Wizards and Warriors Retrospective Forgotten RPG Games
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- Опубликовано: 19 мар 2019
- This is a long form review/retrospective of the 2000 Heuristic Park Role-Playing Game Wizards and Warriors. Created by the legendary DW Bradley, designer of Wizardry 5, 6 and 7 along with Cybermage Darklight Awakening is this game a Hidden Gem or something best left forgotten?
#ClassicRPGGaming
#PCRPGs
#GamesLikeWizardry
Timestamps for the Contents of the Video
Intro
Character Creation 3:35
Story/World Building 7:54
User Interface/Items/Shopping 19:28
Level Design 27:58
Combat 34:53
Item Grinding Frustration 54:32
Conclusion 1:02
Tips are Appreciated: www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr... 
Игры
These videos are great. I remember hanging with my friends back in the 80's playing Wizardry I on an Apple IIe. One person on the keyboard, one person on the graph paper, and one person taking notes. Good times.
I bought this on a whim on gog and just finished it. I personally loved this game. I've never played any of the Wizardry games before, but I'm going to check them out eventually. Great video, you brought up some points I had while playing as well as some deeper observations
This game was super buggy but I loved it when it came out. Who can resist a game that lets you create a party with a faerie ninja and an elephant monk. Also, I adored the music.
I agree on the music, I actually really enjoyed it's eerie, repetetive nature, very relaxing.
This was such a favourite of mine as a kid - used to play it with my parents growing up. I remember how cool it was unlocking the Assassin class.
I've run through this game several times. It was gifted to me when the game was first released. It was my 1st real RPG. There was a lot to learn and the manual wasn't very detailed in telling you how to do certain things, like blessing and enchanting items. You mentioned gold/money being very valuable. There is a way to generate a ton of gold - Blessing+Fletchery. There is a quest to deliver a Dragon Arrow (the best arrow in the game) to a samurai who thinks the dragon killed his father. Deliver the arrow, then steal it from the samurai. Give the arrow to your priest class and bless it for more hit and damage. The more you bless it, the more you can sell it for. Bless it as much as you can and give it to your ranger who has learned fletchery. He/She will craft more of them. If you have more than 1 party member with the fletchery skill, do it with them too. The amount of gold you will generate is insane, which will make maxing out you characters much more affordable. If all your characters are skilled in buffing your party, the enemies die fast. Buff everyone with Bless, Heroic Might, Frenzy, Blood Lust, Stealth, Invisibility, etc and you will mow down your foes. Obtaing and vendoring items for the amount of gold you will need for training is what is so time consuming. The Bless+Fletchery thing I mentioned saves so much time.
40-50 hours of play? The package says over 200. It took me around 300 my first time through. I'm not sure how long it took me the subsequent times I've played it.
What’s your take on best races and classes builds?
I had a crappy computer as a kid. Id try endlessly running this game with no luck. I got it running once. It looked like such an adventure.
I don't think the goal of this game is adventure, I think it's suffering because once you've legitimately finished it you can always say this isn't that bad as fighting the plants or getting the scuba gear. I often used to wonder why they would design things like that, did they get carried away trying to be clever or cryptic? Or is it just some kind of social experiment to see how much mental anguish a player can take.
Great in-depth retrospective. Maybe next you could do Bradley's Dungeon Lords.
This was great content, thanks! I’ve been curious about this game, and your review was the most thorough info I’ve found yet. Hit all the important points, plus with all the gameplay recording I really feel like I understand the mechanics sufficiently to my desire now. Thanks again.
These videos are so flipping good. Thank you so much for making them.
Your videos are lovely to watch. I find myself coming back to your classic RPG analyses over & over again. I really hope to see more lengthy retrospectives from you in the future
Just finished this game, and it was fantastic indeed! Thank you for this video!
Great content my man, keep it coming!
I remember visiting my local gaming store back in the winter of 2000, having to choose between this game and Giants: Citizen Kabuto. I decided to purchase the latter, yet gave W&W a try a few years later. It wasn't the best the genre had to offer yet it was certainly enjoyable.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane, Michael!
i didnt think i'd watch a hour+ review of a game I never heard of and will almost certainly never player, but here I am lol. great video, really interesting.
After looking at the game files in an item editor, I think I've realized the problem behind the harmless melee enemies: Not one of their attacks, besides held weapons, have any sort of to-hit modifier. It shouldn't be too hard to modify these values, creating a rebalance mod...
sounds like it could be achieved through Hex Editor... but then I don't know which tools to use to find which memory values to modify in real time... that would be done most probably through modifying Save Files in a Hex Editor
@FeelingShred That would actually be an editor made by a guy called Jeff Ludwig back in 2012.
@@FeelingShredis that for real? None of the melee mobs have attack modifiers? What an unforgivable oversight.
Came for the NES games but stayed for the quality commentary.
Great in depth review.
I like the art style in this game, a lot of the monsters look simple but interesting at the same time
Never played it but very interesting video. Would love to hear your take on some of the newer attempts at "blobber" type games, from the new Bard's Tale, Legends of Grimrock, Lords of Xulima etc
Nice to see another long and detailed review from you.
I remember wanting to play W&W after I played Wizardry 8, but W&W turned out to be confusing and annoying. Now, as I watch the review, I can see some of the elements that another game by Bradley has inherited. I mean Dungeon Lords, aka Dark Souls of my childhood.
looks interresting with original races, gonna give it a try
You get powerful items in the end-game, including many uniques available in the last two chests guarded by Cet, so that when you 'reset adventures' you can play again, with the same party and items. Zenmaster and Valkirie classes are available after getting half-way trough the last dungeon, and most likely to be obtained after beating the game.
Some people play multiple times.
Blessing is an important part of the game and item power. That is where the variety comes in - some weapons enchant / bless better than others, and some can't be blessed at all, including that Trident of the Tides you have found. The most powerful weapon in the game is the "Lance of the Lady", followed up by Mace +2 and Wizards Blade (dagger). The most powerful off-hand weapon is the Assassins Dagger - and while you need to give it to the guild to get the assassin's class, you can keep it for that character on a second play-trough. Swords are mid-tier, as none offers as high damage when fully blessed (lvl 14 damage blessing from a Zenmaster).
The game appears to have been originally designed with one character in mind (like Dungeon Lords), and that explains weird inventory, quest tracking, combat, combat difficulty and even crab farming (you can buy 1 diving helmet), as well as the 3d character models (3PP) and other shenanigans (any character class can use at least one of the two ultimate weapons to kill Cet). In both games Bradley has run out of time. In DL he focussed more on 3d real-time combat, so the world was less polished.
IMO, had W&W and DL came out as a single game, it would have beaten Wizardry 7.
You don't need the two keys to finish the game. I've found the way around it when I was in the same situation:
ruclips.net/video/OQN19SL-zWA/видео.html
The Dragon Arrow can be blessed after you steal it from the samurai you deliver it to. Max out the blessing and give it to a party member with the fletchery skill and gold rolls in faster than you can spend it.
The vanish trick is one of several alternative methods of gaining access to certain areas. That's one of the things I really liked about W&W. Need to get into the Stout Mine? Find the writ lying next to a dead body in the woods, or get a Boogre Brew. The guard will accept either. Need to kill someone/something to get a drop item? Pick their pockets for it.
@@danwiesdamageinc
Hmm, my comment gets deleted. YT does not like ironworks forum links, it seems.
Yup, I know :)
ruclips.net/video/G7SsJ23uYhE/видео.html
If you know of a faster way to get to the enchanted sea other than treesurfing or the vanish near the sphinx, please do tell me. Treesurfing does not work for me since win xp, and running all the way to the sphinx takes a lot of time.
I loved exploring this world and still think about how fun solving the puzzles was and I still rate the character creation and level/specialization as one of the best in game play.
Unfortunately I then remember the combat, I still get twitchy thinking of some of the monsters.
But I still think about it so that says something about the game right.
Those damn fly traps, hahaha
@@ryanc5572 oh my god yes. The amount of kiting I used to do was ridiculous. I think I spent a lot of combats just constantly running backwards and firing arrow/spells at monsters.
I do remember I worked out a simple cheet/hack for character creation.
Just create loads of team members, strip them of clothing and gold. Deleate and repeat.
I means you could start the game loaded with enough to buy useful stuff.
@@chiddy786 I did that as well, haha. This game was so difficult at times, usually to how outlandish the puzzles or bad UI was, instead of the combat... haha
The fly traps can go die though, haha
I know people are going to say I'm being hyperbolic, but I genuinely think the dungeon design and exploration in W&W is among the best in any game, ever. This game really showcased what could be done with full 3D graphics and spaces for a blobber, and it's *such* a shame that we only saw a handful of 3D games in this style (W&W, Wiz 8 and M&M VI-IX, and that's about it I guess?).
After Wizardry 8, I planned to play this game thoroughly, but certain bugs and overall "bizarre" atmosphere of the game left me disenchanted ... but as years go by, I still listen to the soundtrack from time to time, and I fondly remember the quirky characters the game threw at you. Now that it's released on GoG, I definitely need to revisit it soon. It's basically a diamond in the rough, the long lost offshoot of Wizardry 8.
Ive actually never tried the wizardry games, ill have to try them out between the gold box and old might and magic titles
one of the best open world game I have ever play in my childhood
love it when I found bugs and exploits myself and used it to my advantage (such as teleporting Erathsmedor to underwater, or skipping the stages etc etc)
*"Losing a key in Skyrim would never happen, at least I don't think it would."*
_Bethesda wants to know your location_
oh Man this Looked like it was going to be Fun on GOG . Maybe I'll play Wizardry 6 then work my way up
I absolutely loved this game since it still had a similar class system to the other Wizardry games. But playing the actual game? It was like moving throughout a dream and I loved every bit of it. Sure, it was 2000 and a bit behind technically but it still had a sense of wonder for exploration and the interactivity was enough so that puzzles could actually be enjoyed and not show-stoppers.
BTW as to the name "Wizards and Warriors" the original name chosen was "Swords and Sorcery" but they changed it mid-development.
Love these deep dives into blobbers. (Yeah, it sounds gross in my head just typing it.) On a side note, your vocabulary is refreshingly brilliant. Not many reviewers could get away with dropping words like penury and piquant and sound natural doing so. Kudos.
Thank you for another amazing review. All of your criticisms are valid as this game was rushed and buggy when it was released and could have been one of the greats. I bought it when it was released and was a very active member of the first online group of players. We loved the game despite its many bugs and quirks and even wrote fanfics where we incorporated all of these issues into our stories. Good times. I bought it on GoG a while back after not playing for many years and had a blast finishing it. Although it's not a game I come back to often and it has a lot of problems it is still a classic in my book.
I love this game so much. Grew up playing it with my Mother and have come back to it every now and again.
28 years old now and this video makes me want to play it again.
Another of those game I've started and haven't got around to finishing. One day....
I was actually looking for the action rpg retrospective 😅
Good and atmospheric game. Not the best one, of course, but it has its deserved place in everyone's heart.
The best game i ever played after the might and magic series
I remember the part where you had to farm conch shells for scuba gear. At that point, I think I quit the game, but after 10+ years of MMOs under my skin ... well, it's not that bad :)
Can't be any worse than farming a 1/256% summoning item in Final Fantasy 4.
Welp I am adding this to my collection, I have a thirst for these first person roleplaying games.
It had some problems but I liked it. Not too many of these type games around anymore.
Interesting
I got it new when it came out and won it. Don't remember it that well, but I remember liking it well enough. I do remember wanting to like it more than I did, probably for the reasons you touched on. I did like it was much easier than Wiz 6 (tried to start 7 a couple times but got frustrated trying to import my Amiga(!) Wiz 6 chars into PC Wiz 7). The endian switch I think really stymied me.
3:33 Okay, I admit that I was really confused before you went over that.
So there is no actually relation between the two. Got it.
You played it so I didn’t have to 👏
This game is fantastic imo.
“Cursed by eeeeevvvvilll.” Is that the same actress who does the voice at the end of the haunted mansion in Disneyland?
Like Wizardry and M,ight and Magic, Wizards and Warriors NEEDS remastering
I knew exactly what running/out of breath sound you were talking about before you played it, haha. Hilarious
I also remember the overdramatic "something has happened... something ... evil!" And that vampire chick in one of the caves that you can use a dildo-shaped key on
I finished this game,!
It is an amazing game warts and all, far greater than the sum of its parts.
Maybe I'm jaded after playing Daggerfall, but to _hell_ with large, confusing dungeons.
Legendary 4 me, like Might & Magic 6,7,8,9, Wizardry 8, Arx Fatalis...
hey michael did you happen to play Demise: Rise of Ku'Tan? i'd love to hear your thoughts about it if you did. also you mentioned in one comment you will try grimoire. how did that go? your in-depth reviews of classic rpgs are the best! hope for many more :)
I haven't but thanks for mentioning it! I think I'm going to check it out. As for Grimoire I've only played about 4 or 5 hours of it so far. What I have seen has been great. The character creation system is extraordinarily detailed (with lots of cool monstrous races that I love). When I finish the game, which will probably take a long time I feel that I'm going to have to review it.
@@michaelsnow1 my brother bought grimoire on steam and he says it's poor man's wizardry 7 copy ;) i'm looking forward to try it myself though, ehh if only it was on gog.com ;)
Somehow i felt some criticisms were not valid. Crab thing - i never really experienced that i would have to spend hours. Those shells just came naturally and quickly. As for spelcaster yes, they are more dangerous but i would say that only Mantraps poses that level of a threat . Other casters can hurt a bit , but nowhere near as mantrap clouds, but on positive note they never re spawn and are preset, placing them just out of doors of second city is just cruel though. Melee combat is bit too dis balanced, i also didnt really felt threatened by it, but that's true for alot of games of that era like might and magic where auto attack deal a bit and then you just get wiped by dragonbreath. In w8 yea, they made meelee enemies threatening so in that comparison w8 is superior game. I would also disagree about class polish/uniqueness, each class had some sort of trait and some traits can be trained only for some classes , its not really obvious and i missed some of them as well but its there. Also like w8 it has class unique skills, like ninja get stealth and crit strike unlike some vanila fighter.
I appreciated the game for what it is, trying to do something a bit different from other titles of the same genre (first person party dungeon crawler) even if plagued with various issues, from design to bugs. Certainly you can enjoy the journey more if you focus on that instead of expecting a good game (a bit like Dungeon Lords, i liked it for certain things but not sure it's a good overall :P).
About the combat, i think that when the game tries to streamline a multiple characters combat (party + enemies) with use of realtime or "click a button to automatically hit with all the party" ideas you lose something from the turn based stuff you had before. In other games with grid movement you could already exploit things with jumping away before the enemy strikes you (from the earlier games like Lands of Lore, or in modern times Grimrock), in others it's more about pure stats power instead of more tactical thinking what let you win. Certainly the turn based systems of the past can bore you (with random encounters even more) and i think this change in W&W tried to innovate in some twisted way.
Having played in the last years the Etrian Odyssey series i can easily see how a combat like this is very basic compared to the choices you can have in those games, in particular with the biggest bosses (usually mid, end and post-game bosses that have more interesting behaviours and challenges, like seeing how they counter attack you, weaknesses and so on). Still i think you can have more with realtime combat (ex. Dark Souls) but with a party i don't know, maybe with very good AI or different approach to the party system (not surprised devs use multiplayer to make the party working better).
About a game that tried to evolve from the Wizardry series i think i'd suggest the PS2 offspring, Tales of the Forsaken Land. Even if tied to the more classic Wizardry grindy loop still have things like modern 3D graphics, nice looking dungeons, interesting way to tell the story and some options inside the combat system (like party based actions, combos that attack/defend and so on within particular situations). Plus seeing enemies moving around the dungeons potentially being able to dodge them (not random encounters, yeah!).
I hope we'll see more of this style of games nowadays, i think this kind of movement and party system, the interesting dungeons can have their place even now.
i'll take a redux of this game. thank you
❤❤❤❤❤
I am grateful for this, because it saved me from the anger I'd have felt at going through what you did. I am certain now that I will *not* buy or play W&W, but at some point I will try the Wizardry games. I have previously played and completed one of the Might and Magic games. I forget which number it was, possibly 7; it was the one that ripped off Battlestar Galactica, by having a crashed ship at the bottom of a large lake, which basically *was* Galactica, at least in its external shape. Not really appropriate or "in place" so to speak, in a fantasy game. Oh well. Still, *that* game was enjoyable, in part because of factors you mentioned, like being able to go back and forth between turn-based and real time. There were definitely times when each was vital. Overall then, to be honest, I find myself far more attracted to playing more Might and Magic games, and to finally playing the Wizardry games, than I could ever be to playing *any* of the Wizards and Warriors games. Thank You *Very* Much Indeed, for that insight and information.
How would you rank this w/the Wizardry games? I was thinking about getting wiz 6+7 on GOG, but saw this come up and now i'm not sure. They seem very similar.
good times -
Did anybody try and port this game to a different engine, like some games from that era that were using Glide? (ex: Tombraider, Descent, RedGuard).
Is there a modding community for this game out there?
sadly not
there is only one mod made by Ludmeister that chance some minor stuff, including magic plants to be less OP
What about the compatibility with win10 tho? I remember back in 2ks' i had to go to ironworks forum and dl many extra stuff to make it work and even then it would crash. Is it stable if i just buy it from GOG?
34:28 for description of combat
I'm curious, did you play the original version of this game or did you apply the one beta patch for it?
I think I played the original version. If that was the one released initially on gog a few years ago. I don't know if it had a patch included with it or not. Maybe with the patch the weird stuff with the enemy not hitting in melee would have been fixed.
@@michaelsnow1 Thanks for the answer. Yeah, it was a beta patch which is to say it was developed by Heuristic park but not officially approved by Activision and not extensively tested. The reason I asked is that I planned to check the game out for myself and wanted to see if the patch fixed some of the problems or if it broke the game due to being beta.
I was going to love this game when I bought it as a kid, however, my extra old (Family's) computer did not like this game because it was an old school Pentium 1.
I also never could get into this game, and I tried. Was it the lack of Fabio? Maybe, it's hard to say.
I liked the Elephant race, you don't see them as character options, not any more, but ever, that race seemed specific to this game.
Tempted to play this, but broken combat is a deal breaker IMO :/ Needs a mod to fix combat and it may then become a cult classic.
One of the issues with combat is that the style of the game changed late in development. This was originally intended to be a 6 player, online game. A great deal of time was spent on the various armor and costume slots, since each player would be able to see the other 5 characters as they moved around the screen. When "Swords and Sorcery" moved from Westwood to Activision, not only was the name changed, but the publisher insisted on gutting the multiplayer aspect, which was going to be a massive time suck from a programming and playtesting standpoint. Suddenly the game needed party position mechanics, like the old Wizardry games, instead of allowing the spell casters to hang back out of range.
I'm not entirely sure if this is accurate. The development history of the game is very hard to track down, but I believe there were going multiplayer ELEMENTS in the game, and not that it would be a online-only game. I think the biggest problem was that there was initially going to be a turn-based and realtime-mode that the player could flick on and off (I suppose similar to what was implemented in the M&M Enroth trilogy?), but a lot of that was changed quite deep into development. It doesn't take a genius to see that the entire game is being held together with duct tape from a technical perspective, so clearly it could have used a lot more time in the oven.
Personally, I don't think the combat is nearly as bad as Michael makes it out to be in this video. Yes, it can be annoying at times, and the venus flytraps are the perfect example of that, but I'd say that for the majority of the game, it flows quite well. I absolutely adore Wizardry 8, but the pacing of the combat system was a huge problem in that game, W&W at least avoids this problem somewhat.
@@robinmattheussen2395 Everything Chris shared is spot on. There was a very active online community when this game was first released and one of the lead programmers joined the group and shared this very same information. He even had pictures from earlier forms of the game where you could see the other characters on screen fighting and casting spells just as Chris described. I can't remember his name but he had all sorts of pictures and concept art that he shared with us. I also recall him mentioning that one of the other lead programmers died during production and this combined with other issues led to game being so rough and buggy when it was published as it was mostly D. W. Bradley working solo at the end.
What is going on with D.W. Bradley? There is almost no info about him since Dungeon Lords release more than 15 years ago.
Such a shame he left the game industry as most of his old games are still first class masterpieces.
I seems like a flawed but interesting game.
I've played and liked a lot of heavely flawed rpgs (Two Worlds is one of my favourite games while also being the worst game I've ever finished, and I done so thrice!). So I'm probably going to enjoy this game.
Underwater levels should be a great part of any game but most of the time the implementation is bad.
Combat is nothing special. At least it's fast (hi, WIz 8). But it makes up for it with its great character progession systems and the dungeons of W&W belong to the best and biggest I've ever seen.
How did they fit six people on one horse???
Its a big horse 😄
@@michaelsnow1 Maybe it has six asses
very similar to Wizardry 8
One of the TRULY BEST rpg games EVER. I cound never have enough of it, it's a pure dark, magical and mysterious world with amazing complexity and A DAMN GOOD STORY!! most games nowadays have not story at all, no backround no NOTHING. Gothic 1 and 2, Might and magic 6,7,8 and elder scrolls are the best 3d world rpg's with a GOOD FUCKING STORY!! Today games are shits!!
Albion has a better story than all of those :)
@@dickbison why not? But still i like this more
Problem with this game is, you can just look at the mini map to navigate. It doesn't seem there are loot chests or secrets to find, so just navigate by that.
This is fine, you don't have to look at the horrible rendered graphics of the era -which even for the time, I thought were ugly.
Also to note, yes... just yes. The problem with inventory is astute. The problem with 'identifying' is astute. The problem with the game is, they figured only number-crunching geeks were still playing games this late in the 90's.. or.. or.. they just were ass-hats and didn't understand how to make a game.
:D Graphics,... they were bad, even for this time. 2000 was the year Halo came out or The Operative: No One Lives Forever. Even Spyro from 1998 looked better or Drakan: Order of the Flame (1999) and I could just go on. One of many reasons why it didn't caught attention, graphics were more important back then than today and this game couldn't impress at all.
I almost bought this today, it is on sale at 2.99 on GOG. Looked at the reviews and they all said it was the best game ever or it was garbage. So I checked youtube and came here. This does look good in a lot of ways, but for me that combat, the unfinished feeling and unbalanced progression were deal breakers, If I could have my first choice I'd want a great turn based game, but even a more action system would be alright, this seems to do neither well while trying to offer both.
It's a shame, it has a good look, and feel too it, and the level design looks very interesting, but if it is frustrating to play, fight and solve puzzles due to poor looting systems, and terrible combat, there's no reason to stick with it and explore the good dungeons. I'd even be alight if the combat was simple, but the idea some fights are simple and others impossible just seems like combat gets in the away of the game more than anything.
It's a great game, give it a try, its like 3 bucks what do you have to lose?
The NES Wizards and Warriors isn't an RPG by any stretch. It's an action platformer that might be considered to have some proto-metroidvania elements but I wouldn't call it an RPG.
Definitely. I had it as a kid. It was a pretty good game
Just a side-note: Wizards & Warriors for NES and its sequels are not RPGs.
Also, classless systems really aren't a modern thing.
A tip: you do a lot of repeating yourself multiple times in each segment that should probably be edited out, which would also move the videos towards a more manageable time.
Enjoyable videos otherwise.
Your retro bias is almost laughable.