I was an Ultima kid. I can remember playing the first game in the series on the Apple II computers in the public library’s computer room. This was just what it sounds like – a tiny room with two computers in it that you could reserve for an hour or so, “checking out” software from the library’s collection to play for awhile. (I talk about it a bit in this video if you want to hear more about it.)
Anyway, I played a bunch of Ultima, including the Martian Dreams and Savage Empire spinoffs, but I never really got into the other big early 80s CRPG franchise, Wizardry. I was familiar with it mostly from its ads in magazines.
It looked interesting. Fascinating and eldritch from the screenshots, promising endless depths filled with monsters and treasure, puzzles and traps. I was big into Dungeons and Dragons already and – as I mentioned – the Ultima games, but Wizardry remained out of reach.
For one, I wasn’t really its target market. By the time I hit Junior High they were already at Wizardry VI, and each game more or less built on the last in such a way that its primary audience was “people who played all the prior games in the series.” And it hadn’t adapted in the same way the Ultima games had – growing more ambitious and technologically advanced – but the idea that you could take characters from game to game and let them grow in power was a compelling one. I loved the continuity of it.
Another stumbling block that kept me away was the simple fact that I wasn’t great at the kind of 3D grid CRPGs where you had to build a map as you played. While I’d never played Wizardry, I had played Bard’s Tale III and Might and Magic IV, and those were complex enough to get lost in. Maybe I just didn’t have the patience to get a sense of spatial awareness, but Wizardry always seemed just too hardcore for a kid like me to handle. It was a game for serious gamers. The kind who installed Linux and had long grey beards.
Well, I’ve got a beard now, and while it’s not grey it does have these cool white streaks in it. And I might not know how to set up a Linux box, but I felt I could stand to give Wizardry a try nevertheless.
Which Version?
I decided to go with the original Apple II release – it had many later ports, up to and including the Super Famicom and Playstation – but for the first game in this series I’ll be sticking to the original. There are a few quality of life changes I’ll be missing out on – notably the Playstation’s automap – but I feel its absence will be a more authentic Wizardry experience.
After an animated title sequence I launch right into the game itself, with no pretense at introduction or story. That’s fine, we have the manual as well – Wizardry’s packaging was a step above, more professional when most games would give you a disk and a slip of xerox’d paper in a plastic baggy.
While much of the game’s mechanics are spelled out, the story is not beyond that we’re controlling a number of adventurers who go off on an expedition in search of loot and glory. There’s a castle with some establishments and a maze, but we’re given no context. This is a pure dungeon crawl.
So, first we need some characters. Three in the front, three in the back, and only the front row can attack without resorting to magic.
We’ve got a bevvy of characteristics – Strength, which affects combat ability, IQ and Piety, which are tied to mage and priest spellcasting, vitality which affects our hit points, agility which determines turn order, and Luck, which the manual assures us helps in many mysterious ways.
We also have eight classes to choose from, which are gated based on the above characteristics. Fighter, Mage, Cleric, and Thief are pretty self-explanatory and have pretty low requirements. If you’ve ever played an RPG before you know what they do.
Bishops are combination Priest/Mages that can identify magical items. Samurai are fighters who get Mage spells. Lords are Fighter-Priests – paladins, in other games. And Ninja are unarmed fighting specialists with incredibly high stat requirements.
We also get five races to choose from – Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, or Hobbit. These give you a base in each ability score, and instead of rolling virtual dice for each, you get a random pool of bonus points to assign.
So, we’re going to want a Thief, Cleric, and Mage definitely. Then two fighters – actual Fighters or Samurai or Lords if we get the Bonus Point rolls for it. And then a Bishop to identify stuff for us and act as a backup spellcaster.
This is where I’d go to my patreon to pick supporters to name the characters after… but I don’t have enough, so I’ll need to come up with a theme.
Soft drinks.
Someone in a Discord suggested it, so I run with it. We get our two fighters Dr Pepper and Mr Pibb, our cleric Schwepps, our thief Moxie, our mage Barques, and our bishop Cream Soda.
Character creation is… tiresome. Get a bad roll, you just don’t save the character but have to start all over again. Slowing this down is the game asking you if you want a password for each character… this is, perhaps, showing the game’s inspirations in PLATO mainframe games. You might have a lot of people playing the same game at the same machine, so you can throw a password on characters to make sure nobody uses yours and gets them perma-killed. All the characters in all playthroughs using the same scenario disk – the floppy on which your characters are stored – coexist, though interact only minimally.
I’ll be doing a video game history video on PLATO mainframe games in the near future if you’re interested in knowing more about this.
Anyway, after ruthlessly rerolling my six characters as often as possible, I end up being able to make Mr. Pibb a Samurai – a fighter/mage – so I do. I may eventually be able to change Dr Pepper’s class to the fighter/cleric Lord – if his stats get high enough – so I will when I can. Just for symmetry. If the game holds my interest long enough.
After that I need to actually add all the PCs to the party – the roster on the scenario disk can hold up to 20, but I’ll only use these six slots. I get the feeling that a party wipeout would sap my will to continue playing.
Know Thyself, right?
Then I spend our starting cash on gear at the equipment store. It’s a clunky interface, but everybody gets something. Swords, shields, and breastplate for the fighters, chainmail and flail for the cleric, short sword for the thief, a dagger for the wizard even though – being in the back row – they can’t use them – and leather armor for the Bishop.
The Dungeon
Here we go. Welcome to the Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord. What are we trying to prove? Who is the Overlord? Why is he mad?
It’s hard not to compare Wizardry’s dungeons to Ultima’s, or even Akalabeth’s. Our view of the halls is smaller to make room for our party stats, and the enemies – when they show up – are images rather than the same wireframes as in Richard Gariott’s games.
Another point in Wizardry’s favor is that the game’s smoother. Less delay after hitting a key. Doesn’t take forever to draw in the maze, though I hear the C64 port had its issues in that regard. I also appreciate the W-forward, A-turn left, D-turn right controls. K is the command to kick in doors – there’s no other way to open them.
Aside from that, the dungeon seems… sparse, I guess. There’s no variety to the dungeon’s architecture, and random encounters are sparse. I’m sticking close to the stairs up just in case I get trashed – a quick escape being to my benefit, and I’m at least aware of how difficult the game gets.
Encounters
There are two kinds of encounter, the random ones and fixed ones guarding treasure chests… though the locations of those chests on each 20×20 floor is itself random. I’ve tried the few doors in this quadrant without finding one, but I’m going to stick around and grind for a few levels all the same.
My first encounter is with friendly monsters. Attacking them would shift our alignments towards evil, and I want to stay Good so Dr Pepper can advance into a Lord on level up. So this is effectively a non-encounter.
A few traversals of the corridor later and we have our first fight with some Scruffy Men. As a Scruffy Man myself I cannot help but feel a twinge of sympathy, but get into it anyway. I have no benchmark for my characters’ capabilities yet, and there’s no guarantee these early fights will be something I can handle… but in this case, it is. We kill two of the Men, the third runs off, and only Schwepps takes a hit.
A quick word on spells – you have spell slots, meaning you can cast X spells of each level between rests. And for our first level casters, that X is 2 – so after 2 spells, our rear line characters are pretty useless. You also have to type in the name of the spell you’re casting – listed in the manual and on your sheet.
Which brings me to another tangent about the game – getting information is difficult. You can’t just check your character sheet to remind you of your current XP or spells left anytime you want. Only while encamped or while in town at the tavern. This leads to a lot of unnecessary coming and going as you try to remind yourself of who currently has what, and who needs what.
We keep grinding. The goal here is to level up, and for that we need around a thousand experience points… though gold is good too, as we can improve our party’s gear at the store. And, fortunately, the random chance for there to be a treasure in each of the rooms near us is checked each time we enter the Maze… so after a few tries we’re able to grab some that, ironically, give us less gold than we’d get just by killing the monsters.
Why We Need a Thief
These chests are why we need a Thief, by the way… as only they can disarm traps. Moxie here has to first identify the trap – which she can get wrong – and then try to disable it – which she can fail. And the traps can do anything from paralyze or poison us – resulting in a trip to the healer in town – to massive damage to the whole party.
So chests are necessary, but traps are real bad. Hence the otherwise useless backrow thief taking up a party slot.
Still, you CAN find good items and gold in these early chests. And it gives us guaranteed encounters to grind.
Back to the Castle
Now, the Castle services. The only way to level up or regain spent spell slots is to visit the inn… and each visit adds a week to that character’s age. Just that character. Once they reach ~50, the chances of stats decreasing on level up jumps up pretty high. So that’s an absolute limit on the resting we can do… something I’m not super happy with.
Inns heal us too – depending on which room we stay in – but it’s far faster to let the Cleric heal injured party members and then to rest to regain those slots. Yes, this does lead to weird situations where party members age at different rates.
And, like the Dungeons and Dragons edition the game is inspired by, different classes need different amount of experience to improve, too.
I’m… sort of enjoying the game so far? It’s just grinding, but I can feel the progression, and the kobolds and orcs I’m facing aren’t too hard. The difficulty curve is pretty steep, I’ve heard.
But I can definitely see why Wizardry was so popular in the early 80s… it’s a pity they stopped innovating it while Origin kept improving on the Ultima series.
Back to the Dungeon
Having gone deeper into the dungeon, it’s time for a digression on mapping. There’s no automap in Wizardry – at least not until the Playstation console port. You have to carefully, painstakingly map out each level on graph paper… and sometimes you discover you’ve stumbled through a teleporter and aren’t actually where you thought you were. So you fix your maps.
There’s a spell that helps, insofar as it gives you your XY map coordinates in each floor’s 20×20 grid, but that’s it. And of course there are copies of the maps online… but I’m after the Wizardry experience. Map making is a huge part of the game that’s not part of the software, if that makes sense.
As I spent about a week playing Wizardry, I couldn’t help but compare it to Ultima. Both series launched in the same year, both drew heavily from Dungeons and Dragons, both were, initially, tremendously successful.
Wizardry lacks even Ultima 1’s sense of story, without any hint of why we’re in the dungeon until we hit the fourth level, but makes up for this paucity through its mechanical fidelity with a complexity far outstripping anything that came before or for some time after.
While it does borrow quite a bit from earlier PLATO rpgs, it’s the first game to give the player a party of adventurers to control, as clumsy as the party management and information screens are. It also offers a staggering 50 spells to Ultima’s 7 spell scrolls, paired with a magical system that’s an exercise in logistical management.
It’s a good game. It’s a difficult game. I’m glad I had the opportunity to check it out… but I hope to never return.
