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Wizardry taught me something very important about game design (from a player's perspective). Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming overpowered
by jmyeet 2y ago
Wizardry taught me something very important about game design (from a player's perspective).
Wizardry 6-7 were great from a perspective of becoming overpowered if you wanted to. What you did was get to level 6-8 and then change classes. I forget the exact mechanics of this. But when you changed class you started weak so had to do 1 character at a time from your party of 5. I doubt it was designe dthis way.
Anyway, it was fun. It made you feel like you were beating the game. It made content trivial but I've come to learn that a ton of players like that. It's like seeing a weakness in the system, an unintended consequence and exploiting it.
Wizardry 8 basically removed this and honestly I got bored of it really quickly as a result.
Another way to look at this is that normalizing this made everything feel the same. It robbed me, as a player, of agency. It made my choices basically meaningless. It turned a more open world into a conveyor belt.
I've seen this pattern play out in many games. Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of bugs in police pathing depending on how you stood on a roof or creating massive pile ups and explosion chains on the freeway. GTA5 basically took the "fun" and comerical nature out of this aspect of the game and I basically never touched it again after the campaign.
More generally, you could probably classify this under the banner of emergent game play (not that "god mode" is particularly innovative). But emergent gameplay is both a sign of a well-designed game and what gives it longevity.
Additionally, I miss the days where there were more turn-based games. They were just more chill. The only turn-based strategy game left is Civilization. Games like Elden Ring are great but just not my cup of tea. I miss the days of Bard's Tale, Master of Magic, Heroes of Might and Magic (2 and 3), the old D&D RPG games and so on.
Anyway, RIP.
- ido 2y agoCivilisation is absolutely not the only turn based strategy game left: https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ https://store.steampowered.com/tags/en/Turn-Based/ Almost all of these are strategy games. Two that I’ve put a lot of hours into in the last year or two are slipways and slay the spire, but there are really a lot coming out all the time.
- haspok 2y agoShameless confession: I once completed Wizardry 7 with a single character, from start to finish. I remember the start was very hard, but once I survived the first few fights character development skyrocketed and eventually it became a semi-god of sorts. This was because originally the XP after fights was distributed among party members, so in a regular game every character would normally receive only XP/6. It happened quite regularly that a single fight bumped my character to the next level! IIRC I finished the game with my character having level ~120, after a number of class changes. Fun times! Can't remember how I had so much free time in my life though - I must have still been in high school or uni...
- jghn 2y agoOn the Mac version of Wiz 1 somehow I rolled a ninja out of the gate, which shouldn't be possible. Because I was in 4th grade and had nothing better to do I remember sitting there for hours re-rolling and re-rolling to see how high I could get and one moment saying "holy shit!". Fast forward a bit and I had acquired a shuriken. Which if a ninja equips it, they gain a HP. Except that there was no limit to how many times you could do that. So again, because I was in the 4th grade and had nothing better to do, I sat there for hours equipping/un-equipping it to the point where eventually my ninja had hundreds of HP. Fast forward another bit and I figured out how to duplicate a character. And from that point on my party was fronted by 3 god tier ninjas. Not a surprise that this was my first party where I managed to beat werdna.
- justinclift 2y ago> Like I returned to GTA:SA to have fun shooting down helicopters taking advantages of bugs in ... Did you ever play the early Saints Row series? ie 1-3 Those were pretty fun. The later ones turned to crap though. :(
- distances 2y agoBaldur's Gate 3 has turn-based combat, like D&D should have. The game sure has been praised everywhere already, but as I play almost exclusively turn-based games, I can confirm that it checked all my boxes. Absolutely superb game. I never played the Wizardry series myself, but I can see that Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor with its turn based combat is the title that defined for me what an RPG should feel like.