About This Game A New Wizardry for a New GenerationThe universe is in the throes of violent upheaval and change. Vast and mysterious forces are preparing for the final confrontation. A small group of heroes from distant lands must plunge into the heart of the maelstrom, to uncover long-forgotten secrets, and bring about a new era. Should they succeed, they will gain the powers of the gods themselves. If they fail, countless worlds will fall into the grip of darkness.Wizardry 8 raises the standard for fantasy role-playing with a vengeance. Prepare yourself for a new level of excitement, immersiveness and depth that made role-playing games one of the best-selling, best-loved genres of all time.Prepare to experience the culmination of a prestigious RPG series. Enter a vast world of intrigue and wonder. Unravel a gripping, non-linear storyline. Battle your way to victory using your swords, your magic, and your wits. Compete with rivals or align with allies as you struggle to ascend to the Cosmic Circle. Take the battle to the dreaded Dark Savant in Wizardry 8, the phenomenal conclusion to the Dark Savant trilogy, one of the most extensive and challenging stories ever told in classic role-playing games! This is the legacy of Wizardry 8!Explore a vast 3D world filled with action, magic and adventure. Wander through dark dungeons, lush landscapes, scorching volcanoes and even beneath the sea.Create your own custom party of adventurers. Make a gnome gadgeteer, a lizardman fighter, a rawulf lord or even a faerie ninja. the possibilities are endless!Choose a custom personality for each character and hear them speak over 100 lines of dialogue; Kindly or Chaotic, burly or surly-how your characters act is up to you.Talk to dozens of intelligent characters. How you treat them determines whether they become powerful allies or deadly enemies.Battle over 300 types of monsters in some of the most intense combat ever seen in an RPG. The unique auto-targeting system makes combat easy to learn, while the huge number of strategies adds unprecedented depth.Advanced creature A.I. brings a new level of realism to RPGs. You don't just hunt the monsters-the roaming monsters hunt you.Cast over 100 spells using a unique power-level system that guarantees that no spell ever becomes obsolete. 6d5b4406ea Title: Wizardry 8Genre: Adventure, RPGDeveloper:Sir-Tech CanadaPublisher:Gamepot, Inc., Nightdive StudiosRelease Date: 15 Nov, 2001 Wizardry 8 Download] [FULL] An unsurpassed classic RPG. No game has offered such a combination of deep character development, reach dialog options, clever tactical combat and a crazy world to explore. It's a shame that there's no more Wizardry game to pick up it's banner.I bought it on CDs when it came out. Then bough it here when my CDs got stolen. I'd buy it 3rd time if it mattered :-). I still haven't finished this game. Not because it's hard (though it is), but because every time I get into it, I think to myself "yes, but couldn't [X class combination] solve this better?" and then I never go back to the original save game. 10/10, eternal character generation simulator.. Upon the release of Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar, I had a rekindled urge and desire to play an old school dungeon crawler. I remember always wanting to play these old style RPGs when I was younger but I never had the patience for them. I felt like I could enjoy them more now where as a child, I just felt like the game was unfair and I couldn't understand why. And while I wanted Grimoire, I didn't want to pay that price. And then I found Wizardry 8, a game from a tried and true series and said, what the hell.I tried 6 and 7 first. I wasn't a fan. Some things don't age well and the aid of nostalgia glasses don't help. They were just too outdated and honestly, the graphics were too pixelated and I had a really hard time reading them. The games literally hurt my eyes to look at. And I thought they were too clunky. I just didn't have a whole lot of fun in the short time that I did play them, so they got returned. But Wizardry 8 however, was a different story.This game is closing in fast on 20 years old and even though it looks like it (albiet in a charming early 3d way), it sure doesn't feel like it. The frame rate is surprisingly smooth for something of this age. The sound is very high quality and the dungeon layout is beautiful. The controls are a little odd and the default key layout is strange, but nothing huge to complain about. It's a minor gripe at best.This game truly holds up after all this time and still runs wonderfully on modern systems. Unlike it's predecessors, Wizardry 8 has aged gracefully. It shows us that modern, phot-realistic graphics do not always make the game.. It's more modern than its graphics imply - this game isn't just some old-school zombie that was kept alive by fans, it's an RPG that may be slow at at times, and have more than a few quirks that do require research before building your party, but it has a much deeper system than at first appears. It has true 3d, like an FPS while controlling a full party, and the party is arranged on a grid where "short range" is determined by what quarter of the grid is facing the enemy - attacks to the rear attack your rear line mages first, while your front line fighters cannot reach the enemy. It has an odd hybrid point-buy combined with train-through-use system, as well - skills are both bought and then trained through use, making player choices not be so much a min-maxxing for what skills are most valuable and worth your points, as much as it is a choice of what skills you can train through use the easiest, and which ones need those level-up skill points to get jump-started.If anything, Wizardry 8 is a transitional game. It seems clear that Sir-Tech was working hard to modernize their game while still keeping the depth of their old games, and it's a shame they couldn't have gotten past this point to create a Wizardry 9 that would have more fully brought the game into being both a modern RPG as well as the homage to the RPGs of years past. However, this game gives you all you need to see where they were going.. Wizardry 8 was among the last 1st-person "hard-core" cRPG's, whereby the game is more like a table-top simulation than one aiming for realism. There is always an argument over what "hard-core" means, but for old guys like me (39) who have seen just about the entire evolution of RPG's "hard-core" doesn't necessarily mean hard--although they usually are--it simply means the player's skill is demonstrated by strategic and tactical strategy, exploration, character creation, willingness to keep good notes, and whereby the character's skill is responsible for combat initiate, to-hit, locating items, detecting traps, warning about out-of-sight monsters, etc...Wizardry 8 is a great game for anyone who loves developing characters! You get to design six, count 'em, six player characters, and then steer their leveling over the course of this long game. They will go through all sorts of armor and weapon combos, master their class skills, change professions to master new skills, learn dozens of spells, use musical instruments, create gadget weapons, master traditional weapons, etc... You will never be bored with a party of six PC's to manage.Wizardry 8 is also a great game if you love combat. In fact, back in the day this game became notorious for its marathon combat sessions. Fights can easily go on for twenty or thirty minutes real time! In fact, I would mark this fact as both a strength and a weakness. This opinion will switch back and forth depending on whether I just won or lost a marathon fight. When you win these huge fights you will often level up several characters, if not the whole party, but when you lose you just wasted a half-hour of your life you cannot get back. Often I have been traveling Arnika road, and have had to deal with waves and waves of enemies, expending every last arrow, bullet stone, magic spell and drop of stamina and life, but was richly rewarded with XP, potions, gear, etc...In true Wizardry style, the game world is just as much a puzzle as a fantasy world. The puzzles do not quite reach the sophistication of 'Myst' but you simply can't always go where you want to on the first try. You will need to solve quests for NPCs, find very well hidden artifacts, etc... to gain access to many areas. I love this though, because it makes reaching hard to access areas all the more exciting and rewarding.In terms of difficulty, this game is certainly not easy. There are no quest arrows or fast-travel. You must drag information out of NPC's using your PC's communication skill, fights can be incredibly long and even low level monsters can wipe you out if there are 20 of them and they manage to surround your party (this is one thing about this game that seems ahead of its time--enemies do not just stand there and take a beating. They will always try to flank or even surround you. They don't have 'AI' per se, but their fighting instructions are well-written.Obviously, the game's graphics have aged a lot since 2001. That being said, as you can see from the screen shots, the graphics are nice and colorful and quite sharp. The spell effects are varied, and there is plenty of variety when it comes to monsters. Besides, as I said in my opening paragraph, this game is really more a table-top simulator than a modern open-world RPG. It's not about eye-candy world (it's graphics were already weak in 2001), it's about thinking your way through quests, puzzles, long fights, and befriending NPC's to get much needed information. Also a handful of mods exist that tweak some of the balance issues in this game, and weed out some of the needlessly annoying issues that you will encounter in some areas.In conclusion, I would strongly urge anyone who likes a challenge, and who likes the recent resurgence in old-school RPG's, to give this original old-school game a chance. Also, take the time to read the other reviews and the game description. You'll see they are mostly positive, and many do a better job than mine describing the game. I am really hoping that someone will develop a new-generation Wizardry-style game to go along with the spiritual successors to Baldur's Gate (Pillars of Eternity) and to a lesser extent Ultima (Divinity Original Sin isn't quite the Ultima 7 successor I would like, but it's still really good). Give Wiz 8 a few hours to grow on you. It's like a great novel that needs the first twenty or thirty pages to establish itself, and then it's a real page turner the whole rest of the way.
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