There are a lot of games I could write about having played in 2024 – and have – but there’s one that consumed my thoughts more than any other over the course of the whole year. Well, really it’s an entire genre, but with how much I went into it I’m going to talk about the first entry in the series and the most recent entry in it for my GOTY, and a lot of what came out between them. Poetically, it’s two games in the same series – the originator and its most modern incarnation, and they also both, conveniently, got a release this year. This begs some comparison around the two of them and some retrospection on what came in the 44 years between them.
But first, I need to talk a bit about how I’ve been approaching games for the last little while, because I’m pretty sure most of you don’t know me. I’m a gamedev by hobby and the parts that interest me the most these days are games made by small teams that expose the inner workings or show how you might be able to execute on an idea in a more stripped-down way than what the biggest of big budget games would do, and once I’ve found some small game I can learn from I try to understand what makes it special. The GDC talk Spiderweb Software gave has radically changed how I look at games, as well as the videos ThorHighHeels does, and I can’t remember where it came from but it was a post from maybe ten years ago challenging people to write about games without using the word ‘weird’, from – I think someone in the Glorious Trainwrecks community? Or someone adjacent to it.
Additionally, I should write a little bit about why I’m going with Wizardry instead of one of the big tentpole releases or one of the more distinct and novel indie games like Balatro or UFO 50 or something else that came out in 2024. The short version is just that I spent more time in the year playing dungeon crawlers and learning about the players involved and that left a bigger impact on me than anything else. At a more macro level though, I think dungeon crawlers are having a bit of a renaissance right now. Starting in the back half of 2023 we saw big ports of Etrian Odyssey and Wizardry: The Five Ordeals getting on Steam, as well as a new Experience Inc. dungeon crawler in the form of Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armor. You May Be Defeated, But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King., and 2024 saw a major port of Wizardry 1, and some of the Wizardry Gaiden games got added to Five Ordeals as DLC, and Class of Heroes 1 and 2 also got ported to Steam. There’s about a 12 month period there with around 10 major traditional-style first-person dungeon crawlers released on PC. It’s a great time to be a dungeon crawler fan and I don’t think I’ve seen as much interest in the genre in years as I have right now. Dungeon crawlers were born on the personal computer and, while they lived on mobile devices for most of the 2000s and 2010s, 2024 was the year they really returned to the home computer. For me, 2024 was the Year of the Maze and it’s what I’ll be thinking back on more than I’ll think of Astro Bot or Balatro in the years going forward. Wizardry is emblematic of those and also made up a huge chunk of what I played.
About seven years ago now, I started getting interested in dungeon crawlers as a potential way to execute on the dream of making an RPG of my own in a halfway reasonable timescale on my budget of roughly zero dollars. I think at the time I’d been listening to the Kingdom of Loathing guys talk about how they handled camera movement in West of Loathing, back when they were still doing their podcasts, and something about attaching the movement script to the camera itself stuck with me. I tried taking a few stabs at making my own dungeon crawlers, and even threw a couple of the attempts up on itch, but that’s another story.
Back in sixth grade sixteen years ago I was at the GameStop and I saw a DS game on the shelf that looked like nothing else. Stark yellow text on a minimal black background. The Dark Spire was a moody and oppressive game with this art style that had the shadows just oozing off the characters, clinging to them and threatening to drag them into the darkness. Maybe that’s where this all started.
But I mean really, it didn’t start with me. It started back in 1980 in the early microcomputer scene. Wanting to replicate their experience playing early editions of Dungeons and Dragons, the developers at Sirotech Software (later Sir-Tech) made Wizardry. It was a landmark title in the development of computer games and it holds up really well. Make some allowances for controllers and you could release Wizardry today without much issue, and I can say this with confidence because that’s what Digital Eclipse did in 2024.
Wizardry is a straightforward game. There is a dungeon with an evil wizard. The king is offering a reward for anyone who can reach the end and defeat the wizard. Make your party and challenge the maze.
It’s also deceptively complex. Wizardry is a game developed while RPGs were still basically wargames, and even a stripped-down version of the game they played there has you controlling a full squad of characters and expects you to make at least a platoon’s worth of guys to cycle through as needed. There’s two full books of spells with distinct effects to keep track of and, since this was before menu navigation was standardized, you have to type the names of the spells into the command line to cast them.
The dungeon is ten floors long and full of secret walls and hidden treasures. Each floor fills a 20x20 grid and there are 100 enemies in total to encounter. To frustrate people trying to map the floors and make the area seem bigger, the map wraps around at the edges by using a modulo calculation. The only way to know your position for sure is to have a wizard use a spell slot to cast DUMAPIC, which is more valuable than any use of Fireball (MAHALITO or LAHALITO, depending on how we want to convert the D&D spell here) when you step on a spinner tile. As you go deeper into the dungeon the enemies get tougher and the wandering monsters go from small parties to squads of your size to entire platoons of ninjas that can behead you and dragons that can turn your party to ash in an instant if you get just a bit unlucky. It’s really challenging and if I’m being perfectly frank I still haven’t finished it. My map only goes down to floor 5 right now and I think I’m going to need to rethink some parts of my approach if I want to get further in.
The thing with Wizardry is that every step you take in the dungeon is another step you have to take to get back, for the most part for most of the game. This means that you have to be weighing whether it’s worth it to continue or head back at all times. In the original version you can’t reload a save if things go south and it makes all the decisions in the dungeon a lot weightier.
I think there’s this assumption in a lot of game playing circles that older games are just simpler and easier to make because of it. At least, that’s what I thought when I tried making my own version of it. The game was made on floppy disks in 1980, after all. How hard could it be?
Have you ever looked at the source code for Wizardry? It’s like 12,000 lines long. It’s all arranged into a huge monolithic program. I think in programming terms the structure is stuffing everything into one massive singleton game manager type thing that can interact with every part of the program. I know how long it took me to write a program a fraction of that size and how much of a pain it was to keep track of how all the moving parts were interacting, and how, even at the scale of like 1,000 or 2,000 lines, I started to understand why industry people analogize game systems to engines. They’re these massive hulking pieces of machinery with so many parts moving around inside. Staring at the source for Wizardry is intimidating. The game is towering. What must it have been like, sitting at an Apple ][ day in and day out, writing this behemoth in one of the earliest text editors?
In Wizardry your characters are all basically fungible and can die at any minute for no reason and you’ll need to replace them regularly. This is really interesting and stands in stark contrast to basically the entire rest of the RPG genre where the heroes are all predetermined and will win on a long enough time scale. The game is doing a lot to try and help you win, as players of Wizardry 4 become acutely aware of, but even still it feels brutal and grueling. The atmosphere in Wizardry is so good.
That’s 1980. I want to now jump ahead to 2006. There’s been a lot of development in RPGs in the years since and Sir-Tech no longer exists as a company. The rights to Wizardry are still with Sir-Tech’s extant Canadian branch, 1259190 Ontario Inc, though they’re about to be transferred to a company called Aeria IPM, which appears to be a shell company spun up by a Japanese MMO company for the purpose of buying the Wizardry IP for reasons that are unclear, and there’s a couple games from 2006 I want to talk about because I played them in 2024.
Over on the consoles, there was a company called Michaelsoft, and they secured a licensing deal with the extant Canadian arm of Sir-Tech to make a series called Wizardry Xth. They’d just released the second game in the series. In some ways it’s a step back from the other Wizardry games on the PS2 – Tale of the Forsaken Land adopted a lot more modern genre conventions, it had some more distinct characters with bespoke art and backstories you could add to your party and the maps were a lot more involved with lots more curves and terrain elevation variation and some other systems going on. Michaelsoft were dead-set on sticking to the earlier style though, and they decided that they want a full world map and multiple dungeons, and they’ve also decided that to travel through the world map you should mainly be crawling dungeons. The way they handled it is pretty interesting from a production standpoint. They wanted to keep the appeal of discovering a map, but also wanted to have random maps so that the traversal didn’t get too samey. They could have done what the Shiren games do and have some basic procgen, but they opted to keep the spirit of understanding and getting familiar with the maps and instead just made like 40 maps with rotational symmetry and drew those out of a pool so the experience would be randomized while still letting the player get familiar with the maps. Wizardry Xth 2 here would later get a new coat of paint and get rereleased under its more familiar title: Class of Heroes.
The developers of the Wizardry Xth games would go on to form Experience Inc. Experience Inc.’s Team Muramasa have been the standard-bearers for the first-person dungeon crawling genre and they’ve done a lot with the genre in the years since.
Over on the computers I want to talk a bit about Wizardry the Five Ordeals which also came out in 2006, though it didn’t see a full English release until October 2023, and I didn’t get around to really starting it until later in 2024. I was initially interested in it only for its scenario editor, but I’ve gone back to it recently to try and take it as a game on its own merits, and found a bit to chew on.
In a lot of ways Five Ordeals is just more Wizardry, but it’s also where some pieces of the way the games worked clicked into place for me. Up until playing Five Ordeals I’d mostly been sticking to later ports of Wizardry that had quality of life features– mainly automap. Five Ordeals also has an automap, but viewing it is tied to your wizard’s first-level spell slots and shows you a snapshot of where you were when you cast it. This creates a balancing act and the possibility of losing access to the map if all your casters go down, and this fundamentally alters the experience of playing the game. You have to develop a better sense of the floor layouts, and if you lose access to the map on an unfamiliar floor (from anti-magic squares or running out of spell slots or having all your wizards die) it starts to instill this deep sense of terror. It’s dark, it’s dangerous, you’re far from home, and you have no idea where you are.
I think this sense of terror I experienced while playing Five Ordeals is core to what makes the genre distinct. A few paragraphs back I drew comparisons between Wizardry and a horror series (the paragraph was deleted for flow, but it was drawing comparisons to the macroeconomic circumstances around the creation of Wizardry and Kaiji, comparing the stagflation of the 1970s to the bubble economy bursting in the 1990s), and I don’t think that was an accident. Automap systems can paper over it a bit but the beating heart sitting at the core of the dungeon crawler genre is a kind of terror. It’s what makes the subgenre unique from other kinds of RPGs, and the games that understand this instead of just trying to use the genre cheaply tend to stand out from the pack. Mary Skelter, Undernauts, and Wizardry Variants Daphne stand out to me as examples that explicitly adopt horror trappings and are better for it.
Five Ordeals keeps the core of the first Wizardry game intact with just enough modernization to see what the early titles were doing. As far as I’ve gotten into it I’ve built up multiple parties and had to really learn how to work with some systems that seem a bit vestigial in later titles. There were a few times where I had to weigh whether reviving a character was worth it or not, and there were times where I had to leave party members in the dungeon because if I didn’t they would die on the way back up and I just didn’t have the gold or the spells to heal them. Status effects are debilitating and start forcing some hard choices. It makes me wonder if other games in the genre give you antidotes and poison curing spells too early.
Let’s now move to 2024. It’s been four years since Japanese mobile
game company Drecom acquired the rights to the Wizardry trademark
internationally and the rights to sell Wizardry 6-8. Going by their
investor report from Q1, they’re struggling a bit because one of
their new titles underperformed while the rest of their titles didn’t
grow, and they aren’t able to provide a dividend to the investors. Time
and again they mention the upcoming release of Wizardry Variants Daphne,
which has at this point already been delayed two years from its
originally-scheduled release date. People seemed positive on their
closed beta tests from 2023, but the main thing on their mind is what
they say in the final statement of their report, quote:
“As
described above, the seeds are being planted on multiple fronts toward
the company’s vision of becoming a comprehensive entertainment company
with its own IP at its core.
End quote.
To this end, we can honestly evaluate
the company’s management stance of accumulating financial reserves and
allocating resources for the company’s growth, even if it has to
temporarily suspend dividend payments. The primary question is whether
the successful release of”Wizardry Variants Daphne” will be an
opportunity for the company to scale up. Attention will continue to
focus on whether the next financial results will be a “turning point.””
The report is one of the most nervous business filings I’ve ever read. It reads like a struggling company that wants to be more than a licensed mobile game mill is betting everything on Wizardry doing well. It has to do well. They know they’ve got something special but the wolves are at the door. It just needs a little bit more time. God, please, just a little bit more time. We could fix everything if we just had a little bit more time.
This feeling, I think, bled into the game. Wizardry Variants Daphne’s main story centers around the conceit of traveling back in time to fix what went wrong in the pursuit of a better future. You learn about what can go wrong and then you have to go back and do it again. Nobody but you remembers what went wrong last time and you have to use what you’ve learned to help save people from the decisions that would destroy them. It’s a bit like the Nottagen section in Dragon Quest 7.
Drecom released Wizardry Variants Daphne on October 15, 2024, and showed the world precisely why they kept delaying it. There were two things that stood out:
The first thing that stood out was probably the reason why Drecom seemed so nervous in their report. The game was riddled with progression-breaking bugs. Even after being delayed for two years it was coming in hot. When the game first released the client was sending requests to the server with every movement and it brought the game to a crawl. They went into an emergency maintenance for almost the entirety of the first day because the game was borderline unplayable. And then once that got addressed the bugs just kept rolling in. Sometimes flags just wouldn’t trigger and people would get stuck unable to progress. There was a point in the first couple weeks where something in my client broke and I was just unable to connect to the server at all. I had to transfer my save over to another device and reinstall the game on my phone before it would work again. It got so bad that a month into service the director issued an apology for all the bugs and indefinitely suspended the release of new content and extended all the launch rewards and first event’s duration until the game was in a better state. That continued until the end of December, and it was only the other day where they started thinking the game was in an acceptable state.
The way Drecom handled the difficulties in the game’s launch was interesting. It was apologetic and ginger, handing out rewards left and right, and they seemed to be doing everything in their power to try not to drive people away. It gave the impression that they were desperate to see it succeed. It’s different to what I’ve seen of the other games of theirs I’ve tried (Disgaea RPG and Everybody’s Golf Mobile) which, from what I remember, were loaded to the gills with pop-ups and minibuys. There isn’t a ton of that in Wizardry Variants Daphne, and it seems a bit odd. To understand this, I think we need to try and understand Drecom.
Drecom is one of the many game mills churning out free-to-play licensed mobile games for bigger corporations. There’s an ocean of companies like them out there. I could pick one out of a hat and find a similar story – hell let’s name one and say Kabam Games (if you’ve never heard of them, that’s the point I’m making) since one of my friends worked there and I’ve been watching a similar story play out, but not succeed, as they’ve failed to launch King Arthur: Legends Rise like five times now while the copper’s been getting stripped out of the walls.
Getting people to care about something original is hard, and it’s way easier to just attach yourself to a name people already know. To make a game and wholly own it, to not have to negotiate with the rightsholder, and have it do well, almost never happens. If I go back and check in on where people who made games I liked ten years ago are now, so many of them have ended up in a rut of making licensed games for bigger companies. Bithell Games, 2DArray, and Ludosity all tried to make original games that were just good but market forces dragged them into doing licensed contract work. The industry is littered with the corpses of people trying to make original IP. But even still, that’s the dream. And in this case, for Drecom here, their gambit seems to have paid off. They may not have made Wizardry in the first place, but they do own it now, and the game they’ve made with its name is about as respectful of the name as you can get while still chasing the mobile market. For Drecom, Wizardry Variants Daphne is something that they own. It’s their chance to make a name for themselves. It’s their chance to become something more than they have been. In this light, I think the way they’ve handled the game makes more sense. They want the game to leave a good first impression and that means getting all hands on deck to make sure nobody sees a progression-breaking bug. More than being just business, this is a matter of pride. But in order for any of this to work, the game needs to be good.
This brings me to the second thing that was apparent on booting it up: The game is great. It’s an incredibly well-considered way of making Wizardry more accessible while keeping a lot of the core appeal. It’s hard, but it’s fair (more than fair, even. There’s at least two stages of revive/retry systems in place before you have to take dead units to the temple), and you can’t really get ahead of the expected power curve because you have to show systems competence in grade exams to increase your level cap, in a system that reminds me of something that Operation Abyss did, where you had to fight an enemy balanced to be barely beatable if you made use of every system the game gave you, after which point the level cap would increase. Last year’s Mon-Yu did something similar, where there’s a given level range for each dungeon and you get a bonus for clearing it under par. In Variants Daphne the grade exams follow in this tradition. You have to crawl a small maze and defeat a boss monster at the same level as you and show understanding of some specific mechanic before you can increase your level to the next multiple of ten. It’s a forward-thinking move that should help make sure players know how to play the game moving forward and avoid the problem that gacha games sometimes run into where power creep means you don’t really ever learn how the game works.
The story is this moody horror/mystery type fantasy beat where you’re trying to unravel what the deal is with the Abyss and the creatures within while also dealing with the political machinations of the world’s power players. The character designs are top-notch, with art from Fire Emblem Awakening designer Yusuke Kozaki and music by Final Fantasy Tactics composer Hitoshi Sakamoto. The writing isn’t overbearing but it communicates what it needs to pretty well, and the characters are all just unique enough within the stock archetypes to give the game a distinct feeling. There’s good-aligned dark mages and evil holy priests and timid warrior princesses and street urchin thieves who become priests and other things like that. The way the dwarves weave their hair into their beards creates a really unique sense of culture that you don’t quite get out of most other approaches to dwarves. It’s good.
The way the game is structured evokes D&D adventure modules. Someone’s missing. They’re in the dungeon. There’s some twists and turns along the way, some noble or other will ask you to find something, and there’s a lot of wandering monsters. It feels like an ongoing D&D campaign. The main story feels like the sort of thing you’d find in a larger dedicated campaign book and the events feel like something shorter out of Dragon Magazine or something. It’s a good fit for a live service game, and falls right in line with early Wizardry trying to recreate D&D on the computer.
The thing that gets me after having played all of these Wizardry titles last year is that, even though it’s been 45 years, even though the rights get kicked around like a football, even though the devs change regularly, it never feels like any of them are trying to make a quick buck off of the name, even if they are. The people who get contracted out to make Wizardry titles have this tendency to go on to make more first-person dungeon crawlers in the Wizardry mold after their contract is done. They all fundamentally get what makes the game appealing and try to do their best with it, and there’s a passion and reverence for the series that shines through, even though it’s pretty much always been niche. It’s a game that inspires a lot of strong feelings, and there’s nothing quite like it.