Wizardry - Legacy

Legacy

Wizardry inspired many clones and served as a template for role-playing video games. Some notable series that trace their look and feel to Wizardry include The Bard's Tale and Might and Magic. Wizardry also established the command-driven battle system with a still image of the monster being fought that would be emulated in later games, such as The Bard's Tale, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Following a convention established by the PLATO dungeon games Moria, Avatar and Oubliette, it was the first game for home computers to adapt the now-familiar WASD set of keys for moving forward and turning left and right (the S was not used for movement; it updated the status display). The party-based combat in Wizardry also inspired Richard Garriot to include a similar party-based system in Ultima III: Exodus.

Wizardry was the first game to feature what would later be called prestige classes. Aside from the traditional classes of Fighter, Mage, Priest, Thief and Bard, players could take Bishop, Lord, Ninja and Samurai if they had the right attributes and alignment. In the case of Lord and Ninja, at least in the first episodes of the sequel, it was impossible to receive all the attributes needed when first rolling characters, so the player would need to gain levels to achieve those attributes and then cross classes, thus they can be considered proper prestige classes. Wizardry VI allowed starting with any class given the player could invest enough time during the random character attribute generation.

Wizardry is the major inspiration to the Nintendo DS title The Dark Spire. While the game follows its own story and maps, much of the game utilizes the same game play mechanics, even going as far as adding in a "classic" mode that removed all of the game's graphics, replacing it with a wireframe environment, 8-bit-style sprites for monsters and characters, and chiptune music. The game's publisher, Atlus, also published another Wizardry spin-off, Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land.

In the 1980s, Wizardry also entertained fans that included celebrity figures such as Robin Williams, Harry Anderson, and the Crown Prince of Bahrain. The latter even called Sir-Tech personally on the phone.