I just spend around 3 hours configuring a party in Wiz 7 Gold, only to notice after another hour of wandering around that the Gold version is unplayable. Combat text is so fast you dont know what is going on. Additionally level ups go by so fast you dont catch which stats have improved. After reading around in the forums a bit I realized that I should have gone with the DOS version, which is hidden under extras. Well, another 3 hours of party creation ahead, yikes

In my humble opinion, the DOS version of Wizardry 7 should be the standard version with the gold version as an option for those die hard fans of voice acting... Or at least put a disclaimer there!

Diolomacy is broken in Gold, the character portraits look much worse, and the voice acting is atrocious. The only small thing Gold has going for it is a better automap.

I agree completely. Additionally, There are a number of bugs that exist in Gold that don't exist in the original version, and there's some limited compatibility with the Cosmic Forge editor as well.

I actually think that not including any screenshots of the DOS version of the game on the store page is also doing the game a disservice.

Agreed.
The only reason I tried it out is the sound. Which is better in gold, I guess, because there is speech.
Muffled, badly acted and low quality speech.:(
Stay with the dos version I say.

I have imported Wizardry 8 portraits into Wizardry 7 Gold.
Here's the video showing the results and other info.
Download links are in the description.

I really don't get why are the portraits one of the main reasons for not playing the gold version since you can change them...
they are just 256-colour indexed bmps in the game's folder.

Non-human-like skinned portraits were converted automatically to the indexed format, the human-like skinned ones had to be converted manually and painstakingly (because automatic conversion yielded either brown, red, orange or yellow rather than a caucassian skin colour)

I am not monetizing that video.