The Inside Scoop on Gaming

IMPORTANT: This review assumes you are familiar with the terms and concepts introduced at http://www.rpg.net, such as "RPG" and "Point-Whoring". Also, my ratings are highly objective, because (as history reveals) I will probably spend 500 pages telling you why they make sense. I only include them because it's fun.

Wizards & Warriors falls into probably the worst category of bad CRPGs.

Not the ones that are so abysmal on every level that you have to wonder why they were ever made (those have a "Sweet Jesus! Were they even thinking when they made this?" factor you can laugh at). No, the worst are the ones that show real promise, but have just enough frustrations to outweigh the good things. You end up feeling cheated and tortured. And since this is a computer game, the old "Well, this rule sucks, so we'll just change it" isn't an option.

But first: oh, the power of nostalgia.

Many of us remember those early days of computer role-playing.

You know, that glorious time before character-driven plots were exactly a happening thing, and games like the SSI D&D "gold box" titles, the Wizardry series, and the early Ultima and Might & Magic games ruled the earth. The overwhelming emphasis was on hacking and looting, mazes were everywhere, and the stories varied from "Kill foozle. Get amulet. Man, if this were any more complex, it’d be a fortune cookie" to "Read paragraph 213... oh, so that's where I can finally get the magic (insert something here) to beat whoever’s ass is threatening the world, which must be why I'm in here killing all this shit".

Wizards & Warriors was purposely created as a return to this style of gaming, and it doesn't waste a moment getting into the nostalgia trip. Its setting - the Gael Serran - is the same pseudo-D&D fantasy realm we've seen in approximately eight million other CRPGs. Some Dark Pharaoh guy is about to awaken and - oh, you already guessed that part. Yeah, looks like he's gonna do a bunch of evil stuff, and only the legendary Mavin Sword can - yeah, you guessed that, too. So, it's up to your band of intrepid (but personality-less) chosen ones to probe every maze, loot every treasure, and hack and slash their way up to demi-godhood before remembering "Oh, wait... the Mavin Sword! Did we ever find out anything about that?". Everything is buried in more cliches than Ed Greenwood, Robert Jordan, and the Imagine guys together could shake a dead horse at.

Hell, even gameplay cliches are observed in loving mass. Wizards & Warriors blends the vast 3D world and endless subquests of a Might & Magic game with the impressive character management of the later Wizardry efforts, and while that might not count as "cliched", every lapse of realism you've seen in those or any other "old school" CRPG is present and accounted for in Wizards & Warriors.

I'm not kidding. Towns in the Gael Serran have maybe eight buildings, and there's always some quest you have to do before you can reach the next town (which, of course, will have even stronger monsters around it). Shops are open 24/7, and since the towns are still pictures (not 3D locations), the fricking sun is shining 24/7, too, even if it's so dark outside the town you can't see yourself pee. Six people can travel on one horse. You can swim in full armor - even if you only have one character with the relevant skill - and you can even fight perfectly damn well while you're at it, even if your foes are these nippy little underwater piranhas and all your weapons are blunt.

Quest NPCs rarely bother to avoid metagame references ("Thank you for killing the evil bandit Mon Whatsisass! I am proud to award you 200 experience points!"), which begs the question of how they can just award points like that, and why they don't go ahead and raise you to 500th level, since you are the ones saving their world. And that brings us to the granddaddy of all CRPG cliches - yes, the scary, powerful, evil overlord is about to take over the world, so of course they send your impoverished party of level 1 nobodies to stop him. It's like starting Lord of the Rings with Gandalf telling Frodo to take his hobbit friends and shove the One Ring up Sauron's ass while the rest of the Fellowship (and everyone else who vaguely smacks of power) sits around and has a smoke.

In theory, it’s all great. It's a scientific fact that computer games don't need an ounce of originality or realism to succeed - sure, those can make great games into unforgettable ones, but they won't make a bad game good. It's the actual gameplay that games have to score on, and Wizards & Warrior's whole "Wizardry meets Might & Magic" approach sounds like a winning combination.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work. Wizards & Warriors shows traces of the addictive, power-gaming fun we saw in the Wizardry and Might & Magic series, but almost every high point it has is marred by some frustrating, laughable, or just plain bad element.

We'll start with the little things.

Like the visuals.

Wizards & Warriors spent four years in development and, unfortunately, it shows. There's an occasional cool environment or spell visual, but beyond that, the graphics look pretty dated, especially for such a recent release. It's actually duller than Might & Magic VII, which came out years ago and was itself short of an eye-feast. The Gael Serran's wilderness zones are particularly bothersome - some of the shrubbery is two-dimensional, and even though the game tries to hide it by rotating the image away, you can see the "flat" side if you walk fast enough. The trees themselves are 3D objects, but only the first layer of them - beyond that, and it's usually an impassible wall painted to look like trees.

Not convincing.

Normally, this wouldn't trouble me. I used Fudge for years off that bland, no-frills download before I broke down and bought the hardcopy. I bought Immortal: the Invisible War and was perplexed someone could spend so much effort on artwork (color plates! Models! More color plates! Where the hell did the money for this come from?) and so little on intelligibility. I played through most of the Wizardry games, even though the first five were so graphics minimal they were almost text-based. I still think Wizard's Crown and Eternal Dagger were nifty, even if it is hard to feel menaced by 36 points of Serious Bleeding when your guys are stick figures who are maybe five pixels high. In fact - the ultimate proof of my non-superficiality - it didn't even instantly bother me that every fricking dungeon, town, and NPC in the world of Daggerfall looked exactly the same.

So why does Wizards & Warriors' dated look disturb me?

One minor, niggling little detail.

Load times.

Oh, yes, load times. Even though my computer was well above the minimum requirements, Wizards & Warriors regularly took minutes to load the outdoor maps, which it needs... oh, every time you leave a town or dungeon. Or load a game you saved outside of one.

In other words, all the time.

And if even a couple minutes doesn't sound like much, then you have obviously never stared blankly at one spot before. No, really. Go try it. I'll come back when you're bored out of your fricking mind and start wishing for total global apocalypse or some other welcome distraction. It's a good thing the instruction manual was detailed - it gave me something to memorize while I was waiting (man, some of those special traits look sweet). I also finally finished Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light while I was at it, something that (looking back now) I enjoyed much more than the game itself.

It would be one thing if the graphics were mind-blowing. Or if there were lots of special effects or complex objects out in the wilderness. You know, a reason why the load times would be so bloody long. It might be forgivable if I could feel like I'm getting what I pay for (figuratively speaking). But to see such pedestrian graphics after the load times just adds insult to injury, especially when Might & Magic VII loaded in seconds.

That's not the best part, though. When you load a map, the very best part is how there's a bug that crashes the game roughly one in three or four times. And yes, it does this after it's already spent 5 minutes loading the map. Unbelievable.

Then there's the matter of Gareth the elder.

You know, it's important that the NPC who sets up a game's main quest not come off as a complete dork. But no. When you first start, ol' Gareth the town elder comes up to explain the situation, and it's a riot.. Pot isn't supposed to exist in CRPG land, but this guy is ready for his mystical journey to the Quasi-Plane of Weedy Smoke. You can tell he wants to seem mysterious and wise, but the way he moves and talks is so silly I actually hurt my eyes from rolling them so much, especially after he started talking about these prophetic dreams he just had. Come fucking on! Does every dream in a CRPG have to be an omen?

Almost every gamer I've ever played D&D with would have laughed this guy off... or given him beer money. And I would have, too, if what he said didn't match the description on the game's box. You know it's going to be a bad day when you have to use out-of-game knowledge just to make the Big Obvious Plot Hook work.

After that, things get a little better. Gareth only appears once (after which he gets helpfully assassinated), and I've already admitted you can read things to kill the load times. And the music is pretty good. Your party can have up to six characters (hey! Just like a classic Wizardry or Might & Magic game!), and they've got enough stats, skills, and resistances to make any fan of those series feel at home. Your characters can only start as one of four basic classes (and I am so going to bitch slap you if you can't guess what they are), but they can change to cooler (and more bonus-laden) classes once they do the right promotion quest. Guilds and shops are everywhere (in fact, they're about the only buildings towns have), and doing stuff for them gets you the privilege of buying cooler skills (mmmm... doublestrike) and equipment (mmmm... plate mail 1). It won't be long before you're buried in quests to kill just about everyone's archenemies or find their lost quest items.

And, just because it’s trying, the game even gives you a few options you don’t normally see. There's a really cool way of handling hit points - on the surface, it looks like the game is just rolling a die and adding them each level, but what it's really doing is adding the die and rerolling your entire total (giving you just 1 HP over your old total if it doesn't manage to get higher). The neat thing about this is that it means you won't have to live with crappy hit point rolls. Anyway, you can also set the difficulty level of the monsters, and whether you want your area-attack spells to exclude yourself. You can even set the frequency of encounters, in case you want to do much more or less ass-kicking than usual. Lastly, you can also reset the adventure, starting over while keeping your experience and items.

And it works. For a while. Like I said, Wizards & Warriors has traces of that addictive power-gaming magic, and I still always want to get to the next level, quest, or nifty magic weapon. But again, the creators make a misstep for every thing they get right. The entire game shows a startling lack of attention to detail.

For example, you can save your game anywhere outside, but you can only load in town. Why? (Get used to that word. You'll be repeating it as you go through this game.) And when you're in town, you have to scroll the landscape by clicking these arrow buttons on the side - you can't just push your left/right arrow keys or scroll the mouse over. Why? There's also little sense of continuity - early on, for example, you can deliver a magic elixir to save the toad village six times if you want (once for each character). Again, why? Was it too hard to program the quest NPCs to remember that your characters are all one team, not random individuals who always just happen to walk into the guild at once? Or, for that matter, to remember that something has already fricking happened?

Speaking of that, the NPCs are pretty bad. They actually mimic the game itself - many of them could have been interesting, but their implementation usually cuts that right off. The emissary of the aforementioned toad village is a perfect example. Once you see him, he basically strides up and - before you even say or do anything - declares you the friend and savior of the toad people. Say what? I'm in the middle of some goddamn wilderness, I haven't even opened my mouth, and all of a sudden I'm the chosen one? Actually, why am I surprised? This is more or less exactly what Gareth pulls on you at the beginning of the game.

God, it would have sucked for these people if my party turned out to be evil bastards.

Anyway, the toad friend thing makes even less sense later, when you get to the toad village and learn the humans have been pushing them around. This whole segment of the game could have been a decent play on racial tensions (something rarely seen in CRPGs beyond "[Insert Orc-Substitute Race Here]? Hah! No match for my Vorpal Blade of Point-Whoring!"), but instead it's just goofy. Another early NPC - a woman who tends a windmill - is even better. She keeps a giant spider in the windmill's unsealed, open basement. You can walk two steps from the windmill's entrance and look right down on it. Actually, maybe she's brighter than I think - she might know that spiders can't climb walls any better than anything else in this game.

Naturally, the NPCs display no awareness of what happens around them. That's just as well, since monsters never attack them (except, of course, when the script needs them to), but they sure as hell don't see when you're being attacked, either. The first non-town NPC I ever saw - a cloaked snake-person with a stereotypical suspicious snake voice ("Nooo... what I want with Gareth isss none of your consssern... ") - walked up when I was fighting my increasingly-mangled ass off against a horde of wolf-rat things and got offended when I didn't answer his trivial questions within a few seconds. Gee, pardon me. Apparently, the programmers forgot that it's also the orgasm of bad manners to distract someone who's having a life-and-death struggle. It would have been much cooler if the friendlier NPCs would try to save your ass instead of blithely going "Howdy, neighbor! How're you doing?" (pause) "Ooooh! Too bad about your viscera there!" (pause) "Can you take this rat pie to... "

I guess there's an upside, though. Sometimes, the bad NPCs will drone on and on about their evil plans without noticing that you're preparing all your defensive spells. Oh, yeah, and once you get past Gareth, you'll find that most of the characters aren't voice acted by would-be stoners. Most of them are well done, actually.

Then there's the structure of this game.

As we all know, few CRPGs are complete without hours upon hours of wandering around aimlessly in some wilderness, especially wildernesses where some thoughtful person has left lots of treasure chests (booby-trapped, of course) just laying around. The first time you go outside in Wizards & Warriors, its world looks pretty open and unrestricted, much like Might & Magic VII. You know, the kind where you can go anywhere or do anything.

Deceptive.

Of course, the world of Might & Magic VII was clearly laid out, with functional, useful roads running between realms. Finding dungeons and other quest objectives was simple and (unless you were on that map with all the fucking titans and dragons) fun.

By comparison, the countryside of Wizards & Warriors gradually devolves into a maze (remember, everything after the first tree is a painted wall), albeit one with cute wooden signs. On top of that, there's always some quest or arbitrary obstacle in the way before you can reach the next town. It's impossible to believe the towns in the Gael Serran enjoy any kind of interaction or civilization. Even the first two are divided by a huge flooded cave you have to swim through (and which some oracles happen to be in).

Hell, who am I kidding? If you can swim in full plate armor while slaying piranhas with your two-handed sword, you could probably swim while driving a wagon or leading a caravan. Geez.

Anyway, finding quest objectives in Wizards & Warriors is more troublesome than it needs to be. Okay, sure, I can already hear some of you saying "Well, Jason, god forbid they should take the exploration element out of it!" and while you may have a point, CRPG exploration is only fun when it’s... well, fun.

And again, we have the "this was fun at first, but now it’s really wearing on me" theme. At first, I was eager to see what the Gael Serran had to offer. Hours later, I was reading the strategy guide (which I overwhelmingly recommend if you insist on playing this game) and learning that I missed more than a couple things - or that my quests required me to go to places that were hours deeper into the game. Like many of its ancient predecessors, Wizards & Warriors isn't a game for players who don't want to scour every square inch of territory, pay obsessive attention, and still go "Huh?" on a regular basis. Of course, it's not like Might & Magic VII didn't tuck a few of its quest objectives in distant or tricky places, but at least that game's structure was good enough for me to believe I would find them eventually.

Okay, so you're wandering around outside, looting all those treasure chests (seriously, who the hell leaves those things out there? Are there really people who wake up one morning and think "Wow! That's what I should do! I'll leave my loot out in this chest out in the forest for some moron adventurer to find!"), getting lost, and either wondering where the hell something is or flipping through the strategy guide and thinking "Oh, god! That's not even on this fricking map!"

Eventually, you’re going to get to a dungeon.

I’m not sure what to tell you here.

On the one hand, the dungeons are more structured and the automap for them is better, so you won’t get lost or miss things as easily. And (of course) there’s much better shit to loot than outside. Best of all, the load times are faster. Woo hoo!

On the other hand, they’re dark. Really frigging dark. I mean "depressive wannabe goths covered in soot playing Kult at midnight while being devoured by formless spawn" dark. "Man, I have to go but I can’t see my zipper" dark.

And this is with the gamma cranked up.

Having a torch, infravision, or the torchlight spell (if that’s the name of it. I’m not sure because I stopped using it upon discovering that it sucks) helps marginally. As in "Oh, so that’s where the hallway started". Later, you can get lanterns or the better illuminate spell, which will finally give you some extent of the visibility you take for granted in other CRPG dungeon-crawlers. In other words, you’ll still have to check every corner, just in case there’s some nifty thing on the floor you didn’t see when you were, oh, ten feet away. Compare this to the vividly-lit, vaguely 3D-accelerated dungeons in (once again) Might & Magic VII, and you can see my disappointment.

Nor do the dungeons in Wizards & Warriors bow any more to realism than anything else. You'll encounter hundreds of random, non-quest-related monsters while you're looting everything in sight. Where do they come from? What were they doing before I kicked their asses? I never see these bastards outside the dungeon, so what are they eating? There aren't any answers here, any more than there were in Wizardry or Might & Magic. Or basic D&D, for that matter. One highlight for me was unlocking the sealed Warrior's Ordeal chamber... and finding a group of randomly-generated bandits hanging out inside.

Even though I had the only item that can open it.

Even though there was menacing ordeal-fire shooting from half the floor.

Of course, the realism complaint is hardly valid - seriously, given the games Wizards & Warriors models itself after, it wouldn't have felt right if believability intruded too often. I guess it just gets to be a bit much after a while.

From here, there's really only one thing left to cover. In fact, some of you may wonder why I waited until now to mention it, seeing as how it's a crucial element of this and virtually every other CRPG.

Yes, combat. Volumes and volumes of it. A living hell of it. "Woo hoo! My third character's Kill Counter is up to four digits!"

But first, I have a confession to make. You know all those things I just got done bitching about? The load times, bugs, graphics, cliches, illogical design, dumb NPCs, annoying quests, lack of realism, and everything else? They weren't really enough to keep me from enjoying Wizards & Warriors, at least a little. Yeah, I was often as annoyed (or mockingly amused) as hell, but I was trying hard to make this thing work. I mean, the game is the brainchild of one D.W. Bradley, who (despite bearing a vague but most curious resemblance to Synnibarr creator Raven c.s. McCracken) created the last three Wizardry games, and when you've got that kind of legacy behind something, you provide the benefit of the doubt, dammit!

The combat system, though, is what sunk it for me. It's readily the strangest and frustrating-est element of Wizards & Warriors. Even if everything else in the game was flawless, the combat might still have been enough to doom it to the impermanent hell of the Recycle Bin.

So what's it like, anyway? Well, imagine what combat in Might & Magic VII would have been... if the programmers had been drunk, forgotten what "turn-based" actually means, or something equally catastrophic.

It's very difficult to tell what they were shooting for here. Even after playing this game for 15 hours, I can't be sure. It seems like they wanted to make Might & Magic-ish combat and give it the "active time battle" features you see in many console RPGs, but this is only speculation - at no point is it apparent they had any idea what kind of combat they really wanted to make.

First off, there's no switch between real-time and "turn-based". Well, there is, but all it does is make the fighting all real-time, all the time, instead of the drunken mess it usually is. There's also a "Game Speed" switch on options, but this has absolutely no discernable effect. Presumably, turn-based begins when something makes an attack and you're holding still, but it's impossible to be sure. Monsters can only attack on certain intervals, for example, but they can move at will (if you move, of course, Time Starts Passing Again and the monsters renew their attacks). This makes ranged attacks - like, oh, most spells - largely useless, except against things that are right in front of you (and have thus stopped moving). You can hold your breath underwater forever - as long as you're in combat - but fires, poison clouds, and other "constant damage" attacks will viciously damage you every half-second or so, even if you're not doing anything to Make Time Pass. Of course, many players will panic when these happen, run like loons, and just allow more constant damage attacks.

In the beginning - where the monsters are weak and (once you get the hang of things) not a challenge under any circumstances - the drawbacks of this system are not overwhelming. Later on, when you're up against creatures that come in hordes or shoot fire clouds out their asses, it becomes unbearable.

Compare this to Bradley's own Wizardry VII, where constant damage was only counted once per turn and if you were half dead before you could move the mouse to cast the purify air spell, it was because the monsters were impressively powerful, not because the programmers forgot what kind of game they were making. Or to Fallout or the last three Might & Magic games, where reinforcements actually required time to reach you, instead of being able to free-move their way up your ass even while you were on the options screen.

The fact that the programmers of Wizards & Warriors even wanted any real-time crap at all is the most confounding thing. Did I miss some kind of revolution here? Was there someone who actually had a problem with the wealth of strategy and options Fallout and many earlier turn-based games provided? Since he was making a throwback game to an earlier era, Bradley shouldn't have followed the "half real-time" crowd, and since he did, he should have at least looked at the Final Fantasy games, Planescape: Torment, and other examples of where it's been done right. Oh, well. There's probably a reason why I've played through the Fallout games eight million times (and counting), where most recent CRPGs (like this one) are having a field day if I can be bothered to finish them once.

End Game

Wizards & Warriors isn't an absolute failure, but once we're into "normal" failure, the issue is academic, isn't it? I really wanted to like this game, and perhaps I even did for a while, but in the end, its downright suckish combat and very problematic world were just too much for me. Some of you might be able to get past these things and enjoy the game anyway (a few gamers have), but I won't gamble on that. After how addicted I was to Wizardry VI and VII, it's hard for me to imagine D.W. Bradley dropping the ball like this, and in the interests of mercy, I must question how much involvement he really had with this game, or whether some sneaky parent company managed to mangle it after he turned it in. In any case, I am rather sad now.

Anyway, for a very similar game with more guaranteed enjoyment, I would recommend the last game of the Might & Magic series (which, of course, is Might & Magic VII. I refuse to admit that Might & Magic VIII ever existed). Yes, I know that it's just Might & Magic VI with new clothes on, has various bugs of its own, is just as ridiculous a kill-fest as any other CRPG, and may lack some of the neater character classes of Wizards & Warriors. But it works.

Or just wait for Wizardry VIII. That is, if it doesn't end up sucking like the latest installments of all the ancient CRPG series have (let's see... Might & Magic VIII sucked, Ultima IX really sucked, if time travelers were to release Baldur's Gate X or Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption 4: Yet Another Goddamn Subtitle tomorrow, those would probably suck... huh. Is that all we have left?).