Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (PC 2023 Remake) - Longplay Part 1/2 - No Commentary

The complete playlist for this game can be found here:    • Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overl...  

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Part 1 of my blind longplay of the 2023 remake of the first Wizardry game, Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. I'm playing the GOG version. This game came out of nowhere at me, I had no idea it was even being worked on until I saw it listed in the store recently. It's currently listed as Early Access specifically for bug fixes and polish, supposedly it's "feature complete" already. I've only seen some minor bugs for the most part, like the game saying a character has some brand new item from a treasure chest when they don't. There is one instance when I run away from a battle that my characters automatically pass through a teleporter and the game freaks out, making the walls phase in and out of existence until it just freezes.

This is the first time I've ever played any version of Wizardry 1. The game has a lot of the early CRPG roughness to it still where you can get steam rolled by enemies right at the very start of the game. It's not quite as bad as Might and Magic 1, but until you're fairly over-leveled for any given floor you can still have your entire party get wiped by a single bad encounter where the enemies surprise attack you. The game autosaves continuously, which is both good and bad. Getting your party members killed is pretty devastating in this. You get 2 chances to revive them and if both fail, that character is permanently dead. Having the party get wiped out is basically a show stopper since you'd have to train up a whole new team to try to reach the point in the maze the original characters died. Revives are also super expensive until you end up with a stupid amount of money. The further I've gotten into the game, the more frequently I've gone back to town to create backups of the save game. I've had to resort to save scumming a handful of times after my team got obliterated or one of the party members permanently died.

I do a lot of grinding for levels in the first part of the game and switch to grinding for money/items immediately after. Ironically I find the Death Ring near the end of my money grind, which sells for an insane amount of money. The keyboard controls in the game are a little clunky and hard to get used to. Some mouse support gets added in a later update after I've already been playing for a while and got used to the keyboard for everything. The "Identify" function also gets added at the same time along with a bunch of updated artwork for some of the characters and close ups of the enemies. The last couple of floors in the game get fairly difficult with a decent amount of random encounters that can basically insta-kill your party if they go before you. Turns out the end boss is not strong against the most powerful magic attacks and I'm able to take him out pretty quick when the time comes. I don't know what I was supposed to get out of the "hint" you're given on the wall in the final floor, I just ended up brute forcing the path to the final room and wrote down which directions ended up with forward progress until I made it through. Overall I liked the game and I'm glad I got to play through it.

In this part I go from the start of the game and explore down through all of floor 5.