Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge - Lessons from the Past

"The Bane of Queequeg" is a stupid name for a blog.  It's OK, I know that's what you're thinking, it's hard to spell, it doesn't make sense and it alienates a large proportion of any potential readership.  I accept that, and maybe if I was starting again I would call it "Great Old Games" or "Drunken Ramblings" or "Badger Attack!"

Hmmmm... "Badger Attack!"...

This might just work...

Anyway there is a reason why this blog is called the ridiculous name that it is, and that is a game called Wizardry 6: Bane of the Cosmic Forge.  The "Bane" bit is obvious, but "Queequeg" is the name of the  first NPC you encounter.  He's loosely modelled on Queequeg from Moby Dick (in that he is some kind of sailor) but he sells items, and you can talk to him about things (like a captain and some treasure.)  He sidles up to you in as shifty a way as is possible for a graphic from 1990, metaphorically pulls open his jacket to show you a selection of dodgy watches and asks if he could "interest you in a bargain." 

This must qualify as one of the stupidest questions in gaming history.  You're a group of adventurers stuck in a musty castle with the ubiquitous giant rats (who always inhabit the early part of any RPG) constantly nipping at your extremities.  You're wearing the equivalent of suits made out of shattered dreams and you're reduced to trying to kill things by thinking really hard at them - of course you're interested in a bloody bargain!  Queequeg provides you with the first opportunity to sort yourselves out and he's the first friendly face you meet - I can forgive him that his name is hard to spell in Google.

Just like in Moby Dick.

Wizardry 6 is widely recognised as one of the greatest RPGs ever made.  It was released in 1990 and is a classic dungeon crawler; create 6 characters, walk into a castle, kill everything that moves that isn't Queequeg and collect treasure - whilst progressing towards your eventual goal.  This is hardly revolutionary, there are plenty of games where you can do that, but Bane sticks in the mind because of a few things.

Firstly it deviates from the normal fantasy milieu in lots of ways.  The standard Fighters and Priests are, of course, present but lots of other, much more interesting, classes are also available.  Valkyries, Lords, Bishops, Monks, Samurai and Ninjas are all there, waiting for you to use them.  You can wield katanas, you can dual wield katanas, you can use psionics, you can pick races such as a mook or a dracon, and they had khajit way before those johnny come latelys at Bethesda.  It uses enough familiar stuff to make any RPG player feel at home, but it also adds a touch of the exotic - something else to imagine and picture in your mind's eye.  I mean, let's face it, Samurai are cool aren't they?  And half dragon Samurai who breathe acid are even cooler.

Another thing that Wizardry does well are the puzzles.  Here it benefits from a healthy dose of "Old Game-itis".  Basically put Wizardry doesn't really give a stuff about you.  It doesn't follow conventions which are so ingrained in modern games that they have become.. well.. conventions.  Nowadays if you pick a key up then it will be used somewhere in the immediate vicinity.  If there is a locked gate then something nearby will open it, or somebody will give you a hint on how to do so.  This simply doesn't happen in Wizardry.  In this game progress-crucial items are hidden away in dark corners and you have to search to find them.  If you don't find them then nothing happens, nobody pops up to tell you anything, you just have to sit there and try to work out where you've gone wrong.  If you miss something early in the game (like, for example, something that a bargain-obsessed sailor might be selling) and are unable to get past a later obstacle then you have to go back and search the WHOLE GAME to find whatever it is you've missed, so that you can carry on.  And, not only this, but there are loads of obviously really important gates and doors that you encounter right at the beginning of your journey which you can't open for absolutely ages.  So you have lots of items which might or might not be important, and lots of doors which clearly need to be opened, but no way of telling how those match up - or even if they're supposed to yet.

And mixed in with this are some genuinely interesting puzzles.  I don't particularly want to single out Skyrim again but it only has one puzzle - that one with the different animal blocks and the big diagram on the wall detailing exactly what to do.  Compare that with this, which are the instructions telling you how to lower a drawbridge you find once you leave the castle...

*CAUTION* Safety detachment required prior to inchoate winder advancement. Do not activate coilwrap until a wait of 5 seconds post pump nascency, over safety interdigitation. Truss ascension may follow, but under no circumstance should fall extrinsic to pump and winder immurement. Final winder engagement induction for draw bridge facilitation.

Got that?

Modern games have perfected the art of giving the player a constant, gentle challenge.  They provide enough of an obstacle that you feel like you are making progress, but they also follow set rules that make everything pretty straightforward.  Look at the latest Deus Ex game, for example.  I have never seen so many high security complexes with easily accessible and extensive ventilation shafts in my life.  It's almost like somebody wants you to succeed.  There is a lot to be said for this approach and things have become much less frustrating as a result, but it also necessitates that game elements like puzzles become more sterile and similar (hence why fantasy vikings have started to leave the solutions to them on the walls right next to the doors that you're trying to open).  The player needs to know what is expected in order for it all to work, and the solution needs to be in reasonably easy reach because, if that doesn't happen, then they suddenly don't know how to deal with the obstacle that is stopping their progress and they become frustrated.  Wizardry 6 comes from a less polished age, but it actually requires some effort and concentration as a result and, of course, there are plenty of full solutions available on the internet if you decide to cheat.

And, it's not only the puzzles that require thought...

That, my friends, is the first level of the castle - drawn by my own fair hand.  Mapping is essential to making any progress, things are too confusing otherwise, and this was the last Wizardry game not to include an automapping feature.  Nowadays every game has one, but Bane is (just about) from a time when that responsibility was still placed on the player.  In a world full of green flashing arrows, or symbols on a map telling you exactly where to go, it provides a healthy, refreshing change.  There is no hand holding going on here, if you want to beat this game then you are going to have to work for it, and that will involve messing up a lot of graph paper and sharpening a lot of pencils.

To many, many people all of this will seem like a lot of hard work.  I wouldn't like to say that the general gaming population has got soft and lazy but I'm certainly aware that this sort of thing only appeals to a niche market.  I can't see many of the people who voted Grand Theft Auto V as the "most anticipated game of 2013" queueing up to try their luck with a 20 year old dungeon crawler where they have to draw their own maps.  (Rockstar are ripping you all off by the way, they've released the same game 4 times already.)  Wizardry 6 is not user-friendly, it's not polished by modern standards, it has its ups and downs and it can be frustrating and confusing.  However it also rewards effort, it rewards dedication and it gives the player a sense of achievement that just doesn't seem to exist in mainstream gaming any more.  Probably most importantly it shows us some of the things that we have lost in the past 20 years; a trust that the player is able to think for themselves, that they are competent games players and that they are able to cope with something challenging and thought-provoking.  I think it's a shame that this has almost disappeared.  It's hard to see how a game that promotes thought as much as this does could exist in today's gaming world.  It's too raw, it's too difficult and it just doesn't fit, but it illuminates very clearly how far things have gone in the opposite direction - and that maybe it's time to take a step backwards, just a little way.



If you want to try your hand at Wizardry 6 then it is available for free here
You will need a way to play it, as it is a DOS file.  If you have DOSBox then that will work.  Personally I recommend D-Fend Reloaded
This may look daunting but, in fact, it is really easy to use.  Guide here

The Grimoire Thing Just Gets Weirder

A few posts ago I wrote about "Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar".  This is a rather mythical game amongst RPG aficionados because, as I said then, it has reputedly been in development for the past 17 years.  Its story (which is long and strange) is irreversibly entangled with that of its creator Cleveland Mark Blakemore (who might not be long but sure is strange.)

I probably don't have the space to fully cover that story here but I can give you the basics.  Cleve has stated that he started developing Grimoire as a direct consequence of his experiences working for an Australian company in the mid 90s, who Sir-Tech had asked to make a follow up to their seminal game Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant.  This game was supposedly called "Stones of Arnhem" and he described a project full of incompetents, run by an Australian actor Max Phipps (he was in Mad Max 2, here he is),



which devolved into a total mess and was eventually canned by Sir-Tech before anything meaningful was created (but not before they wasted $250,000.)

Cleve makes some, frankly, pretty unbelievable claims about this time in his life (most of which don't bear to be repeated here) and he describes a number of the monsters created for the game, which were mostly based around aboriginal mythology or creatures from the outback, but which also included "the rectum gobbler" and something he christened "the penisaurus".  His version of events paints a damning picture of a project team out of control and completely disconnected from the Sirotek brothers at Sir-Tech.  He details an almost Kurtzian situation, with the leaders heading off on their own doomed jaunts into the creative jungle and nobody (except him) able to tell them that having monsters based on reproductive organs was not necessarily a great idea.  He says that he eventually had to quit the project as it was having a deleterious effect on his mental health, the scars of which he still bears today.

The problem was... no reference to Stones of Arnhem existed on the web (apart from Cleve's own words, and a comment on one website from somebody who purported to be his erstwhile partner, Michael Shamgar) so people found it difficult to believe him.  Add in to this that Cleve's online persona is often extremely offensive, totally unconcerned with the niceties of political correctness (or common politeness) and will say that stuff is true which appears to bend the rules of reality itself (for example that he killed all those Mexicans with the jawbone of an ass during the LA Riots, or whatever that story was.)  He's been trolling gaming sites since the early days and has annoyed or exhausted countless numbers of people.

So you can imagine the reaction when he fronts up with "Oh yeah, by the way guys, did you know there was almost a follow up to Wizardry 7 that was being made in Australia and had dick monsters in it, and transsexual furries killing each other and shit?  And I was, like, the lead programmer on it and spent all my waking hours trying to save it, but it never got made because the project manager got taken into a sanitarium, and hey, have I told you about the time I got hit by a truck but survived cos of my titanium skeleton?"

I mean we've all encountered them; people who make stuff up, who turn themselves into something they're not and try to counteract some kind of deep-seated inadequacy in their very heart by sticking lies up on the internet.  Come on!  This is some kind of bizarre joke isn't it?  A Penisaurus?  Rectum gobbler?  These are just the rantings of a disgruntled, delusional lunatic, a madman, don't pay any attention to it, it's obviously completely untr....

Oh.

Right.

Turns out that Cleve might have a point after all.  Because, in a completely bizarre turn of events, somebody has turned up AT JUST THE RIGHT TIME to provide him with at least partial corroboration.  An ebay user with the "name" of "hotalibl" says that he bought the remains of Sir-Tech, including all of their documentation, sealed games, artworks and so on.  He's even put 50 lots of it up on ebay, with another 50 to go up next week. (Click the link above to see the list.)

Amongst commonplace items like sealed first editions of different games, signed artwork and design documents the auctions include such gems as the letter canning the Stones of Arnhem project

and um... Cleve's resignation letter....

Of course I should probably make it almost legally clear that this doesn't mean that any of Cleve's other claims are in any way true, but you know, that picture does kind of fit his description, sort of almost exactly, and there's a lot of evidence there that "Stones of Arnhem" existed and that he worked on it before resigning and, if that's true, then... well maybe it's best if we don't think about what that might imply...

Oh and, while we're here, Grimoire has a new pitch video as its resolution has been updated.  Demo due end of this month.  Apparently.  The Indiegogo campaign is still running.

Further Reading:

If you want to read the full story go here (be aware it is 50+ pages.)

A demo of the game was released in February 2013 - read about it here