Check our Digital Eclipse Bundle! Purchase The Making of Karateka together with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Featuring the GRAMMY® Award-winning score by Winifred Phillips!
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a full 3D remake of the first game in the legendary Wiz...
Check our Digital Eclipse Bundle! Purchase The Making of Karateka together with Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord.
Featuring the GRAMMY® Award-winning score by Winifred Phillips!
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is a full 3D remake of the first game in the legendary Wizardry series of RPGs.
The first party-based RPG video game ever released, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was a direct inspiration to series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. Digital Eclipse's revival preserves the appeal of the classic, with many upgrades for modern role-playing game fans.
Dungeon Crawling, Deluxe
Craft your own party of adventurers and head into the labyrinth at the behest of the mad overlord Trebor, in search of the amulet stolen by the evil wizard Werdna. Battle groups of challenging enemies, avoid hidden traps, and make your way deeper into the dungeon as you prepare for the ultimate battle: Facing Werdna himself.
Commitment to Accuracy
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is built directly on top of the original 1981 game's code. Although it looks all new, underneath the hood is the authentic game. You can even view the original Apple II interface as you play.
Challenge Without Hassle
While the well-known difficulty of the enemies has not been altered, quality-of-life improvements have been added in every area. Party management, navigation, spellcasting, and combat have all been significantly enhanced.
A Legend Reborn
If you're just discovering the legendary Wizardry franchise, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is the perfect jumping-in point for new players. Series veterans will love the gorgeous new graphics and sound, and the streamlined interface.
Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners Co. use of certain elements from Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord have been authorized by SirTech Entertainment Corp.
2024 Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners, Co. WIZARDRY and the WIZARDRY logo are registered trademarks of Drecom Co., Ltd. in the U.S. and elsewhere. Digital Eclipse and the Digital Eclipse logo are trademarks of Digital Eclipse Entertainment Partners, Co. Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord licensed by SirTech Entertainment Corp. All rights reserved.
I've been a fan of most of the Wizardry games throughout the decades. This is a good remaster of the graphics on and old and dated game. It still leaves a lot to be desired--mouse support, manual saves. The automap is good, but doesn't persist when you leave the maze and return. I hope to see many improvements to come.
When I saw this I admit I allowed my "excitement" to cloud my judgement so I bought it on the spot and now I regret buying it a little but if you enjoyed it in the past you can still enjoy it now. First the positive... The graphics are great. I even liked the little "legacy" screen it shows to the bottom right for what it used to look like. A miniMap? Oh yes why thank you! Everything is mostly as I recall, but I can't say I am sure and I think my regret is hitting me too much right now... maybe because it is still EA...
So far it has full controller support... but no mouse support there is some wonkiness here and there like losing focus when naming Characters... but it's easy to fix.
There are a couple of Quality of life things I like such as Gold is now Auto Pooled for all and the Shop only shows what your character can equip. You also have a minimap... but it's limited and not really useful as it will get bugged making you have to restart the game to fix it (you wont lose progress) but it does wipe every time you change a floor. So... it's back to making maps from the days of yore, which is NOT the kind of nostalgia I was interested in.
You still have to heal up with spells and equip items in the dungeon camp... which I guess is no big deal, but the useless number of spells still sucks and it definitely sucks when you only healer does not get any new healing spells after 7 levels.... which is absolute baloney.
You will have to remake characters because of mind numbing madness... another thing I hated from the original.
I think this would have been better if it was not so much like the original game. It CAN stand to have improvements that don't ruin the experience in my opinion.
Having played all of the NES, Ultimate Wizardry Achieves, and SFC versions of Wizardry, I am happy to experience this re-release, which uses the console music and combines the feel of the SFC version in the dungeon with Wizardry: Tales of the Forsaken Land in combat--both good to great games aesthetically. I question many of the design choices, some good (customizes away many "old school" traditions), but which overall make the game close to unplayable.
The game is the game--you get invested in your characters, they die/permadie easily, you overestimate your chances, you encounter strange and challenging enemies and traps, and you gradually become a master player. It's good, but pretty high up there in unforgiving entry-level and endgame experiences in a party-based RPG. Having a player friendly interface is important to make such an experience enjoyable. The interface is not player-friendly.
Unlike every prior release, this game has no way to circumvent Wizardry's aggressive autosaving of everything bad that happens to you: no multiple saves, no reset/force quit in the middle of a bad combat (the game saves character status round by round), no easily accessible save/character files to make manual backups. It is impossible to overstate how profoundly this changes the gameplay.
The game weirdly makes it impossible to access newly created (and naked) characters' gold until they enter and then leave the dungeon.
It's hard to figure out what's going on in combat. The action's going on in front of you, but most of the information is off to the side, so you're constantly having to move your eyes for things like what spells are going off, which monsters were affected, and how many hits connected. Tales of the Forsaken Land had no trouble giving you this information.
This game may be great when it's fully finished. In its current state it needs more polish and different design choices.
Instantly bought this the day of release to show support for the genre. While I don't regret the purchase, I am hoping the developers do a bit to modernize the interface in the coming year of Early Access. As it stands, it often feels like a jumping puzzle trying to access the submenu that I need.
In '81, all these menus were split up to work within memory confines; there's no longer a reason to split up user access to equipment, characters, and other needed information to such a degree. Mouse support is stated as being on the way, but I hope the devs don't simply paste the support on to replace Q, E, lAlt, rAlt, etc.
Controls aside, the gameplay needs (at minimum) a save-in-town option. The RNG encounters are otherwise too extreme and often discouraging in the face of total party kills.
It's funny, I played this in highschool on the Apple IIe. My group of fellow nerds sat around a single computer with one of us driving and the rest watching. We all had a character that we played. We made maps on paper (so many arguments when we got lost/mixed up, too funny). I remember being sad when one of the party would die (and die they will), hoping we'd make it back to town before a complete party wipe. We got so addicted we propped open the window in the school and snuck back in to play at night/weekends. No alarm systems back then.
Great to see this game getting some love and I especially like the QoL features they put in to allow the player to choose which gameplay style choices they'd like. You can make it as punishing as the original if you like. Also really enjoying the added 2-d vector map on the side showing you the original game view. I even can remember some of the maps!
Be wary friends, this game punished you and it still does. There's very little hand holding so if you're scared of games that don't allow you to save every 2min then you might want to avoid this one. I really hope this does well and they can move on to the sequels. Keep it up!