Baldurs Gate 2 ToB Arcanum Wizardry 8 Blade of Destiny Syberia     

Wizardry 8 Low-Spoiler Directory of Quests and other Cool Things

There are several walkthroughs and spoiler pages for Wizardry 8 out there, but none of them told me what I wanted to know--namely, whether I'd missed any quests, puzzles, character interactions, or other cool things to do on any of the maps, WITHOUT telling me the solution at the same time. Strategy and riddles I can figure out on my own, but was there any more to the Rapax Royal Family subplot that I was missing somehow?

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So, I've written one myself, with the intention of pointing gamers towards things they might not have tried rather than divulging puzzle solutions or giving step-by-step walkthrough instructions. There are plenty of other sites that do that better already... besides, some people don't want that stuff spoiled, they just want tips on where to look for more things to do. So I've been vague where possible, trying to include only the starting point for each quest so as to let you work through the rest of it on your own, and I haven't indicated every fight or treasure source. If you want a more explicit hint, please check out my Links page, where several good walkthroughs and messageboards can be found.

Now, on with the game!

Wizardry 8 Review
Wizardry 8 Hints and Tips
Wizardry 8 PC Voicesets
Wizardry 8 NPC Guide
Wizardry 8 Walk through: Monastery through Trynton
Wizardry 8 Walkthrough: the Swamp through the T'rang and Umpani
Wizardy 8 Walkthrough: Mt. Gigas through Ascension
Wizardry 8 Game Quips and Quotes
Wizardry 8 Cheats
Wizardry 8 Gadgeteer Guide (partial spoilers)
Wizardry 8 Links (Patches, Trainers, Editors, Maps, and Forums)

Wizardry 8 Hints and Tips



This is a classic, old-school CRPG, and the character interactions and side quests are few and far between. Tips for making the most out of it:

Party Creation: When putting together your party, create six characters for it. You may like to go solo if you play the game a second time, just for a different set of challenges, but there's one point at which the game will choke on a solo character unless you manipulate the plot by killing off a certain NPC, and being told to do this in advance ruins one of the best subplots in the game. Besides, with six characters you will get the most commentary from the surprisingly rich and entertaining voicesets. (If you're having trouble deciding which of the 32 voicesets to pick, see here for a better description of each.) At least one of your characters should be male, and if one is a Mook, you will get an extra little character interaction at the Mook HQ. It doesn't matter to the plot at all what character classes they are, but a gadgeteer will give you the added fun of gadget-making, and there are many special items useable only by bards (or those who have been a bard for 12-14 levels, at any rate). The automatic-searching feature of rangers is convenient for not missing any hidden items, but you can duplicate it by having a character with mage or psionic spells cast "detect secrets" repeatedly. The alchemist's ability to create potions is much less useful than it sounds, and ninjas and rangers are just as good at mixing potions. If you have at least four characters with spellcasting ability, the pointless travel time will be drastically reduced, as you'll be able to cast four different portals (more if you have the right NPCs along).

Settings: Don't play on Iron Man, at least not the first time. This is not a bug-free game. I died twice due to falling through cracks in the 3D environment and once due to a buggy elevator. If such a death caused me to have to literally restart my game from scratch, I think I would have thrown my CD out the window.

Classes: Don't worry overmuch about class-switching. Unlike Wizardry 7, it isn't necessary to class-switch to build good characters. There can be good reasons to class-switch--if you want a particular NPC but his current class doesn't fit your party makeup, if one of your characters has maxed out his profession and is getting boring to level-up, if you want a non-spellcaster to learn the portal spell to cut down on your travel time, if you have a bard (once they have enough levels to play all the instruments well, they can switch to another, more effective class with no penalty). You will retain the old skills your character has built up, but not the special abilities of his old class, and you will not be able to add to his old skills anymore unless his new profession also uses them. Tactically you can win with any party, but fighters and rangers make particularly good classes to switch to due to their innate berserking and critical-shooting abilities. In the end, though, whether to switch your classes around is entirely a matter of personal preference and you shouldn't feel pressured to do it just because it's possible.

Time Management: There is no time limit anywhere in this game and your characters don't age. If it takes you six years to get to Arnika, fine. So don't be afraid to rest as often as you need to.

Skill Improvement: You can grow your abilities dramatically through practice. This means that if you sit around casting 'charm' on Braffit over and over again, your Mental and Psionics scores will steadily rise. This is effective but very boring. You don't need to do it to win the game but if you enjoy it, there is no downside to skill training, ever, so knock yourself out.

NPCs: You can only have two NPCs in your party at a time. The excuses they give for this range from amusing to just plain stupid. NPCs will leave your party if you try to enter areas they're not programmed for. You can drag them in anyway by teleporting or by knocking them unconscious before entering (giving them the Giant Silver Nugget to carry and them running around in a circle will usually do the trick); however, they will complain incessantly, will be cursed in all their abilities and skills until you leave again, and will have no comments or interactions with anything in the area they don't belong in. Information on specific recruitable NPCs is listed in the Wizardry 8 character directory.

Sticky Fingers: Be careful with pickpocketing. Except for a couple of Rapax with keys late in the game, nothing you can pickpocket is a unique item, and being caught pickpocketing will lower your rating with the victim's faction even if the victim is the kindly sort and forgives you. Some victims will attack or refuse to talk to you again even if you pay them, forcing a lengthy reload if you ever want them to trade with you again. And the gold flows VERY freely in this game, particularly by the time your pickpocket skill is high enough to steal anything valuable, so it's really pointless to shoplift something you can so easily afford. Don't shoot yourself in the foot. If you do shoplift, incidentally, trying to sell the goods right back to the victim won't work--they'll recognize their item and become angry.

Conversations: Most NPCs you meet will gabble on about the plot items and factions until the cows come home, but you'll quickly notice it's all the same information and you probably could have figured it all out without talking to any of them anyway. Don't feel obliged to sit there asking every NPC you meet about every item on your list. I'll mention important things to ask about in my guide. If it amuses you, most NPCs also have a retort/reply to cursing at them or asking them for sex.

Treasure: Don't be afraid to open any chest or pick up anything you see lying around anywhere. No NPC will ever notice or complain about this. CRPG's are stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one: they can make NPCs completely unperceptive to being robbed blind, which is unrealistic and a little goofy, or they can make NPCs attack you for picking the wrong things up, which makes the game a pain in the ass as you try to figure out which things are which and who can see you at any given moment. Wizardry 8 chose the former. Just pretend your character waited till the NPC was looking the other way or something.

Items: In general, you should save any unique item you come across--nearly all of them can either be used to make gadgets or forged into useful equipment at Ferro's. You don't need to hang onto any generic items, though, with the following exceptions: keep light crossbows (gadgeteers can turn them into powerful weapons) and one ring of protection (used as an ingredient at Ferro's).

PC Voicesets: There are *32* PC voicesets in Wizardry 8; more voices than you could run through in two full play-throughs of the game, in other words. You only get one sample sentence to judge them by as you're picking characters, and the descriptors are useless ("Laidback" female 1 is much more eccentric than "eccentric" female 1, there's more difference between the two "aggressive" males than between "aggressive" male 2 and "burly" male 2, and so on), so here's my quick rundown on the available voicesets, just in case you're having trouble making a decision. If you want some spoilers for quips the various characters come up with during the course of the game, click here.

Wizardry 8 Personalities:

Aggressive Female 1 is a fearless, take-charge woman who talks a little like a marine sergeant in movies ("Get a move on! I've got a situation here. Dammit, don't die on me!")
Aggressive Female 2 sounds like a crabby New York barmaid.
Aggressive Male 1 is a swaggering hunter of dubious heterosexuality. He has a loud French accent and talks about 'ze thrill of ze chase' a lot. I think he might have been better as a Felpurr, in retrospect.
Aggressive Male 2 sounds kind of like my high school gym teacher. He has a loud laugh, a Bronx accent, and he shouts a lot; he doesn't seem like the brightest fellow in the world, but he's enjoying himself.
Burly Female 1 is a hefty farmer woman with a really bad Swedish accent punctuated by annoying giggles.
Burly Female 2 is a proud, courageous warrior woman with an occasional soft side. She's one of the more realistic personalities.
Burly Male 1 has a hard time putting together a complete sentence, which fluctuates between funny and annoying. His voice is clearly supposed to sound like a mentally challenged barbarian type, but it actually faintly resembles Cookie Monster, which can be disconcerting if you grew up on Sesame Street.
Burly Male 2 is a boisterous, highly emotional warrior-type with a very exaggerated Scottish accent (be prepared to hear the word "wee" forced into every second line he utters).
Chaotic Female 1 has a grating, screechy voice of the sort usually associated with b-movie harpy wives. and pretty much spends the whole time screaming at everyone about everything. She does have amusing reactions to some of the main game events, but her day-to-day comments are the most intrusive and irritating in the game.
Chaotic Female 2 is an over-the-top sadist with a bad German-Russian accent.
Chaotic Male 1 is your classic mentally-imbalanced guy with a big mouth and a short fuse. He can get pretty entertaining, but his voice is loud and very grating after a while.
Chaotic Male 2 is sort of an evil necromancer type. He talks about death and darkness a lot in melodramatic tones.
Cunning Female 1 is a chipper young woman who is always getting into and out of scrapes; she is occasionally snide, occasionally cowardly, always cocky, and often charming. She is weirdly materialistic for a game in which no one is even allowed to have personal cash, but generally fun.
Cunning Female 2 has another one of those annoying muddled Russian-German spy accents. Primarily she complains about everything, but she's pretty devious beneath her whining.
Cunning Male 1 has a kind of genial, New Jersey mobster voice. Like Cunning Female 1, he's oddly obsessed with cash considering that the game won't even let him have any, but it doesn't stand out too much.
Cunning Male 2 is an excitable, rather whimpery sneak with a bad Italian accent.
Eccentric Female 1 sounds like an overwrought dowager. It can be kind of amusing to hear the incongruous sounds of her trying to adventure, but her soundset makes a bit less sense than the others.
Eccentric Female 2 is a new-age astrologer. Her day-to-day comments can get a little annoying, since every other remark she makes is about negative or positive energy, but she's a good send-up of a certain real-life type. (-:
Eccentric Male 1 is an old scholar with an annoyingly quavering voice and a lot of metaphysical musings. He goes on about his theories and inventions a lot and would probably have made more sense as a gadgeteer.
Eccentric Male 2 has not only a bad Spanish accent, but the annoying gimmick of narrating events in the third person and past tense as well.
Intellectual Female 1 is the haughty, snooty type who goes on about her superior upbringing and schooling a lot.
Intellectual Female 2 is a philosophical adherent of Destiny. She has a strange accent but some interesting observations.
Intellectual Male 1 has a deep Klingonesque voice that I think was intended for a Mook; his personality is quiet and thoughtful, and he always uses the most complicated vocabulary available for even simple concepts.
Intellectual Male 2 is a supercilious mage-type who's sure he knows more than anyone else.
Kindly Female 1 is another effusive noblewoman with an exaggerated British accent, but she's less arrogant than Intellectual 1 and less silly than Eccentric 1. She generally thinks everything is just fabulous and going to work out fine.
Kindly Female 2 is sort of a sassy country singer, with a Southern accent and a lot of lines about her extensive and unhappy lovelife.
Kindly Male 1 is a heroic-sounding, eager young knight-type.
Kindly Male 2 is a gentle, rather quiet type who endures damage in relative silence and is always looking out for others.
Laidback Female 1 reminds me a little of Phoebe from "Friends", her voice eerily cheerful and almost childishly pleased by even the direst of things ("Wow!" she says cheerily, when badly injured. "Is that my blood?") I feel like I ought to find her extremely annoying, but for some reason the incongruity of her happily mellow vocal tone and the things she was saying kinda grew on me.
Laidback Female 2 is a mystical, meditative sort who likes to stay in the background. She has an annoying "*gasp* That was close!" whimper every time a monster misses her, unfortunately.
Laidback Male 1 is presumably intended as a bard; he makes a lot of references to theater and music, and takes everything pretty much in stride.
Laidback Male 2 is a stereotypical old Zen master, referring to everything in philosophical metaphor.
Loner Female 1 is a whiny crone with an affected accent who seems to think she is an animal (talks about the hair standing up on her neck, her instincts, the party as a 'pack', etc.) I could see her as a Rawulf or Felpurr elder, maybe; she just seems stupid as a human.
Loner Female 2, unlike the others, doesn't have much of a personality. She just makes bland statements in an annoying Cockney-ish accent.
Loner Male 1 is a dry-voiced, laconic fellow who expresses everything in as few words as possible.
Loner Male 2 sounds sort of depressive; he certainly doesn't get very excited or disturbed by much of anything.

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