So, as the title suggests, was the Dark Savant right or wrong? When you finally get to the Cosmic Circle, and the other Cosmic Lords are gone, and it's just you, Bela, and the Dark Savant/Phoonzang.
Can you really blame evil Phoonzang (The Dark Savant) for being angry? He created 3 artifacts, and gave mankind a way to find them all. The other Cosmic Lords (unnamed?), banished him from the circle, for daring to question their wisdom.
He was forced to live as a mortal, for a time. His hatred and bitterness overpowered him, and he became part man, part machine, infused with his knowledge, and the longevity of machinery. He became: The Dark Savant!
Was he right or wrong?

It is not about anger, it is what we do with it.
Also, he fell from a tall horse. Make of it what you will.
And he did basically many crimes against human- (well, space-) kind.
Sometimes all you have left is your anger.

Also, to (mis-)quote some brilliant exchange from Richard Burlew (author of "Order of the Stick") himself:
Person A : You are who you are on the worst day of your life.
Person B: Yes. You also are who you are on the day after that, and the next day, and so on.


(edit: minor typos).

The Dark Savant is definitely evil.

See, for example, his plan to blow up an entire planet just to keep someone else from ascending.

Or talk to Vi Domina and ask her about the Dark Savant.

Or, for that matter, watch the evil ending of Wizardry 8. (For whatever reason, it's the only ending that gets a special video.)

(Out of curiosity, how evil is the Dark Savant if you judge him solely on his Wizardry 7 appearance, ignoring Wizardry 8?)

I actually DO hate the Dark Savant for everything that has happened to Dominus: He shot down my spacecraft, and only my party survived (RIP Grimpak, the great Mook who got us here). He also shot down another spacecraft in Arnika (anybody know who that was, the one with the damaged black box)? Most notably, he shot down a Helazoid ship over Bayjin, killing everybody but Jan-Ette, who, with her last words, mentioned that HE is to be stopped. Grabbing their black box, and using the black box reader in the Arnika Spaceport, and then triangulating the Black Ship's position with the OrbitTracker, I was able to give the cloaked Black Ship's coordinates to Z'Ant. With help from the Umpani-T'Rang alliance, I was able to destroy the Dark Savant's Black Ship. But does HE still live? Was HE on the ship at the time of impact?
Nobody knows until the final showdown, when the Savant presents you with this moral dilemma. Join him, write him out of existance, or tear out the page and create a new universe?
My theory is that there is a multiverse, where all 3 realities can co-exist as one, without affecting the other. Similar to Schrodinger's Cat, the cat can simultaneously exist as both alive and dead, and it takes an observer to force an outcome.

Or it could be like the Warp in the West from the Elder Scrolls series. Daggerfall has multiple endings, and later in the series, by teading books, you learn that all of them happened at once, somehow. (This led to the term "Dragon Break" appearing in TES lore.)

As for the endings:
* The "write in the book" ending is the most obviously happy ending, and the one that, perhaps, least lends itself to a sequel.
* The "join savant" ending is the one that, I'm guessing, would lead best into Wizardry 9, should it ever get made. You need to have conflict to keep things interesting enough to have another game.
* The "tear page" ending is the one that, I'd argue, leads to the Japanese Wizardry spin-offs. Essentially, you have the universe where some early games in the series may have happened, but definitely not the later ones. The rules might be different, like how Valkyries have to be neutral (meaning that Vi Domina, who is easily Good (since she doesn't like the Dark Savant), is not a valid character under these rules). (To put it another way, this universe branched away from the main Wizardry universe sometime before the Cosmic Forge showed up.)

I actually grew up with Morrowind (it was the first game I downloaded from GOG, before W8). I loved creating Nord Males, for their high Endurance (remember that Endurance is not retroactive, meaning get it as high as possible early, to maximize hit points). I loved the Fighter-Nords, they would max Strength and Endurance early, and then work on Dexterity and Speed afterwards.
I just got lost in the world, talking to too many NPCs about everything, that I would usually get too high level (by abusing trainers, and the Creeper that would make me a lot of money), and few quests would be done, that I lost interest. I would also get annoyed with the many bugs in that game, like the one that would prevent you getting a 5X attribute bonus on level up if you were to get an attribute to 100. I would often "cheat" just to fix the attribute system, and edit in 100 to whatever "should" have been maxed, if not for the bug.

Anyways, I agree that the Dark Savant had no right to do the evils that he did, but I do sympathize with him, on the grounds that he had a right to be angry *at the Cosmic Lords who banished him*, not everybody else. His anger is misdirected.

C'mon, it's 2002, and they're *still* using non-retroactive HP gains? This stupid mechanic should have died a long time ago. It *maybe* was undestandable back in 1994 (when Arena was released), and *possibly* when Daggerfall was released in 1996, but come on. Might & Magic 3 had retroactive HP gains, and that was back in *1991*. Evin Wizardry 8, released in 2001, got rid of both non-retroactive HP gains and random HP games. It's really inexcusable that Bethesda has stubbornly clung onto such an awful mechanic.

(And the problem persists into Oblivion, relesaed in 2006.)

This whole issue with HP gains isn't the only thing that Wizardry 8 did better than Morrowind. For example, with skill increases:
* In Morrowind, you have to succeed at using a skill to get skill experience, making it rather painful to raise a skill from a low value without training. This is not the case in Wizardry 8, and in some cases (spells), skills improve faster when they fail.
* In Morrowind, the difficulty of the action you perform doesn't affect the amount of skill experience you get. If you want to practice Destruction, you need to repeatedly cast low level spells; casting a high level spells, assuming it's successful, won't give any more skill experience. (Exceptions do exist.) Wizardry 8 isn't like that; casting a high level spell gives you more skill experience. (Note that, in both games, it's harder to increase skills that are already high.)

Yes, thank you. That was my biggest problem with Morrowind: Non-retroactive HP gains. If you want a tough character, you had better take the sign that increases Endurance, The Lady? It forces melee characters to maximize Endurance early, lest they lose out on hit points. It's a terrible game mechanic. Not to mention, the backwards level-up system. If you want to reach the highest possible level, you had better pick a race that is terrible at what you want, and pick a specialty that doesn't benefit your skill set. It's so backwards.
After Morrowind, Oblivion felt so watered down, that I couldn't play it for very long. The armor system was reduced to less body parts. The skills setup was reduced to fewer skills, and there were overall fewer spells to cast. Yuck to younger Millennials and Gen-Z kids.
Note that, if you want good end-game gear, I did check on Flamestryke's site (RIP). There is a good chance of getting a Harassment Rapax squad at the East side of the Mountain Wilderness. They will usually appear in yellow (neutral). They have a 100% drop rate for treasures, meaning you will always get something for killing them, great for farming. The Estoc de Olivia (an excellent non-Mook Ranger-only sword), and Gowns of Divinemail, both upper and lower body armor, may be farmed.
My Bard and Gadgeteer both have the Lower Gown of Divinemail leg armor (+10 AC to legs, +15 Vitality, +1 HP rengeneration). If they could get the same for the upper body, that would be another +10 AC to the chest, another +15 Vitality, and another +1 to HP regeneration (certainly better than the Robes of Rejuvenation sold by Ferro).

Actually, it forces *all* characters who want to eventually raise Endurance to do so early, when for some characters I'd rather focus on other attributes, like Intelligence or Speed, first.

Arena also has this problem, but between Oghma Infinium farminig (lets you raise attributes as much as you want, but beware the all attributes 100 softlock), and the fact that boosts to Endurance from equipment and Fortify spells affect HP gains, it doesn't feel quite so bad. Then again, Arena does have random HP games, unlike Morrowind and later.

For birthsign, I tend to like the magical ones. For Morrowind, Apprentice is pretty good (the drawback isn't *that* bad), and Atronach is pretty fun. For Oblivion, I go with Mage, because the other two have rather serious drawbacks. (I've tried Atronach in Oblivion, and you have to spend a lot of time gathering ingredients for Restore Magicka potions if you're playing a mage.) With that said, at least Oblivion allows you to use the console to change your birthsign in a well-behaved manner, unlike in Morrowind where that particular cheat is not well-behaved. (This means that I can use the Atronach birthsign for experiments when I deliberately don't want my Magicka to recover on its own.)

A couple random facts:
* Greater powers require 0 Magicka to use (in addition to being only usable once per day); if you don't have that much (that is, if you have negative Magicka), you can't use greater powers.
* The Ayelid wells in Oblivion are treated as you casting the Ayelid Well spell. This means you get Restoration practice each time. On the other hand, it means that, if you don't have at least the 0 Magicka that the spell requires, your attempt to draw power from the well will fail due to lack of Magicka.

Let's agree that Wizardry 8 is better than the Bethesda games overall.

I found myself playing Oblivion more than Morrowind just because Oblvion has less jank. In Morrowind, there are so many janky mechanics that they interfered with my enjoyment of the game. Things like how Fortify Intelligence and Fortify Magicka interact, or how Alchemy can't be used without either breaking the game or imposing overly restrictive self-imposed rules that also deny what I see as legitimate strategies.

There's also the fact that, in Morrowind, humanoid enemies don't ever respawn (except for Guards, but I'm nervous about reputation in any TES game other than Arena when it comes to them).

On the other hand, I don't like how Oblivion took away so many spells, and as a result ruined the balance between magic schools. Mysticism no longer has Absorb Health (that's Restoration only) or Divine/Almsivi Intervention. Alteration no longer has Levitate (gone), Slowfall (gone, also cue rant about how they got rid of all ways to mitigate fall damage, which I find rather frustrating), and Jump (gone, yet Restoration still have Fortify Acrobatics). Then, of course, they made Restoration level slowly to try and counterbalance this, which ended up making that skill rather painful to level. There's also the fact that there are no custom Cast on Use enchantments, as those are my favorite in earlier games in the series.

(I also don't like how, in Oblivion, you can't climb up steep slopes without a horse (and it makes no sense that a horse would let you), whereas in Morrowind having high enough Acrobatics would let you climb by repeated jumping (or just use a Levitate spell).)

I think the games are too different to really compare them. In particular, the combat systems are too different.

Bethesda games definitely have more of everything (including bugs).

Again, it comes down to us older generations vs these kids: Dumbed down game mechanics, and instant gratification (these newer games practically hold their hand, whereas in Morrowind and before, you were on your own).