f13.net

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/06/09/e3-2011-first-look-at-wizardry-online/

Open PVP with permadeath that runs on Win XP & DX9.

I, err, wish them luck.

I couldn't help read that like I was reading it from The Onion site.  I mean they seem to be taking everything people like about the direction MMO's have taken over the years and do the complete opposite.  This can't be real.

I'll give it a whirl.  To be fair though, I like hardcore (permadeath) in RPGs.

Ehhh...

F2P? Believe it or not, I'm intrigued.

First april? -No. Holy sh1t! I seriously wish this game reach release. Just to see how that bold experiment pans out . Albeit  I somehow  have a feeling that  it wont even reach beta stages :( With permadeath and open PK they would really have to go great length that griefing wont become main meta-game- people like killing and hunting for sport. Thats why pk is so popular.

I feel odd regarding this.   I love the idea of trying an mmo made for the express purpose of permadeath.   I also love PvP.   The idea of combining those two things though makes me shudder a bit.  I can only see it as an invitation for griefers to do nothing but roll up newbs in large groups and try to PK high level characters.

It has the Wizardry tag, so I'll have to try it.  My nostalgia needs to be crushed.

You could pick up just about any of the Japanese versions and get that feeling.

Is this the same group that announced the FFA-PVP-Permadeth game a while back, or a different one?

FFXI FFXIV Every other Asian grinder called and wants their midgetelffucks back.  Take the Asura with you when you go, please. 

Otherwise, color me interested.

Groups of up to 100.  PK with impunity in dungeons.  Permadeath.

I see this going really far.    :awesome_for_real:

100 enter, 1 man leaves!

Future Headline: "A man committed suicide yesterday after his Wizardry Online character, who had just logged in his 8000th hour of playtime, was PKed."  :why_so_serious:

Well I see a true RP there!

Groups of 100 + Permadeath.

You can bet item #1 in the cash shop is going to be resurrection scrolls or potions or whatever. Buy or die.

All you need now is friendly fire  :awesome_for_real:

*edit*
P.s. gog.com needs the old Wizardry games.  I would love to replay them.

The thing I have noticed over the years, and having worked on an arguably "hardcore" game for over 2 now. The entire "hardcore" thinking is pure forum/Rose colored nostalgia talk.

In practice, no one really wants it, and will do everything in their power to circumvent it. ( And when I refer to "hardcore" I mean the extremist utopian version, not to be confused with a challenging game )

Duh?

To expand:  It's been noted severl times in the past that if everyone who talked about the, "Good ol' days of Open PVP/ PK in UO" had actually had a sub, UO would never have introduced Trammel because it would have alienated 2x their actual playerbase.    :awesome_for_real:

I had a sub then and did feel it was fun (in its own way,) but there wasn't really anything else out there for me at that time.  By the time EQ came around, I had bypassed all my NEWB issues and dealt with the harsh virtual world in UO.  Then my paradigm was set, so when Trammel came I thought, "Hey, might as well try EQ now...everyone left anyway."  If I started playing a game like UO was back at launch now, I'd drop it like a bad habit.

If this is truly F2P, I'd give it a shot.  First time I perma-die and think, "I don't really want to go through all that again to get where I was..."  I'm out.

http://www.wizardrythegame.com/

It has website.

SOE  :awesome_for_real:

This might just give the Elder Scrolls MMO a run for it's money.

Lol. Perma-death and PKing? This game is going to fail and fail hard. This will be like early UO but with more ragequit.

Oh its Japanese .. That explains... everything!

Well, if they keep personal progression to utility based items ( AKA, not just ever increasing number ALA Wow ) and keep it relatively shallow as far as time invested and power increases. It wont be so bad. A lot like "Relm of the mad god" like model.

Perma-death = it's dead to me
 :oh_i_see:

heh... "Thirty years in the making, Wizardry Online is a blah, blah, blah."

I still remember holding the floppy disks in my sweaty little hands...the anticipation in study hall was almost unbearable.

Hey, uh, so I guess it's open beta now. I logged in and it's like, downloading.

http://www.wizardrythegame.com/

2 gig client. We'll see how this goes.

Apperently theres 3 great reasons to play


Er ok.

I pulled it down.  I really shouldn't have.  Usually I can eke some enjoyment out of damn near anything, and I couldn't even be bothered to get through the tutorial.  It's set some new standards for terrible.

But is it HARDCORE terrible?

I fought one monster and promptly uninstalled.  That's how hardcore the game won.

I also did the install/uninstall permadeath dance.

So, what's the deal? Is it an actual open world, where I can have my Secret Rebel Base in some far-off corner and sneak around, or is it basically a series of instanced action RPG dungeons linked together by a lobby? Can't tell from the trailer.

This game is so ugly, I haven't even gotten to a fight yet, I don't think I can make it.

Why/how?

I couldn't tell you, I didn't even get that far.  Basically, the art and models are completely terrible, the controls are completely terrible, the pacing of text against cut scenes is the slowest I've ever seen on a game, and is completely terrible and boring on top of everything else.  Oh, and there's permadeath, so you get to repeat all this painfully annoying crap if you do die.  If you don't believe me, pull it down and see if you can get any further, but I really wouldn't recommend it.  This is one of the worst MMO's I've ever seen, and I've tried most of the korean ones over the years.

Permadeath is a welcome release from playing this game.  :uhrr:

I tried this.

You have four classes - fighter, priest, mage thief - and four races, elf, dwarf, human and paedobait. You have a hotbar at the bottom of your screen which looks a lot like the WoW hotbar. You attack things more or less by tab targeting them and pressing hotbar keys, although instead of autoattack you can click the left mouse button to swing your weapon and perform a standard attack. You also have to unsheath your weapon by pressing / between fights, so if you forget to do that you're left impotently pressing a number key and wondering why nothing happens, while a mob beats on you.

It does have permadeath but not every time you die. Instead, there is a random chance of permadeath which you can reduce by sacrificing items. Health and mana do not regenerate automatically and you have to find fountains in dungeons to regenerate them, or use items such as potions. The game is pretty hard compared to most WoW clones and the introductory quest puts you in a small maze-like dungeon where it's actually possible to get lost and get killed by the mobs.

Interesting. I guess the only reason I'm asking for more info is that in direct opposition to what I'm hearing on this forum, people I know who are into "hardcore pvp" seem to be trying and loving it (while agreeing it's very rough around the edges).

As a fan of the Wizardry series, this makes me le sad.  :heartbreak:

Unless it's been changed in the last week or so, the way it works is you start with 100% chance to rez yourself at the nearest rez point, which you have to run back to. That percentage is reduced by being hit by some spirit mob(s) that wanders around in the netherworld, or whatever you want to call it.  If you rez with less than 100% chance, you've got a chance to turn to ash, at which point your character is gone. You can sacrifice items to increase the percentage back to 100%, though. You can chose to auto-rez as well, but there's a penalty of some sort involved, but I don't remember what it is.

I haven't run in to any pvpers, so I can't say if being killed by another player changes things any.

Other than that, what others have said is pretty well spot on.  I haven't tried playing a fighter, but mage and thief were atrociously painful.  Playing a priest was a cakewalk compared to the other two, at least at early levels.

These "people" who are into "hardcore PVP" are also usually masochistic OCD sociopaths.  :why_so_serious:

Plus they have to say they are loving it or be accused of being carebear. It's a bunch of guys punching each other in the dick and saying how awesome it feels until no-one is looking, then quietly slinking away. Or finding some bug / flaw they can loudly blame for their ragequit ("I loved being punched in the balls repeatly, but these fucking devs just can't do it quickly enough to keep up with my levelling.").

Oh god, it gets better.  From the Something Awful (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3525362) thread:
Ball punching indeed.

Damn... the last paragraph is making me want to try it. Sounds like Zek + Felucca + Justin Bieber.


EDIT: I am actually checking it out right now and I'll come up with more in a few hours. I have to say though, I didn't know this was a Japanese game. And it really shows, it feels and looks a lot like Final Fantasy 11. Take taht any way you want.

EDIT 2: I also liked the intro movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppEisP2NeLo), which tries too hard to be Demon's Souls but still manages to generate some nasty dungeon feels.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3584773/Wizardry.jpg)

It's tempting to download and just zerg pointless sociopathic characters at people.

Well, I don't know guys... spent a few hours in it. Ok, it looks fuckin OLD and the UI is a mess. But it's a roguelike, and it has permadeath like every other roguelike. It's also big huge nasty immense dungeon crawler, I am not sure I can dislike this.

Make sure to crank the resolution up, and turn the music off. And give it a fair try if you are into roguelike and dungeon crawls.

Wizardry came to Japan a long time ago, was strangely popular, and has been steadily produced ever since. The first person dungeon crawl game (even though this isn't first person) has never been a dead genre there. You have games like Shin Megami Tensei, Shining in the Darkness, Arcana, Etrian Odyssey, etc. There are Wizardry Gameboy games!

They were nice enough to keep the random bonus points roll from the original game, but unless you want to run Auto Hotkey with a script that rerolls for you, it's too painful to waste the time worrying about getting more than 10 - 12 bonus points.  You can only put 10 points in to any stat to start, anyway, so it's not really the biggest deal ever.

Characters on the same soul share dungeon unlocks, maps, and bank space.

I was wrong. Mages, past the first 3 or so levels, are pretty sick.

Not that I've put a massive amount of time in to the game, but thus far, I've not encountered any pvp.  Mind you, I've been aiming to avoid it, so take that for what it's worth.

For a f2p game, it's not the worst thing I've ever played, if you can overlook the Asian influences, and level grind.

I disagree with Falconeer calling it a roguelike.  The only thing it has in common with roguelikes is permadeath.  Beyond that, it has much more in common with Final Fantasy 11, and even that is somewhat sketchy.

Yup. There are even futuristic Wizardry-like games for the PC (Generation XTH) that are really faithful to the early Wizardries, down to the "MURMUR - CHANT - PRAY - INVOKE" thing when you rez someone at the temple. The only thing they are missing is TILTOWAIT. :awesome_for_real:

It's also why I don't understand this game at all. Why not make an online party-based (ie. everyone controls a party of 6) first-person dungeon crawl game in the first place, complete with 90 degree turns and all? Instead there's this weird mess of dickpunching and permadeath. :japan:

Yeah, after spending some more time with it I take back the roguelike label. it's just a massive dungeon crawl which I personally like. It's just super-old, but pretty good at what it is trying to achieve I'd say.

Your characters belong to your soul, which is represented by a last name and a level. All your characters share the same last name and while they level up independently, they share bank space and some story quests, so if you start a new one you are not really starting from scratch. As I said, you level up your characters but you also level up your soul, and bydoing that you earn some benefits like inheritance rights for new characters when you encounter permadeath.

PvP is not allowed until Soul Rank 2, which is roughly level 7 with a character.

Grouping seems very encouraged to me, considering the crazy spawn rate in every dungeon and how problematic it is to die (corpse run, risk of permadeath, other players able to loot your body, etc.) so seems to me you should never go solo. Also, grouping seems to keep the XP and loot flow going at a very good rate.

this thing reminds me a lot of EverQuest 1 dungeons in 1998, the atmosphere is there. What seems to be improved is the time to kill mobs (quite fast) while I can't say much about camping requirements, I haven't progressed that much yet. Also, the combat is more dynamic considering that you have to click mouse to attack, you can actively parry, and you can definitely learn mobs' attack pattern to just dodge away.

After some more time in it, I like it even more. As I said, this is like playing something from ten years ago, so that's what you should expect. But at the same time it has a lot of atmosphere when it comes to dungeon, maybe it's just the nostalgia effect for me but it's working, and the combat is still slightly more satisfying to me than the generic autoattack-based MMORPG.

The Japanese style dialogue menus are a pain (especially when not skippable), the UI is too old to be bearable, the visuals are reasonably terrible, the music and sounds are hard to swallow and the lore and setting so incredibly bland. And still, there's something tremendously addictive in venturing down creepy dungeons while trying to conquer them foot by foot fighting to stay alive in ways that we have forgotten through the past decade of very easy games, and dramatically rewarding in getting out alive with little HP left and a bag full of loot, only to get ready for another trip to explore the next level. What can I say, I like dungeon crawlers and this is a good one.

Which makes me question why the PVP, permadeath, and dick punching was mandatory.  You can have a great game doing that with a party system (as mentioned above) or at least making it less horrible to deal with the other sociopaths out there.

There's no dickpunching here, just PvP and Permadeath. There's plenty of ways to keep permadeath away, but in general I think the answer to your question is that there's a niche of people who like that, and since they don't have many games it's good that sometimes a new one gets released. Also, the reason the game looks and plays like shit is exactly because it is aimed at such a small niche that there is obviously not so much money to invest or hope for. Good thing hardcore dungeoneers don't seem to care, and good thing not everyone is trying to remake WoW dungeons.

This is a panel you can click in towns and tells you how many permadeaths happened in the last day and month. As you can see, not so many.

I can't help but feeling that it is exactly because of the extra thrill that the whole dungeon exploration feels "different" from other games (in a good way if it's your thing, in a bad way if it is not). Why do roguelikes have permadeath? Why people play them? Why people play Diablo hardcore?

I understand it's a bummer for those who are looking for the usual light-hearted dungeon experience. Luckily, there's a million other games for them out there.

Without the permadeath feature, the game wouldn't be able to stand on its own as anything even remotely unique.  I have to agree with Falconeer on this one.

I spent an hour with it, and it really isn't my cup of tea.    Not so much the permadeath, but I spent an hour installing/tweaking/tutorials/fetch quests and never got to see the actual combat.  Game needs to thin down the overhead to actually get into the game.

Open beta ending in a few hours. Launch following in a few days. Hawkbit, I totally understand the frustration with all the clunky tutorials and running around. But since you made the effort up to that point, I strongly suggest you push it a little bit further. You might hate it anyway, but the dungeons are worth a fair look if crawling is your thing and you don't mind ten years old visuals.


EDIT to add:
Other random things that happened to me and I like because I'm weird:

- Occasionally monsters drop chests but before you can open them they need to be cleared of possible traps. That involve a RNG with a very high chance of triggering the trap, unless you are a thief. Thieves get away with chests a lot, which makes them very welcome in every party especially considering that a trapped chest can easily kill your character in one shot. Happened to me twice. Heh. Of course, one time I revived fast enough to get back there and loot it, another time it was empty by the time I reached it. Fucking thieves.

- Some spells and abilities do different things based on the alignement of your character.

- Dungeons feel huge and diverse. There's levers to pull, items to collect, traps to avoid, treasures to open, rare mobs to find and areas to unlock which may or may not have an ingame map to help you find your bearings. The feeling of loneliness can be overwhelming at times since you never know what's around the next corner and if you are deep into it you may not have an easy way out considering HP and MP do not regenerate themselves automatically (although you can bring potions). Once every 12 hours you can use the /return command to teleport safely to the city, which is instant and good to escape the occasional unexpected player gank, but most of the time it's just you and your party in the bowels of some dark place which seems to be plot driven enough to make you want to get to the end of it. It feels like a maze in the same way the dungeons from our 80s D&D sessions did, with different sections and secrets that you have to uncover and conquer foot by foot until you can claim the dungeon "cleared". That kind of dungeon-conquering satisfaction is something I thought was forever lost in the most recent games. Sure a better execution would have been appreciated, but I think the atmosphere here does more for me than better coding or production value would have.

- Early in the first dungeon there's a chest you can't open cause you need a key. Much deeper into the same dungeon you find the key. So I trotted back to the chest to open it and there was another player there who was, I thought, just exploring the room and probably trying to figure out why he could not open the chest. Well, I went on and opened the chest, and it had 4 unidentified items of a kind I've never seen before (like a greataxe), so gloating at the shinies I started making room in my inventory only to see them disappear from the chest in real time. The other player noticed I opened the chest and took everything out before I could say anything. This happened to me too many times in UO to phaze me, and while it definitely didn't feel good I took it as a life lesson. Next time I open something make sure no one is around, or prepare the blade to slay the thief (which I could not do in this case due to low-level PK protection).

To add a few words about the game, it certainly takes some love for oppressive dungeon games from the past. Being the Shin Megami Tensei lover that I am this feels natural, but more than anything it sends me back to two specific Memory Lane experiences: Shining in the Darkness (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_in_the_Darkness), a Genesis/megadrive Japanese dungeon crawler I spent hours and hours on about 20 years ago hand-drawing dozens of maps since that was the only way not to go completely crazy, and the original EverQuest. The first dungeon feels a lot like Befallen (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/scenery/befallen-entrance.jpg), only you are playing on Zek, the PvP server, and the combat sucks less.

So yes, maybe a crappy game. But the crappy game a very specific and tiny niche has been dreaming about for a while.

This game is intriguing to me - even with permadeath - but the no-consent always-on PvP just kills it dead for me. No way.

I added something in the above post if you care about some more details.

Anyway, about non-consensual PvP: I had a little chat with some PKs today. They were in the big town glowing red like crazy just a few meters away from the guards aggro range. They were helpful, talkative people so I asked them a but about the whole PvP deal. They say that it's very easy to get away from Player Killers since the Time To Kill is long enough to prevent one-shotting people, and that running away is pretty easy considering that characters in combat mode run slower than characters with a holstered weapon. So basically, they say, while it's entirely possible to be ganked without a chance to react, it's not that simple to kill someone that is not willing to fight. On top of that, they say, the /return command is instant so if you find yourself overwhelmed you can use that once every 12 hours and just get an insta-teleport to town. Also, since there's many instances of every dungeon, once you got out of trouble you can just get into a different instance and the PKs won't be there anymore. Finally, they said, while it's true that a PK can loot your corpse of all your items, they say the action of corpselooting takes time and the more valuable the item, the longer it takes. So if you can revive before they are done, you are gonna save all your stuff in the unfortunate event of a death.

Ultimately, PK status takes a long time to go away, and PKs glow so bright red that they are easy (legal) targets for everyone. I am not pretending it's ever gonna be OK to die from a PK while you were somewhere in the deepest dungeon with lots of valuable stuff on yourself. Just saying that at least they put a few measures to make sheeps a little harder to kill. Like the whole permadeath thing. With soul level being more important than your character level, and inheritances helping you recover from a death, it's not like you really have to start from scratch in the event of a permanent death (which as I pointed out a few times can be avoided through different means).

Non-negotiable. Full, open PvP stresses me out too much nowadays, and I don't play games to be stressed or paranoid.

The more I'm reading, the more interesting this game looks. You can switch classes at a certain point, keeping some skills of your previous class; so you can start as a Thief, switch to Fighter, but keep your stealth skill. Interesting...

The combination between trying to enforce co-operation through having a very challenging dungeon, no resource regeneration and death penalties seems completely in conflict with having open PvP and loot stealing. It doesn't sound like good PvP either and the idea, "you can mostly get away", doesn't really make it sound much better.

... but eh, Japan. If that's what they like more power to them.

I see this as some kind of weird experiment that SOE is trying to see what players do under these rule conditions. I humbly suggest the answer is, "Stay away in large numbers".

Open beta is over. Game launches January 30.

 :ye_gods:

Any word on the free golf clubs?

Soviet Ponies, a "communist" PK guild (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=w8B4hdzUBUY).  :drill:

Who's joining? Besides Slayerik and me I mean.

And it's live. (https://www.wizardrythegame.com/news/article.vm?month=012013&id=4)

I insist. Not for everybody, but give it a try.

This was literally the shortest amount of time I have ever put into a beta...3 minutes maybe and I uninstalled...Im mind blown its live.

It's not just live. It's live and on Steam.


EDIT: Should you decide to give it a try don't forget to crank up the resolution as soon as you can. Game starts in 1024x768 no matter what. And requires a restart to apply the new resolution. Also, endure the painful first 20 minutes of tutorial and get to a dungeon. There is where you might start to enjoy it.

I'm just gonna RP a psychopath.

Old Skool EQ loading times.  Hardcore!
Sorry Doublepost =/

I gave it a quick whirl last night:

- Yep, it's atrociously amateur time when it comes to presentation and general clunkyness: something you expected to see about 10-13 yrs ago. But after a bit of messing around, you manage to adjust the interface/hotbar to your liking.

- Dialogue window...Well, you can get past it but I don't understand why it's conceived that way  :uhrr:

- The trial dungeon: umm, I was kicked out of it at a certain point: is there a time limit? (but if I understood well, you can re-enter it by talking with the same NPC)

- So, when you attempt a resurrection at a spirit guardian, you can raise your chances by offering items, including cash shop ones that you can lose if the attempt fails. Is that right? Seems legalized gambling to me.
---

You know, if I knew that this game got a competent team, that could churn out interesting dungeons, with diverse layouts and challenges at a decent rate (isn't it the philosophy behind D&D online and the upcoming Neverwinter Online?), I wouldn't dismiss it, even with the PvP and all that.

I have a hard time believing that the market / interest for a game like this is anything but very small, even when its done well.  This game is catering to an already small small community with what appears to be a fairly shitty game in many aspects. 

Yes, there is a time limit on the first dungeon, I think it's twenty minutes. It warns you though, telling you have 5 minutes left. You might have missed that if you were afk or tabbed out. It's impossible to run out of time unless you were afk by the way. Seriously.

Sadly, this game does everything it can to turn away people. If the terrible dialogues and the stupid low resolution default settings weren't enough, the 20 to 40 minutes it takes to get to the real first open dungeon (Caligrase Sewers) are gonna kill the interest of anyone who isn't extremely resolute.

That's too bad cause I keep saying that the dungeon experience is, from a crawl-lover perspective, really engaging. The combat isn't as bad as it seems at first (moving around and especially blocking with the shield is VERY important, this isn't your auto-attack clone. Health doesn't regen, so you want to avoid being hit, got it?), and the exploration totally did the trick for me.

Maybe it's a shitty game in many aspects, but it's quite the only one of this kind that I can think of. Or the only ones that combines lots of features I've been hoping to get in one single game for a while. Anyone cares to remind me similar multiplayer dungeon crawlers with non-autoattack combat, severe death penalties, and open PvP? (Not a rethorical, or snarkym question. I am wondering if I am missing something similar but better that I haven't heard of).

Is it like a rejected prototype of a "true" Demon's/Dark Souls type MMO made 6-7 years ago? That's kinda the impression I got.

I would agree. But make it 10-12 years ago.

Is this the same dungeon where the few mobs hit for 1-2 dmg?  The tutorial one?  As a fighter I jumped through hoops enough to get to a quest that put me into a real dungeon.  Mobs start doing 1/5 of your health on attack and respawn in 5 seconds.  Had three pieces of treasure drop, 2 of them in locked chests, which were trapped, which poisoned me, and I died without finding how to unpoison myself.  I guess you have to be prepared with antidotes. Well, at least the dick punchers finally found their nirvana.

I died to the first chest in the "tutorial" dungeon, I uninstalled. Nothing about this title is compelling to me.

Block attacks. It's the shift key. You lose no HP when you are blocking. As a warrior is really easy to be in trouble in the first real dungeon (not the tutorial). So block, block, block. And dodge too.
Chests are the reason why you want a thief in your party. Basically, characters who are not thief should never try to open a chest, unless they feel lucky or they are full HP with no enemies around. Thieves can actually specialize as treasure hunters and trap disarmers, other than, well, thieves (they have a Steal skill).

The front end interface on this game needs an enema. It seems to have been written for a game without queues, but when SOE got it they couldn't be arsed to make simple changes to accommodate the F2P model. "Connecting," could have been replaced with "In queue..." People understand queues, especially if they're getting the game for free. You know what "Connecting" for unspecified  minutes tells them? This game is broken and shitty, ctrl+alt+del and go do something else. I'm not even saying that the game should give you an indication of your place in the queue and what your estimated wait time is - which any MMO queue should - I understand that sometimes you get a good deal on an IP and want to turn a quick profit. But this is just lazy.

Hopefully get into the actual game a bit this weekend. We'll see.

Ah.  So the Connecting... is a queue?  I wondered, but after five minutes of no response, I just alt-f4'd and went to play MWO or GW2.

WO pulled off Steam by SOE as they work to fix the "current issues (http://forums.station.sony.com/wo/index.php?threads/steam-deleted-u-guys.1541/)". That was the day after launch. If I'm doing it right (or there's not some country lock on this title), it looks like it still hasn't been returned to Steam now, two weeks later.

This is clunky and bad, but I'm going to give it more of a shake before i decide to uninstall.


Edit: Uninstalled