and then a sledgehammer. We threw them into our inventory and forgot about 'em, continuing to explore. Well, explore and fight. On the plus side, we could use fireballs and fire storms again, and most of the creatures were subject to mental attacks.

In one cave, we found a loose man-made stone wall. Application of the sledgehammer opened it up into a room with a door that had been sealed from the other side. There was no way in that we could find. A little bit more exploration (and fighting - did I mention fighting? There was a lot of fighting) took us to an area with a pit. Getting bold, we jumped down into the pit - and found ourselves surrounded by hostile, man-eating insects the size of small ponies. Fortunately, they were big and the cave was small. They could only attack us two at a time, and they were nicely subject to being driven insane. For the most part, we let them kill each other.

But that fight was nothing compared to the next one. We found some light coming down through a hole in the ceiling. We used the rope and hook to pull ourselves up to a room - with the back-side of the sealed door we'd seen earlier. We were in.

And we were facing an army of undead. Something like about twenty, plus some giant undead dude called the Keeper of the Crypt. Our first attempt didn't go so well - we took out the keeper and most of the undead, but soon found half our party dead - especially when the undead siges summoned big ol' elementals to aid the fight. We were more careful on the second attempt, pulling the undead to a corner where we were protected on two sides. We managed to silence the undead siges early on, preventing them from summoning any elementals or casting other nasty spells against us. What spells the other ghosts hit us with were often reflected back with our too cool Eye For an Eye reflection spells we now possessed. See, I'd learned something from those awful little Leaf Faeries!

The Keeper of the Crypt was almost easy to defeat at the end of that battle.

Following that, we found some slippery slopes that would drop us down pits, forcing us to retrace our steps (and fight lots of battles) to come back to the tomb area. We found some spiked boots back in the tomb, which our robot companion NPC was able to wear. They magically helped the entire party keep from slipping down into the pits, but then we found another obstacle - an uncrossable chasm that needed some other object to cross. The boots could get us safely to the edge, but not across.

This time, we voluntarily dropped down a pit, and searched around the island until we came across the remains of a wrecked ship. Spinning to make itself obvious, there was a large wooden plank there which was remarkably both sturdy enough to carry us, and could shrink down to fit in our inventory. Perfect!

Unfortunately, on our way back, we were unable to avoid a fight with some multi-armed nasties on the beach. By the time we defeated them, five other groups of nasties had converged on our position, and we found ourselves fighting 9 more of the multi-armed nasties, 8 sand crabs, 4 curare crabs, and four death beetles. That's right, 25 monsters at once. This was a new record. The battle took over twenty minutes. And that's WITH firing off Asphyxiation spells to insta-kill about three at a pop for the first three out of four rounds.

When it was over, we made our way back to the tomb, which had become newly repopulated with undead. Twelve re-dead monsters later, we crawled back to the chasm, dropped the plank over it, walked across, used a key we'd found to unlock a door, and entered a tomb where a ghost lay resting on a vault. The ghost stood up, and we chatted. This was the ghost of Marten, the dude who stole the Destinae Dominus years ago. He told us that the thing had driven him insane, and he was just oh so happy to pass it on to us so we could go crazy. Which he did. Plus a 400,000 XP bonus. My entire party went insane, cackling violently as they leveled up.

I gave the artifact to the bard, who was wearing the Helm of Serenity we'd gotten from Trynton. Immediately everyone regained their composure, got their clothes back on, and tried desperately to pretend nothing had happened.

All three artifacts are mine. I should go to Disneyland. But instead, I'm probably going to the Rapax Castle and then Ascension Peak. But first, I have to finally take Glumph back to General Ymir and get credit for this mission. He grumbled the whole time, but he gained about four levels in the process, so he shouldn't complain too loudly.

Taking Design Notes
Finally meeting Marten, after chasing him all these weeks, felt like something of a climax. I was afraid that once I met him, I'd get a lame, "Thank you, Mario, but the Destinae Dominus is in another tomb" response, but everything came together well. I was also pleased that, once the mission was accomplished, he stuck around to talk and answer some questions. Since I'd heard "Marten this" and "Marten that" since level seven or so, and about the theft of the artifact since level one, it was great to hear the story from his perspective. There wasn't much to add, in all honesty, but it felt better to me somehow.

The path to reach him once I got to the Sea Caves was nicely tricky, but not too difficult, involving much more than combat (though the fighting definitely took the greatest amount of time). The puzzles remain standard adventure-game fare, and I'm not complaining. They have taken the rule to heart that - most of the time - the object needed to accomplish a task in area X can be found in area X, unless it is part of a larger quest.

While they are very rare, I do like that the characters in my party occasionally make specific commentary on major events. They had to create a unique commentary for every voice "type" in the game, which is impressive.

The battles are, as I mentioned before, getting tedious. I don't mind a decent battle taking three to five minutes, or a boss battle taking even a little longer, but these remain pretty annoying speed-bumps.


More Wizardry 8 Play-Through Entries:
Part I: So a Samuari, a Valkyrie, and a Bishop Walk Into a Bar...
Part II: Running the Gauntlet
Part III: Vi Domina Tricks
Part IV: Arnika Bank - No Safer Than Under the Mattress
Part V: In Fear of Little Naked Winged Women
Part VI: Old-School Goes Old-School
Part VII: Ratts!
Part VIII: Dances With Rhinos
Part IX: My Duplicity Has a Price
Part X: Missing Men and Mutant Frogs
Part XI: Swimming With the Psi-Sharks
Part XII: Desperately Seeking Marten
Part XIII: Lucky Thirteen, Unlucky Rapax
Part XIV: Storming the Castle

Labels: Game Design, retro, Roleplaying Games, Wizardry

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:23 AM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post