Revisiting: Wizardry: Scenario #3 - The Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983)

I have a few reasons for returning to the wireframe halls of Wizardry III. The most obvious is that I didn't do a good enough job with it the first time, nearly five years ago, when I spent only the minimum required time on the game before getting frustrated with its character creation process and permadeath. I was still adhering quite strictly to my published rules, and it had only been a couple months prior that my party stepped over the corpses of dozens of failed colleagues to win the first Wizardry. Exhausted at the idea of going through the same process with the two sequels, I abandoned both the second and third scenarios in quick order. Later, I went back and re-won the first game and completed the second, in both cases by allowing limited backups of the party roster.

When I first played through the series, I lacked any sense of history. Now, with almost two decades of CRPG titles in my rearview mirror, I have a greater appreciation of Wizardry's status as a founding father of an entire CRPG line (including the Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and Dungeon Master branches). Yes, Wizardry itself borrowed or plagiarized many of its elements from PLATO's Oubliette, but Oubliette owes its existence to Moria, which owes its existence to even earlier PLATO games, and ultimately it all goes back to Dungeons & Dragons (or even further, some would argue). It's a rare game, novel, movie, or other work of art that doesn't owe some of its elements to some progenitor. Wizardry still occupies a landmark place in the history of CRPGs, if nothing else as the first multi-character game.

The party in town. The names of the businesses don't change all the way through Wizardry V.

  
I also have a greater appreciation for how well Wizardry still works as an RPG. It is essentially the first game to have all the elements of a modern RPG in their most primeval forms: exploration through an environment, a main quest, tactical combat, a fully-realized spell system, a big variety of foes, role-playing decisions, and character advancement through both leveling and inventory acquisition. For these reasons, it is (at least for me) the earliest RPG that can still effectively satisfy the RPG craving. I gave Wizardry a 37 on the GIMLET scale. The average of every game before it was 19--nearly half--and no game came close to touching it until Ultima III came out in 1983 and ushered in the Golden Age.

 

The Wizardry series was the first to introduce this combat mechanism, in which each character decides on an action, and they execute (along with the enemies' actions) all at once. This dynamic continues through The Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and Wasteland.

It's therefore been fun to re-visit Wizardry every couple of years and contrast it with whatever games I'm currently playing. In this case, it's particularly interesting to contrast it with the recently completed Dragon Sword, which does a reasonably good job copying Wizardry's interface and mechanics. In making this contrast, I've developed a much greater appreciation for the pacing of a game--a quality that doesn't really exist in my GIMLET except for a minor consideration in the "gameplay" category. When you distill a satisfying CRPG into its most basic elements, what you have is a reasonably regular system of challenges and rewards. "Challenges" include not only combat but also the more unpleasant aspects of RPG playing, like drawing 20 squares on a piece of graph paper, or spending 5 minutes hauling your party back through a map you've already cleared, or working out a logic puzzle. These things are work, and every once in a while you expect to get paid. Such "rewards" include literal rewards like gold and equipment upgrades, but also things like character advancement, uncovering the next plot point, or even seeing an interesting graphic. Until you've played both in a row, it's hard to appreciate just how much two tiny differences--the ability to save anywhere and the overwhelming frequency of random combats--make Dragon Sword a game I'll never play again and Wizardry a game I'll find a way to revisit again and again for the rest of my life.

Nothing in Wizardry is very sophisticated in content, but it still manages to get the challenge/reward ratio about right despite--and this is the key--being extraordinarily difficult. You fail a lot of the challenges. Characters die. If you're playing it "straight," you have to start over a lot. And yet you still feel a compelling sense of accomplishment at regular intervals, whether that comes from a level-up (which accompanies almost every return trip after an expedition), a new piece of gear, a special encounter, or some random message on the floor.

Graphically, the Wizardry series is very much "tell" rather than "show."

The difficulty is, of course, a key part of the Wizardry experience. You've heard me blather on about it repeatedly, but I think it's still worth emphasizing, because we've utterly lost it in modern RPGs except perhaps in the rare case of a Dark Souls. By including permadeath, but disallowing traditional "saves," and by offering no ability to restore spells while in the dungeon, each of the first three games maintains a marvelous sense of tactical tension. Each step feels like a risk. You find yourself carefully weighing whether to map a few more squares or start heading back to the surface for a refresh on spell points. There's a palpable relief when you get back to the castle and know you're temporarily safe. There are hard individual battles, yes, but the real difficulty comes from the accumulation of battles--the slow whittling down of your hit points and spell slots. A battle doesn't have to be hard to be ruinous; it just has to be unlucky. A die roll goes bad and a character gets decapitated. Unlike most games, you don't have the option to reload, so with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, you bring him up to the surface and try your luck with a resurrection. Another die roll goes bad and he turns to ash. Raised on modern RPGs, you find yourself unable to believe that that's the end--that there really isn't any other way out of the situation.
 

Death is frequent and not even paid resurrection is guaranteed. This one failed.

To achieve the same tension in modern games, you have to purposefully delay saving. I was playing Fallout: New Vegas about a week ago, traveling the interminable canyon path between Jacobstown and Red Rock Canyon. The place has so many cazadores (giant mutated wasps that will definitely make my "most annoying enemies" list when I get to 2010) that it's crazy. I had plenty of ammo going in, but towards the end I was reduced to fighting with a BB gun and a tire iron. I kept thinking that I'd finally killed all of them, but then I'd round the next bend and there would, unbelievably, be three or four more. As the likelihood of death increased in proportion to the expenditure of my ammo, I was continually cognizant of the fact that a quick, simple save would ensure that I didn't lose all of my progress. Preventing myself from doing that was a Herculean feat, and I really wish developers would make that decision for me, like they did in this early era.

Wizardry admittedly goes a bit too far, particularly in the second and third scenarios, when death is not only permanent, but creating a new character means firing up the original Wizardry, creating him, and importing him into one of the sequels. (Neither II nor III has an internal character-creation process.) III is slightly better in this regard, since imported characters are supposed to be "descendants" of the I or II party members, and thus start the game at Level 1 no matter what level they were in the previous game. Starting over in II, on the other hand, meant trying to survive the advanced dungeons of that game with a Level 1 party or spending time re-building a character in the first game just so you could import him into II at a higher level.

I paid my dues winning Wizardry straight, burning through dozens of characters before defeating Werdna with my umpteenth party, so I don't feel compelled to adhere to such difficulty in III. Instead, I'm following the same rules that I use when playing a modern game like Skyrim or New Vegas: set my iPhone timer for 30 minutes after each save, and don't allow myself to save again until it goes off. In the case of Wizardry III, that means allowing myself to back up the scenario disks. It still maintains a lot of the tension, but with slightly less disastrous consequences.

Just about time for a reload.

Scenario #3 is explicitly not a sequel, but rather the second of two expansions to the original game, but later entries in the franchise kept the numbering system as if it really was Wizardry III. The gameplay is so unchanged from Wizardry that its section in the Ultimate Wizardry Archives manual is only 4 pages, all describing the back story and the import process; all other mechanics and spells are the same as the original.

As for that back story, again we see that story-telling wasn't Sir-Tech's strong suit. If the era is famous for trite "kill the evil wizard" plot, Sir-Tech is famous for nonsensical embellishments on it. The game nominally takes place in Llylgamyn, the same setting as Wizardry II. A generation of peace and prosperity followed the recovery of the Staff of Gnilda and quelling of the rebellion, but now the world is threatened by an inexplicable increase in earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and other natural disasters. To determine the source of this new evil, the city's leaders have asked the party to find the Orb of Earithin, a powerful scrying stone hidden deep in the lair of the great dragon L'kbreth.

Each imported character goes through a "rite of passage ceremony."

The party members are explicitly given as the descendants of the victorious Proving Grounds and Knight of Diamonds adventurers. After importing the characters from the previous games into Llylgamyn, they have to go through a process of "legation," which is presented as a kind-of blessing from the ancestor to the descendant. The descendant keeps the name and attributes of the original character but is re-set to Level 1, gets only 500 gold, and can re-select an alignment. They also keep the symbols that indicate whether they won the first game and what role they had winning the second.

The ">" indicates Gideon won the first game; the "G" is Gnilda's symbol for his retrieval of the pieces of the Knight of Diamonds. I don't know what the "D" is about. Everyone has it, even the character I just created.

My party had finished Knight of Diamonds alive, but as you may recall, my thief had accidentally been changed to a lord by a Ring of Metamorph. I needed someone to disarm traps, so I jettisoned him and created a new thief character to join this party. (Later, I realized it would have made more sense to keep the lord and get rid of one of my two fighters.) After that, it was off to the equipment shop to buy the standard gear (500 gold per person was more than enough) and into the dungeon!

Checking my old "WIZ3" folder, I was pleased to find that I already had all of Level 1 and much of Level 2 mapped, so I could concentrate on character development during the first stage of the game. This is good, because the hardest part about this game is surviving Level 1. Each character's 8 hit points are easily obliterated by a single attack from some of the level's foes, and the 2 Level 1 spell slots allotted to the mage and priest barely help. I spent most of the first few hours reloading from my save disks when my characters died (easier than creating new ones), and saving at every successful combat after the iPhone marked the 30-minute point. Eventually, I was able to stabilize the party at Level 4.

Thank La-La for the KATINO (sleep) spell. Almost everything is susceptible to it. Unfortunately, a Level 1 mage only has two of them.

The first few Wizardry games have several quirks that are worth remembering:

• When you find items in treasure chests (which is rare), they are usually unknown, annotated with a question mark before their names ("?ARMOR"). Unless you want to pay Boltac to identify the items back at the trading post, you have to have a bishop in the party. In Wizardry V, I created a bishop but kept him in the tavern, swapping him into the party only when I wanted something identified, but it didn't work well because the bishop really needs to level to identify things successfully. In this party, I have a bishop.

• Bishops are one of four "prestige" classes offered by the game. The others are lords, samurai, and ninjas. It's very hard to create characters of these classes because they require high attribute values and you'd have to get very lucky during character creation to get enough points. Theoretically, you can switch to these prestige classes later, once you level up and increase your attribute scores. The primary advantage to the bishop, other than identifying items, is that he can cast both mage and priest spells.

Paul prepares to identify a bit of clothing.

• When leveling up, there's a good chance that you'll lose points in some attributes while gaining in others. In fact, it appears to me that every attribute has basically a one-in-three chance of increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. This makes it very hard to ever get enough points to switch to the prestige classes. This may only happen in the DOS version; I'm not sure if we've ever come to a solid conclusion on that.

I'm so glad I leveled up.

• The series is the first I know to offer the mechanic, now somewhat commonplace, by which you can hide the command options and status windows while exploring the dungeon, theoretically creating a deeper sense of immersion as you explore.

• Equipment-based improvements are very slow in the early Wizardry series. A +1 weapon or armor is an advanced piece of gear; +2 is epic. I'm not sure +3 even exists.

• If you want to find equipment at all, you have to open chests. Only a thief has a chance of disarming traps on the chests, but he often fails. This was responsible for an accelerated ending the first time I won Wizardry.

Lone Wolf identifies the wrong trap.

• When you first encounter a group of enemies, there's a chance that they'll be friendly. If they are, and you attack, there's a chance your party (or just some members) will become evil. Conversely, if your party is evil and it declines to attack a "friendly" bunch, there's a chance that they'll become good. See this post for one of the consequences of this.

• When you enter combat, there's a chance that you surprised your enemy or that they surprised you. The party that surprises the other gets a free round of attacks. Oddly, if your party is the one surprising, mages can't cast spells in that first round.

Level 1

Level 1 of the dungeon (or tower; the levels work upwards instead of downwards) is dominated by an area shaped like a castle with four turrets in the corner. The castle is surrounded by "moat monsters" who provide a reliable 50 experience points each and were responsible for a lot of my grinding, particularly since they were susceptible to the KATINO sleep spell. Near the entrance to the level is a "lake" with an island that I can't reach. I'll have to check it out later when I have the MALOR spell.

Inside the castle are repeated fixed encounters with "Garian guards," who would be reasonably tough except for their tendency to run away in the middle of battle. At least one such group drops a pouch of gems every time I defeat them. I don't know if this is a quest item or just something to sell.

Why?! You're winning!

The castle culminates in a message from L'Kbreth that "neither good nor evil alone can triumph here." This is an indicator of the game's little gimmick: some levels are only accessible to some alignments. I don't know if the entire party has to be of that alignment, just a majority, or just one of the characters, and I don't know how the game treats neutral characters on those special floors. Beyond the message, however, are three staircases, two of which kick my entirely good-aligned party (save one neutral thief) back to the town. The third one lets me up to Level 2. At some point, I'm going to have to create new characters or somehow switch the alignments of my existing ones.

This is about as far as I got in my first attempt to play Llylgamyn back in 2010. Shortly after this, my entire party was killed, presumably on the last square I mapped of Level 2, and I gave it up. I look forward to finishing it this time. It might take a few weeks and a few posts in between MegaTraveller and other games.