Wizardry VII is still an incredible game
Finally got around to playing and finishing Wiz7. Played on Easy, with an automapper utility - imo required, since the in-game automap is cumbersome and the game would be unbearably tedious without one.
A remarkably vast game, and a remarkably well-designed one. It is ultimately a series of nested and interlocked McGuffin hunts across a dynamic world where, remarkably, there are NPCs and NPC factions that are hunting for (and taking, and often beating you to) those same McGuffins.
This sounds chaotic and annoying, but it’s remarkably well-designed overall such that you will eventually track down everything you need. I was very worried the open-world stuff would be obtuse, and for the vast majority of the game's runtime it isn't - only towards the very end does the natural exploration and open-world nonlinearity devolve into frankly obtuse MacGuffin hunting that presents you with the choice of either burning a lot of time just adventuregaming your way around until you stumble on the answer, or just checking the official cluebook (sold separately).
But I don’t want to undersell what a magnificent design feat this is - even with all this variability and dynamism, even though no two of your playthroughs will be the same, you will, eventually, figure out the things you need, and the game presents you with plenty of ways to get them. Short of discarding obviously-marked key items, you really cannot softlock yourself (and even if you do discard the wrong item, halfway across the world, the Locate Object spell can help you). Eventually, you can and will beat this game. It may take a lot of time and some patience, and a lot of saving/reloading, but you will.
This is an encounter-heavy game, but critically it doesn’t actually have random encounters - it has fixed, trigger-based encounters, so once you’ve finished clearing and mapping an area, you can more or less explore it freely without being constantly interrupted by encounters, and to me this is catnip. The game has a pretty smooth difficulty curve (on Easy anyway) too - I never had to grind to pass any difficulty gate, I just cleared every area I encountered.
The class system is meant to be abused - characters reset to level 1 when you change classes, but they keep all their old classes’ skills and abilities, so switching classes as soon as your leveling starts to slow down is highly recommended.
The chest trap disarm and lockpicking minigames are excellent, and maybe the best I've ever seen in any CRPG, even today.
I also think the magic system is the best I’ve ever seen in anything - it does the “schools of magic” concept better than anything I've ever encountered, and the way each school has a secondary mana pool split is genius, and explicitly pushes you to diversify and use different kinds of spells in combat regardless of how big your overall mana pool is.
A remarkable game, one of the best DOS games ever made, and unlike anything I’ve played.
(Skip Wizardry Gold and play Wiz7 in Dosbox Staging with MT32 music - works great)
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