Could there ever be another Wizardry Online?

News & General Discussion
1

At the beginning of this year the MMO Wizardry Online announced it’s closing unsurprisingly. Being a niche game it was only a matter of time. I played it a lot and it was much better than reviews said. In fact many reviews of the game were flat out wrong and gave misleading “facts” about Wizardry’s game mechanics. Many potential players were turned off by the perma-death aspect, while most just never heard of the game. It had terrible marketing.

I think it’s a shame. Now I feel like there is a hole in the gamingverse. There is no other game like what Wizardry was. You would go into a dungeon and not know for sure if you’re coming back out. Sure, it could have been better, it had a few major launch issues and bad translating, but it had real potential. I want to play a game like it again, but I don’t think a game like it exist. I wonder if anyone in the unity community was a fan of the game in addition to me.

I wonder if anyone has aspirations to make a similar game.

But, I guess it’s a dead end. Anyone who decides to make an MMO doesn’t know how, or they wouldn’t even attempt it in the first place. Even if it is a smallish niche MMO.

2

Heya, I played Wizardry for a bit although I’ll admit it didn’t quite grab me as much as I thought it would. I do agree it was better than the reviews gave it credit for.

If you like that niche which includes PvP and meaningful loss you might want to check out Darkfall Online although I haven’t played since they relaunched as Unholy Wars. It is more open world than Wizardry was(not really dungeon oriented) but still has that same feel where you’re always on edge.

3

I looked into that game too. I think a similar game to Wizardry with a better implemented perma-death system needs to exist, but be an MO instead of an MMO. I think servers of hundreds rather than thousands would keep the volume of billing/customer service/bandwidth etc reasonable.

Not saying I’m planning on doing this, just kicking ideas around. I mean… I’m not totally crazy.

4

I completely love the permadeath system and it’s a shame that it’s often represented as a bad gameplay design because it can bring so much to the game. Each encounter feels tense, you get emotionally attached to your character and it helps with not breaking immersion when you die.

And it can be applied to NPC too. In Mount&Blade, you and the lords NPC never die. You are miraculously taken prisonner when hp gets to 0, and you can take prisonner wounded lords but you can’t kill them. After a while, I feel like the game world is very static, apart from the capture of forts and villages and I can’t immerse myself anymore in my play.

For multiplayer games, it’s a bit different because player respawn rate can be very high, and you get to treat with problem like high lvl player ganking new ones at the starting zone (which is why I stopped playing Darkfall).

You should take a look at Wurm Online, you can play it for free. It is heavily based on craft and harvesting, there is pvp server, full loot and permadeath but player of your faction will be reluctant to kill you because killing you would mean killing one source of resources income. Actually, they will help you get your skills and craft gear up so that you can provide war resources (armor, weapons, arrow, cart, …). But like Wizardry, it’s a very niche game and it suffers from low server population.

5

Check out Moraff’s Revenge, circa 1989. :smile:
I had played for a couple months on a single character, and was down in the dungeon doing the rounds when I encountered a trap door that dropped me through a few additional consecutive trap doors. I ended up far deeper into the dungeon than I ever wanted to be and encountered a level 80 vampire that practically insta-killed me before I could use my hard-earned holy hand grenade… :frowning:

6

I think most people think of it what I used to think, that those who play PD are showing off. The truth is people play PD because it’s a superior game play experience.

It seems to me that in so many games, implementing PD is difficult. I think perma-death is a poorly refined concept that needs better principles applied to it. I actually didn’t like Wizardy’s % system. My vision of ideal PD is a character goes through stages of health;

**Robust:**The character has 80% HP or more and has consumed food and water recently.

The character has slight stat bonuses.

Healthy: The character just has 80% HP or more.

The character is normal.

Worn: The character has between 80% HP and 50% HP.

The character deal slightly less damage.

Wounded: The character has between 51% HP and 20% HP.

The character also moves slightly slower.

Heavily Wounded: The character has between 21% HP and 0%HP

Vision is obscured some and damage and move speed penalties are greater.

Incapacitated: The character has just lost all HP and 1 minute count down starts.

Can’t move or attack. Must wait for; 1 minute, to be healed, or to be eaten and suffer 100% perma-death.

Gimped: The 1 minute countdown ends without being healed.

Recovered a little, can crawl around to try to get to a safe place to nurse your wounds. If attacked in this state it’s 100% perma-death.

Then… After your character dies, if it was a low level character you probably get a penalty to stats on new character, if it was a high level character you get a bonus based on the level of the character that died, so you didn’t lose everything, some part of that character lives on. This is how I always envisioned ideal PD to be.

Also, the thing to note about the above concept, is that when incapacitated, monsters will ignore you to fight other party members, or stupid monsters may think you’re dead and ignore you, moving while gimped may be a bad idea, best to wait till they move on or help comes. Class, gear and race may factor into how well monsters ignore you when downed.

Just imagine, your party is fighting a tough fight, one guy goes down and the rest of the party can’t get to him because they are wounded and being attacked. He panics and tries to crawl away attracting a monster to him. All they can do is watch and back out, leaving their friends to be torn apart and eaten alive!