Wizardry III: Won! (with Final Rating)

I'm pretty sure this is the first mention of either Queen Beyki or Queen Margda in the entire series.

Wizardry: Scenario #3 - The Legacy of Llylgamyn

United States

Sir-Tech Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II; 1986 for DOS; 1987 for Sharp X1, PC-88, and PC-98; 1989 for Commodore 64 and 128, NES; 2001 for Game Boy Color; remade 1994 for TurboGrafx CD; remade 1997 for PlayStation, SEGA Saturn, Windows         
Date Started: 10 April 2010

Date Ended: 3 January 2015

Total Hours: 34

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 74% (125/169)

Ranking at Game #458: 345/458 (75%)

Well, I was right about what I needed to do to win the game: rediscover the Crystal of Good on Level 5 and the Crystal of Evil on Level 4, re-fuse them into the Neutral Crystal, and trade it with a different statue on Level 6, a little harder to find than the first, but possessing the true Orb of Earithin. In planning this move, however, I was forgetting that I'd need a good-aligned party to go back to Level 4. Thus, after retrieving the Crystal of Good, I had to change alignments again. But it was just about as fast and easy as the first time. I wandered around Level 1 for about 30 minutes before I'd declined to attack enough friendly parties that all my characters had the "G" next to their names again. I'm glad I got to end the game with good-aligned characters.

The only other consequence was that my fighter could no longer equip his hard-won "ebony blade," as it was aspected to evil characters only. Later, I found a complementary "ivory blade," but I didn't identify it until after I won, so I never got to wield it.

I forgot to mention last time that both Crystals are in the hands of boss-level characters on their floors. In the case of the Crystal of Good, the battle is with "Soul Trappers" and Crusader Lords. The Crystal of Evil is held by a guy named Delf and "Delf's Minions." Both are relatively hard when you first encounter them, capable of mass-damage spells and paralysis, but my second battles were much easier (obviously), as I'd gone up several levels in the meantime and had plenty of high-level spells of my own to hurl at them.

A battle with Delf and his minions. I forgot to cast LATUMAPIC before embarking on this adventure, so the monsters are still unidentified for now.

Going from Level 4 to Level 6 is shorter than going from Level 5, but getting back was a bit of a nightmare. Level 4 has an area full of squares that say "look out!" followed by a random encounter no matter which way you step. You have to step on at least 5 of these on the way to the stairs, plus deal with a few other fixed encounter spaces--unless you can answer a riddle near the entrance, in which case you get automatically teleported to a square near the stairs. This is the riddle:

I tried an embarrassing number of options--WILD, WILDERNESS, NATURE, HORSE and EGO (the last fits perfectly!)--before I realized that the obvious answer, pairing with the AIR answer on Level 1, was FIRE. In my defense, there are no riddles whose answers are EARTH or WATER.

Up on Level 6, I explored the unmapped areas (including several 3x3 squares with no way in that I could find) before finally discovering a secret door leading to the real statue. This was proceeded by yet another tarot-based riddle, but I think I could have figured out the answer to this one without scouring online images.

Behind the riddle, a statue held the crystal Orb of Earithin and traded it for my Neutral Crystal. All that remained was getting back to town.

It was tougher than I imagined. I hit upon a couple of very difficult battles on Level 6, plus when I got back to Level 4, there was no teleporter back through the "look out!" squares, so I had to contend with all of them. In general, it felt like there were more random encounters on the way back than usual. But I had plenty of healing spells by this point, so while it was a bit nail-biting at times, I made it back with everyone alive.

Late-game obstacles.

When I reached the city, I was given a choice as to whether to turn over the Orb. I was curious what would happen if I said "no," but I didn't, and I got the endgame screen above. In addition to an asterisk in each character's profile, I got about 200,000 experience, enough for everyone to increase 1-2 levels. It's too bad that no game uses them again. My mage never did get MALOR or the other top-level spells--I was about 70,000 experience points short.

Later, I read that if you say "no," they just keep asking you every time you enter the city.

The lack of a major final battle was a bit odd, as it was in Wizardry II, but in general I found the endgame a lot easier than the first Wizardry, with less variability in the difficulty of encounters on the final level. The Priests of Fung aside, I thought the enemy difficulty was reasonably well-balanced throughout, though of course I did have to do a lot of grinding in the early game.

Since playing the first Wizardry, I've had a lot more experience with this series (aborted attempts at II, III, and IV, followed by winning Wizardry V and re-playing and winning I and II), and of course I allowed myself to back up the save disk every half hour. Both factors are probably responsible for my general sense that III was a bit easier than I. At six levels, it was also a better length. The sense of character progression was a bit more limited (though much, much better than II), but I liked the selection of equipment better here. Overall, I expect III to do about as well as I on the GIMLET. Let's see:

• 3 points for the game world. There's a main plot, but unnecessarily embellished with an extra layer. The dungeon itself is non-thematic, full of monsters, structures, and NPCs that don't make sense together. (Who was Abdul, for instance?) It would have been cool if the natural disasters were all a setup for Wizardry IV, and the final screens revealed that the source of the evil was Werdna returning to power, but the game wasn't that clever. Overall, I had no love for the good and evil levels or the veiled idea that good and evil need to be in balance to prevail (a grade-school level interpretation of Taoism).

• 4 points for character creation and development. I was grateful to be back at Level 1, enjoying the rewards that were absent from II. In terms of classes, attributes, and alignments, and their associated spells, item restrictions, and aspected weapons, the trilogy offers more than almost anything else on the market in 1981-1983. This is probably the first game in which alignment is used as a plot element. It wasn't used particularly well, but we have to give some credit.

• 1 point for NPC interaction, and that's for having a single wonky NPC. It was not a strong suit of the trilogy.

Yes, I gave a point for this.

• 5 points for encounters and foes. I liked the challenging riddles (even if I thought the tarot one was a little unfair). The Wizardry trilogy offers a better gallery of creatures, in terms of special attacks and defenses, than anything before its explosion of descendants came out in 1985-1986.

This is, and always will be, bull****.

• 6 points for magic and combat. I think that's what I gave the first two games, and nothing has changed. You might protest that such a high score doesn't leave a lot of room for development over the next 30 years, but to me quality magic and combat systems aren't about the number of options so much as how well-balanced they are, how tactical they are, and how much the player has to put into them. With just a few options, Wizardry's system remains remarkably challenging and engaging even today, and it's rare to find a more well-balanced spell system, with just enough slots to help you survive, but not enough to let you get cocky.

• 5 points for equipment. With a variety of helms, armor, weapons, shields, amulets, rods, potions, scrolls, special items, and unique artifact items, the game more than satisfies my craving for a solid equipment system. The only thing that mystifies me is why they didn't include more types of scrolls in the game beside KATINO and HALITO.

A final character and some of his gear.

• 3 points for the economy. The game does reasonably well. You make your initial purchase of goods and then come back a few times throughout for +1 weapons and armor, when you can afford them. There are always potions and scrolls to buy with extra funds, though I generally found myself spending most of my gold on healing and resurrections.

• 2 points for the main quest. No options, no alternate outcomes.

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The sound is still negligible and the graphics okay. The interface is flawless, full of easy-to-learn keyboard commands. This reminds me: Early in my re-play, Brutus alerted me to a DOSBox setting that would produce better graphics and color. I did it, and agreed that it was better, but then had to switch back to the default settings for MegaTraveller. When I went back to Wizardry III, I completely forgot about the issue. Oh, well. You don't really play the game for the graphics anyway.

This is the color we could have been looking at. Sorry, everyone.

• 4 points for gameplay. Challenging and not too long, but of course relatively linear and not very replayable.

The final rating is 36, which turns out to be 1 point higher than I gave it in 2010 after playing for only a few hours, 1 point lower than the original Wizardry, and 4 points higher than Wizardry II. I'm fine with all of these outcomes. Wizardry III is about equal to the original game. We haven't left the Silver Age, so there's not even any sense complaining that Wizardry hadn't evolved since the first game; it's still better than anything else that came out that year except Ultima III.

If you think that's high praise, regard the opening lines of Softline magazine's July-August 1983 review:

The third Wizardry scenario wasn't written; it was composed. The rhythms of good and evil, light and dark, earth and fire pulsate in counterpoint. The dungeon feels like a living, breathing entity. Llylgamyn's mythology is built around the Tarot. The juxtaposition of good and evil and the use of the Tarot as an eerily haunting submotif create a mood that pervades the playing of Legacy of Llylgamyn. It is fascinating and rich and very, very alive.

If that review had come out in 1987, I would have accused the author of overstating the case at best and taking money from Sir-Tech at worst. But it makes sense in 1983, when there was nothing else comparable, when a game like Wizardry III evoked things in the imagination and eager players' minds filled in the gaps in the story and setting.

In Dungeons & Desktops, Matt Barton clued me in to a fun historical curio: In 1982, Datamost Software started selling a Wizardry character editor called WizPlus, advertised to work with both Proving Grounds and Knight of Diamonds, allowing players to edit attributes, experience, gold, spells, and equipment. It retailed for $39.95, or close to $100 in today's money. Can you imagine spending that much just to cheat? Apparently, enough people did that Sir-Tech started including notes in their software boxes, warning that "it took more than four years of careful adjustment to properly balance Wizardry" and that "these products tend to interfere with this subtle balance and may substantially reduce your playing pleasure." According to a note in the July-August 1983 Computer Gaming World, "Sir-Tech tells us that if your Wizardry program has been modified by WizPlus, the warranty on your Wizardry disk will no longer be honored." Gaming was serious business back then.

Judging from the box, they had a better aesthetic sense than Sir-Tech.

Anyway, Sir-Tech got the last laugh, as something about the program made it so the edited characters couldn't be imported into Wizardry III.

I'll have more thoughts on the legacy of the early Wizardry trilogy in my 1980-1983 wrap-up, which I'll complete after I offer my post on Moria. For now, I'll just conclude that for a classic RPG experience, there really wasn't much to rival these games in the early 1980s. The Ultima series was getting its legs, sure, but until III, it didn't offer anything approaching quality combat or a quality magic system. Via its debt to the PLATO games, which themselves were directly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, the Wizardry trilogy did a better job of re-creating D&D-style mechanics than the two officially-licensed D&D titles that came out during this period. 

I'm glad that I redeemed my horrible quasi-review of 5 years ago and won the game. That means Wizardry IV is the only one with a "no" in the "Won?" column. Don't hold your breath or anything.

Wizardry III: Out of Alignment

The party, now thoroughly evil, relaxes in town.

Lots of Wizardry III playing over the last couple of days. I've mapped the first five levels completely and about half of Level 6. I think I'm only a few hours away from winning.

Now that I can see the dungeon in its totality, here's the setup: Level 1 is an introductory level. It's basically for grinding. Levels 2 and 4 are for predominantly good parties and Levels 3 and 5 are for predominantly evil parties. Through experimentation, I found that this means only that more than half of the non-neutral characters need to be of those alignments. You could go with 5 neutral characters and just swap the last one, or you can do what I did and start with an overwhelmingly good party (5/6) and then switch their alignments. As soon as 3 of them went to the dark side, I was able to get on the evil levels.

The primary goal of the good and evil levels are to find the Crystal of Good and Crystal of Evil. There were also elemental artifacts--an Amulet of Air, a Staff of Earth, a Rod of Fire, and Holy Water--found after fixed boss battles. Each of these items casts a useful spell, but I'm otherwise not sure if they're technically necessary for the endgame. Nothing has called for them yet.

After I finished exploring Levels 2 and 4, it was time to switch alignments. The process was easier than I thought. I just roamed Level 1, blowing through easy combats, until I found a friendly group of Garian guards. I attacked them. Two of my characters immediately switched. The next 30-40 minutes produced 3 more encounters with friendlies. In 2 of them, no one switched, but the third one finally left me with 3 evil characters and 2 good ones. This turned out to be enough to access Level 3. Later, I found other friendly encounters that switched the rest of them. In fact, the bigger difficulty was remembering that I needed to attack "friendly" parties from now on, lest I switch back.

"No, Chester. Please. I can't do it," Gideon begged as Chester gestured to the guileless group of Ronin. "They haven't done anything to deserve it." Victoria just whimpered in horror. But they were mercilessly prodded forward by Malory and Grey Star. "We have tasted of innocent blood," they said in eerie unison. "So too must you."

This is pretty messed up from a role-playing perspective, though. Think about it. You have a party of pure-hearts trying to help the kingdom of Llylgamyn. But some message in the dungeon tells them that they need to understand evil to solve their quest. So after putting it off as long as they can, they come upon a group of affable guards who wish them no harm. Steeling their resolve, they draw swords and mercilessly slaughter them. Repeatedly. Meanwhile, the poor neutral thief who just joined the expedition to make a few bucks looks on horrified, as he soon becomes the least malevolent person in the party.

Because the game doesn't know whether you'll be starting good or evil, you can access either Level 2 or Level 3 from the castle on Level 1, and the battles on Levels 2 and 3 are pitched about equal. So are the battles on Levels 4 and 5. This means that, having grinded on Levels 2 and 4, I had a fairly easy time with 3 and 5, only to get slammed on Level 6.

I just thought this was funny. What kind of master ninja are you?

Scattered about Levels 2-5 are "Ships in Bottles" that you get after random encounters. They don't do anything when "used" and don't sell for anything, but I figured out through trial and error that having one in your possession allows you to cross the moat on Level 1 and access two staircases that go directly to Levels 4 and 5, making late game navigation a lot faster.

A lot of the stairways and key areas were blocked by riddles, most of them quite simple, but there were two that stumped me for a while. One was a simple demand for a password. Earlier, an NPC had said, "Tell them Abdul sent you," so I tried ABDUL as the password, to no avail. Later, I realized that the voice hadn't asked who sent me but rather what the password was. The answer was literally ABDUL SENT YOU.

The other was harder and a little unfair. It blocks the way to Level 6, so you can't avoid it. See if you can get it:

I had no idea what it was talking about. After a while, a tarot deck--with which I have no experience--occurred to me, and a quick Wikipedia search confirmed that a typical tarot deck has 78 cards. Not knowing what any of them were, I did some image searches and scanned several decks before I decided that the answer was probably CHARIOT. The card sometimes depicts two horses drawing a chariot ridden by a king with a crown. Other times, the chariot is drawn by sphinxes, or the king doesn't have a crown, or it's a modern deck that depicts a motorcycle or muscle car or something. Anyway, without the Internet, I have no idea how I would have solved the puzzle, and I have no idea what kids in 1983 did other than hurl insults at their computers.
  

Not all of them are as obvious as this one.

  
Level 3 was the hardest to map. The middle part of the level consists of a series of concentric "rings" of walls that appear when you move north or east from the starting point. Each of the gray walls in the map below isn't there when you're facing it from the west or south, but when you move, it suddenly appears behind you. The level is also notable for three consecutive squares with messages warning you not to go any further. If you step in the fourth square, you get teleported into solid rock and the entire party dies (and remember, this game has permadeath). You can't even send a new party to retrieve them. In 1983, I would have been tearing apart the floppy disk with my teeth.
  

  
Level 5 contained a large and pointless area of darkness, full of trap squares, and the only way out was to pay Abdul $5,000 or find the one teleportation square. The area wasn't only dark but also magic resistant, which really helped when I encountered large groups of necromancers, but not so much when I needed to cure poison or paralysis. Mapping in the dark isn't so hard until you lose track of where you are, or aren't sure that the keypress for the last turn actually registered, and then you're hopelessly screwed up.

Level 5 with its areas of darkness and the Fung Priest temple to the west.

  
"Abdul" showed up as an NPC several times throughout the levels, usually offering a quick trip back to the castle for $2,500 or $5,000, and I availed myself more than once when things looked grim. He also appeared on Level 5 to sell me the Rod of Fire for $25,000.
  

  
Oh, but to get to him, I had to pass through the "Temple of the Irascible Fung," which included numerous fixed battles with "Priests of Fung." The level had been relatively easy up to this point, so it seemed a little unfair to suddenly face multiple parties of multiple enemies, each capable of casting BADIAL (massive damage) and BADI (instant kill) spells. There are 6 such battles in the area and at least 4 are necessary to progress to Abdul and buy the staff. If there was only 3 groups, it was technically survivable: I had my lord and priest cast MONTINO (silence) on two groups while my mage cast MADALTO (mass ice damage) or LAHALITO (mass fire damage) on the third. But a fourth group, or an unlucky roll of the dice, meant instantly-dead characters.

ONE group of these guys might have been fair.

After several trips back to the castle with dead party members and a couple of reloads from my save disk when party members got turned to ash during the resurrection process, or when my whole party died, I resorted to a worse sort of cheating. When you enter an encounter, Wizardry saves your location to the save disk. Once the fight is over, the game saves the results to the disk. If you kill the game in the middle of the fight (once you realize it's going badly), you can reload and "restart an out party" from the "utilities" menu to get back to your pre-encounter state. The danger is that you immediately re-enter an encounter (a random one) and, once that's over, then face the original encounter again. If you have to do it multiple times in a row, you run the risk of your party getting weaker and weaker while still having to kill the same enemies that caused you to resort to such cheating in the first place. But sometimes you get lucky and get fewer enemies, or better rolls of the dice. Using this method, I limped through the area. I'm not proud of it, but the alternative--grinding for 300,000 more experience points until I got a TILTOWAIT (nuke) spell--didn't seem like something I'd do.

While I'm thinking about that, here's a major complaint about the game: while leveling is relatively rapid in the early stages, it tapers off very quickly after Level 10 or 11. Even on the higher floors, there are hardly any encounters that deliver thousands of experience points. (Those Fung priests should have been worth like 10,000, but they were only around 1,200.) My mage is currently Level 11 and has 164,132 experience points. To get to Level 13, where he'll finally get Level 7 spells, he needs 439,874. While I've been patient about grinding, there is simply no way to grind that much in this game and retain your sanity. That means I'll never get MALOR or find out what the "wish" spells do. By the way, the wish spells are stupid. You get HAMAN at Level 11 but you're not allowed to cast it until Level 13, by which time you have MAHAMAN. What possible reasoning is behind that?

Anyway, at long last I made it to Level 6. I soon discovered DUMAPIC doesn't work, but that's fine: I'm an old pro at mapping blind. Only two doors into the level, I encountered the dragon L'kbreth, who immediately attacked me. None of my attacks would hit him, all of my spells were "neutralized," and soon I was dead. A couple of reloads, attempting to use the elemental artifacts, produced no better results.
  

"Surprise" didn't really help with this foe.

  
I then took to messing around with the crystals for a while. I discovered that if I invoked the Crystal of Good, the character turned to ash, but if I invoked the Crystal of Evil, it fused the two crystals together into a Neutral Crystal. With the Neutral Crystal in hand, L'kbreath stopped attacking and told me to "go forward in peace."
  

"Worthy?" You don't know what kinds of crimes we've had to commit to make it here.

    
Not too long after L'kbreth, I ran into a statue holding a crystal sphere. It took my Neutral Crystal and gave me an unidentified Orb. Thinking this was the Orb of Earithin, I joyfully started hunting for the exit (the way back to the stairs had closed behind me in L'kbreth's room). Level 6 is a classic maze, and the enemies are a lot tougher than Level 5. (They include archdemons, hydras, cyclopes, and a samurai-looking warrior called a "Mifune," which I assume is an homage to Toshiro Mifune, the Japanese actor famous for The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Rashomon). But I was mostly only interested in mapping progress, so I didn't mind so much if the party died. I just reloaded, reacquired the Orb, and mapped a new direction.
  

The famous "6 samurai" dismantle my party.

Eventually, I found a teleporter back to the stairs and joyously returned to the town, only to find upon identification that I had an Orb of...Mhuuzfes. I thought that seemed too easy. Thus, I think what I have to do is re-visit the levels that have the Crystal of Good and Crystal of Evil, re-acquire them, fuse them again, and explore the top level a little more carefully. There must be another encounter somewhere that results in the real Orb of Earithin. Or maybe something that converts the Orb of Mhuuzfes into the Orb of Earithin or trades one for the other. I still have about 1/3 of the level to map.

A few closing notes:

• I generally like the spell system in the game. You get an increasing number of castings per spell level with each character level, up to a maximum of 9. At Level 11, for instance, my priest can cast 9 Level 1 spells, 9 Level 2 spells, 7 Level 3 spells, 5 Level 4 spells, 6 Level 5 spells, and 3 Level 6 spells. The limitations on the slots preserve the tactical challenge of the game, as they're only replenished when you return to the town. At the same time, there are some deficiencies. The mage has increasing levels of mass-damage spells (MAHALITO, LAHALITO, MADALTO) but lacks a good single-enemy spell. The priest gets some cool damage spells, but you basically have to preserve all her slots for the various healing spells (DIOS, DIAL, DIALMA, MADI), cure poison (LATUMOFIS), and cure paralysis (DIALKO), since tons of enemies cause the latter two conditions at higher levels.

• Here's another riddle. I tried DIE and DICE to no avail before realizing the more obvious answer.

  

  

• Even at the top level, the best weapons and armor my characters found were +2. The one exception is an "ebony blade" that I have in the hands of one fighter. I assume it's good.

• I forgot about helmets and gloves until very late in the game. The store sells them. I could have enjoyed -1 or -2 to my AC for the entire game.

     

One fighter's character and equipment late in the game.

              

• Unlike most games, including previous Wizardry titles (I think), when you look at teleportation squares straight on (without stepping into them), they show you their destination rather than their origin. You know there's a blank wall in front of you, but the square shows a massive room. It's pretty cool.

• It's not often that a game makes me laugh out loud with its monster names, but this one did:

           

    

• On the other hand, I'm not sure it's concept of a "vulture" is very accurate:

       

           

• At one point, something got corrupted in my inventory, and I was unable to use one of my slots. When I viewed that slot in Boltac's Trading Post, it turned out to contain an "**ERR**" that sold for $5,170,000. It took a lot of willpower not to take advantage of it.

        

That would buy a lot of resurrections.

    
As I play Wizardry III, I'm reminded how much I like the process of mapping old RPGs. Mapping is really a sort of puzzle--especially when you have to deal with tricks like teleporters, dark areas, and no-magic zones--and every room or corridor feels like a small victory. I've learned to treat mapping as its own "progress," irrespective of what's happening to my characters, and more than once my party has become so battered that I think of them as being on a suicide mission--just map as many more squares as possible until you (inevitably) die, so I can reload with a fresh party. This wouldn't be possible, of course, without the leeway I'm allowing myself to save every 30 minutes. Back in Wizardry, I would desperately cling to any hope of life.
    
I'm guessing one more post on the game, including the final rating, but do let me know if I'm off track with the Orb of Earithin. I know I should get back to MegaTraveller soon, but the problem with both it and Hard Nova is that I simply can't muster any interest in them. I'm not saying they're bad games--I haven't played long enough to assess that one way or the other--but for some reason they just leave me feeling blah. I'll try to rally myself nonetheless.

Wizardry III: Good...Bad...I'm the guy with the MAHALITO

Never gets old.

Irene and I have an annual tradition of watching all three Lord of the Rings films over some Saturday or Sunday in December. This year, because of holiday scheduling and a desire to dig into Dragon Age: Inquisition, we delayed it until last Monday. While I like the tradition, there are only so many times you can watch a film--even if you space out the viewings by a year--before it no longer has anything new to offer. I thus spent most of the 11-hour session playing Wizardry III on the side. It felt oddly comforting, and I realized somewhere around the Battle of Helm's Deep that for three of the past four years, I've been playing a Wizardry game during our LOTR marathon. In 2011, it was Wizardry V, and last year it was the original Wizardry again. On a fourth occasion, I think back in 2010, I was playing Phantasie III. I've started my own sub-tradition within our tradition.

The early Wizardry trilogy is a good series to play with something else going on at the same time. It makes small demands on your conscious mind, especially when you settle in for hours of grinding before moving on to the next dungeon level. There is a case to be made that no truly good game would require this much grinding. While I still like the series for all the reasons I outlined last time, you'll note that none of the first five games get out of the 30s on the final rating. They all straddle the line between "recommended" and "not recommended" (which is around 35-40), which in this case you can interpret as "recommended for players of a particular disposition."

A couple of interesting foes from Level 4. Lions are scary enough as it is, but Lions of HELL?! Damn.

  
My Wizardry III sessions have been relatively predictable since the first post. Leave Llylgamyn for the dungeon. Fight my way through a bunch of fixed combats on Level 1. Get to the stairs to Level 2 with some fraction of my original hit points remaining (obviously, this part got better as I increased levels). If I got unlucky with those fixed encounters, return to the castle immediately via the teleporter right next to the Level 2 stairs. Otherwise, ascend to Level 2, map a few squares, and fight a few combats. When I reach about 1/3 of my original hit points and spell slots, retreat to the stairs and return to the castle.

Wizardry III is much deadlier than its predecessors, however, with a lot more random variability in the difficulty and number of monsters you encounter in both fixed and random combats. About half the time, my plan above failed, and I found myself reloading from my saved backup. I would never get through this game playing it straight.

Suddenly coming upon 13 enemies in an area that normally serves up only 5 or 6. At least I surprised them.

There was a change in cast along the way. I got sick of how useless my thief was in combat (the "hide" and "ambush" system wouldn't come along until Wizardry V), so I decided to go with Delmoko's suggestion of getting rid of the thief entirely and relying on the priest's CALFO spell to identify traps and then either ignore them or suck up the damage. To replace the thief, I grabbed my old thief-turned-lord from Wizardry II, renamed him, and put him at the head of the party.

Well, that lasted a single expedition. Even though I knew I wasn't missing out on a lot of great loot on the first couple of levels, I still hated leaving chests just sitting on the floor. Thus, I rotated the thief back into the party and got rid of the bishop. He now spends his days in the tavern, waiting for my party to return with objects for him to identify. (That system works better here than in Wizardry V, because the whole "you touched it!" dynamic doesn't exist yet.) I mourn the loss of the additional priest and mage spell slots that the bishop offered, but at least I got some more priest slots with my lord. It annoys me that I have to lug someone around whose sole purpose in life is disarming traps, especially since he so often fails at it.

Level 2 so far. I can't get to the blank areas yet.

  
About one-third of Level 2 ended up being inaccessible--I tested every wall for secret doors--so I can only assume that there will be a staircase back down from a higher level or I'll need to wait for the MALOR spell to pick up the rest of it. There is only one special encounter on the level--a riddle whose answer was painfully obvious...

  
...and there was one teleportation square to momentarily confuse mapping. The stairs up from Level 2 went to Level 4 rather than Level 3; I assume that to get to Level 3, I need to use the Level 1 stairs that require an evil party. (More on that in a minute.) I started to map a bit of Level 4, and I thankfully found a second staircase there that returns me to Level 1, on the other side of the "moat" area. While I still can't cross the moat, a nearby staircase teleports me back to the town if the party is the wrong alignment. It's nice to only have to worry about the "out" expedition and not the return.

My party is all Level 7-8 at this point, which means they have little to fear on Level 1. Level 2 is generally safe, but still capable of serving up the occasional battle with multiple large packs of foes just when I've run out of KATINO (sleep) and MAHALITO (fireball) spells. I generally try to run in such cases, but fleeing in this game is insidious because it resets all the fixed encounters on the level. It hardly ever works anyway.

Now that I've achieved a certain level, I can keep LATUMAPIC (identify) and MAPORFIC (protect) going for the entire expedition.

  
My sense is that at some point after Level 4, maybe right after, I'll need some kind of plan for transitioning my party to evil, as at least one level (I'm guessing two, for symmetry) won't allow good characters. The two major options seem to be: 1) create a brand-new evil party and build them up, a thought that fills me with despair; or 2) switch my existing characters to evil by attacking friendly parties. The problem with the latter approach is that friendly parties don't come along very often, and it's not guaranteed that even one party member will change alignment if you attack them.

My ticket to an evil disposition. Later.

  
I probably made things more difficult for myself by creating an almost all-good party in the first place; on the other hand, I don't think the game gave me a "neutral" option when I was importing the characters from Wizardry II. Anyway, since the time commitment isn't trivial with either option, I don't mind spoilers to this question: what is the actual nature of the alignment restrictions on the levels? Does Level 3 kick me out if any of my characters are good, or does it only kick me out if none of them are evil? Would a good/evil mixture be able to visit all levels? (It's normally not possible to combine them both in one party, but there's a trick to get around this.)

Not much else to tell you at this juncture except a bunch of random notes:

• Last time, I suggested that every time you level up, there's an equal chance that each attribute will increase, decrease, or stay the same. On further examination, I don't think this is quite true. While attributes do frequently decrease during leveling (and while I occasionally get a horrible level-up in which all attributes decrease), in general I think the ratio of increases to decreases is about 2:1 or maybe 3:2. My party members are generally better now than they were at Level 1, as evidenced by the fact that both my fighters could transition to samurais if they wanted to.

Occasions like this are as common as the "all loss" screen shot I had in the last post.

• Alas, I'm no closer than ever to becoming a ninja, which requires absurdly high stats--17 in everything. Has anyone ever legitimately made ninja in the DOS versions of one of the first three Wizardry games?

When I created him, he had a very high bonus pool. Despite that, and despite reaching Level 8 already, Lone Wolf needs 2 more strength, 7 more IQ, 6 more piety, and 6 more vitality to be a ninja.

  

• The joy of getting your first MAHALITO in a Wizardry game is akin to the joy of getting your first "Fireball" in a Gold Box game.

• While I still like Excel for mapping, I don't have a good way to depict one-way doors. There are a lot of them on Level 2.

• I've always been mystified by the options to rest at the inn. You need to rest to gain levels, but in doing so, it doesn't matter if you choose the stables, which are free, or the other options, which cost between 10 and 500 gold pieces a week. The only difference the room quality makes is how many hit points you restore per week--from 1 on "a cot" to 10 in the Royal Suite. It works out to between 10 and 50 gold pieces per hit point. In a game where gold is so precious (you need it for resurrections), why would anyone pay to restore hit points, when you can just pop into the dungeon, cast all your DIOS and DIAL spells, and pop back out if you need a refresh? Did loading speeds on the original platforms make it somehow worthwhile for players to just spend the money?

Maybe some players just like the extravagance.

  

• The word "Garian" precedes a number of enemies in the game: Garian raider, Garian priest, Garian guard, and so forth. I'm curious where the name came from. The only citations I can find for "Garia" are a neighborhood of Calcutta, India, and an extinct town in Newfoundland. At least one other enemy, the Bengal tiger, suggests a south Asian theme for some of the monsters. I'll also take theories on the origin of "L'Kbreth."

• I have a love/hate relationship with banshees, an enemy that has appeared on Level 4. On one hand, they die easily and can be "dispelled" in large numbers by my priest, providing solid experience points in both cases. On the other hand, if they manage to get in an attack, they level-drain the character. There is no more annoying effect in RPG-dom than level drain.

The definition of "relief."

• Looking over the list of spells, I realized that never once have I tried a HAMAN (wish) or MAHAMAN (big wish) spell in a Wizardry game. The reason is the one level of experience that it costs to cast it. However, I'm curious about the "selection of possible boons" that they offer. I look forward to trying them when I get those spell levels.

My enjoyment of Wizardry III is heavily influenced by how often I remind myself that I have a list of over 1,000 titles waiting for me. When I don't think about that, I'm actually enjoying myself a surprising amount. Only allowing a backup every 30 minutes still preserves a lot of of the tension, but it doesn't give me an anxiety attack every time I encounter a master ninja. The sense of character progression has been significant (I'm very glad the game started everyone at Level 1 again), and I think perhaps no game does spell balance as well as this series. I love that when I get slightly turned around in the maze, I agonize about whether to spend a spell slot on DUMAPIC.

Probably one or two more posts to finish this up. Happy New Year, everybody! Here's hoping I can finally finish 1990 in 2015.

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.