Welcome to the board, Albromor!!!
Generally I find it a bit difficult to critique games for other people. What one individual player enjoys in a game can be so different from another but I will attempt to make some comments that may prove useful to you. I have played both games but I never completed Wiz8 which is a comment in and of itself.
W&W is the best and most enjoyable C(omputer)RPG I have played in a very long time. Yes, it does have some bugs. For those bugs which actually cause difficulty in playing the game, solutions have been found. The other bugs can be rather endearing such as the infinite gold bug. [img]smile.gif[/img]
W&W is superior to Wiz 8 in terms of character development. You have many options on how to develop your characters and are not punished for your choices. In Wiz 8 you are best off picking the correct character class from the very beginning of the game and and there is no advantage, indeed there is a disadvantage, to changing class later in the game. In Wiz 8 if you find that you have not choosen your characters' class well, you are better off restarting the game from scratch. In W&W if you find that you are missing a particular skill you have many options on how to aquire what you need and continue on.
W&W is genre consistant. The W&W is a fantasy medieval world which is consistant start to end. Wiz 8 is a mix of medieval and sci-fi. I personally do not like my CRPG genre mixed. It was the continuous sci-fi elements in Wiz 8 that eventually caused me to stop playing the game.
The graphics are better in Wiz 8 but I personally don't play a game for the "eye candy".
In W&W you create your party 1 to 6 members and while you will meet many NPCs along the way, none will ever "join" you. In Wiz 8 there are NPCs that you can have join your party. Sometimes that can be helpful if they have skills and weapons that your own group hasn't achieved but I prefer to be concerned only with the development of my own party and not have to worry about whether or not I should be taking this NPC with me or that NPC. (You can choose to not add any NPCs to your party in Wiz 8, I just dislike the option which leads player to believe that there is good reason to add an NPC when there isn't). Some of the Wiz 8 NPCs will work fine with your group and then suddenly refuse to go into the next area you've decided to explore. They just abandon you and if later you should want them back, you have to trek over half the kingdom to reclaim them.
Wiz 8 is bigger than W&W. Some players really like that. I prefer a smaller game world that I can get to know very well. Both games have a wide variety of environments to explore so there are lots of changes in scenery.
Some of the puzzles in Wiz8 required that you be standing in exactly the correct spot to solve which is not obvious. I had a rather frustrating encounter with a rope bridge puzzle. I was perhaps just one step away from where I needed to be to have solved this particular puzzle the very first time I encountered it. Instead I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to figure out some other solution. I never experienced such a problem in W&W.
W&W is a simplier game, overall, than is Wiz 8. To me that is to its credit making the game more fun and satisfying to play. By "simplier" I do not mean easier, just less confusing.
Wiz 8 has much better towns than W&W. W&W towns are nothing more than cardboard cutouts of buildings. In Wiz 8 you can walk through the towns and enjoy the same 3D experience as in the rest of the world.
W&W is biased towards swords, knives and staffs as far as available weapons go. While there are some good axes and weapons of other types within the game, swords, knives and staffs were really given the emphasis. I noticed no weapon preference in Wiz 8.
W&W was a rushed job. The developers were running low on cash and rushed completing the game to get it to market as a result many elements that were planned for the game ended up being dropped. There are places within the game that loose ends linger about what was planned. These do not harm the game. Wiz 8 appears to have had full development time and things were not cut to rush it to market. Indeed, it took longer to get to market than had been planned. Even so, the game came with bugs that they had time to remove.
Sooooooo I really like W&W and played it beginning to end and played it again. Wiz 8 I never completed and never will. Primarily it is the sci-fi in Wiz 8 that put me off completing the game. If you don't mind the mix of genre then you may very well enjoy both games. W&W is very cheap these days. Wiz 8 should be dropping in price. Try them!
And I am not Bradley! (LOL! that was a very old rumor and never true!
)
When this board was first started, Bradley was supposed to have come by and read the posts from time to time. That was shortly after the game had been released. I'm sure he is much to busy with other projects to bother about us now.
Pity - I think he would learn a lot which would help with a W&W II !
Wyv