Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant

[kmonster]

The graphics have aged quite well, some monster animations look still impressing today, they were among the best rpg graphics 1992. The sound is about about average for a 1992 rpg, I played with the sound turned off most of the time and didn't miss it.

You can choose from 11 races and 14 classes for creating your party of 6, I enjoyed many hours thinking about the most powerful party possible.
Sadly, you can only think about the best party with self-imposed handicap once you understand the meaning of class changing.
You can simply switch classes again and again until everyone has learned all spells and maxed all skills. It's unbalanced that a priest who switched to Valkyre after 10 levels will have the spell power of level 17 priest faster than he'd have reached priest level 11 without class switching.
But meditating about the right party is still the most fun part of the game for me.

Character creation is time-consuming, dull and boring.
You type your name, select race and gender, then the computer rolls one number, just a single number so you don't have to use your brain. This number usually isn't good enough to create the character you desire, but you can't reroll immediately. You first have to choose a profession you don't want and distribute bonus points for this character, select a portrait, distribute skill points and roll karma before you can finally delete him and try again.

Special about this game is that you have competition which is a mixed blessing. Discovering that the reason why your party was fighting and puzzling through the dungeon has already been taken by someone else (how could they get there and still leave the monsters and riddles untouched ?) isn't fun. If you're unlucky the game might become unfinishable, but on the other hand you can get all the maps even if you don't manage to solve all riddles.
There are no NPCs in the game who can join your party on the other hand.

There are several fractions in the game and they have NPCs you can talk to and hundreds of standard monsters (who look just like the NPCs) who attack you. NPCs and their mirror images don't care for each other, so you can befriend the gorn king and still get attacked by gorns in a random encounter even right in front of his throne for example. The game doesn't care about realism when throwing random encounters at you.

The story isn't great either, the ending doesn't make sense and is very disappointing, not only because it's an introduction to a future sequel.

Most quests consist of getting told a phrase you have to retype letter by letter at another location. Sometimes the text is auto scrolling fast and you don't always get a second chance to read it.

Sadly only a few of the puzzles are fun, too many test your patience more than your cleverness or don't make sense. An example: Throw a ball to hit a target. Success depends on luck, if you miss you have go through the whole dungeon to get it back and repeat until you succeed.

Wizardry 7 isn't difficult.
You only have to be aware that it's not fair and balanced like most other role playing games. It requires luck manipulation by save/reload. Treasure chests will explode and cripple your party even if you handle them perfectly and the random number generator will send monster groups at you which are not survivable.
And use different save games. It's possible that you get attacked each time you reload a save which can ruin it or that important items (like the journey map kit) get stolen and destroyed without feedback so you will have saved without realizing.

Success of almost everything in combat (spellcasting , kirijutsu, weapon special abilities, ...) depends on the combatants' levels compared to each other, so if you level up enough you won't have any difficulties.
In the second half of the game my characters just had to bash everything and were rarely injured, tactical skill is not necessary, only patience and the ability to press the reload button.

Wizardry 7 is not a particularly large game, only about half to two thirds the size of "Clouds of Xeen" which was published the same year.
But completing Wizardry 7 will take three times as long since the game playing time is artificially protracted.

Equipping the party is very time consuming, each time you enter a shop in New City you first have to read several pages of description until the shopkeeper (who looks exactly like a hundreds of monsters you kill during the game) moves in front of you.
You can't buy several items of the same kind so if you want to buy a sling for everyone you have to enter and endure this 6 times in a row. There are many locations with descriptions which should be shown only once.

The battles are slow, most of the time you just try to give the standard commands as fast as possible to get it over, but they set pitfalls to make you misclick. If you wear a shield you get the block command, but instead of adding it to the back the other commands are moved to other locations for example.
With a wrong click you can throw away your weapon forever, because of a bug my fairy even threw one of the best weapons in the game which isn't even throwable and cursed.

Hit point and mana regeneration is extremely slow, only sufficient for very low levels. Later in the game regenerating the mana used for one single spell can require resting 35 times 8 hours game time or 35 minutes real time just waiting and doing nothing. Unless you are extremely lucky you'll get interrupted which will cost even more real time. Even walking across to the whole world to visit a mana regenerating well is faster although travelling could have been handled better.

Some skills seem to be made to waste as much time with stupid work as possible.
Getting able to swim long distances properly requires hours of stupid repetitive "swim a square - regenerate stamina - swim a square - ...".
The mind control skill is also an example, you can't just get it by meditating, you have to mediatate and hope for the random number generator and repeat until everyone succeeds, by doing "click meditate - step back - step forward - click meditate" for hours you'll get this skill up.
You can do even more time consuming repetitive work to get up your firearms skill, spend days doing stupid work to get powerful.

The automap is horrible, instead of a short key you have to click on use item, click on the character, scroll past the equipped equipment and click at journey map kit.
But in order to use the journey map kit you first have to find it, it's hidden at the end of an optional area you have no reason to enter, so you might never get it unless you're spoiled.
In order to use it effectively you first have to spend skill points from many level ups and it can get stolen and destroyed if you're unlucky.
It's also buggy and confusing, especially in wilderness areas it's often unclear if a square is undiscovered or the map ends, whether a square is shown or not may depend on from which direction you entered it.

The inventory is too small for the many quest items you'll find, you never know if you can drop them safely or need them later. A separate inventory for quest items or the automatic removal when no longer needed would help enormously to reduce inventory shuffling.

Unusual for a turn based rpg is that you can't just see your characters' exact condition and how exactly spells affected them before deciding what to do next round, you have to cope with less information.

The same applies to the manual, the class specific maximum number of attacks per round and many racial resistance bonuses and penalties aren't mentioned, Players wouldn't feel that bad about taking seemingly useless humans if they knew about the "lifeforce" bonus for example.
The spell levels were in the Wizardry 6 manual, why were they omitted in the Wizardry 7 manual ?

I gained the impression that the developers didn't care about the quality of the time spent with the game, only about giving a good first impression and keeping the player occupied as long as possible.


Conclusion:
Little content artificially lengthened with dull work and lots of waiting.

2/5 points

[galraen]

Whilst there are things in kmonster's review, I don't disagree with his overall evaluation in this day and age. Even back when I bought the game the disappointed me, and I loved Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge on the Amiga. W7 is basically using the same engine as W7, and what was acceptable a few years earlier, wasn't when CODS came out. It was an early entrant in the disappointing sequel stakes. I'd have given it a bit higher rating back then, but now, when measured in retrospect, 2/5 is very fair.

[kmonster]

It's not mainly "what was acceptable a few years earlier, wasn't when CODS came out", in my opinion Wizardry 6 was still a good game at the time Wizardry 7 was released.
The reason why I consider Wizardry 7 in spite of the better graphics inferior to Wizardry 6 are deliberate design change decisions made by the developers.

They decided to lengthen the game playing time with working and waiting.
Grinding skills were added for wasting time with stupid and repetitive work, resting takes about 10 times as much real time than in W6 which you can spend staring at the screen doing nothing.
They also decided to change the riddle design, where W6 riddles mostly required logical thinking, W7 riddles required trial and error, work or clairvoyance to stretch the game playing time even more.
Great for marketing the game as "big" and "challenging", but a fraud on the players expecting real content.