Wizardry: Thanks for the Love

I am surprised by how many people still love and remember this series fondly and have yet to give up hope of its return. I have always loved it since I first played it in 1981, so I count myself among those people. I worked on the series for 18 years, though, so I have an obvious bias.

A few RPG outlets picked up my last post on the reasons I selected the ending I did for Wizardry 8, and even though it’s been 8 years since its release, it created a surprising flurry of traffic here as well as a number of emails asking me if I was going to make Wizardry 9. The answer to that question is multi-class but rests on a single answer: no. I can’t imagine a future in which I don’t eventually make another RPG. However, I am very happy making what I am making now and chose it for a reason over RPGs.  This isn’t the time for me to fight fight fight parry parry parry. Also, I don’t own the license anyway.

Ironically, however, I am also learning to code in C++ and am writing an RPG which will never see the light of day (seriously, and it shouldn’t). So, any latent RPG desires I might have are hidden in a sometimes error free compile. Other times, I invoke a segmentation fault. Mostly, I selected an RPG because I needed to work hard on the code and not on the design.

Regardless, this is where I wanted to go. Tolerate the level 1 coder statements:

// Set up story

printf( “\n\nThere is silence.” );
printf( “\n\nIt is a silence you don’t remember hearing before.” );
printf( “\n\nThere are objects, places and creatures that are quiet, but silence is an absolute.” );
printf( “\nIt is an absence of anything at all. It is pervasive, it is unpercussive,” );
printf( “\nand it is all around you.” );

// Allowing players to input their name

printf( “\n\nWho you are, where you are. Nothing seems very clear right now.” );
printf( “\n\nYou struggle to remember your name:  ” );

cin >> playerName1;

printf( “\nThe last thing you remember thinking was the impossibility of it all, that someone” );
printf( “\nwould just write the universe out of existence.” );
printf( “\n\nYou remember your friend turning to you and saying:”);
printf( “\n\n’%s? Is this it?'”, playerName1 );

printf( “\n\nThere were tears in his eyes. There were six of you then. Remembering,” );
printf( “\nyou start to cry in the darkness, and it breaks the silence. It is evident “);
printf( “\nthere is only one of you now.\n\n”);

And we all know that’s way too much text by today’s standards. Rewriting it for 2009, the DD would read: “Insert cutscene here.”