Wizardry 5 is one of the best dungeon crawlers you will ever play, but you have to give it a chance to get its hooks into you. I didn’t start with the early Wizardry games, but the D.W. Bradley trilogy that at least had EGA graphics. At that time, I looked back at the early Wizardry games and thought, why bother.
Bare-bones wireframe dungeons with – at least on the PC – really ugly (in terms of coloring) NPC and monster graphics. CGA really did the PC version no favor. That said, from the first to the last, despite their technological short-comings, almost all mainline Wizardry games managed to utilize the available technology to the best by having superior art direction, even in CGA.
So, at first glance, nothing to write home about, no reason to go back. But because Wizardry once upon a time was the champion of dungeon crawlers I wanted to know why these early entries were still so much beloved, and then worked my way through the first up to the fifth (except the fourth, haven’t finished that yet) until I caught up with where I started at. And it was all worth it.
Wizardry 5, which was finished even before Wizardry 4, is really a massive improvement over the early trilogy, but not as much of a radical change as the later Dark Savant trilogy was. It looks and feels like the original trilogy, but once you dive in a little deeper you see all the small changes that add up to something much more expansive and arguably better in a lot of ways. NPCs that move around, that you have to talk to, exchange items with and learn about secrets and puzzles that litter the dungeon.
The thief, once a pretty useless class, has become indispensable to lockpick doors, steal important items from NPCs (and given some of the prices if you try to get them the honest way, this is often the better choice) or attack from the shadows during combat if he successfully managed to hide. And finally, weapons have a different reach. That adds tactical depth to the combat without changing its underlying nature and also helps to make all of the characters equally useful in combat, given that you find the right weapon.
But the biggest improvement is certainly the dungeon design. Wizardry 1 to 4 (as 4 was still following the earlier template despite finished later than 5) had dungeons designed on a 20-by-20 grid. There was a lot of inventive maze design in those titles, but that restriction exhausted itself after those titles. Wizardry 5 could sprawl in all directions, no longer constrained by a grid.
The first level still felt very much like a castle dungeon of the older titles, lots of smaller rooms, lots of blocky corridors. But the second level already abandoned that approach, instead opening up into a vast mountain vista with lots of smaller side canyons and neat puzzles, and the first pools, a unique new gameplay element that was essential to master to survive the final levels. Here the new swimming skill came into play. You could dive deeper and deeper, but only with a high skill (or the right item) could you survive and find essential items, healing or the many, often deadly ill effects in their depths.
The second level was followed by a crazy labyrinth on the third floor and a truly unrestrained fourth dungeon pulling out all the stops. Invisible walls, a vault with shifting walls, a side dungeon that seems to mock you with its one ridiculous long corridor that leads back to itself and a room where you have to turn back time to meet an NPC. I can’t say I liked level five much, but even that has some cool elements. Level six was great again, evoking icy depths trough monster design, the descriptions and some of the environmental hazards.
The first time you look at a game like Wizardry 5 (and to a lesser extent the games before it) you see white-on-black wireframe dungeons and you wonder how anyone can play something like that. Shouldn’t it get boring very fast?
But one thing those games did was forcing you to map everything by hand and the process of mapping those levels forced you to remember them, to engage much more with the very structure of those levels, how they worked, than if you just had an automap. Those level structures hooked themselves deep into your brain, fired up your imagination and like when reading, after some time you stopped seeing wire-frames, but instead saw the vistas those structures evoked.
It also helped a lot that the core gameplay loop the Wizardry games had since the first one was an almost perfectly balanced execution of explore-combat-loot-survive that got deeper with the additions of the fifth part but never changed much. The one significant change to this formula was the number of puzzles, some of them brilliant, some of them sadly of the usual opaqueness preferred by creator D.W. Bradley.
But overall, Wizardry 5 was just as addictive as earlier Wizardry games, but due to its size and level design could sustain your explorations much longer. And with the significant changes Bradley introduced in the sequel, Wizardry 5 was pretty much the perfect capstone of the earlier iteration of the franchise.
The Entropy Pump 