What was the actual purpose of combat design like this? Where no amount of player skill mattered because the game decided the enemy gets a free turn before yours and it's just a coin flip whether or not you get a total party wipe before you get to do anything. Was it just to make the game last longer and you wouldn't beat it too quickly? I'm all for hard but fair old games but there's no fairness in what's just Russian Roulette.
>>12807690Resource management and being cautious is a skill, he shouldn't have been on that area if he would get one shotted
>>12807690I mean yes some of it unironically is just "to make the playthrough last longer" but also killer GMs were just a thing back then, the idea of a GM who is dead-set on killing off the players isn't anywhere near as common as it used to be outside of tournaments were the purpose is to be the party that lasts the longest.
- don’t go to a dungeon floor unless you’re stronger than the enemies there- know what the enemies do so you can run or nuke them with aoe spells if necessary
>>12807779You're not wrong but at the same time how would you be able to know either of these points without encountering them and possibly getting a random party wipe first? Unless you unironically advocate reading a guide before playing.
Total party wipe nothing. Worst case scenario maybe, but losing 1-2 people in the first round then running is the most likely outcome. Ninjas can insta-kill people, but it's not 100% chance. Then you bail back to town and revive, and go grind on the higher levels until stronger. Greater Demons only show up on the final floor, which is a literal gauntlet of hard battles before the final boss battle, so if you aren't prepared before walking into the final floor, that's on you.Still find it wild people recommend the computer wireframe originals over the PS1 remasters. Those monster graphics alone are worth it. Quality spritework out of the end of the 2D era.
>>12807803You can beat Wizardry 1 in like an hour after you've mapped out the dungeon. Encountering these points and getting party wiped is just part of the experience. Plus, you can rescue your guys later, stage your big comeback. Of course it'd be better if you had ways to make more informed decisions on these matters but this is how the game is, it's old!
>>12807825It's not because it's old, it's because it's designed like a tabletop game rather than a videogame
Just cast KATINO
Wizardry was an unlicensed D&D clone.Higher level undead and demons had level drain which was permanent level loss, no saving throw from each hit. Wizardry is bullshit because early D&D was bullshit. The random encounter tables in some early D&D rulebooks were horrifying as well. D&D was inspired from "A Wizard of Earthsea" from the 1960s, a non-tolkien source where a lot of the spells and bullshit came from in early D&D, including the level drain mechanic. Ninja/Assassins had instant death strikes as well back then. It was a percentage based instant kill attack.Enemy winning initiative is always a reality in tabeltop gaming.tl;drThe large number of the enemies is indeed a problem here, but the core mechanics are period accurate for 80s D&D bullshit.
Decided to finally get around to playing through Wiz 4 arranged mode to see what is different besides getting 5 different individual monsters instead of 3 groups of 1-9 monsters. So far, there's some additional flavor text for every spell and monster, and when first getting major items like the Black Candle or Black Box, the game will have a unique graphic and text bit about it. Pic related is a crappy OCR google translate of what you see when you touch the Black Candle for the first time. Neat.
>>12807690First of all, no, this surprise attack will NOT instawipe your party in Wizardry. Far from it.Second of all, the only reason why RPG designers can get away with such garbage encounter design in the first place is because it's largely mitigated by simply running away. Like I said, you will not be wiped, but running away is the obviously correct option in this encounter. No shit.That sucks for many reasons, but one of them is that running away is just a flat diceroll with zero mechanical interactions. That's essentially what this whole encounter boils down to. Running away is such an unbelievably garbage mechanic considering its importance, and that's pretty much true for most RPGs.It's either an undercooked diceroll, or it's some unholy piece of jank where you need to physically touch a screen transition or something.The mechanic of running away from encounters is such a blind spot in RPG design and it causes so many other issues with the genre. The encounter highlighted in the OP happens to be one of them.
>>12807803You fight weaker versions of most monsters earlier in the game.You often fight small packs with fewer monsters, safer to learn from.You don’t need to dive deep to know if you’re ready, grind on your safe enemies until they’re effortless. Then go down one floor
>>12807690The point is to make combat exciting.If you want turned based combat to be interesting and rewarding, the possibility of failure needs to be real. In the case of well designed RPGs this comes in the shape of being able to come victorious only if you want the right decisions at the right moment, coupled with random factors (enemy types grouping, and number of enemies, dmg calculation, type of attack enemy choses, surprise attacks by the player or the enemies).The result is combat that is always entertaining because there is a balanced between the expected and the randomized and because you only survive if you make the right calls and are well prepared, and because the random factors makes sure combat never play out the same.The drawback is that from times to times the random factors could stack against you and fuck you up if you're really unlucky; but I'll take that and the occasional loss that couldn't be prevented over combat being so predictable and easy it becomes boring, which is precisely the problem people these days have with "JRPG and random encounters being 'Bad Design'", unlike what they believe the problem isn't RPGing or random encounters per se, but the balancing lacking these things that make it interesting. Pic unrelated, a JRPG where combat is actually interesting because it has all those random factors but where you could get fucked if you're very unlucky.
>>12807690As others have noted, the post overstates the threat posed by the encounter a bit. To be clear, that ambush does absolutely suck, but that's mostly just because of the greater demons and the possible insta-death from the ninjas. It'll hurt a lot, but it's survivable for an end-game party not just an instant game over.As for the point, though, part of it is just having some tension and unpredictability when exploring. You can't rely on being able to always wipe out enemies with overwhelming offensive power before they do anything, which makes the game less "solvable." There's some ambiguity in just how far you can safely keep pushing forward, and you'll sometimes find yourself scrambling to survive with limited resources, which makes the game more interesting.Wizardry also has a mechanic to rescue downed parties, and it exists for a reason. It's expected that you'll get fucked up sometimes, and there's a way to recover from it.
RPGs, even tabletop ones, are about random events inspiring your imagination to make a storyThey're not pure skill games
>>12807707The dungeon master is the bastard known as Pliny the Ill
>hyperventilates>blood pressure rises>ears turn red>face turns red>eyes dilate>hands shake>tiny fists clench>nails bite into palm drawing blood>feebly pounds table, causing pain and inflammation to heel of hand than anything else>"I-I-I-I-.....">struggles to inhale rasping breaths>"HAVE TO REPLAY A SECTION OF CONTENT I ALREADY CLEARED DUE TO UNEXPECTED FAILURE??!?!??!?!??!?">squeals a shriek of pure rage that collapses its throat and strains it vocal cords>quivers and tenses every muscle in head so tightly in temper tantrum rage eyes go bloodshot and enters serious aneurysm territory>passes out from hypoxia>mother finds him on the floor of his room, pants shat
>>12808271Toddlers will actually do this and nearly pass out out of a poorly developed subconscious idea that causing pain to themselves will get "revenge" on the perceived perpetrators of their unhappiness. Normally they are socialized out of it by 2. If they're still doing this by 4, you have someone who is seriously emotionally disabled and is likely going to display profound personality problems for the rest of his life, as OP demonstrates.
>>12808271It's crazy how old devs really threw in objective bad game design in their games to artificially extend the length of the game, combat rental and sell strategy guides, and players were totally oblivious too. But we know the truth now, us modern gamers have it so good.
>>12807803>b-but how are you supposed to know everything about a game before you play it???zoomers are such disgusting creaturesimagine actually refusing to play a game unless you've watched someone else play the entire thing firstthey unironically think that playing games "blind" is some sort of special challenge rather than just being a normal person>would you be able to knowthere's this little thing called "trial and error" with which your generation seems utterly unfamiliar
>>12808330On the most basic level what they lack is the joy/exhilaration of exploration. To them, anything unknown is terrifying. What exact set of childhood circumstances leads to this is hard to say, but it sure has become a generational problem. They are only comfortable doing only what they are told to, and what the authority says is acceptable to even think about trying. No quest marker? horror. No always-visible minimap? Horror. No immediate list of goals without searching the immediate area to discover context clues? Horror. No perfect list of gear/equipment/traits that allows them to instantly know "the meta" or whether something is "worth it"? Horror. This seems to extend to any expression of the idea of "exploration" you can imagine. They don't like going outside and seeing what's around the corner, don't like jailbreaking devices, inspecting source, downloading files from alternative sources (no comment on morality, but it is interesting).It's really bizarre how striking and clear the difference is. No child in the 80s/90s ever had a problem picking up a controller or keyboard without an instruction manual and just pressing all the buttons to see what happened. If they ever got stuck, they'd press every button again to see what happened. They'd equip a different item and try pressing every button that way. They'd jump and duck and crawl and search and talk and bash their way into discovering new things about the game, and if they ever found anything truly cryptic, they'd brag about it to their friends at school (or lie), which spread the fun around. Every once in a while they might rely on a tip from a "ask the pros" column in a magazine, and that was cherished lore to get excited about, not an economic burden as the resentful try to characterize it today. If they ever truly got frustrated, they'd put the game on hold, play something else, and then inevitably feel the urge to come back to it later and give it another shot or try something different.
>>12808369>What exact set of childhood circumstances leads to this is hard to sayIt's no mystery, just poor parenting.Prior to the internet, kids were expected to learn by doing, trial and error. You would give them a general direction, then let them go at it and figure it out for themselves. The parents would only step in when things headed for disaster, like little Jonny trying to put out an oil fire with water. After the internet, parents just wanted to shut the kid up so they can go back to watching youtube videos, so now it's "Do X exactly as I tell you! No, why aren't you doing this exactly the way I told you?!" Rather than being expected to learn and shown forgiveness for not being 100% correct all the time, a lot of zoomers grew up with parents that would just yell at them for not following instructions exactly.So to fail is the worst possible thing. Never put yourself in a situation where you can fail. Get guide, get handheld, don't ever let yourself walk in blind, because then you might fail. That's what causes this. Piss poor parenting. We're witnessing the results of a generation raised by absent parents who spent more time looking at a screen than their own children, who couldn't even bother to pass on the lessons their own parents taught them.
>>12807856>wizardry was an unlicensed D&D cloneyou absolute fucking retard it was an Oubliette ripoff
Losing is part of the game. Sure it can be bullshit but many PC older PC games relied on you losing and trying a different approach. C&C or Jagged Alliance come to mind. Save scumming was just part of the game.
>>12809076>Losing is part of the game.I think this is something that's lost in the modern generation. People are terrified to not 100 percent a game on their first go and they're even more terrified to just not win. They cry about losing their precious time but the act of playing the game is the fun, not the act of wrapping it up.
>>12807690>Where no amount of player skill matteredThat's the entire point of traditional role-playing games. To be bound by the limitations of your character's build, not your skill. Which is why real-time RPGs or any other watered down forms aren't real RPGs.>But I don't like this!Cool, but that's not the point.
>>12809090Making the right decisions is a skill, as evidenced by modern RPG players having trouble making the right calls in even something like Dragon Quest
>>12809093To clarify further, the use of physical skill which is what people usually mean in terms of video game context.
gae
>>12809107This is actually very overblown, since the original version of the game came with a small sealed envelope that had instructions on summoning a cleric and wandering around until he casts the light spell in a fight. Also, since you're speedrunning to the next pentagram for the first half of the game, you probably never even noticed Trebor's ghost. If he starts to get close while mapping, you just run back to the previous floor and that will reset his position, then go back to mapping. He's only an issue deep in the game when navigation becomes a chore, and you find the item to banish him shortly after inside the Cosmic Cube.And the last post in that chain is HORRIBLY wrong, since Japan loved Wiz 4 a lot, and remade it for the PC Engine and PS1 with a new enhanced Arranged mode that changes the summoning system and adds in a lot of flavor text and new graphics. Pic of some of the new stuff here:>>12807906
>>12807690I asked somebody about this in the Usogui storytime thread on /a/ and he said it kind of misrepresents the game's difficulty because apparently the player characters are strong enough to wipe all of this out in one turn too anyway.
>>12809153Here's the screen you get when you first see the Black Box. Arranged mode also makes the Black Box it's own menu instead of being an item in your inventory for the rest of the game. Items also automatically move to the Black Box by default, so you don't accidentally lose a required item to a thief because you forgot to box it.
>>12809076>>12809085That's complete bullshit when you realize roguelike/lite games are huge in the indie scene>Save scumming was just part of the game.Didn't beat the game
>>12809229Are you implying that dying isn't a big part of roguelikes and roguelites? They're literally designed around dying not being a huge deal.
>>12808489>you absolute fucking retard it was an Oubliette ripoffYou are a textbook wiki autist and didnt even bother to use your fucking moueewheel to scroll down to first paragraph to see what Oubliette even was:>The game was designed by Jim Schwaiger, together with John Gaby and Bancherd DeLong, initially as a means to automatically perform dice rolls in Dungeons & DragonsYou act all clever and cunty but you are the least informed person in the history of the chans. Saying "it wasnt D&D it was Oubliette" is possibly the dumbest thing ever said in over a decade on /v/.
>>12809231>Are you implying that dying isn't a big part of roguelikes and roguelites?No? That guy said losing a game is something modern gamers dont like in games when those two genres are still popular to this day with modern gamers
>>12809258oh oops
>>12809249> on v
>>12809289Meant to say on the /v/ groups. /vg/, /vr/, regular cancer /v/. All of them combined, and we have by far the worst userbase. Only /vr/ has the wiki/youtuber secondaries who never even played the games back in the day, but feel entitled to have strong opinions on them through watching letsplays from their favorite streamers and copy pasting shit from wiki pages. They need to fuck off back to gamergrumps.
I'm not a fan of ambushes in RPGs. When you're ambushing, the fight is easy, and thus boring.When you're being ambushed, and you have a character die before you can take an action, it feels like you lost despite not doing anything wrong.I think the concept of back attacks and surrounding like in Final Fantasy is much better. You're put at an advantage or disadvantage that incentivizes you to play in a different way, but you don't have control of your characters stripped away from you. And if you're clever, you can sometimes design your party in such a way that being back attacked or surrounded isn't as dangerous.
>>12809229roguelites are a very specific exception and they also come with the caveat of you keeping something of what you earned on each death.
When did you realize 4chan was dead and it was just like 5 schizos max making the same exact threads over and over
>>12809249how fucking dare you slander Oubliette
>>12807690Its reflecting thr normal standards for rpg difficulty as it was originally created. Ie early dnd.You were absolutely supposed to permanently lose party members from playing poor or just from being unlucky. Mind you this wasn't "for rpg veterans" as there were no veterans this was considered normal and appropriate for someone who had never even learned what a level up was until yesterday. It was considered a fun experience you were willing to pay money for the privilege of experiencing.Everything I tell you is true. RPG gamers have just gotten so casual that they see this and cant make sense of it
Because that's how random encounters with high level enemies worked in Dungeons and Dragons at the time. >Walk though dungeon>DM rolls for Random Encounter based off the table listed for that dungeon>Monsters show up in groups instead of individually>If they get the drop on the party for a litany of reasons, they get first attackSince a video game has way less room for the actual reasons why this would happen in D&D (sleeping, eating, making too much noise, literally can't see them, ect.) it's just more arbitrary feeling.
>>12810421Ironically, the casualization is a symptom of shitty gate-keeping. Back in 3.5e/4e, Tomb of Horrors was tried like it was the final boss of all D&D; an impossible adventure all the most hardcore of players could EVER hope to beat.In actuality, it was originally a tournament module: you played it at conventions like GenCon and scored points based on how you played, with the expectation that you were going to die so often that you needed to roll up AT LEAST three characters. Whoever scored the most points "won".But because 1e players thought that 2e players were casuals ruining their game and because 2e players thought the 3/3.5e players were casuals ruining their game, the actual history got lost. Why? Because when you gatekeep by completely shutting the gates, the newcomers just build their own community and the game studio pays attention to them instead of the old guard who refuses to buy new product.
>>12810443So what you are saying is they never brought in young blood and initiated them into hardcore.Did that also happen with electronic rpgs?
>why was a game designed to soak up time in an era when these types of games were brand new... le hard and sometimes unfair?>>12810443If you give a fuck what people think about your precious product you're the problem. Casual interest in catchpenny trinkets like games, movies, RPGs, etc. is the rule, always has been. How many people bought a yoyo in the last century? Hundreds of millions. But weren't they all casuals? I have the yoyo I got as a kid and I can walk the dog and do all kinds of moves with it sleeping. I am easily the best yoyoer I know in real life except one dude I know who is an amateur stage magician. But I'm a casual, it was just something to do a few minutes at a time if I was bored or waiting for the school bus.I can't imagine how that must still, to this day, irk the real, hard core yoyoers. The people who live to yoyo, their precious yoyo culture being ruined by people who just yoyo for a little bit at a time and ENJOY IT like they have no idea what the fuck they're doing. In fact I think by not yoyoing hard enough and buying enough hard core difficult yoyos, I may have contributed to the sorry state of today's yoyoing. Shit you can buy a yoyo that sleeps itself now! The fucking yoyo is RUINED!
>>12810463Yes on both accounts and typically for the exact same reasons: the devs make a new product that makes things a little easier for newcomers to play to get into the series as a whole. The grognards get mad at the "casualization" of their hobby and retreat away from anything modern instead of treating it as a "You've got the basics down, not challenge the classics" introduction to the hobby.>>12810474An apt metaphor and mindset, but the D&D version of this is that modern Yo-Yoing is bird hunting sport because kids two generations ago took the whole "It was an ancient hunting tool" marketing ploy too seriously and they're now angry that the next version of Yo-Yoing comes with sights and a semi-automatic trigger that does Around the World for you.
>>12810494>An apt metaphor and mindset, but the D&D version of this is that modern Yo-Yoing is bird hunting sport because kids two generations ago took the whole "It was an ancient hunting tool" marketing ploy too seriously and they're now angry that the next version of Yo-Yoing comes with sights and a semi-automatic trigger that does Around the World for you.The issue is nobody can gatekeep a product unless they control both the product itself, the distribution channels (game stores), etc. And people shouldn't - getting attached to the BRAND is what the marketing people want. If you like D&D or AD&D of whatever edition, a new lame ruleset shouldn't affect you or the people who play with you.Honestly I'm a little shocked that people follow the rules in these games extensively. Long ago when I was into role playing games we eventually evolved our system from "D20" style rules, to GURPS, finally modding that to have two types of HP - blood and bone - and other tweaks like leaving stuff out. Every other group I was aware of was similarly loose.I don't think I ever played a set scenario either, not once. We always had our own shit going on.
>>12810501Even the guys who made D&D insisted that the rules in the book were just guidelines and homerules trumped all else. Why every generation of D&D nerd has to be a weirdo elitist about a game that literally tells you to make stuff up on the fly to make it more fun for everyone is beyond me.
>>12810515>Even the guys who made D&D insisted that the rules in the book were just guidelines and homerules trumped all else.Yeah I know, the original TSR people were great. They ran low on money in the mid-80s after overextending and had to draw in VC and that's when it all went to shit. Just like any company founded by nerds, they do some fun cool shit, then by hook or crook big money takes over and drives it into the ground.>Why every generation of D&D nerd has to be a weirdo elitist about a game that literally tells you to make stuff up on the fly to make it more fun for everyone is beyond me.We get weird takes from marketing people here. That's much of it. I've noticed a lot of posting around such theories like "a bad remake / reissue / redo / something else can RUIN X or Y" but how can some stupid company's bone headed move retroactively ruin something people enjoy? Makes no sense, unless you consider that that kind of post is made by a shill from a competing brand, or a very disgruntled "fan" who thinks they should control a company's output despite being a stupid smelly retard who probably pirates shit anyhow.
>>12807690play Dungeon Antiqua on Hard Mode, you're gonna get whooped by some ninjas that can instakill and greater demons calling in reinforcements while spamming not!blizzaga on your mates
>>12807690because the one crucial detail missing here is that with the exception of the original Apple II release (and this was changed in Wizardry 2 and all subsequent ports of Wizardry 1) no one can use magic in surprise rounds. Meaning that while OP will get their frontline fighter, samurai and priest harmed (or if they're really unlucky one or more them might get killed) their backline thief and 2 mages are gonna be completely shielded for that round. And in Wizardry your mages are basically glass cannons with absurdly powerful area of attack spells. So that fight isn't necessarily game over.And besides that's the sort of encounter you get on floor 8 or 9. Y'know, near the end of the game. That's just called challenge. I swear people seem to think that this shit happens on floor 1 of Wizardry or something but that's not the case at all.Also this: >>12807823
>>12807702fpbp
>>12807823>Quality spritework out of the end of the 2D era.It's more than that. They are digitised illustrations by the legend Jun Suemi. He was also art director for those versions and still illustrates for the series to this day. He clearly enjoyed and understood the games he was working on as many of his paintings depict scenarios and concepts that any Wizardry player will relate to. Like the awful tension of examining a chest after a battle, pic related.
>>12808486>>12808369>>12808330Its amazing how much you can rant about people much younger than i am without even bothering to read that my reply was in the context of "you're supposed to use your game knowledge yo know you can't handle this encounter" and I was just making the point of "how would I know I can't handle it if I haven't fought it before, I can't use game knowledge i don't yet have". It's funny how you always blame young people for not accepting failure when if anything, it's our generation that says, "yeah I got other shit to so in life and responsibilities that I can play games for hours on end like I used to, so I don't feel like savescumming for an hour until I win"
>>12811497>I swear people seem to think that this shit happens on floor 1 of Wizardry or something but that's not the case at all.It's a Tomb of Horrors situation again. The craziest parts of the game are presented to youngsters as if that's how the whole game is as a dig at how "casualized" newer games are. They'll never admit to things like savescumming, manual hex editing, and the Bishop Glitch as the actual methods people used to cheese their way through the original Wizardry back in the day.
>>12812518When I was a kid I used to think that dungeon crawlers were an impossible genre for geniuses. Basically that any cause and effect was always completely obscure and that you would have to do things like put a stone on one tile in floor two and two stones on a different unrelated tile in floor five to move a wall in floor three but the passage it opened would be illusioned to look like it hadn't changed, and even if you thought it had changed it would be solid if you tried to pass through it, only giving way after 7 attempts to move through it with no indication that it was a magical force simulating a wall. Beyond the wall, there would be an instant death spike pit unless you let one specific snail enemy live in the maze on floor four and after seeing him for the first time arrive at the wall after taking no fewer than 130 steps in the dungeon but no more than 250. And it was essential to beat the game. That's what I thought dungeon crawlers were like.
which versions of the old wizardry games do i play? snes? i feel like i'd get filtered hard by the original apple II versions
