Summary
- Wizardry is one of the progenitors of the RPG genre.
- After being sold to a Japanese software company, the series has largely chased trends.
- The latest entry in the legendary series is a gacha game.
Unfortunately, we’re at a point in the cultural zeitgeist where people have largely forgotten about Wizardry and its influence on advancing the CRPG genre. Wizardry, along with Ultima, popularised several aspects of RPGs that are still prevalent in the genre today: turn (command)-based combat, selectable classes and races, multiple endings and so on.
Wizardry’s popularity peaked early in the series’ history, but developer Sir-Tech continued to release new entries before stopping in 2001 after the release of Wizardry 8. Notably, Wizardry became a very popular series in Japan throughout the ’80s and ’90s, leading to Japanese software company Drecom purchasing the series’ IP rights. Since then, several Japanese-only spin-offs have been released and… well, the series has followed some of the more controversial gaming trends ever since.
Revolutionary to Derivative
Eternal Crypt – Wizardry BC was a free-to-play NFT-based game with strange-looking Minecraft characters. It’s hard to gauge the success of these types of games because you only need a dedicated base of big spenders to make them profitable, but we haven’t heard much about Eternal Crypt since its release. NFTs are largely falling out of use in gaming, not that they ever really took off in the first place, so Drecom has decided to capitalise on a much more successful trend – gacha.
Indeed, Drecom’s latest release, Wizardry Variants Daphne, has some of the same outward appearances as games like Genshin Impact, but the core of the game is very much a dungeon crawler rather than something resembling an action RPG. Variants Daphne was originally a mobile-exclusive but released on Steam on March 6. Judging by some of the reviews on the game’s Steam page, fans of the mobile version aren’t pleased with the state of the game’s port. Wizardry Variants Daphne currently holds a ‘Mixed’ review score on the platform after over 500 reviews.
As far as gacha does, Wizardry Variants Daphne doesn’t seem particularly exploitative. Most of the incentive to spend real money is so you can obtain rare characters, but a free-to-play run appears doable. Your characters can permanently die, which is likely frustrating if you’ve invested real money in obtaining them, but permadeath is wholly in the spirit of the original Wizardry so perhaps we’ll give Drecom a pass on that.
It’s strange to see a legendary series diverge so heavily from its roots, but in reality, these games only have the Wizardry title attached to them for brand recognition purposes. One of the series’ creators Andrew C. Greenberg has since passed away, and the other, Robert Woodhead, is a noted Eve Online player and probably hasn’t given the series much thought since the ’80s.
Wizardry IV: The Return Of Werdna
