This mod aims to enhance the gameplay of all three games in Wizardry’s first trilogy. They were already hard enough, and required quite a bit of dedication to get anywhere. On top of that, they seemed to have a couple of rules that seemed arbitrarily handicapping to the player. In creating this mod I hope I have smoothed out some of the rough edges of this game, in order to make it more accessible.
This new version makes level ups more interesting by making attributes gained more random (while removing the possibility of attributes going down). It also lessens the crippling effects of changing classes by applying a penalty of -3 to all attributes (instead of reducing all attributes to racial minimums).
The Rebalancing mod is not an Easy-Type mod. That said, care has been taken to ease the player into the difficulty a bit, especially in the case of Wizardry 1: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (Overload? Ha!) Several rather arbitrary rules that end up making life difficult for players have been removed… for example, party members 4-6 can now attack like the first three characters in the lineup and certain upper-level spells do not drain experience levels in order to cast them anymore. However, many weapons that used to grant extra attacks to players do not grant this boon anymore; it is relatively rare to have a character’s number of strikes augmented this way. In this manner, a character doesn’t become a demi-god simply because they found an Infinity -1 weapon… they still have to be worthy to be able to fight with it.
Major props to Gideon Zhi of Aeon Genesis Translations. It was his pioneering hacking efforts in translating this previously Japanese-only ROM that made this project worthwhile for me to undertake. This download contains his v1.0 patch, as it is a prerequisite for the Rebalancing Mod.
To peruse a more exhaustive changelog, go to http://jeffludwig.com/wizardry1-2-3/download.php. There’s also information on the characters, items, magic, and monsters.