Wizardry VI: I Capture the Castle

I was apparently wrong that this game gives no credit to the developers of the series.

Both Wizardry and Dungeon Master pioneered the dungeon crawl, but both suffer from a certain feeling of artificiality. Their dungeons are abstractions rather than real places: perfectly symmetrical, impossibly deep into the earth, with layouts that would make little sense even if it was possible to build them. Even the Gold Box games, which do a great job with world-building, have dungeons that feel overly constructed and unrealistic in their perfect 16 x 16 layouts.

Wizardry VI bucks this trend by offering an indoor area (at least during the opening) that feels like the ruins of a real place. The castle is of sensible size, with particular rooms--throne room, guard rooms, kitchen--in sensible locations. It has four small turrets in the corners, a barracks for the guards, and a belfry.

The first two options seem to produce endless encounters with bats, which I suppose is good for grinding.

We're still in the area of graphical minimalism, so we don't actually see the belfry rope or bell, the armory dummy, or the piles of rotted barrels. But the developers have made the castle come alive with solid in-game textual descriptions, at least as good as in the Gold Box games (and without requiring an external document). And while some of the puzzles and NPCs I've encountered have been a little silly, I was remembering Wizardry V and bracing myself for characters like the Duck of Sparks and Lord Hienmitey, so in that sense just a "little" silly is a significant improvement.

A few examples of the game's welcome area descriptions:

 

The game started me with a vague goal--go into the abandoned castle and see what's what--and hasn't gotten any clearer, though the unstated goal in this phase simply seems to be finding ways to open up areas and continue exploring. At this point, I've mapped about a dozen closed and locked metal doors that require some key or switch to circumvent.

My worst enemy.

Most of the foes in the castle have been vermin, including giant rats, bats, and hostile vines, but there are some inhabitants, too. There appears to be some kind of thieves' guild in the basement that's looking for a password to enter. A nearby NPC named Queequeg says he has the password, but he'll only reveal it if I give him the location of some buried treasure, which I  haven't yet found.

Queequeg, who hangs out in a dilapidated barracks, introduced me to the game's approach to NPCs. I've only encountered two so far, but both were capable of both conversation and trading. The conversations are similar to the system introduced in Wizardry V, by which you can type full sentences. The manual warns you to actually type full sentences and not just keywords, and even to make sure to put a question mark at the end of questions, but I haven't really noticed any difference between typing WHAT IS THE PASSWORD? and PASSWORD. Nonetheless, in the spirit of role-playing, I've been trying to pretend I'm having actual conversations. Here's one with Queequeg after I'd explored a bit of the dungeon.

M: Hello
Q: How may I be of service?
M: Do you have anything to trade?
Q: Possibly...
M: What do you have?
Q: What are you looking for?
M: Weapons, mostly.
Q: You can find items in the dungeon.
M: What dungeon?
Q: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
M: What is this "Captain's Den?"
Q: The local seedy hangout of ill-repute!
M: Who is the Captain?
Q: A rather ominous fellow.
M: Ominous in what way?
Q: I don't know about that.
M: Do you know the password?
Q: I'll tell you the password, but first I need information.
M: What kind of information?
Q: Where did the captain bury his treasure chest?
M: How am I supposed to know?
Q: No buried treasure, no password!
M: Tell me more about the chest.
Q: The captain buried a treasure chest somewhere far away!
M: I need a drink.
Q: Find a fountain.
M: You're a jerk.
Q: That's your opinion.
M: Bye

I'm not saying it passes the Turing Test, but it's pretty good. For fun, I decided to repeat the same conversation with Cleverbot, the latest in conversation-based artificial intelligence, and I got this.

M: Hello
C: How are you?
M: Do you have anything to trade?
C: I wonder if simon larsson likes me.
M: What is the "Captain's Den"?
C: An exam to get into grad school, but that is not what I am taking.
M: Do you know the password?
C:  To what?
M: To the Captain's Den.
C: You are not making sense.
M: Oh, and like you are.
C: Fair enough.

Queequeg also had a little store with him, and I bought some armor upgrades, though I didn't have quite enough money for his potions or magic items. As numerous commenters have noted, NPC inventories reset with every new conversation.

I'm still getting a handle on equipment. Armor is easy to figure out, since "assaying" it while in inventory tells you its protective value. Weapons don't automatically tell you their damage; I understand this comes later with the "identify" spell. The process of trading items among characters (or even switching from character to character) is a bit annoying, and there's an exhausting set of rules about which races, classes, and sexes can handle which equipment, some of them a little inconsistent. My Faerie bard, for instance, couldn't wear the cloth pants and shirt that she started with. I assumed that, being a tiny little thing, she couldn't wear regular armor or clothes, and was thus surprised when she was later able to wear a suede doublet and pants.

Nysra views her sword and its capabilities. Only fighters, valkyries, and lords can wield it.

I've found only a handful of magic items so far: a Sword of Striking, which I gave to my valkyrie; some kind of enchanted shield that disappeared after I "invoked" it (this "invoking" thing first appeared in Wizardry IV, I think, and I still have no idea what it's about), and an Amulet of Life that casts resurrection.

One nice addition to this series is the appearance of "extended" melee weapons--polearms and other weapons that allow characters to attack from the rear three positions. Between those and some missile weapons, all of my characters are able to attack in a combat round, which is particularly nice when you have an easy group of foes and just want to tear through the combat options. Another good addition is the ability to dual-wield certain weapons, giving an extra attack each round.

Most groups of foes stopped being easy after the main castle level. I was losing a character or two in about one-third of my combats for the first few hours of the game, a situation that--although against the spirit of my rules--generally caused me to reload because I didn't have any resurrection alternatives (and it doesn't appear that you can replace party members once you're already in the dungeon) (Later edit: I'm wrong about this. I just missed an option). The best thing keeping me alive was the bard's instrument-playing ability, which puts groups of enemies to sleep.

My survival ratio improved as I went up a few levels, especially once several of my characters got "Heal Wounds."

The screen that comes up after full character death.

Leveling in the game is an interesting process. As soon as you cross the threshold, you're jerked to a screen in which the game automatically levels you up. The character's attribute scores increase by a few points (randomly, it seems), and sometimes you get points to assign to skills. Whether you get any points, and how many you get, seem to be random. A couple of times, I didn't save after leveling, had to reload, leveled again, and got completely different results. Finally, for spellcasters you get to choose a new spell. As I write this, my characters are all Level 4 or 5.

Assigning skills while leveling up.

Some of the skills (like weapons skills) improve with use, so I've been avoiding wasting leveling points on those. Others, like spellcasting skills, only seem to increase when you assign points to them. I'm going to save a detailed discussion for skills and spellcasting for a later post, after I understand a little more about it. Suffice to say for now that there are six magic "categories" (fire, water, air, earth, mental, and magic), each of which has different spells depending on the "book" used by the caster (mage, priest, alchemy, or psionics). The "spell slot" system used by previous Wizardries is gone. Each caster has a different number of spellpoints assigned to each "book," which increase with each character level, but only after the caster has at least one spell in that book. When you cast a spell, you can choose how many points to put into it (above a certain minimum). Points regenerate over time or by resting.

My gameplay experience has mostly centered around mapping and trying to solve a few puzzles that would get me into new areas. I still don't have the password to the Captain's Den, nor any intel on where he buried his treasure, but I haven't mapped all of the castle's upper level yet. On the lower level, there was an interesting puzzle by which I had to use a block of rotten cheese at a mouse hole, causing an army of rats to blow through the wall and open up a secret passage. (Incidentally, this was the most difficult combat in the game so far. There was one giant rat that hit me multiple times per round and just wouldn't die.)

Each of the four turrets had some kind of special encounter and rewarded me with a (textual) view of something in the distance. Walking off the edge was deadly.

In a jail cell, I found an old logbook with coded scribbles, but I don't seem to have any way to decipher it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the location of the Captain's treasure, but I suspect it does.

A roomful of graffiti indicated that someone named L'Montes was looking for "Snoopcheri." When I asked Queequeg about it, it transpired that L'Montes was a mentally disturbed man who lost his "beloved" and had holed himself up in one of the turrets. I had previously found him there, but he wouldn't open the door and I wasn't sure what to do. When I returned and asked him about Snoopcheri, he asked me to find her. I intuited that "Snoopcheri" was actually a stuffed dog that I'd found somewhere else, gave it to him, and was rewarded with a key in return. Now I need to try the key on all the locked doors I've mapped.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• The game only offers one save slot, which seems limiting, except in comparison to the permadeath of the previous entries in the series.

• You can "rest" repeatedly to restore stamina, magic points, and health (though the latter regenerates very slowly). I don't know if there's any disadvantage to resting except that enemies can attack you. I'm not sure if characters age.

• The game has an annoying copy protection system by which you have to match three runes to a long list and find an associated codeword. It's even more annoying because I bought this one, as part of the Ultimate Wizardry Archives back in 2010, and yet it didn't come with the documentation to enter the right code. I had to download that from an abandonware site like a criminal.

The icons on the screen don't exactly look like the ones in the book, either.

• I find the sound in the game simply unendurable. An anonymous commenter clued me in that the game's use of Sound Blaster was "nonstandard," and that the PC Speaker option is better, and he's right, but "better" doesn't mean "good." Although the combat and door sounds are okay, they're not worth the godawful racket that accompanies the appearance of every NPC or enemy. I'm playing silent.

• I still think the keyboard is the best way to navigate the game's options, but the game wasn't really designed for the keyboard. None of the lettered, numbered, or function keys do anything. Instead, you hit ENTER to bring up the menu and then use the directional keys to move around the menus. It would have been a lot nicer if, say, the function keys had brought up each character view, or some key like "L" took you right to the lockpicking screen.

• At first, I thought the lockpicking screen was a mini-game, where you watched for all green values on the tumblers and then hit ENTER. Now I think the colors probably moved too fast even with era-specific hardware, and there's really no way to "time" when you hit the ENTER key.

It was worth a try.

So far, I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. Its liberal saving and reloading system lacks the first game's nail-biting tactical tension, but it makes up for that with (so far) a good NPC system, equipment system, economy, and--most important--interesting game world. I'm not exactly sure where it's going to take me next, as I seem to have explored most of the castle and I know there's still a lot of game left to play, but I look forward to it.