Brenda Garneau: Well, almost 15 years ago now, Linda Currie [a designer on the Wizardry series, too] and I had a pretty chance encounter, and she offered me a job as a Wizardry hotliner. My job, basically, was to know everything there was to know about Wizardry and answer people's questions when they called the game's hotline. For a kid, I was 15 at the time, getting paid to play games was complete robbery, and I knew I had it made. I just loved it, and I still do. There's something about this industry, you know, that makes 'work' seem more like an intriguing challenge, and the results are always more fun and more creative than, say, looking at a plain old balance sheet. I kept working with Sirtech all the way through school and into college, testing the games, doing QA, writing the manuals, and when it came time to leave and go off into the real world, I just couldn't do it. It was boring. When I thought about working with IBM and revising DOS manuals, and that was about the most exciting job opportunity, I knew I wanted to keep doing this. Besides, at that point, role-playing and Wizardry had become more a passion than a job.

GN: What exactly is your role in the development of Wizardry VIII?

BG: I'm the writer, storyteller and old-school Wizardry addict of the design team.

GN:  How has your role changed over the course of the Wizardry series?

BG: It's been an apprenticeship more than a change, I think. Since I've been with the series for so long, I've had a chance to work with and learn from all the designers along the way. The more you apprentice, the more you learn, the higher up you go. Of course, I've been able to work with designers outside the series, too, from Ian Currie [Jagged Alliance] to Guido Henkel [Realms of Arkania]. So, my perception and understanding of a game, you know, how it goes from someone's head to a box on the shelf, has grown. The industry, the players, what they want has changed, too. In one way or another, I've been involved with all the Wizardry games, but this is my most direct involvement.

GN: Have you played a prominent role in each of the Wizardry's or have there been games where you've "taken a break" from the series?

BG: Wizardry IV, I think, is the one I felt the most out of touch with. I was in college at the time and the design team for it was pretty sequestered. I remember coming into work when the school year was over. They sat me at an Apple II, and gave me a finished but buggy alpha version of the game. Norm Sirotek, the president here, tells me that the game is 'expert level.' Naturally, considering that it's my job to know more than the rest of the planet about Wizardry, I figure: "cakewalk." I was super wrong, but man, I did not let that game get the better of me. I think I would have died of thirst and starvation first. They wouldn't tell me anything about it or give me a single hint on any of the puzzles. I finally finished it a couple weeks later. I think I was ticked off at the design team and half the office for the next two weeks, though. I had the record of being the first in the world to finish quite a few versions of Wizardry, and someone beat me to the end of that one by a single day. Funny, I can't even remember who it was now. Anyway, Wizardry IV and I, technically, are not really related.

GN: Have you always been a RPG/Computer gamer or was this something that started when you worked on the first Wizardry?

BG: Yes and no. I was an RPGer first, but didn't really know it. When I was 11, I somehow managed to get my hands on Dungeons & Dragons. I thought it was a cool game, but I didn't really know that it was role-playing per se. Luckily, in the little town where I come from, no one made a big deal about role- playing, so I could play with wizards and fighters and dragons to my delight. ( A true rarity nowadays..-ed) Of course, since I was 11, I am sure I had no idea what I was doing. Anyway, Wizardry was my first computer game, and it honestly was love at first sight. I came into work early, left late, worked for free and generally spent far too much time worrying about my Wizardry characters. I still have my original party, in fact, on an old Apple II floppy. I think I was an RPG addict waiting to happen.

GN: What other games out there have had a big influence on you both personally and professionally?

BG: Wow. I've played an awful lot of games in 15 years on and off the machine. Let me split this up a bit. Wizardry, of course, is a given, and of all games, it has had the most influence upon me hands down. I compare everything to it, and that's something that just happens naturally with me. There are other games, of course. On the machine in the early days, there were a few games that really got me. Ultima Underworld was one. Civilization was and still is another. I can lose weeks in that game. For some reason, I loved DOOM. It was completely mindless. You know, you spend all day living in these strategic and character driven worlds, and it was nice to come home and just blow the hell out of something. Off the machine, I still DM a group once a week in a system that's, well, I don't know what it is anymore. It started out as the ICE's Rolemaster system, and it's been pretty cobbled and changed through about 10 years of play. Gary Gygax has had a tremendous effect on me. His work set the standard and built the basis that all RPGs are founded upon. Magic: the Gathering, the card version of the game, has cost me thousands of dollars, I am sure. I love that game. That design was brilliance. Of course, it's hardly just these games that have an effect overall on the Wizardry design team, you know. We've got our strategy addicts, our wargamers, and our hardcore "play everything that's released" gamers. So, there are a lot of different influences, but by far, Wizardry itself is the biggest.

GN: How much of the Wizardry VIII team is comprised of Wizardry veterans vs. new talent?

BG: More than half of the core team are Wizardry veterans, and two of us go back to the beginning of the series, me and Linda Currie. Honestly speaking here, this is Sirtech's baby. They're not going to put together a team of "new talent" and let them ride the series off into the sunset. Everyone who's on this team is very talented if not a veteran and has been hand-picked for a reason. Alex Meduna, the guy behind the incredible AI in Jagged Alliance, is on the core design team, and he's bringing some solid depth to the way the world acts and reacts to the player. Also, he's a real gaming veteran. I mean, this guy has played everything. So, when it comes down to it, he's often able to show me a path that I wouldn't have seen since I've been walking on the pure Wizardry road for 15 years. It's a wonderful asset to us. Everyone, from the lead programmer to the modeler, had some kind of solid experience to get themselves on this team. So, you've got your Wizardry veterans, industry veterans, art veterans and gaming veterans. Everyone brings something to the table.

GN:  Do you think that a mix of old and new blood is helpful in developing a game that is both fresh and has a good sense of its roots?

BG: Oh, I know it is. I think it's critical to get that outside perspective. Me? You know, I loved Wizardry VII. There's a part of me that would be content to let everything stay the way it is and play the game over and over and over. Of course, that's completely out to lunch. In order to make anything better, it needs to be challenged. Role-playing has evolved over the years, too, so systems are becoming more sophisticated as computers are able to handle more and more.
All in all, and it's certainly proved this way for us, I think the more input you have, the better your decisions will be and the more likely they will be to reflect the
group of people playing our games. At the design table, I think I am a perfectly good spokesperson for the old-time Wizardry players' desires. I do not, however, think I can comprehend a newbie's perspective on role-playing. In fact, we regularly sacrifice Wizardry virgins here at the office to test out new theories on them. Do they get it? Do they understand what we're trying to do? Is this easy for them or would it take 40 pages of a manual's help to comprehend? So far in our design, the game is clearly a Wizardry, believe me, Linda and I would be super vocal if it weren't, but it does have new things, new touches, that people have wanted for years. It's the "new blood," as you say, that brings a lot of that to the table.

GN: I'm sure you don't want to give too much away here, but what's the plot/big theme of Wizardry VIII going to be like?

BG: Well, I can't give away too much actually, but it's a direct continuation of Wizardry VII. Right there at the end, the Dark Savant, this enigmatic god, had managed to capture a device called the Astral Dominae. In this device is the power to create life, to create a universe or to destroy one. It's probably the most powerful artifact ever discovered in the Wizardry worlds, and last you knew, he had it in his hands, a smile on his face and he was on route to a very specific place. That's where you'll meet up again. There's much more to the whole picture, though, stuff that goes back 200 years in the game's story that even the Dark Savant doesn't know. And you're not the only one coming to this planet.

GN: Obviously characters, their development and creation, are a big part of most RPGs. What kind of new details and ideas are going to make it into Wizardry VIII? Will we be able to import old character from previous games?

BG: Characters really are the core of role-playing, aren't they? We spent, goodness, just hours and hours reviewing our races, our professions, the skills, the stats. You name it. In general, we've removed the traits or things that you didn't like. We didn't change a thing that makes a Wizardry *a Wizardry*, however. We improved upon it and added some cool new features. A character's personality is now more than a statistic, for instance. You'll select a personality type for your character from a really wide selection, and it adds a great dimension to game play. Some are outright funny and others are serious kick-your-ass tough. It's cool, though, that your characters will talk now. They won't say something every time you go around a corner, but when they have something important to say, they will. We've added new skills, of course, to reflect the technologies you'll happen on here. What else? We've improved the balance, certainly, and added more unique abilities. There's a new profession that I can tell you about, too, the Gadgeteer, and we made significant improvements to all of the others. I can't be much more specific right now, but we went over everything with a fine tooth comb and made it solid.

Importing the characters, yeah, that's a given. I'm too damn attached to mine to have it otherwise. Besides, you've already chased this Dark Savant all over one planet. Your characters deserve the chance to keep up the pursuit.

GN: There have been a load of new technologies to come down the pike (3D graphics/sound, MMX, etc) since the last Wizardry. Are their any plans to include these new technologies in Wizardry VIII?

BG: Wizardry VIII will have a full 360 3D engine that will go over hills, up and down and even underwater, a first for the series, actually. All the bells and whistles are there, and we've pretty much pulled out all the proverbial stops for it. We've got a full-time writer, a full-time musician, a real sculptor doing our modeling, numerous in-house studios, and yeah, you can expect we're going right over the edge on the technology side, too. We're requiring 3D acceleration right now, in fact. ( A 3Dfx Wizardy! -ed)

GN: As always, the debate rages on over how combat should be done in games: 1st vs. 3rd person perspective, phased vs. turn-based vs. real-time combat, etc. What approach are you going with in Wizardry VIII?

BG: We're going with phased combat. Did you know that Wizardry invented phased combat on the computer? I think we'd be crazy to change it now, huh? You know, it's strange how this has become an issue in RPGs, actually. Anyone who knows RPGs knows that this is the only type of system that will provide you with accurate results based on initiative. Real-time systems throw off that roll to the dexterity of the player, and turn-based systems assume that everyone just stands there while one guy goes.

At the same time, we aware that people might not like the longer combats that happen in phased time. So, way early on and through many, many design meetings, we worked for a way that would give players a "real-time" feeling for the combat without losing any of the accuracy of a phased system. It's cool, kind of revolutionary, actually, because I don't recall a game ever doing it before. Basically, we're trying to preserve a true RPG system. We're willing to do everything we can to make it accessible to everyone. At the same time, we don't want to compromise what makes a Wizardry a true RPG. That's our design philosophy, too. Some games have become so RPG-lite that they've lost the core of what a role-playing game is. It's more than statistics, combat and a wizard showing up here and there.

GN: What other kinds of new features and "toys" can gamers start looking forward to in Wizardry VIII?

BG:  Would you settle for "cool" ones? Yeah, I'm being elusive, but we're still a year from release and I have to be. I can tell you that we read a ton of letters, and let's face it, we're gamers ourselves, so we added stuff we always wanted to see. The really cool features, the ones that I think will make this game . . . I have wait a few months to tell you about. That's kind of the nature of this biz. If I tell you today, other games have time to get it in ahead of us.

GN: True RPGs involve a lot of numbers being rolled and thrown around. This seems particularly true in character creation and use of special weapons and magical items. How much control and knowledge of these numbers are players going to be exposed to in Wizardry VIII?

BG: Well, all the detail is there for the asking, but some of the stuff you might consider "hard core" is well hidden from sight, I guess. All the basic stats are there as well as your skills and spells as in the traditional Wizardry system. If the player is interested in more detailed things, like how certain modifiers are affecting their character or how much armor class bonus they're getting from a super shield, it's available to them. Actually, we've opened up that part of the system for players so that they can see exactly what's doing what to them. Again, it's not over the top and it won't intimidate new players, but for the role- player who is interested and wants to be in control, yeah, it's all there. Also, their characters, they can sculpt them from the ground up, and they are in complete control of those numbers. It's very, very custom and solid RPG.

GN: There's always been controversy in gaming over striking a balance between story and game play. How is this design team trying to strike this balance with Wizardry VIII?

BG: This is weird because I've never really thought of it that way. With Wizardry, it's known for its story, and a good one is vital to the game, so it's never been a question of one or the other for us. They are so intricately tied to each other. For instance, if you take five different groups of people, races, with very strong traditions and beliefs, inevitably, something will conflict. That conflict will lead to others. Then, it might lead to sabotage. Get that whole ball of wax going, and you show up as a group of six characters. Of course, you want to win. So do others. People hide things. Keep secrets to themselves. You have to be smarter and faster. In a nutshell, that's how a story gets solid, starts conflict and gives rise to game play. Game play without a story, well, I guess that's something like solitaire or on the really fun end, DOOM or Quake. If you want complete immersion like you get in a role-playing game, you have to make the player care about something, his characters, and keep him caring enough to believe the goals you set. A story is the only thing that can do that. Like I said, I don't think we ever think in terms of story vs. game play or of achieving a balance between the two. Around our design table, the two are so intricately tied that they're hard to separate. Everything else, combat, magic and the like, they are almost separate games in their own right. I still remember great role-playing battles both on and off the computer [traditional pencil & paper games], but I don't remember exactly what the circumstances were that surrounded it. They're all so tied together, though. The reason that combat is so great, so intense, is because you care about your characters and you want them to live because you have things to do. What you have to do, of course, is the story.

GN: Have there been previous Wizardry games that you feel were a bit too unbalanced to one slant or the other?

BG: Wizardry IV was perfectly balanced for expert Wizardry players, but completely off the map for everyone else. The others, no, I think they were just perfect as they were. Like I said, it's an evolving genre, and we're always trying to simulate a little more of a fantasy/reality world. Each game was exactly what it was hoping to be at the time. We might make them a little different right now if we had to do it all over again, but I think that's the nature of anything you might do. The second you finish it, you say, "You know, if we could have added . . ." Each Wizardry game is an evolution of the one before it in some way or another, sometimes a giant step and sometimes a little one. Having played every Wizardry game to the point of memorization, trust me, we go to super extremes to balance the game. It helps, too, that we're not owned by a bunch of stockholders. We release a game when it's finished. There's no pressure from stockholders to shove a beta on the public. We're fortunate to have that.

GN: There's been a lot of talk the past few years that RPG as a genre in computer gaming is dying off, or at the very least in a lot of trouble. How do you see RPG developing as a genre in computer gaming?

BG: I don't think it's really developed. I think it's regressed, actually, with all these "lite" titles coming out. They blur the genre for true RPGs like a Wizardry or an Ultima. Right now though, wow, they are coming back, and I am thrilled. I think the reason that RPGs trailed off for a couple years is because, well, the audience for RPGs isn't as big as, say, DOOM, and these games cost a ton of time and money to make. You have so many systems, so much detail, that their budgets are usually twice that of a normal game. So, unless you know what you're doing, you're better of making a DOOM knock-off than an RPG.

How do I see it developing? I think in the next year here, you're going to see the master houses of RPG come out with true titles and it will uncloud the genre, return it to its roots and we'll enjoy a revival. One that I hope lasts. I know of at least seven titles in development right now that are "pure" RPG, so I think the genre will enjoy a healthy recovery, and let's face it, much as I hate to admit it, marketing guys are not entirely dumb. If there are no role- playing games on the market and the public is screaming for some, they will come.

GN: Do you feel games that are becoming known as RPG-lite (like Diablo) are a boon or a hindrance to RPG as a genre?

BG: Both, I guess. Diablo, while not a true RPG, did wonders for the genre's name. People who never would have touched an RPG are willing to now because of games like Diablo. One thing that I think Diablo did, too, was to capture that feeling we used to get sitting around the kitchen table playing D&D. People worked together. They talked. They stayed in the office all night. So, yeah, I think it's a help. Where it's a hindrance isn't so much with Diablo but with other systems that are, well, not very solid. Unfortunately, the stuff that's come in to fill this gap, this "RPG-lite", is the result of people who don't really understand true RPG trying to make a game that is. So, it doesn't work and the systems start to fall apart. The people who buy those games might steer clear of RPGs. Hopefully, they found something like Diablo to get them back.

GN: It seems to me that our media hamstrings any game released these days that doesn't include multiplayer features (particularly in the strategy genre), even if the game stands just fine on it's own and has absolutely no need of multi-play? How do you feel about the recent trend towards multiplayer gaming?

BG: I guess in an ideal world, it would be nice if people recognized that not all designs benefit from a multiplayer environment, and maybe even recognize games that are intended to embrace one or the other. Of course, this isn't to say that some games can't or won't do that equally well, be great on their own and online. In some genres, though, it's hard because some games hold together best in solitary mode, either that or all players must always play at the same time in order to make it fair. You almost have to do two games to get the point across.All in all, though, I think multiplayer RPGs will develop into their own genre. I recognize that it's infinitely more fun to maim your friend in a game than it is to maim the computer AI. There's something really satisfying about it, so I can see why everyone wants it.

GN: What kind of an impact do you think multiplayer has had and will have on RPG computer games in general?

BG: Maybe one of two things. Either it will return it to its roots, multiplayer around a kitchen table, that table now being the Internet, or it will spin off into a genre in its own right, RPG-Action. Obviously, they'll have to become more competitive internally in terms of who gets what and for what reason. Combat might have to go up a notch or two.

GN: Has there ever been any pressure to include multiplayer feature in Wizardry VIII?

BG: There has been pressure to include everything under the sun in Wizardry VIII. Our prime concern, right now anyway, is to maintain our true RPG system. That doesn't mean that multiplayer won't be a part of the Wizardry universe, but right now, it's not on the drawing board.

GN:  After eight releases, Wizardry is one of the longest running series in all of computer gaming. Is there and end in sight, or do you think things are just getting started?

BG: Right now, we're all so immersed in Wizardry VIII that we're not really thinking about Wizardry XI on your home holodeck. We're always thinking of cool features, and, sure, I don't think anyone here would say that, "Yeah, this is it." There are too many fans of the series, many of us that work here, to stop it. What's kind of funny is that I remember being asked this question way back on Wizardry III, I think, ten years ago.

GN: Now I'm curious. You've had a long and involved history with the Wizardry series. Which of these games is your favorite?

BG: I have two favorites, actually, for two very different reasons. The original Wizardry, I'll never forget how I felt when I first played it. It was my first ever trip into a world like that, so I was amazed, addicted, awed. In many respects, my feelings for that game are similar to those people have about their first love. It was my first love of computer games. Wizardry VII is my other, although for some reason, I am also wildly fond of Wizardry VI. Can I say that Wizardry II, III, IV and V are not my favorite Wizardrys instead?

GN: Yeah I guess that works too. :) Okay, well we're pretty much at the end here. I'd like to thank you again for taking the time to talk to us. I know all of us here at the Gaming Nexus as well as all of our readers really appreciate it. I decided I needed a good closing question that I could use in all my interviews. A question that really strikes to the heart of things and allows us to get to know you as a person. What's your favorite pizza topping?

BG: We order a lot of pizza here, and mine keeps evolving. I am a high maintenance pizza person, apparently. My current favorite pizza toppings are extra sauce, super light on the cheese, onions and hot peppers with Tabasco. Apparently, I don't have any taste buds left.

Look for Wizardry VIII, the next chapter in the classic Wizardy Saga, in 1998 from Sir-Tech.