Wizardry Online Preview

We haven’t really heard much about Wizardry Online after we learned about it being published by Sony Online Entertainment, so it certainly comes off as a pleasant surprise that RPGFan had the chance to go hands-on with it and wrote a preview out of the experience. Here’s a snip:

Visually, the game is quite distictive. Dark, dreary colors greeted me in the zombie-filled dungeon whose depths I plumbed, and I was certainly impressive with the art style. Fusing an anime-inspired style of character design with a very gritty, Dark Souls-like environmental presentation very successfully captured the Wizardry atmosphere. Unlike the other games in the series, players are free to explore in either first or third-person, and I found both views to be mostly viable, although some situational awareness was certainly lost in the first-person mode.

Portions of the user interface were still untranslated, but it certainly didn’t look like it was going to set the world on fire. If you’re familiar with any recent MMO, you should be right at home here. However, there were some nice features. Hotkeys for different weapon sets were very welcome, and allowed me to quickly swap from my knuckle weapons to a sword and shield combo in the midst of the action RPG combat. Locking on to enemies was accomplished with the tab key, and allowed me to easily strafe around foes and avoid their attacks. The mapping system requires special items in order to complete your area maps, as well as to call attention to hidden pathways. There was a very muted, hand-scribbled aesthetic to the interface as a whole that I found appealing and consistent with the game’s art style.

Combat was a bit mashy, with the handy lock-on feature letting me easily run circles around my zombiefied foes as I mashed on my attack keys. The standard attack combinations look attractive and have a nice sense of weight when you connect with your foes. A hotbar on the bottom of the screen offers a number of special attacks, potions, and other abilities in other words, par for the MMO course. One quirk I noticed was that even after killing an enemy, the lock-on stays active, which can lead to odd situations where your character refuses to break stance and move in the direction you’d like them to until you manually release the lock.