First off, let me say I'm absolutely pumped that this got announced. I had always hoped to see some form of release of Wizardry 1-5 on GOG, but figured if it hadn't happened by now, it wasn't going to simply because they were in legal limbo. Whatever wheeling and dealing had to take place to make this happen, I hope it bodes well for releases of 2-5 as well.

That being said:
If you feel like wasting 3.5 hours of your life, my Twitch VOD of the initial experience is here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1927305918

If not, and I don't blame you, some of the highlights/lowlights/bugs/etc:

-Like others, I initially had problems with getting my new party and/or other changes to save. I'll go back through the VOD and see if I can be more specific later, but I created a party, went back to the main menu, and the game basically decided "No you didn't." and acted as if that never happened. Then I tried changing the names of the default party, went into the maze with them, and noticed the name changes had also been reverted (You can actually see the changes revert at right about 48 minutes in the above video). It wasn't until I did some adventuring with the default party and then exited the maze that any subsequent changes I made in terms of character creation/name changes/etc. seemed to actually "stick". If it helps, I think that's when I stopped seeing the "You start with a premade party..." prompt every time I loaded the game as well.

-EDIT TO ADD: The bug with things not sticking until you did some adventuring with the default party carried over to Options changes as well. At about 42 minutes into the video, you can see me change the "Random Points on creation" to "On", and go to the Training Grounds...where the option turns itself off mid-creation (I go back into the menu just before 44 minutes).

-Others have reported this, but the help text implies that when you create a character, they start with a basic set of equipment. They don't. They start with some Gold...but that gold doesn't actually go into their pockets until they enter and exit the Maze (I note that in general, entering and exiting the Maze seems to be the most reliable way of saving progress, even if you shouldn't ordinarily need to, IE when gaining a level at the Inn). Fixing that so you see the gold as soon as a newly created character joins your party (Or just giving them the implied basic equipment) would be great.

-Speaking of equipment, love the Quality of Life descriptions of weapons/armor/etc. No more looking up an online list of weapon/etc. attributes for me! No more guessing how good an item is based on the price either! Wahoo!

-On that note, I appreciate showing some of the resistances that were apparently in the original game (And had to do with your Lineage, I guess), but were never actually shown.

-Also love the QoL mapping features, particularly the "quickly see last Dumapic cast" feature in conjunction with it showing a map of what you've explored so far.

-One of the QoL features I'm less a fan of is the "Predetermined attribute points at Character Creation" one. I get it, but I also think the "quickly reroll bonus" option if you go old school is enough of an improvement there.

-Two smaller bugs: 1. Sometimes back row characters get reported as having an AC 2 lower than it actually is. It looks like it's doing some real-time tracking of AC a la Elminage, and setting it to 2 lower when those characters Parry...but it doesn't always properly set it back such as when a battle is over. 2. This may actually be intentional, but when running from a battle, the minimap gets a little wonky.

-I'm just going to vent here: You should really be able to automatically succeed in running from a battle where you surprise the monsters. I know, the original Apple II version behaved this way (I think), but c'mon.

-Speaking of the Apple II version, that version (And other ports) had a few features this one seems to be missing and it would be great if they could be included somehow. Someone in another topic mentioned doing a lot of character maintenance in Gilgamesh's Tavern, but the two big ones for me are both in Camp in the Maze: The "quickly equip everyone" feature where you just say "Equip" and it goes character-by-character and asks "What weapon do you want to equip? What armor do you want to equip?" etc., and the "Quickly reorder the party" feature where you pick the slot the character is currently in to be first, the next one to be second, etc. (So hitting "5 1 2 4 3 6" would put the fifth character in the lead, the first in the second slot, etc.)

-Presentation-wise, I like the little Apple II representation in the dungeon. I also loved the nods to the NES version music (Especially in the battle theme--see about 50M30S in the video above for my reaction). The graphics are cool too, a lot of neat dungeon touches like the skull near the stairs to the city or the statue at the end of one of the hallways. I haven't actually gotten very far into the dungeon yet--turns out it's really hard to get a party going in this. I presume you're aware of that, hence the premade party beginning at Level 2.

-Finally, I noticed the Battle Log didn't auto-scroll as much as I would like it to. It seems to just stop once it fills up a "Screen" worth and I need to manually PgDn it to get it to work again. Oh well, minor thing.

-As far as the difficulty goes, I think I agree with the people who want some form of save file backup. Yes, I know the "Developer-intended" way of playing Wizardry was very hardcore, but as I understand it, almost no one actually did that even back in the day--they either made multiple backups of their character disks or, if they felt particularly lucky, took said disc out of their drives before any catastrophic failure could be written to them. I came along a little later, with the console ports of Wizardry...and I had no problem basically living near the Reset button so I could dive for it if something really bad happened.

(Speaking of "things done back in the day", I'm crushed that you can no longer identify Item 9/S/J, though I do understand why that bug as a whole isn't a thing here anymore)

Overall though, I'm very excited for what this can be once it's completely finished, and look forward to hopefully seeing Wizardry 2-5 on GOG in some form (Be it this, straight ports, or something in between).

I actually did run into this situation, where I ambushed the enemies, but failed to run in the surprise round.

I'm thinking that there should maybe be a "Wizardry 2 rules" option that causes the game to behave like Wizardry 2, or like some console versions of Wizardry 1. Make it so that spells can't be cast in the surprise round (on both sides). Make spells like LATUMAPIC, HAMAN, and MAHAMAN work like in Wizardry 2.

Perhaps also an option to make running away take you back only one square, which is how console versions of Wizardry 1 worked. (But not Sir-Tech Wizardry; it's particularly annoying in Wizardry 7 where the party fleeing can be the result of a status effect rather than the player entering the command.) They could copy Wizardry 8. When you start a new game, some options appear, with the Iron Man setting on the bottom. If OFF, you can save and load as you choose to. If ON, there's only the forced auto-save. This would go in the retro options, except that it wouldn't be possible to change this setting once the game has begun. I've found that I like identifying, I think, Item ";", which would teach the next character LOKTOFIET. Now that the character knows a 6 level Priest spell, they could then learn MADI, by far the best healing spell, by leveling up.

There's also a way to change the condition of a character to "Afraid", a status ailment that is otherwise unused. (It goes away on its own, but if you try to remove it in the temple, the cost is equal to an uninitialized variable times the character's level, which is quite expensive (unless there's a way to manipulate it).) This only works for some status ailments, but it does work for Ashes, providing an alternate way to revive characters.

I had spent around 2hrs in the game so far, but most of the initial play time is wasted in recreating new characters again and again as didn't realize the game won't save your progress if you accidentally exited to the main menu from the town screen (after created the new characters, want to go back to previous screen to enter tavern to change party members, but hit the B button too fast and exited to main menu instead, was amazed that there is not even a warning asking you whether you want to proceed to exit the game to the main menu without saving) and all the effort of creating new party members wasted as the game did not save first before exit to the main menu, it seem the game only save when you exit from a maze, or if you quit the game properly.

I also encounter a strange bug, it seem the game constant crash to desktop when I try to inspect the inventory of a specific newly created character while in the maze. Most of my earlier exploring efforts are wasted because of this bug as you cannot save the game until you exit the maze or quit the game properly. Only after I finally decided to delete off that specific character causing the problem and created a new char as replacement, then this problem is resolved but now have to re-level that new char.

And not sure if it is a bug, when ventured deeper into Floor 1 the auto-map started to map the newer area over the older one, which become very confusing as you now have two different maps overlapping each other and can no longer read the now messy map properly. Also kind of disappointed that the auto-map do now save your previous exploration after quit\exited the maze or move to a different floor and back. So even with the option of the auto-map, it seem it is still a necessity to draw and keep a manual map to keep track of your progress like the old hardcore days.

So though I had already lowered my expectation because the game is still in EA, but apparently the game still not in a stable state yet for me. :( I think I will shelf it until the game has gotten a few patches and bug fixes, and hopefully a more user friendly way of saving the game progress will be added in the future too.

Try casting DUMAPIC when this happens.

Okay, played some more earlier this afternoon, or at least tried to. For some reason, after not having a problem with this in 3.5 hours yesterday, the game was super crash-happy today. One time gave a generic "Fatal Error", but every other time the graphics would freeze while the audio kept going, and after two minutes, the following error would pop up that I couldn't even get a screenshot of:

"LowLevelFatalError [File: Unknown] [Line: 1209]
GameThread timed out waiting for RenderThread after 120.00 secs"

From this, I learned in-game saving is..interesting. More precisely, it looks almost like your character stats are saved independently/more frequently than your position in the maze. IE if I fight a battle on a square, exit the Maze, and the game crashes, the most likely result is that I'll wind up getting the credit for the battle, but when I go back into the game, I'll be fighting another battle on the same square as I fought the first. Not sure if this has happened to anyone else, or if this description helps at all.

Either way, really enjoying the game when it's not crashing!

EDIT Late on 9/17: Okay, seems like the game is pretty stable in the not-crashing sense so long as you don't change the graphical settings (Particularly resolution and window) from their defaults. If you do, it's basically a crapshoot. Changing them back to 1920X1080 Borderless Window (My defaults; I don't know if the game auto-detects these or not) seems to have cleared up the crashes at any rate, but I'll do some more experimentation tomorrow to confirm.

Oh, some other thoughts: Yes to both of these, moreso the first than the second. In particular, a somewhat-useful KATINO spell would really help with getting that crucial first level or two to help make survivability a bit easier. I would actually even be happy with something like the following (DISCLAIMER: I have no idea how hard something like this would actually be to implement): When you load the game, your character roster state is copied to another location. At the end of your session, before you go to quit, you're asked something like "Overwrite Roster with current progress before quitting? Y/N". That would most closely mirror my experiences (And I imagine, most people's in reality) with PC versions of Wizardry--backing up my characters at the start/end of each session. I feel like a session's worth of progress is enough to potentially lose to be punishing if I screw up, without being so much that I ragequit and never play again simply because Wizardry decided to Wizardry in a session.

I'll be honest, I've never been a fan of how total party kills are handled in Wizardry 1-5. Yes, it's hard, yes, maybe I need to "git gud" or whatever, but I'm fine with, EG, having a character (Or several) die and trying to make it back to town with my remaining members. I'm less okay with the total party kill as applied in Wizardry--if I'm making a backup party to get the first, and that backup party is strong enough to get to where the first died and rescue it, why would I not just continue on with that backup party instead of wasting time and money trying to restore the first?

Even something like "On total party kill, send bodies back to the castle minus gold" or something would be something I'd be willing on play on from, versus just calling them a loss and starting a second party instead. Again, maybe a potential quality of life option, I don't know.

There's also other considerations:
* If a party dies to the final boss, good luck getting them back.
* If your party teleports into solid rock, there's no way to recover them.

Some console ports mitigated the second issue by "only" killing the party and teleporting them back to town. I noticed that in one of the Wizardry Gaiden games when they pulled the "walk into rock" troll on me 9though, since I was using an emulator, I could just save state out of that).

So that you don't have to grind up a whole new party when your backup party gets wiped of course!

I've actually found that when I ironman Wizardries, running two parties in parallel (alternating with each expedition basically) makes the games play much more smoothly. Between the way leveling works, and the fact that some expeditions are going to be longer and more successful than others your characters aren't going to be all that far behind where they would be if they were the only party, and party wipes really aren't a big deal if it only takes you ten minutes to go and get them back.

Too bad they took away that option later in the series.

(It's the one change that Wizardry 6 made that I dislike the most. Well, that and the whole "base miss chance" mechanic.)

Oh man, yes. Keep the highly random, lethal combat. Toss out the multi-party mechanics, add in save-everywhere and you end up with a savescum fest that turns the highly random parts of the game into a giant waste of time, instead of a challenge to strategize around. These days, I'll periodically fire up one of the Dark Savant trilogy games, only to quickly grow bored and abandon the playthrough. Meanwhile, I'm at like 400 hours in Five Ordeals, and am currently grinding the last floor of the Five Questions user scenario so that I can survive the post-game floor...

I like having save anywhere, or at the very least a manual save that the game won't overwrite without me telling it to.

On the other hand, I like being able to change up my party, creating new characters, changing who's in my party, and still being able to get the old characters back.

For the CRPG I'm making, I'm thinking that combat will sometimes be quite lethal, but you'll respawn back in town without losing anything. Or something along those lines. Hence, when you die, you lose your position, but not your character growth. (And there will, of course, be the option of reloading if you use up; too much weapon durability.)

Okay, back for more, putting in about 20 hours in total so far (A decent chunk of it being grinding on Murphy's Ghost).

First off, now that I've had occasion to use it, I'm really liking the option to leave characters inside the dungeon on an individual basis. As far as I know, that wasn't a thing in the original version (Or at least it wasn't easy to do). There's still the issue of dragging the corpses back to the surface once you get them (Particularly if, as mentioned, your previous death was on a boss encounter), but at least getting to them is much more reasonable now.

Also, regarding stability, others have mentioned changing some settings in the %Localappdata%\murphy\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\GameUserSettings file, primarily setting bUseVSync to True and FrameRateLimit to either 60 or 30 in the [/Script/Engine.GameUserSettings] section. I also found that setting the various options in [ScalabilityGroups] from 3 to 1 makes things a lot more stable for me (I'm guessing these are visual quality options), probably at the cost of making the game look worse, but I don't notice that much of a difference. Just something to note if anyone else had their game crash frequently.

Other stuff: I did notice this in both the SNES port of I-II-III and the NES port of Knight of Diamonds (In the former case, I fell for the "walk into rock" trap [To be fair, I was pretty sure it was *a* trap, just not the specific kind of it]; in the latter, I was unfortunate enough to set off a teleporter trap in a chest on the floor with solid rock on it). I wasn't sure if those mercies were added to those ports, or were a side effect of both being "stuff the game did to me" versus "Stupidly mis-inputting Malor coordinates on my own", or both.

I've thought about making one very inspired by Wizardry II in particular. My very preliminary thoughts on how I'd handle this are something like this...first, there would be a "bank" of gold (Similar to this remake, actually!) your collected gold would go into when you made it back to town. That said, on a total party kill, I'd see three potential options the player could select:
1. Leave the bodies in the dungeon with everything they collected on the excursion--gold, items, experience, etc. This is for those who really want the "Classic Wizardry" experience, or who like running multiple parties in parallel, or hate the idea of losing that potentially shiny new sword they collected on the excursion, etc.
2. Teleport the bodies back to town. They would keep any experience they earned on the trip, but lose the gold they collected (I'm undecided on items). They would also still be dead, similar to the NES/SNES Wizardries that showed you a bit of mercy and occasionally put your "teleported into rock!" characters back in the Castle, meaning you'd have to dip into that bank or use other resources to resurrect them. I feel like this is still punishing enough to encourage caution in travel, while avoiding some of what I see as issues with how Wizardry handles it.
3. Reload session. Similar to restoring from a copy of your character disc in the original versions of Wizardry, this would basically just be like "The last amount of time never happened", a la restoring from a Final Fantasy save point or similar. You'd obviously lose any progress you made in the session, but on the other hand, don't need to worry about resurrecting the characters. People who really dislike savescumming wouldn't like it...which is why the other two would be options.

Oh, jumping to something I noticed: It looks like if you don't have any Good characters, Friendly monsters simply don't appear. I feel like that's something that should be changed (I can't remember if that's original behavior, but I know it's not in later ports), otherwise if you have a good character accidentally flip to Evil, how are you supposed to flip them back? Do the whole workaround to get them in a party with Good characters and hope a Friendly monster shows up then?

Anyway! Still enjoying the game!

I call that particular floor of Knight of Diamons the "cave floor". Its level 4 on computers, but level 5 in the FC/NES port and versions based on it. There's enough solid rock in that floor that I consider it prudent to get a second opinion about traps, and to maybe leave teleporter traps alone. There's a couple other interesting things about that floor, like how rooms are not separated by doors, and that there are enemies with high index numbers that are specific to this floor (things like bats, for example).

(Dev suggestion: If you do remake Wizardry 2, this floor should visually look like a cave.)

I'm thinking that, for my CRPG, I want the unexpected to happen, so that a player who simply gets unlucky could find themselves in a scary situation, and have to hope that the important spell goes off, or that the enemy decides to not attack that one character. Also, that the player should have to prepare for contingencies, like if the main healer gets one-shot by an enemy's lucky critical or death spell. On the other hand, I don't want to penalize the player too harshly when that does happen. So, I'm thinking that I'll use a less punishing version of #2, where your party ends up alive in town without penalty (keeping any stat increases gained during the battle), but not auto-saving, so the player still has the option to reload (if, for example, the player used up too much item durability trying to survive), or just turn off the game without saving.

In any case, combat would be balanced more like Wizardry 8 or Dragon Quest 2, not like Crystal Project (where you can, with the right strategy, prevent enemies from using their nasty attacks and/or force the enemies to target your tank instead of your healer).

Also, I'm going to try to avoid mechanics that would require too much reloading. This means that, for example, it might make sense to allow bosses to be re-fought so that the player can more easily try to farm for specific skills. (I don't want a situation like trying to learn Flare or Teleport from Dunatis in SaGa 2.)

Another interesting aspect of my game's design: There will be one race (though I'm thinking of using a different term, though not "lineage" because the "races" aren't similar enough for it to make sense) whose stat growth and skill learning is highly random. If you don't like that, you don't need to include that race in your party; there will be 3 other races to choose from.

That's how the original worked.

Attacking friendly monsters, I believe, resulted in a 1 in 2000 chance of the character's alignment changing to Evil, a change that there's no way to reverse.

(I don't remember how the game handles parties with both good and evil characters, but such parties would be highly unusual in the original and could not be saved; this remake, however, does allow the trick of leaving opposite-aligned characters in the dungeon and picking them up with a new character.)