Wizardry 8 - Steam Update

It's nice to see that the RPG masterpiece Wizardry 8 is still getting support:

Hello everyone,

A small update for Wizardry 8 is available now. It contains the following:

• (Windows) nGlide was updated to 1.04 from 1.02
• (Mac OS X) The game will now launch on OS X 10.11
• (Mac OS X) Wine was updated to 1.7.54

Enjoy!

More information.

Thank you for the info, Carnifex!

Wizardry 8 is the best blobber I have ever played. I hope they will make a sequel to it one day like they did to M&M.

If they do, then PLEASE without level-scaling / auto-levelling of enemies !

Hmm I wonder if this will cause any of the mods to stop working? I use Dodds mod.

Daniel.

Originally Posted by Alrik Fassbauer
If they do, then PLEASE without level-scaling / auto-levelling of enemies !

And please, without the insane amount of respawn. This is what made me stop playing the game!

I wonder if gog will get a similar update; I wonder if I even need the update as the game seems to run fine on my computer. Sadly there will not be a wiz 9; the folks who made wiz 8 has aged out and no one seems capable of making a game like this. I think it has something to do with the attention to details or something. Oh well.

What is the actual effect of this update for Windows players?

Originally Posted by Kordanor
What is the actual effect of this update for Windows players?

Support for Windows 10 and overall better performance.

Ah, alright. Well then I guess it's basically just an update to compensate for the regular incompatibility problems of early 3D games.

Originally Posted by you
I wonder if gog will get a similar update (…)

This is also one of my concerns when I choose to get a game's GOG version instead of Steam: sometimes the updates takes ages to get to GOG, when (if) they do.

I just got it off Gog cuz it had it on its winter sale for $1.50 or somesuch. Even bought the previous two for the same forgetting I had them on steam.

HX can you combine the two threads?

I think we're going to continue seeing these kinds of patches as long as there's new OS's - which makes it good. I mean, this patch is no big deal as far as patches go but it keeps games like this running.

I've been thinking lately about how IBM managed to strong arm Micro Soft back in the day to make new versions of DOS backwards compatible starting with DOS 3.0. Its something the MAC didn't have to do. So lately, starting with XP, MS has been back to their planned obsolescent ways…

IIRC Wiz8 had a number of graphics drivers - Glide, D3D, OGL and maybe even software! As such, this only updates the 3DFX Glide version.

At the time, there may have been reasons for picking that version (sometimes stability due to only limited hardware to test against, and sometimes speed), but glide was often limited to 16bpp etc. As such, I'm not sure if it is really the best option these days, so an update to the 3rd-party glide->D3D convertor which wasn't in the original game… GOG guys probably aren't missing too much.

Excellent news - I did try to play once since OS X 10.11 but didn't look too much into the failure to launch!

Did you know the same man, Robert Sirotek, was responsible for Wizardry 8 and Jagged Alliance 2? And that neither game sold enough copies for him to continue in the industry? Here we are 15 years later, long after he sold off his rights, these games are still selling, and he had to go get another job.

Well, if he helped nordic games creating a new JA, that would be an insta-buy, even after the last failures.

Among the Best RPGs I ever played. Do you remember the first awesome 3DFX card the Diamond 3dfx Voodoo1? OMG! That was my first.

3Dfx and Glide was already dead in the water when Wizardry 8 finally came out in 2001 after many delays. You would have had to own a pretty ancient PC to still be on a 3Dfx card.
If you had a semi-ancient rig you might have had a nVidia Riva TNT/TNT2 or an ATI Rage but if you cared about graphics at all then you would have had one of the first GeForces (the GeForce 3 came out in 2001) or an early Radeon.

Wow haha really.. how nice… wiz8 is my favorite crawler … I was too young for 7 , but 8 was totally 90s

Originally Posted by Irien
At the time, there may have been reasons for picking that version (sometimes stability due to only limited hardware to test against, and sometimes speed), but glide was often limited to 16bpp etc. As such, I'm not sure if it is really the best option these days, so an update to the 3rd-party glide->D3D convertor which wasn't in the original game… GOG guys probably aren't missing too much.

Do note that glide wrappers in general don't have the 16bpp limit. You don't get the color banding that you did with real hardware.

nglide is free anyway, so if you wanted to update your GOG copy, it's not difficult. I don't think the nglide they use is customized.