Grimoire Forever

Actually, Wiz 8 is very popular here and Grimoire has many similarities with it. However, I'd say it was actually closer to Wiz 7!!

I almost brought the big hammer over the Wiz8 comment, but I didn't want to derail the thread.

Sorry it wasn't intended to be an insult for anyone or anything.
Actually Wiz8 is the best of, but a bit boring compared to other story driven crpgs.

No harm done. Even as a certified Wiz8 fanboi, I would agree that the game doesn't have the best story. That said, as an "old skool" RPG, the story is really only a prop to support the character development and strategic combat--it's not really supposed to be epic fiction.

I didn't like Wiz8. I thought the story was weak and uninspired and the world itself lacked any personality. Technically it was flawed in the nature of the combat encounters and it was a game killer for me.

I would say Corwin is correct in suggesting that Grimoire is a lot like Wiz7 except with a better interface, story, gameplay mechanics and look'n'feel.

Note that the screenshots from the old DOS version which apparently started circulating lately don't resemble the current game much at all. Corwin and others who participated in the last beta test could tell you this.

Expect to be organizing a new beta test to run at least two months, this time with a game that is absolutely complete for all purposes except in the tweaking of the combats and challenge level.

Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:

I didn't like Wiz8. I thought the story was weak and uninspired and the world itself lacked any personality. Technically it was flawed in the nature of the combat encounters and it was a game killer for me.

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Would you share what combat encounter flaws you're referring to? Not looking for a fight, just curious.

Perhaps he played it with out the wizfast patch, in which case I can understand the comment; walk 3 steps have a half hour battle, walk 3 more steps, rinse and repeat, especially on a certain road!!

To me, there were too many random fights, but I liked the Tree Village *very* much !

Corwin said:

Perhaps he played it with out the wizfast patch, in which case I can understand the comment; walk 3 steps have a half hour battle, walk 3 more steps, rinse and repeat, especially on a certain road!!

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I didn't get the patch and tried to play it for several days as it came out of the box.

The number of encounters and frequency was absurd. The length of these combats as opposed to time spent enjoying the atmosphere and exploring was equally absurd.

This is the kind of thing that the designers are supposed to pick up on as part of the beta testing. I had an informant monitoring the beta test for me inside of Sir-Tech and he told me it was run about as well as everything else there. It was half-ass and Sir-Tech staff was only responding to showstoppers, critical crashes and game-blocking flaws. They ignored everything else, claiming the need to "get it out." This is why the game failed at the retail level, most people would play for an hour and realize the entire game was like this. It was a problem in Crusaders but nothing compared to W8.

I've experienced this all the time over the past two decades working in the IT industry. It's amateur hour for business applications and many of the "senior managers" you will find on a lot of a software projects don't even understand the development cycle. Nobody ever told them how you actually do it and they just assumed because they were still getting hired, it must be okay to not know anything about it other than understanding it topically, with words. Nowadays a lot of "managers" will even skip testing altogether or else they'll just lump it in with UAT and call it a test cycle.

The team that worked on W7 was a lot more stable and understood proper testing better. W8 was just actors. If this was not the case, then the team of W8 would have gone out and gotten much better jobs in the IT industry than they did. Many of them work for peanuts now as gophers at obscure game companies. I probably spent more on lunch and gasoline last week than these guys make in a month. It's because the W8 staff were not really seasoned technical, just kind of going through the motions.

I don't get the need to put down other people (and most of the leads have gone on to much bigger projects...Linda Currie, Brenda Braithwaite, Charles Miles, Derek Beland...) but leaving that aside, the failure at retail is more likely to be because of the limited distribution and outdated technical features. I suspect the first-person-blob-with-legs style was out of favour with public at large, as well.

I find the fights excessive myself but it was critically acclaimed and enjoys considerable favour among our readers, so it did something right.

I almost joined the Wiz8 cult myself, but everytime I was about to take that swig of Koolaid it seemed the only copies I could find were horrendously overpriced. I'll look again right now, curious...

Good luck Cleve, I hope you like find your game-making zen or something

Glass houses, Cleve, glass houses.

But anyway, I'll agree that playing the game without Wizfast would get pretty ponderous and that issue should have gotten caught and corrected during development.

As Dhruin pointed out, shipping in the shadow of BG2 made the classic first person party arrangement a liability to the masses. Combine that with dated graphics and horrible distribution, and you've got a tough sell. And yet, somehow it sold reasonably well and gained all sorts of critical acclaim. It's almost as if that group of rubes managed to do a pretty good job.

Interesting enough, Grimoire will face the same set of liabilities when it ships. As a "defender of the flame" for the past couple years, I hope Grimoire achieves even half the success of Wiz8.

Agree with Cleve about Wizardry8. Bold statement from a game developer. Telling others how to do it. But that makes me like you more. Too many people say how you should do it but never manage to show how it should be done. And also, it doesn't means that every one has to agree with you. You will just show people your version of a good game, and that gives merits to your criticism of other games.

Credit to you for that.

And regarding Wizardary 8. I tried to play this game. I tried to love it cause it was old school. However, the scaled enemy was killing me, the walking roots, plants and other creature evry few meters with the same tactics to beat them used. It made me lose interest.

However, that Wizfastpatch sounds interesting, perhaps it will salvage that sorry game for me? But i would have been satisified if the enemy didn't scale with you...

The games Wizardry 1-8 are about battle. There are among the best turn based combat games I have played, ever. Only the Jagged Alliance series (from Sirtech, too!) comes close.

The Wizardry games can be described with one sentence:

Built are party with the right stats that fits together to survive the combat.

If you keep this in mind you can play in Iron Man Mode without much trouble.
The Arnika road is a bit hard in the beginning, every other location in the game is fine balanced.
My first party was an old party that was exported from Wiz 6 and Wiz 7 into Wiz 8 and it was very satisfying to play through the triology after all these years and the game recognizes veteran parties with special dialog options.

Cleveland Mark Blakemore said:

W8 was just actors. If this was not the case, then the team of W8 would have gone out and gotten much better jobs in the IT industry than they did. Many of them work for peanuts now as gophers at obscure game companies. I probably spent more on lunch and gasoline last week than these guys make in a month. It's because the W8 staff were not really seasoned technical, just kind of going through the motions.

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Less of the egotistical denigrating claptrap like the above (glass houses indeed), and more actually releasing the game you've been promising us for what seems like an age.

Wizardry 6 was the best in the series for me. I disliked how W7 had a time element to it.

HiddenX said:

The games Wizardry 1-8 are about battle. There are among the best turn based combat games I have played, ever. Only the Jagged Alliance series (from Sirtech, too!) comes close.

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While I loved the JA games and was entertained by Wiz7, the Wiz8 demo was a proper warning to not buy the game. I played it twice because I knew of so many folks who enjoyed the game, but playing the demo twice didn't help at all.
I agree with those who say that combat was a major turnoff - for me at least, it was. Also I want my games to work right out of the box. If I must patch a game to be able to enjoy it at all - I guess it's an unofficial patch at that? - , chances are that I won't like it.

I'm just glad Cleve is still working on it. Although the 2 months beta testing was a bit of a disappointment to read. Since it was supposed to be released on Christmas and now it sounds like it will, at the very least, be another 2 months. It does look like a fun game but please release it soon.

Wiz8 was a great game. I liked the characters, story and combat. Wizfast made it even better, but even without it, on my first go through, I liked it.

Why do we scream "Release the game" and then when the game is released scream "FIX THE BUGS".

Obivously the game isn't finished. If it was, i guess it would be released.

Since it is really impossible for me to know whether or not something I say is going to shock people (since I tell the truth all the time) at some point many years ago I just gave up trying to anticipate reactions.

I personally believe that games nowadays are crap. They're really, really lousy. Really bad. I don't want to be accused of putting out a bad game. I don't want to be accused of putting out a game with bugs (like W8) because I could not be bothered to beta test anymore and fix them. That's the only reaction I could get to the release of Grimoire that would move me much. Somebody saying this game is buggy and was never polished.

So better for me I put it on the shelf for a year if necessary rather than just say "Yeah, whatever, here play this" and throw it out there.

I'm just a guy in a garage. Every year, game companies with hundreds of employees and nigh unlimited funds do just that. Which proves that despite appearances - they suck.

I read a post a while back by some guy who said he stopped playing PC games for several years and went he came back, he found he had not really missed anything. He had played all the good games, they were in the past and had simply gotten more remote in time. The truth is that the FALLOUTs and the Wizardrys and the great RPGs that were supposed to be coming never materalized. What we got instead was a gazillion World War II FPS shooters and a bunch of other games that can barely hold my attention for ten minutes.

There have been exceptions, like BioShock and Half Life II. Otherwise the only decent games released since 1998 (ten years ago) have been largely indie productions.

I can't understand how these companies stay in business, but as long as I own majority stock I will never put out games like that. Grimoire is going to be my first release in a long time, one of many great RPGs to come afterwards and whether or not I make a lot of money on it is not that important to me. I just want it to be a good game, bug free and worth paying for. That game represents me out there permanently and as many of you have already gathered I regard myself as something of a wunderkind, so I will test for as long as I need to in order to be certain it's solid, stable and polished.