Let’s keep rolling with these Youtube finds. There’s millions of them, but most of them are obnoxious, with the emphasis on noxious, so I try only to repost here the best. And this one’s pretty informative.
Which version of the classic foundational CRPG Wizardry should you play? I’m going to emphasize that you should play one of them. Wizardry inspired so many people, but one ever quite duplicated its mixture of tabletop-inspired party-based play, permadeath, and overwhelming difficulty. Wizardry is a game that doesn’t want you to win it. That’s why characters cost a fortune to revive, cost an ever greater fortune to bring back if that process fails, and it becomes impossible to revive them if that fails too.
If characters die in the dungeon, their corpses aren’t even brought back to the surface for you! You have to take a different party of characters into the dungeon (assuming they’re strong enough to survive the journey!), move the dead members into empty slots in your group, then return to town, unload them into storage, and repeat until you’ve rescued them all. And woe to the characters who mistype a teleport spell and end up embedded in rock, because they’re utterly destroyed, vanished, obliterated, annihilated, eradicated, gone.
Wizardry hates players, and that’s why you should play it: to teach it a goddamn lesson.
Youtuber Tea Leaves played a lot of versions of Wizardry, including a very promising upcoming version by Digital Eclipse, which has modern quality of life features and modern graphics, while also having, at its foundation, the Apple II original, with all its hatred for organic life. In summary, he thinks that version is great, but also has positive things to say about other versions, especially the fan-patched translation of the Japanese Super Famicom version. But they don’t like the DOS version-it has a terrible bug which Tea Leaves emphasizes makes it unplayable. Noted!
Which Version of Wizardry Should I Play (Youtube, 27 minutes)
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Wizardy, Bards Tale, Might & Magic, all those classic dungeon crawls I mean to play but haven’t gotten around to…
I love that you say Wizardry hates players. It’s true. I cannot count how many hapless adventurers I’ve lost forever in the first few floors of the Proving Grounds. It’s amazing to me that a game so harshly difficult was such a massive hit. It’s not “tough but fair”; it’s just an asshole.
As for which version to play, as wonderful as the Digital Eclipse’s version is, I’m predicting the definitive way will be the Apple II “Wizard Replay” collection being put together by 4am. It will be packed with many classic scenarios (official and third-party), will include all of the bug fixes that have gone into Proving Grounds, and have some utilities to make life a bit easier for the player.