[Brak]

It is similar in many ways to Icewind Dale if you've played that. In both games you create your own party of six. And combat is around almost every corner and is quite difficult. However, it is more similar to BG2 in the way that there are so many race/class combinations, it is staggering. Wizardry8 much more so even than BG2. Because any race can choose any profession. And the mage-style classes are much more diverse from one another than in BG series.

As was stated, this game is 1st person view not overhead iso camera view. That can be quite confusing in a game where you control a party, so let me explain. You are not looking through the eyes of any one of your characters, but rather a camera that you can think of as floating at eye level between all of your characters. But you don't see any of your characters so you are kind of looking through the eyes of all of your characters at once. Because of this the party is always grouped together and always moves as a group (even unconsious party members move with the group??!!). This is highly unrealistic sounding, but somehow the game pulls it off successfully without the loss of immersion I expected. Unfortunately the effect on gameplay is that you can't move party members seperately to achieve strategic advatage (i.e. have fighters charge the enemy while spellcasters and archers stay a safe distance away). But you can customize formations at any time, so that involves a bit of strategy.

The game is very stat driven and it is even more important than the BG series to balance those stats and allocate level up points properly, because there is A LOT to it. In that respect it almost reminds me of my days with Diablo 2, saving level up points so they could be best spent at the best place when that skill (or in this case spell) became available. And planning and analysing and disecting the development path of each character before you even set out so you won't be midway through the game wondering why your characters suck. *Note, not everybody does this, and you don't need to, but my point was that the stats and skill point allocation in this game have such a huge effect on gameplay that it certainly lends itself to that kind of analyzation, any so many people do.

It is a VERY different feel from the BG series and depending on how you handled combat in BG, the combat can either be very similar in W8 or very different. If you liked to just issue a couple orders and let your characters go at it in kind of a fast pace W8 will seem like it is crawling. But if you made liberal use of the pause button or auto-pause options and issued orders every round so as to micromanage your party, then W8 will be fairly easy to get used to. But even then it might seem kinda slow in large battles because it is a modified turn based combat scheme, which means each of your enemies takes thier turn one....at....a....time. Either way combat in W8 is silimar to combat in BG when compared to a game like Diablo 2 or Gothic.

Gotta tell ya, I played all the infinity engine games (but never finished Planescape: Torment because I couldn't stand to do all that reading, I like action and adventure in my games, if I wanted to read I'd pick up a book). As different as these games are, I am hooked on W8. It is a great challenge and I can't wait to go home and play it. Speaking of too much reading sorry for the long post... [img]smile.gif[/img]

[ 01-17-2002: Message edited by: Brak ]