|
PurpleXVI posted:Now, truth be told I don't entirely know what the stats do. I mean, okay, some of it's obvious. Speed makes you act faster and be harder to hit, Strength makes you hit harder and able to carry more, Piety gives you more mana, etc. but the game also insists that, say, Intelligence "influences" lockpicking ability. However, at no point does it give a direct, listed percentage or skill point bonus indicated anywhere, so maybe it means that you learn the skills more quickly passively? Neither the manual or in-game tooltips deign to specify it in any detail. Probably there's a FAQ out there that has a very precise definition but I'm not a nerd who needs FAQs. I got curious and figured I'd go find some FAQ for juicy juicy numbers. I found some, but not nearly as many I expected. In particular, no one knows how controlling attributes work exactly. The basic idea is that if your controlling attribute is low then the associated skill goes up slower when killing crabs, but no exact details. They have reverse-engineered the combat formulas pretty well. Some tl;dr notes:
Most of the details are compiled in this horrifying crime against formatting, please don't read it.
|
#
¿
Jul 14, 2020 19:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:32 |
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:I get why all the corridors are twisty-turny(to prevent you aggroing too many enemies at once), but it makes the building layout feel really wonky. I wonder if a simpler solution wouldn't just have been more doors to section things off.  /  Well actually, games of a certain age do this for purely boring technical reasons. Absurd twisty-turny corridors break sightlines. In non-zoned games they let you load and unload areas, and in zoned games they just limit how much stuff the player can see at once from any given point which guarantees that the geometry you need to render and the textures you need to keep on the GPU are below whatever the limit is to keep the game running on your lowest spec machine. Plain doors can work for this purpose as well of course, but with free viewpoint the player can see both sides through an open door and that might not be OK. My personal favorite example is world of warcraft, where almost every city in game had these weird tiny entrances with S-bends or walls right in the middle of the thoroughfare to ensure players can never see both the inside of the city and the zones outside. Most of those weird entryways are still there, years after the technical limitations went away and they redesigned the entire game for flight. It's generally done more subtly now, but even a modern Uncharted game or the like will have disguised loading cutscenes where the game zooms in on the protagonist squeezing through a small crack in the mountain or something while the game loads and unloads things in the background.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2020 00:09
|
|
|
Arzaac posted:Hey so uh...is Wizardry good? They're good in that almost all of the wizardries are exemplars of their genre. They're less good in that their genre is janky 80s-style turn based hydra dungeon crawlers, which is probably not something you'll enjoy unless used to the conventions of those games. I think 8 is worth trying even today because its systems are interesting and it is less obtuse and evil than it's predecessors, but if you do then please remember that it is still an old-school dungeon crawler that will randomly kill your party when you make a bad roll. Save often, run away a lot and overuse any cheese you find. As for the others: - 1 is interesting in that it basically established computer roleplaying games as a genre, but it established its genre on the goddamn Apple 2 and odds are you don't want to play through a 4-color dungeon crawler from 1981 no matter how historically significant. - 2-3 are quick sequels that just provide more of the same. - 4 is famously one the of the meanest games of a mean genre. Try it only if you really want to repeatedly get kicked in the teeth by the kickstarter backers of 1987. - 5 provided the first engine update and is the last and most polished of the "classic" games. - 6 is the first "modern" wizardry, introducing many of the systems used until 8. It's ugly as sin and still one big linear dungeon crawl. - 7 is a stone cold classic with an entire open world full of big long dungeon crawls. It's obtuse, complex and brutal. The archives have LPs of 1, 4 & 6, and there's one of 7 in progress but currently on hiatus.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2020 04:04
|
|
|
Robert Woodhead -- one of the two people who made Wizardry 1 -- was, uh, apparently not well loved in the late 70s PLATO mainframe dungeon crawler community. Quoting Dirk Pellet, who worked on dungeon crawler dnd:quote:Sometime around 1977, Robert J. Woodhead (who was non-affectionately known on PLATO as "Balsabrain") through means unknown to the dnd authors, obtained a copy of the source code to the current version of dnd (probably 6.0 or 7.0). He "created" "his" own game from it, in a file called "sorcery." It had essentially all the same features of dnd except the messages, monsters, and magic items had different names and pictures (although identical functions). Apparently the illicit copy hadn't included the charset. The elven boots were socks, among other alterations. "Balsabrain" followed up on making Wizardry 1-4 by: - Making some of the first antivirus software for the Mac. - Starting one of the first anime translation companies, AnimEigo. - Moving to Japan for 6 years and marrying one of his translators. - Winning the 30 lb division of the Robot Fighting League with his kids. - Playing a ton of EVE, up to being a part of their weird player-council thing for years. I suspect he may be the biggest nerd alive.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2020 19:40
|
|
|
Combat XP is just divided between characters, so having RPCs along means you get 25% less XP. Quest XP is not, however, everyone gets full value no matter what the party size. Anyhow: do 3, grab Sparkles, delay doing Umpani stuff and go to Arnika. I'm all for cheating the RPC XP values to more freely switch between them, but bringing along that one character you're expected to bring along to most places is probably a good thing in an LP.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2020 19:35
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:I really wish there was a fan patch or mod of some sort to fix the atrocious draw distance, it always feels like the part of the game that has, technically, aged the worst, and it somewhat spoils the more open areas if you can get up anywhere a bit tall. You can, in fact, fix the view distance! Get the Cosmic Forge editor for modding the game files. Open the location editor in their wonderfully 2000s UI, pick a location and be greeted with this:  Go to "General Parameters" and change the view distance to whatever you'd like. Do this for every location in the game, because the value is individual to each of them. You can now see forever, or at least further than your dog in front of you. The caveat is that changing the view distance means you might see some seams in the world that you're not supposed to see, and that supposedly this can cause the game to load more stuff than it supports in some areas, causing crashes. I've never actually tried it. Googling found an overhaul mod which apparently includes some tested view distance increases, but it also has a bunch of grognard bullshit that you definitely don't want. Also recruit Vi, drop Saxx, suffer Sparkle forever.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2020 19:28
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:I remember from old experiences with the Cosmic Forge editor that editing areas/items you've already encountered would tend to lead to a hard crash. Is it the same for the view distance? I have no idea! Never tried it myself, I just remember I saw some screenshots from someone who was playing with triple draw distance or whatever (also the widescreen mod that messes up the UI) so I googled a bit to find out what they did. It's probably the map edit that's least likely to crash the game since it just changes a single pre-existing value and so might not cause explosive mismatches on load, but depending on how they implemented things that might still mean 100% likely to crash.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2020 20:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:32 |
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Ha ha, yeah, that's like eight enemies that are each ten levels above the party's. Oh and they've got a Gibbering Head for one type of caster backup and a... Nebdar? What's a N- Brenda Romero is about to make you her, uh, hound? [E:] Also appropriate that she killed Werdna first, since we didn't have a Yeldarb. Xerophyte fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Aug 28, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2020 19:50
|
|
