Wizardry Online: Partying like it's 1997

[Wasted]

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

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

Why/how?

[Ard]

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

Permadeath is a welcome release from playing this game. 

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

[Scold]

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).

[Zetor]

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

[Cadaverine]

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

people I know who are into "hardcore pvp" seem to be trying and loving it

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

[UnSub]

people I know who are into "hardcore pvp" seem to be trying and loving it

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

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.").

[Sparky]

Oh god, it gets better.  From the Something Awful thread:

PvP
It's everywhere and heavily based on gear(soul rank) and level. Attacking a non criminal player will make you criminal. Looting player corpses will make you a criminal. Bounty Hunting will make you a criminal. Healing or buffing criminals will make you a criminal. Attacking criminals will not make you criminal. Guards will throw you in jail when they catch you. You actually have to sit in jail for a few minutes and repeatedly asking the dude to get you out of jail extends your stay. While in jail people on the outside can press a button that kills everyone on the inside. Check out the death section for why this might lead to you uninstalling.

Really early on, the game makes sure to inform you that co-operative play is a risk-and-reward venture. If you die, your "friends" can loot your body of valuables (some stuff is not able to be taken), and if more than one of you dies, the game encourages you to throw your teammates in front of the walkers (who make it harder to come back if you get caught by them) so that you can make your way to a revival statue.

If anything, it's good to work in groups to make your death less likely to be permanent. If you work with someone you trust, and one of you bites it, the other one can pick you up and take you to a temple where your chances of not getting turned to dust are higher. They can also guard you from the aforementioned looting.

Teamwork in this game is all about trust. There's nothing stopping you from flagging yourself for PVP and going to town on your teammates so you can loot their corpses and make their lives hell (provided they even come back), but if you work together with others, it's a good way to give yourself some longevity. Some dungeons can be downright brutal, and considering you can lose almost everything if things go pear-shaped, it never hurts to get some help.

Ball punching indeed.

[Falconeer]

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, which tries too hard to be Demon's Souls but still manages to generate some nasty dungeon feels.

[Bzalthek]

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

[Falconeer]

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.

[Margalis]

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!

[Cadaverine]

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.

[Zetor]

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!

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.

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:

[Falconeer]

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.

[Selby]

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.

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.

[Falconeer]

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.

[Hawkbit]

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.

[Falconeer]

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, 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, 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.

[koro]

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

[Falconeer]

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).

[koro]

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

[Scold]

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...

[Kageru]

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.

[UnSub]

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".

[Falconeer]

Open beta is over. Game launches January 30.

The Wizardry Online team has been relentlessly working around the clock to create and deliver this re-imagined MMORPG in a way that captures and stays true to the franchise’s hardcore trademark features. As we head into final preparations for launching the game, we have decided to move the launch date of Wizardry Online to January 30, 2013 in order to allow us extra time to ensure we’re delivering the most epic gameplay experience possible to our players.


We are excited and eager to launch Wizardry Online and are committed to delivering the very best gameplay experience possible. We thank you for your patience as we make a few additional refinements to the game. For more updates and information, please visit http://www.wizardrythegame.com/ or the forums.

During this time we plan on releasing more information about Wizardry Online here on the forums. So make sure to keep coming back; there's info you won't want to miss!

[HaemishM]

 

[tazelbain]

Any word on the free golf clubs?

[Falconeer]

Soviet Ponies, a "communist" PK guild.  

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

[Falconeer]

And it's live.

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

[Shatter]

And it's live.

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.

[Falconeer]

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.