MegaTraveller: A Cool $2 Million

I'm exhausted just reading this.

I can only think of one other game, Baldur's Gate II, that requires you to hit some kind of monetary threshold before moving on to the next stage of the plot. I'm sure there are others, and I'll be glad to hear about them in the comments, but I can't remember this type of challenge showing up so far in my chronology.

The difference, of course, is that Baldur's Gate II made the accumulation of funds fun and interesting, with numerous quests and a couple of related sub-plots. It's a safe bet that most players continue playing that chapter well beyond having achieved the monetary threshold. In MegaTraveller, in contrast, the accumulation of $2 million takes a long time, is mostly boring, and happens in maddeningly small increments. Take the screen shot that leads this post, for instance. You race between three planets to return a flag to the original planet, all for a measly $10,000--expending about $3,000 in fuel in the meantime. It's simply not worth the effort.

A "Jump 2" drive is necessary for traveling more than 1 hex at a time. Thus, you need one to reach the upper-right systems.

The $2 million is needed for a "Jump 2" drive, necessary to get out of the original cluster of systems and to the Boughene system, where an agent named Arik Toryan is waiting. Depending on how many terms your characters served and how you selected their retirement benefits, you might start with anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000, but you also have to buy weapons, armor, miscellaneous equipment, and ship's equipment, so the real amount of money you need to move to the next plot point is closer to $3 million. You can accumulate it a number of ways:

1. Waiting for assassins to attack you, then taking their ID badges to the Imperial Military Security Agency on Alell for the reward. (Fortunately, Konrad Kiefer only hires "most wanted" criminals to bounty-hunt the party.) This is by far the most lucrative of the options, awarding a couple hundred thousand dollars (it varies depending on the assassin) per ID badge. Unfortunately, you can only earn up to around $600,000 using this method in the first cluster of systems, as the rest of the assassins are in areas only accessible with the "Jump 2" drive.

The manual has a detailed description of each assassin.

Grabbing an ID off the corpse of one of them.

2. Gambling. But you need a character with high "gambling" skill to make any money, and the rewards are small.

3. Cargo-trading. Recording prices at each starport allows you to buy low and sell high.

4. Finding miscellaneous items wanted by various NPCs, like gems, pendants, and artifacts. Like the "racing" option above, these provide such low reward value (around $10,000 - $20,000 each) that they're barely worth the effort. There are also a limited number of items to find and return.

These small amounts aren't really worth the trouble.

The first and fourth options are most akin to the quests of Baldur's Gate II, and in a better-plotted game, I would have been happy to run around fighting enemies and solving side-quests to earn the $2 million. But the planets of MegaTraveller are consistently boring, as is the gameplay necessary to move from planet to planet; the combat system is unimpressive; and there's almost no sense of character development (which would be the other reason to do side-quests and engage in combat), so my first attempts to earn money centered mostly on gambling.
  

One of these days, we're going to have to have a long discussion about gambling in RPGs. It's hard to do it well. In the real world, the game itself is half the point, but in a CRPG, you're already playing a game that's presumably more interesting than the gambling minigame, so if the minigame takes too much time and effort, you get impatient. But if it's too simple and fast, the gains and losses rack up awfully quickly, magnifying even the slightest edge towards the player or the house, either breaking the game or making the minigame an idiotic proposition.

Then there's the whole saving aspect. If the game already allows liberal saving, it's hard to make an exception just for the area of the gambling facility, but without such an exception, gambling becomes meaningless.

MegaTraveller manages to solve some obvious problems. Even though gaming is quick--a three-second slot machine spin--the losses and rewards are so small that it's hard to either gain or burn money quickly. Since you can only save in starports, this puts a little distance between the game and the gambling facility and discourages reloads. Since you can only wager exactly $100 at a time, there isn't much danger of catastrophic loss in the first place.

The system is otherwise mostly nonsensical. Even though the only gambling game is a slot machine, somehow "gambling" skill affects the results. Perhaps slots work differently in the future, but I don't encourage any of you to head to Vegas thinking that you can somehow beat the slots through experience or education. To have a chance of a consistent winning streak, you need a character with a skill of 4 or 5, which is relatively hard to achieve. Recall that during character creation, you pick the category that you want to study in, but the game randomly picks the specific skill (or sub-category of skills) from the category list. "Vice" is the sub-category containing "gambling," and for all branches of service, it only shows up one time on one list. To get a skill level of 4 or 5, you have to select the master category containing "Vice" every time and hope that the random roll selects it. I went through 12 or 13 characters before I finally graduated one with a skill of 5.

A winning spin.

I added him to the party and took him to the casino, where I recorded the results of 200 rolls. With results ranging from $0 to $1,750, I averaged a return of about $140 on a $100 investment, meaning the average roll returned $40 in profit. This sounds pretty good--it would be great in a real casino--but do the math. I would have needed 50,000 rolls to achieve $2 million, and at 3 seconds per roll, that's 42 hours.

I wasn't above weighing down the ENTER key while I did other things, but the other complication is that the casino runs out of money after it loses about $30,000. You have to get into your spaceship, take off, and re-land before you can start winning again. In general, then, it was a way to make some of the money I needed while I took a shower or ran an errand, but it wasn't going to get me to my goal.

This is what happens when a casino bases its slot payouts on skill rather than luck.

I ultimately turned in three bounties, and collectively they netted me about $500,000, which was a good chunk of the money I needed. I turned in NPC rewards when they were convenient; for instance, a bartender on Efate wanted a pendant that I also found on Efate, earning me $15,000.

My most lucrative bounty.

Most of the funds came from trading. The most lucrative route that I found was to fill up my cargo hold with water in Efate for $50 a unit and sell it on Louzy for $3,390 per unit. Unfortunately, the cargo hold only carries 20 units of anything at a time. Still, the route earned $57,800 per trip, minus about $5,000 to refuel the ship each time. Once I had a system in place, each trip took about 10 minutes in real time. Supplemented by gambling, about 30 trips got me the $2 million I needed, plus a comfortable padding, and about a third of the way through the first season of The Rockford Files. That show really holds up.

(I should also mention that I was constantly spending money, too, mostly on ammunition, healing, and fuel. Earning money isn't a constant upward trajectory.)

Loading up on cheap cargo for resale.

Reader Gaguum, a big fan of the tabletop Traveller game, has commented several times that the spirit of the game involves playing a party that is usually broke and scrounging for its next meal, taking on any job or mission that it can find just to survive. In that sense, the computer version has done a reasonably good job mimicking the tabletop experience. It's just that the game world and mechanics of the computer version are so uninteresting that it makes this stage of the game an exercise in warding off tedium. Nothing interesting happens on the planets except that someone tries to attack you. NPCs never have anything interesting to say; there are no discoveries. And 1990 players didn't have Netflix to keep them company while they ran dozens of trade missions between the same two planets.

Refueling at a starport saps my hard-won credits.

In any event, I eventually had about $3 million. I bought weapons, computers, and programs for the spaceship, then blasted off on the main quest to Boughene. Before I talk about that, let's discuss the game's approach to combat, which I've mostly figured out.

Missed shots leave a blasted landscape.

There are hostile NPCs on almost every planet, and sometimes--as in the case of the gravitic city bar on Efate--it's not entirely clear why they're hostile. They just start shooting. To respond in kind, you first have to enter the "party" sub-menu and break up the party's single icon into multiple icons representing each character. The game scatters them around the initial location using any space available, sometimes putting them right on top of the hostile NPCs, which creates a bit of a problem.

Once separated, you can enter the "orders" sub-menu, which pauses the game, and issue individual orders to each character, including moving, firing at a target, reloading, and using an item like a combat drug or grenade. Exiting the "orders" menu causes your orders to execute, and characters will keep doing what you told them until you issue new orders. The character's skill with the chosen weapon affects both speed and accuracy. You watch as your character's shots and the enemy's shots criss-cross each other, often missing, sometimes leaving gouges in the floor, sometimes hitting but doing no damage, sometimes hitting and doing damage.

Blasting away in close quarters.

The dynamic doesn't sound too bad, except that:

• Characters don't always seem to do what you tell them to do. In an early post, I remarked that I couldn't get them to fire at all. Lately, I've had problems with a single character never firing his laser rifle despite having a "laser weapons" skill of 3 and plenty of ammo.

• Sometimes, characters do no damage. Minutes will pass in which every fired shot does 0 damage. I'll enter orders mode again, tell everyone to fire again, and suddenly they'll start doing damage.

• Characters often mistake my orders to target a particular enemy to target the enemy's square. The enemy moves and half my characters track him and keep shooting at him, while the other half waste ammo blowing holes in the floor where he was standing a few moments ago.

Perhaps the worst part is that combat is extremely unpredictable. I've had my entire party wiped out by a foe, reloaded, and then had the same party kill him without taking any serious damage.

The only real tactic seems to be to avoid engaging more than one enemy at once. This isn't too hard, as groups of enemies wander around randomly, and with a little patience, you can separate one from the herd. Once you enter "party" mode and start shooting, enemies never enter or leave the active screen, so skillful use of the terrain lets you take them on one at a time. In confined quarters, like a building, this strategy doesn't really work.

Siphoning a single enemy from the larger pack across the river.

One major complaint that I have about the game is that the characters don't seem to be developing at all. I thought I understood from the manual that skill levels increase through use, but multiple combat victories haven't advanced anyone's weapon skills, and hours and hours spent at gambling didn't increase my character's "gambling" skill. I'm pretty sure not a single skill has increased through use. That leaves training as the only mechanism for "leveling." Training areas in some starports offer a relatively random selection of training opportunities (they change with every visit), but at around $40,000 to $50,000 per skill point, it will be a while before I can afford even a handful.

This starport offers training in "laser weapons" and "jack of all trades." I could afford two sessions, but I'm not sure it's a good expenditure of funds at the moment.

At long last, I made it to Boughene to track down the contact that the Transom agent had instructed me to visit in the game's opening scenes. A bartender told me that a man named "Viktor" wanted to meet me on the other side of a bridge. It took me a while to find it. "Viktor" turned out to be another traitor working for Konrad Kiefer, somehow high enough in the corporation that he arranged for Arik (the contact I was supposed to meet) to be transferred to the nearby planet Neaera. He explained all of this in his villain's speech:

He attacked me with five other guys, and I kept dying, so eventually I just walked away from the battle and flew to Neaera in my ship. In the only building on that planet, I found a locked door, so I figured I needed to defeat Viktor to get a key or something.

82 skills in this game and not one of them is "lockpick."

I returned to Boughene and used the strategy described above to engage and kill them one-by-one. Even as singular foes, Viktor's party was extremely deadly, and I had to run back to town to heal and save between each individual battle. Eventually, I killed him and got a keycard from his body.

I end this post back on Neaera. The keycard got me into the facility, but it's crawling with Kiefer's agents, and there are no healing services on the planet, so I'll probably have to take this slow.

If you made a list of the lamest villain names in speculative fiction, "Kiefer" would have to be close to the top, perhaps just under "Malcom Trandle."

In the meantime, a couple random observations:

• Technically, you don't have to pay for fuel. Once you have enough money to buy "fuel scoops" for $25,000 and a "fuel purify plant" for $50,000, you can stop by any gas giant and refuel. Although the manual clued me into this, and I bought the items fairly early, it took me a while to find suitable gas giants. Planets that I thought were gas giants confounded me when they didn't do anything, and it's hard for me to see their color (dark blue or maybe purple) against the black of the main navigation map.

Not a gas giant suitable for refueling.

Here we go!

• Gaguum told  me that Traveller fans refer to the game simply as "Trav." This is, probably not coincidentally, the name of the executable that starts the game.

• My navigation of systems is complicated by the presence of asteroids in a lot of them. They show up on the mini navigation map, but I have trouble distinguishing them from the planets, more because of the size of the dots than because of the color.

It makes a pretty cool picture, though.

• The manual probably explains away some of my points of confusion, but the blasted thing is 85 pages long. It's tough to keep track of that much information. 

• I experimented with buying information for $2,000 a pop on some planets. The intel has been mostly useless, discussing things that I would have found through general exploration anyway, such as the presence of a maze on Sino or the flag races on Alell.

This information is easily-discoverable by simply talking to NPCs in museums.

I hope the game moves at a faster clip now that I'm fully equipped and engaged in the main plot. I have literally no idea what percentage of the game I've experienced. For those who have played: is accumulating the $2 million a significant portion of the game, or is it just a prologue to a much longer plot?

MegaTraveller: The Journey Re-Begins

A little red splotch denotes my first successful combat.

I'm happiest in an RPG when I can develop some kind of plan. I don't want to be on a linear track--I love open-world RPGs--but I do prefer when I can at least identify a path through the next X hours of the open world. I want to settle into a system and know that I'm making some progress towards a goal. It's easy for me to abandon a game when I can't identify the game's overall structure and thus don't quite know what I'm going to do next.

Usually, after about 2-3 hours, I get a sense of the game's general layout and can then start anticipating my next move. That's the point at which the game becomes addictive. Whether the next move is obvious (such as progressing to the next level in Captive or mapping the next set of squares in Wizardry) or a matter of player choice (such as deciding from among half a dozen quests or leads in Pool of Radiance or Ultima VI) determines my enjoyment of the game, but it's less important to my compulsion to keep playing a game. Ultimately, I suspect I'll decide that MegaTraveller is a better game than Wizardry III or Dragon Sword, but right now I have to summon the willpower to open a session of MegaTraveller when I had no trouble convincing myself to fire up the other two. Right now, several hours into MegaTraveller, I still have no idea what the game wants from me, and every time I open it, I sit there staring at the screen, wondering what I should do.

Rolling a new guy.

           
For whatever reason, I decided to start completely over, though I don't know that I did much better with party creation than the first time. I did end up getting 4/5 of my characters skilled with laser weapons, and 3/5 actually armed with laser pistols (thanks to their post-enlistment benefits). I think I also did better with their careers. Four retired as officers--the highest a Navy lieutenant commander. In terms of skill selection, I think I wound up about the same, perhaps a little worse since the skills aren't ideally grouped by character. For instance, skills like "carousing," "interview," "streetwise," and "trader" are spread out among four characters instead of centralized in one "Face" character. I don't know if this even matters. As before, no one got Travelers' Aid Society membership. I don't know how you get that.

As before, I fled from the first combat and quickly explored the main area of Efate, purchasing vacuum suits and oxygen tanks this time. I followed a suggestion from Gaguum to rent an ATV and plow over the attackers, which worked satisfyingly well for a few of them. Looting their bodies afterwards, I found a laser rifle and gave it to one of my characters with high laser skill.

Equipping a character with a vacuum suit.

    
The ATV did no damage to a few of the guys in the wilderness. One was a bounty hunter I didn't see (or didn't notice) in my first game; he said that Keefer had placed a price on my head. Also, by running over the enemies, I "damaged" the ATV, so when I returned it, I lost my $4,000 security deposit.

I tried fighting the bounty hunter in regular combat. I at least got my characters to fire at him (not sure what the problem was before), but I couldn't kill him without losing at least two of my own people in the process, so I decided to save him for later. Combat remains another huge complaint I have about the game. I rather prefer games that start you off with a couple of easy combats so you can get used to the interface, not games that offer impossible combats right in the starting area. I suppose I could suck up the loss of the two characters and just go roll new ones.

Plowing into an enemy with my ATV.

          
Next, I rented a "grav vehicle" to explore the "gravitic city" part of the planet. This time, no one attacked me in the bar. The bartender gave me a quest to return a stolen pendant, but I'm not sure where to find it.

Near the bar, I found the weapon shop, where I stocked up on ammo. Further along was an "information shop" that sold rumors for $2,000 each.

The information shop.

I didn't want to splurge on all of them just yet, but I bought the first one, which said that "Efrate's atmosphere is tainted with destructive gases and chemicals that are emitted from a strange, explosive plant life that grows in the planet's swampy regions." This seems to refer to an area in the southeast part of the map in which plants do explode and deal damage when I walk on them. I'm not sure if there's anything to actually do with this information.

Am I supposed to kill these plants or something?

Next up: navigation, jump, and take-off programs for the ship. I loaded up on cargo (someone had suggested water, which sold for $100 a unit) and took off. I landed on nearby Stur and sold the water for $240 a unit, which netted me a $2,800 profit. Subtracting the $1000 in fuel that the trip cost me, if I do this 1,111 times, I should have the $2 million I need for the "Jump 2" drive.

Loading up on cargo. Apparently, I can only carry 20 of anything at a time.

In the bar on Stur, an NPC indicated that she'd be amenable to a bribe. I gave her some money and she told a twisted version of what happened in the bar on Efate, in which my party is a "rogue band of pirates" who nearly gunned down Konrad Kiefer. Assassins and bounty hunters are now looking for me. Stur also had an information store.

Given how ineptly I've been bumbling about, the assassins and bounty hunters must not be very good if they haven't found me.

I next visited Solon, in the same system, where I got to use my new vacuum suits to survive in the atmosphere. Outside, I immediately got into a gun battle with an alien representative of SMIRK, "the most powerful criminal society in the area." After some effort, I was able to kill him, but there were a bunch of other guys wandering around, so I eventually backed off.

By "the area," do you mean just this little corner of the spaceport? Or an entire planetary system? It's a pretty vague term when you have faster-than-light travel.

    
Next up was a visit to the small planet called San, which had virtually no services in the spaceport. I explored the planet and wandered into a facility where one NPC told me that it was a restricted area and another told me that because of something I had done (walked in?) "this whole place is going to blow!" Despite the alarm, nothing happened and it didn't seem like there was anything to do on the planet.

This NPC was apparently just messing with me.

Kra had a cave that I couldn't explore because I didn't have any source of light. On Llun, I encountered another bounty hunter and managed to kill him, but for my troubles I just got his ID and a medkit. I also found a "power pick" lying on the ground. There were some mines that I couldn't enter because I wasn't "company personnel."

Trading shots with the bounty hunter. I'll blog  more about combat when I understand it better.

At this point, in summary, I'm just flying from planet to planet, logging what I find. The problem is that I'm going backwards in development. Fuel, oxygen, and ammo cost money, and I'm just expending all three with no real payoff. (I suppose if I eventually just run out of everything, I can start a new party and outfit it with this party's notes.) At the same time, I'm not getting anywhere with character development, since the MegaTraveller system doesn't have experience points or levels. All I can do is hope that I'll occasionally increase a level in "laser pistols" or my other various skills.

The tone of this review probably conveys how lackluster I feel about the game. Unfortunately, Hard Nova doesn't strike me as any better, so I might reach further down the list to find something more addictive to play in between MegaTraveller sessions.

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.