Wiz 8 Alteration

And here’s a bit of good news on the Wizardry 8 front. The team announced on their Official Site that they’ve reduced the loading times significantly. From some of the various message boards such as the Official Wiz 8 board over at VNBoards and then Greatest RPG fans Wiz 8 board, there’s been some talk about the long load times as witnessed in the press demo. Here’s the scoop from the official site:

We wanted to give you a little update….

And just to get this out of the way first… No, there’s no official word on the publisher or the release date.

But there is a positive side. We’ve been able to devote some time to investigating something that has been niggling away at us, with great results. We are happy to report that we have been able to improve our loading times by anywhere from 30 – 60% (depending on the level being loaded). The biggest improvement came from manipulating the way we load material lists. By changing this system we now have the advantage of avoiding a LOT of disk access and lookups via texture names. Of course we still need to do some additional testing on these changes but all looks good so far. We thought you’d appreciate hearing about this improvement.

From my experience, the load times were approximately 20-30 seconds for a load depending on where one loaded from. It certainly wasn’t like Fallout 2 pre-patch, but it was somewhat annoying upon start up. The saves, however, were pretty much instantaneous. From a PII 450.