• Re: Wizardry: The Five Ordeals

    From Julian@j63840576@gmail.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg on Sat Oct 7 20:44:09 2023
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

    On Friday, August 25, 2023 at 4:14:53 PM UTC-5, RelMark wrote:
    Julian <j638...@gmail.com> wrote:

    This game is too hard. Between getting beheaded and having no way
    back to the surface when going down, my party is forever lost and I
    don't want to grind out a new one to rescue them. I'd like that sword
    of slicing, but I'm spending 1750 per adventure on resurrection
    because of Bushwhacker special instant kill attack. What convinces me
    I'm making the right decision to quit this game is the battle delay.
    All Wizardries before this pace through the battle with a timer, but
    W:tFO has you press a button to advance battle. It's tedious and it
    causes me to miss important information. You have to go down by
    entering a cave in. Then, while enemies are hitting you left and
    right, you have to cave in to third level where you can take a rope up
    to second level. To get to first level from second there is a hideous switch puzzle where there are three UNLABELED switches and a blotted message that's supposed to explain what to do. Jesus I just want to
    be able to experience a second level without certain death. There
    don't seem to be any walkthroughs available yet.
    If you run out of patience with the switches, you can find the correct sequence on the game's discussion board on Steam. I ended up looking
    it up myself after trying a number of times based on the in-game hint
    and getting nowhere. I don't think there's a complete walkthrough
    there, but there are solutions for many of the puzzles, and the guides section had floor maps for a number of the scenarios.

    There's also a keyboard shortcut that can help with the battles:
    Control+F1 will reset back to the title screen. The game auto-saves
    fairly often when walking around the dungeon but never during battle,
    so when your party ends up dead, level-drained, turned to stone, etc.,
    if you reset before the battle ends, you'll be back before the battle happened when you reload.

    RelMark
    You know I tried this and it did reset to the title, but my characters were still lost. I'm playing the Original Wizardry now, and was successful in recovering a party by shutting down the computer. That's what happens when you're surprised by 5 orcs and 5 kobolds against your second level PCs and you're distracted by the cleaning lady trying to start a conversation..
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  • From Julian@j63840576@gmail.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg on Mon Oct 9 20:56:29 2023
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

    On Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 10:44:10 PM UTC-5, Julian wrote:
    On Friday, August 25, 2023 at 4:14:53 PM UTC-5, RelMark wrote:
    Julian <j638...@gmail.com> wrote:

    This game is too hard. Between getting beheaded and having no way
    back to the surface when going down, my party is forever lost and I don't want to grind out a new one to rescue them. I'd like that sword
    of slicing, but I'm spending 1750 per adventure on resurrection
    because of Bushwhacker special instant kill attack. What convinces me I'm making the right decision to quit this game is the battle delay.
    All Wizardries before this pace through the battle with a timer, but W:tFO has you press a button to advance battle. It's tedious and it causes me to miss important information. You have to go down by
    entering a cave in. Then, while enemies are hitting you left and
    right, you have to cave in to third level where you can take a rope up to second level. To get to first level from second there is a hideous switch puzzle where there are three UNLABELED switches and a blotted message that's supposed to explain what to do. Jesus I just want to
    be able to experience a second level without certain death. There
    don't seem to be any walkthroughs available yet.
    If you run out of patience with the switches, you can find the correct sequence on the game's discussion board on Steam. I ended up looking
    it up myself after trying a number of times based on the in-game hint
    and getting nowhere. I don't think there's a complete walkthrough
    there, but there are solutions for many of the puzzles, and the guides section had floor maps for a number of the scenarios.

    There's also a keyboard shortcut that can help with the battles: Control+F1 will reset back to the title screen. The game auto-saves
    fairly often when walking around the dungeon but never during battle,
    so when your party ends up dead, level-drained, turned to stone, etc.,
    if you reset before the battle ends, you'll be back before the battle happened when you reload.

    RelMark
    You know I tried this and it did reset to the title, but my characters were still lost. I'm playing the Original Wizardry now, and was successful in recovering a party by shutting down the computer. That's what happens when you're surprised by 5 orcs and 5 kobolds against your second level PCs and you're distracted by the cleaning lady trying to start a conversation..
    Sorry you were right. They camped out in the dungeon. I expected them to be in the castle.
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  • From Julian@j63840576@gmail.com to comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg on Mon Nov 20 14:53:57 2023
    From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

    On Wednesday, August 23, 2023 at 8:52:16 AM UTC-5, Mike S. wrote:
    On Wed, 23 Aug 2023 07:45:10 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
    <spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

    Nonetheless, I think my main thesis remains apt: if it's Wizardry,
    it's hard (or it should be). It's the original 'git gud, scrub' game. >Creating a fun experience was always a secondary goal of the series. >Frustrating the player with repeated deaths was always the first. ;-)
    I don't know about this Wizardry but as far as the original Wizardries
    go, you do NOT have to make another party and send them in to save the
    first party. I don't remember what I did exactly as I have not played
    a Wizardry game in years but I think it was something like just
    rebooting the game if your party died or something like that and
    continuing from the castle from my last save.

    The only Wizardry that is difficult is the fourth one. The others are
    on par with Bard's Tale and Might and Magic.
    This works except it puts you somewhere random in the dungeon. It could be anywhere. What I've been doing is I have an Evil party and a Good party then when I need some kind of rescue mission I put together some combination of the two.
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