I'm sentimental about the Wizardry series. I watched my dad play it when I was a kid, and I found it to be a fascinating alternative to Star Wars as a future fantasy series. A few years ago, I finally managed to do what I wanted to do all my life: Play a party through 6 and Gold and import it into 8. However, I lost interest after a bit, and now I want to try with a different party.

But I do NOT want to go through the slog of taking that party through 6 and 7 as they were designed. The tile movements; the random encounters; the frequent loading of saves due to how easy it is for party members to die (and the statistical penalties that come with resurrection); the nonsensical and limited interactions with NPCs; the need to strictly follow a walkthrough because of how extremely easy it is to miss plot-critical items and not be able to go back for them (looking at you, Indiana Jones puzzle). The overarching story is important to me and I want to experience it in the context of a new party of characters, but I do NOT want to go through all of the terrible dungeon-crawl mechanics again.

Does anyone know of any mods that present Wizardry 6 and 7 in Wizardry 8's engine? Many people complain about it, but I very much prefer it to its predecessors as a means of doing open exploration, turn-based combat, and NPC interaction. I strongly prefer to be able to spot enemies who aren't concealing themselves and put effort into avoiding or baiting them, I prefer to be able to see items that can be picked up rather than depend on an overt Search die roll, and I LOVE being able to use the topography to my advantage when I can.

Check out Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar.

It originally started out as Wizardry 8, but after that project was mismanaged and fell apart, the programmer went off on his own and continued to work on it.
It is essentially Wizardry 8 in all but name, and plays in a very similar style to Wizardry 7.

[About Grimoire] Does it include ugly mechanics like the "base miss chance"? (That value is a hidden stat that improves by random amounts depending on class when you level, but it is based on the class you first reach a given level as, and it stops improving past level 20.)

Hmmm, I'm not sure about that specifically, but you can rest assured that it has its fair share of ugly and fiddly mechanics.

That game was created, or should i say assembled from mostly stolen code
(based on watching gameplay vids, also assessment of more competent people aka other devs),
by a despicable person whose name i refuse to write.
He must have really harassed the other devs at Sit Tech,
as they gave him a cameo as calvin barkmore in JA2 with appropriate a-hole text and comment of player characters,
not to speak of "town does not care" flag is not set, in opposition of all other miners (if you kill one of them deliberately)
In case check the web for some of his messages to make your own judgement.
I would never spend money on a product from which someone like "it" gets even only a fraction of a cent.

TT:
there was an attempt by user svojna to create Wiz7 in Wiz8, the terrain is iirc mostly done,
if not completely, some fixes were applied by me, but it still lacks nearly all monsters,
perhaps also some dynamic objects, and a workaround for the "chance to spawn monsters on every tile" in wiz7.
(spawn trigger for evry "tile" may overload engine, in case use NPC invoker trigger which sets location variable,
use locVar to trigger random jump in NPC or lua script for tile related spawn)
If anybody would like the archive to complete the work
- its a serious amount, i could not do it in just 50h or so, and you probably not in 100 ;) -
let me know here or on postcount.net, i may even be able to provide some if not all the new "required" monster models.

This sounds pretty tough, like you have some inside knowledge about all this.

In fact, it's an ugly lie you fabricated out of thin air. Nothing in Grimoire is stolen from any other game. Why would it be? I started from "Hello World" and just kept building on top of that.

I think you are trying to impress others here by sounding like you speak with some expertise but in fact I suspect you have never kissed a girl and still live with your parents. You may have a restraining order requiring you to keep a minimum of 300 feet away from schools and anywhere children congregate and might also have an ankle bracelet that rings the police if you try to walk into any areas in your neighborhood where there are kindergartens or daycare centers.

You're making up fibs about a game that is sold here on GOG and if I were a moderator I'd tell you to either produce some evidence to support your claims or shut up. If you're just making up ugly slurs about a stranger on the internet insisting they stole some code which they "reused" in their game then you're just a typical millennial who is unlikely to ever marry and is probably currently waiting on your hormone therapy to start your transition to your real gender, which is definitely not male and which I support fully in addition to any new pronouns you would like to use.