Impressions of Wizardry Online

Has anyone seen Wizardry Online? It’s free-to-play, and another one of those hardcore old school MMORPGs that SOE seems to like. It’s clearly Asian in origin, but it’s weird because it’s an Asian vision of standard European medieval tropes like elves and dwarves. The graphics are odd as well. It looks a bit like everything is a low-contrast sepia-toned image.

WO seems to be one of the “hard” MMOs that everyone clamors for (but never actually plays). Some games are hard now simply because the controls are foreign (like EQ and AC-playing those two now is like trying to type on a Dvorak keyboard). WO is hard even with a modernized input system. There are no (well, few) sparklies showing you where to go. Supposedly it is permanent death if you die. (I haven’t died yet to test that out.) Supposedly it is open world PvP and anyone can PK you. (I haven’t encountered any PKs yet.) It’s got an odd combat system where you lock onto targets to fight with them (it’s a bit like Dark Souls if you’ve played that). There’s no renewal of health or mana so you have to drink potions or cast spells to heal. It’s got very limited inventory so you have to really choose your equipment wisely (things that you wear still take up space in your backpack, a super old school concept). You can’t see how tough monsters are until you fight them. You have to identify magic items to see what they are, and you have to go back a place to level up after you’ve gained enough experience. It’s … you know, hard.

It does have a few modern amenities though. It has quests to kill ten rats and so forth, and it has a bunch of achievements.

Other than being hard, though, it doesn’t have many other selling points. I think I only saw one other person playing when I was on over the weekend, and there was no general chat. It doesn’t have any story that I can discern yet.

It’s kind of quaint though. I can see myself playing more if I get bored of another MMO’s grind.