Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

I played the Wizardry series a lot when they were released, and completed all of the games multiple times. I'm also currently playing Wizardry I in an Apple II emulator. The main problem I have with this remake is that it's WAY more difficult than the original game. My entire party has been wiped out during the first encounter, on the first level, in the first room entered, multiple times. There's no difficulty setting, but somehow the developers made the monsters WAY tougher. My other observation is that while the graphics and audio are nice, the UI is weirdly clunky and inconsistent. The original game is literally easier to use. I'll stick with it, but so far it's been frustrating.

This was a pleasant surprise remake and I’m enjoying it so far. There are many good things to say about this version but I’ll just mention the following. Multiple reviews indicated that the auto-mapper resets every time you re-enter the dungeon level. While this is true, the exploration progress for each dungeon level is actually saved and can be recalled/saved by casting the level 1 Mage spell “DUMAPIC.” The game could have been more clear on this point. There are two things I think could benefit from “modernization”: 1. Healing spells tend to roll on the lower end for some reason for me. It’s frustrating to cast high circle spells to heal for 4 points. If anything, there should be some scaling to caster level and or Piety. 2. The surprise mechanic is too random and punishing. I rather have it disabled and let the initiative system with some randomness to handle it. Lastly, I’m not a fan of the default keyboard mapping for UI menu navigation. It is clunky and unintuitive to use left/right alt, etc for navigation.

I feel like I just jumped into a time machine. Amazing job converting this to a modern version but still keeping the same feel of dread and excitement I felt 40+ years ago. Thoroughly enjoying it and can't wait for Knight of Diamonds so I can port my characters over and continue the legacy of Gilgamesh.

Never played this game; started the Wizardry series with Wizardry 5, with Wizardry 6 being my favourite of the series, some 32 years after first playing it. Felt I needed to explore the true roots of Wizardry and one of the formative games of the entire genre. Only up to Level 4 for my characters but enjoying the game a lot. I do like that I am able to pick and choose among some of the old vs modernized gameplay/QoL options. Always liked the class change options in Wizardry. So far, exploration and combat have been fun although my mage has been surprisingly useless to date, I do not like the vim/age mechanic and plan to turn it off for resting - only my magic users ever need to rest and hard to accept that they get older so much faster than my fighters. Resting should not make the 'resters' older than the rest of the team. Also would have liked an option to allow my back row to have reach weapons so they aren't so useless. Afterall. when facimg two groups of enemies, both can hit me while my response capability is much more limited. But quibbles aside, one can see why Wizardry 1 founded a genre.

nice havent played this since 512 Mac