Wizardry The Five Ordeals

[Jaymann]

You want old school hardcore RPG? This is definitely that. And I have beaten the other two recent entries. No saves except when you exit the game. Inventory management is incredibly clunky. You roll a party of six. You can re-roll your stats, but you have to fully create your character then delete it. Dungeon mazes with traps and puzzles.

My first party of course I took my stats through the roof, even got a Lord. Then, even looking at an online map, I fell down a floor. No problem, I thought, and checked the map for the exit. But I got jumped on the way to the switch for a full party wipe.

All you can do is roll up another party for a rescue mission. I did that, but you better believe I am going to level up ridiculously before attempting it. Great fun.

[Jaymann]

Well I staged a successful body retrieval with a level 6 party. You have to have an open slot for each character you want to rescue, so I went in with a party of 5 and grabbed my dead Lord (now I have 2). There is another thief I want to save; may leave the rest to rot as they are only level 1 with no gear to speak of. Now that I know the drill it should be trivial. However, some mobs can get lucky and one shot you with a decapitation.

[GreenGoo]

I remember doing that with the original way back in the early 80's. I don't think I have the fortitude to do it again. Interesting hearing about your escapades though.

[Jaymann]

I had to really grind to get enough geld to buy the elevator key ($15k!).

Spoiler:

Actually you buy dynamite so you can get to the key.

Every time I got close escalating resurrection fees knocked me back. Now I have a res spell but it ages you a year and lowers VIT by one. No thanks. At least while grinding geld I was getting good exp.

[Carpet_pissr]

geld

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

[Jaymann]

It's fine as long as we aren't talking about horses.

[GreenGoo]

Geld is a surname literally meaning "gold" or "money" in some Germanic languages.

[Jaymann]

Well the game has officially become a grind (at level 11). I got to a quest item on floor 8 and could not beat the guardians in 4 or 5 tries. Now my only recourse is to grind levels and it is now very slow.

[Jaymann]

Good news is I finally beat that tough mob on floor 8.

Terrible news is I had to use Evacuate to warp home and I lost all my gear and all my geld (including the elevator key). Brutal!

At least I learned that lesson now instead of later. From now on I will bank my geld and a backup set of gear.

[Zarathud]

Back in the day you could copy/pirate the whole disk for emergency backup. That gave me the choice of losing ALL my gold and gear, or PART of it along with the XP. Never an easy choice.