Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds

Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds was released in 1982, less than a year after the release of its predecessor Wizardry. The game was originally sold as an additional “scenario” (today Sir-tech, the publisher, might have used the term DLC). The game engine is mostly the same but there are new maps, a new objective, tweaked spells and new monsters. The player is expected to have finished the first Wizardry, or at least come close, because Wizardry II required characters to be imported from the first game.

Wizardry II was first released on the Apple II but ported widely. It was developed by Robert Woodhead and Andrew Greenberg.

Gameplay Video

This is the best video I could find of the original Apple II gameplay, it doesn’t go through the entire game but there’s enough here to get a feel for how it played. I have shamelessly taken my screenshots from this playthrough.

Setting

Wizardry II is presented identically to the first game, you spend your time killing monsters in the dungeons returning to town to level-up and rest. In theory this is a different town to the first Wizardry but there’s little to distinguish it.

Goal

In Wizardry II, the City of Llylgamyn has been taken over by the evil Davalpus. To help save it you must retrieve the staff of Gnilda.

In order to get the staff you need to find each piece of the Knight of Diamonds’ armor, scattered throughout the dungeon. These are quite sophisticated completion requirements. Only rivaled by Ultima 1 or Akalabeth at the time.

Character Creation

There is no character creation, instead you’re expected to import your existing party from a Wizardry save file. The game suggests the characters should be at least level 13, but you can import characters of any level you wish.

Overall this makes for a pretty user hostile play experience. In theory, if your party is wiped out in Wizardry II, you have to start again from level 1 in Wizardry! In practice, players would have gotten around this by various means; using disk backups or other tricks to make sure they could restore their party to an earlier state on death.

Input

Input is the same as the first Wizardry’s input.

Exploration

The presentation is the same as Wizardry; a first person dungeon crawler with some text menus to explore the city above the dungeon. The dungeons are made up of a 20x20 grid and there are 6 levels for the player to explore.

One quality of life improvement is that it’s now possible to save within the dungeon, instead of being required to return to the town.

Here’s the first level of the dungeon.

In the center, square 10,9, is the Apparition of Gnilda, and if you go there you’re greeted with:

AS YOU ENTER, AN EERIE GLOW FILLS THE ROOM. WITH A BRILLIANT FLASH, A TOWERING APPARITION APPEARS BEFORE YOU. SHE SPEAKS: I “HEAR THESE, THE WORDS OF GNILDA. THE CITY OF LLYLGAMYN HAVING SHOWN ITS UNWORTHINESS, I CHOSE TO RECLAIM THE SYMBOLS OF MY FAVOR. I ONLY HERE, IN MY TEMPLE, MAY ONE WORTHY ENOUGH REGAIN THOSE SYMBOLS AND RETURN. BUT WOE TO THOSE UNDESERVING WHO MAY TRY. I TO OBTAIN MY STAFF, ONE MUST ACQUIRE THE FIVE. THESE ARE THE TESTS, AND SHALL BE THE PROOF BEFORE ME PRESENTED. I THIS IS THE WILL OF GNILDA.” THE APPARITION SLOWLY FADES.

This sets up the objective of the game. Go find the armor pieces and bring them back. If you retrieve the armor and return you will get this text:

THE APPARITION REAPPEARS AND INTONES:

“ONE ALONE.”

This is a hint that you should return with a party containing a single character, wearing all the armor and if you manage to do that, then you’ll get:

A FIERY FACE APPEARS BEFORE YOU AND DEMANDS, “WHAT IS THE ANSWER TO THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX ?”. THE IMAGE DISAPPEARS. PRESS [RET] A NOW FAMILIAR APPARITION APPEARS AND SAYS: “THROUGH YOUR VALOR, WIT, AND PRESENCE OF MIND, YOU HAVE PROVED YOURSELF THIS DAY. BY OBTAINING THE FULL REGALIA OF THE LEGENDARY KNIGHT AND PRESENTING IT HERE BEFORE ME, YOU HAVE DEMONSTRATED THE WORTH OF YOUR ILK. I SHALL RECLAIM THOSE ARTIFACTS, BUT ALSO WILL I PRESENT YOU WITH A GIFT.

RECEIVE THE STAFF OF GNILDA!

And assuming you answered the riddle correctly, you return to the surface and have completed the game.

Inventory

No changes to the inventory system itself. See here for details of the original system..

Items

There are new weapons and armor such as Slayer Of Dragons, a sword that does double damage against dragons and the Wand of Mages that recharges the party’s spells. But nothing ground-breaking.

Combat

Reviewers at the time report that the combat is still well balanced and tense; there’s always a chance of death if you overextend yourself and that makes for an engaging experience.

The new monster additions are interesting and add a challenge, many having high magic resistance preventing the players from easily dispatching them with spells. For instance, Arch Demons are 75% magic resistant requiring parties to use more non-magical means to defeat them. There are also Fuzzballs, low HP enemies that call in additional Fuzzballs during combat making it hard to keep their numbers under control.

The game’s overall objective includes finding the armor of the Knight of Diamonds and when you find these pieces of armor, you have to fight them. Yes, that’s right, you have to fight the inanimate pieces of armor. There’s one piece per level of the dungeon. Once defeated, you can pick up the armor and carry on your way. This is novel and fits Wizardry’s general sense of humor.

Otherwise see Wizardry’s combat section.

Magic

The magic system and spells are the same as the magic system in Wizardry, apart from a few tweaks. For example, the success rate of KATINO, the sleep spell, has been increased.

Advancement

Advancement is the same as in Wizardry; you can only level up by resting at the tavern outside of the dungeon. The major difference is that your characters are expected to begin at a higher level. See the Wizardry advancement section.

Systems

The systems are mostly identical to the first Wizardry.

Riddles

Wizardry II contains a number of riddles, in the classic sense, you’re given some cryptic question and expected to type in an answer. There are only two or three but the consequences for getting these wrong can be severe - you can lose all the pieces of armor you worked so hard to collect.

Who was responsible for the monster design in the early Wizardry titles and who wrote the riddles for Wizardry II and III?

Woodhead: Andrew and his friends at Cornell.

RPG Codex Interview with Robert Woodhead

For a taste, this is the riddle from floor 6:

LYING IN FRONT OF THE DOOR IS A BEAST WITH THE HEAD OF A MAN AND THE BODY OF A LION. IN AN HYPNOTIC VOICE IT INTONES: “ENTER HERE, THE VERY FEW WHO CAN GIVE THE ANSWER TRUE OF THIS RIDDLE ASKED OF YOU.

SEARCH THIS LEVEL, IF YOU DARE SEARCH EACH DEN AND MONSTER LAIR THREE CLUES HAVE I HIDDEN THERE.

SEARCH EACH PASSAGE AND EACH ROOM FOR A KING WITHIN HIS TOMB FOR THE ANSWER WAS HIS DOOM.

IF YOU LIVE, YOU SHOULD NOT LOSE FOR THE ANSWER TO THIS RUSE LIES CONFUSED AMONG THE CLUES.

ANSWER ?

The For the answer to this ruse lies confused among the clues is a hint that the final answer is an anagram of a later phrase. To give it away entirely; you can discover the phrase THAT KING HE FINDS DOOM and that is an anagram of THE KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS. The phrase THE KNIGHT OF DIAMONDS needs to be given a couple of times to complete the game.

Release Date

The game was released during the spring of 1982. Busch has a comment on CRPG Addict’s Site explaining the possible release window.

Development

Wizardry II was developed shortly after the release of Wizardry by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead. It was developed as more of an expansion, expecting the player to advance to this game after completing the original Wizardry.

Matt: One of the things I’ve noticed about wizardry, the series and the games that Richard Garriott was putting out, it seemed like every time he came out with a new game, he redid the whole engine. Whereas with Wizardry, at least the first four, it seemed like they all looked fairly similar.

Woodhead: I’d say 90% of the code was the same. But there were lots of internal tweaks.

Matt Chat 262: Robert Woodhead on Wizardry and the Apple II 🎙️

Legacy

Despite being mostly an expansion for the original game there are some features worth calling out.

Gather Parts of a Thing Quest

Up until this point the goal for CRPGs had mostly been - get to a certain level, collect a certain amount of points or defeat a certain enemy. This game introduces collecting something that’s been broken into parts - the armor of the Knight of Diamonds.

This kind of structure is a play on the “find X” type quest but it breaks that X into bits so it’s a “find x of n” quest. CRPGs certainly didn’t invent this form, it’s one that recurs through a lot of different media. Harry Potter is an example that springs to mind - to defeat Voldemort the heroes must first find (and destroy) all his horcruxes.

Succession

In Wizardry II you’re required to have a fairly experienced party from the previous game. In the original release this was an absolute requirement. That’s a first. It’s even arguably a first being able to transfer your party from one game to its sequel. Hellfire Warrior, the sequel to the Temple of Apshai, can do this but it’s manual; you type in all your party’s attributes, which doesn’t really feel the same as importing the data from a disk.

Matt: I’ve heard from the Robert Sirotek interview, there was some friction about whether you should have to play the first game and then take your characters from that game to play the second one and then the second, on through, or whether you should just be able to create characters that could play the new game right away.

Woodhead: I didn’t see any other way we could do it. Because if we wanted to sort of up-the-game with bigger and nastier monsters, to give the people who played the first game something new we couldn’t dump them in with level one characters again; they’d get their asses kicked.

From my standpoint, it was the only way we could do the kind of story that we wanted to do. And if anybody who was interested in playing the second game, if they had not already played the first game, they would have bought the first game and played it first.

So, I don’t see that it was really a significant problem.

Matt Chat 262: Robert Woodhead on Wizardry and the Apple II 🎙️

Character Branding

There’s sort of an achievement type system in Wizardry II that appears to be a first and quite a nice feature. To complete the game only one character can approach the Apparition of Gnilda wearing the Diamond Knight’s armor, that person’s name is marked with “The Symbol of Gnilda” a [G], while the rest of the party members are marked with a [K] to show they’ve been knighted. A little cosmetic award to acknowledge your achievements.

Influences

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds is a direct successor to Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and shares the same set of influences including: Oubliette, Shōgun, James Clavell, 1975 and Dungeons and Dragons. Predecessor

Further Reading

Here are a selection of resources used in the article and for further reading.

• 🌍 Computer Role-Playing Game Survey by Scorpia
• 🌍 Data Driven Gamer - Wizardry II
• 🌍 Data Driven Gamer - Wizardry II : Bestiary
• 🌍 Matt Chat 262: Robert Woodhead on Wizardry and the Apple II
• 🌍 Softline Magazine, May 1982
• 🌍 Zimlab Wizardry II Walkthrough