Life of a Wizard

Am i the only one that seriously hasn’t played it yet

Only 5 times the demo

Nope. I haven’t played it. 3 Times the demo :stuck_out_tongue:

It’s a very, very long game, so if you buy it, expect it to take about ten minutes or so to finish.

I’ve played through the game a few times, and I am honestly disappointed. The game was fun, I admit, but the characters were incredibly lifeless and flat to me, I didn’t care for any of them, nor for the plot. I wouldn’t go as far to say it was a waste of money, but it didn’t grab me like I had hoped it would.

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well maybe lil flat but the achievement system is adictive and I feeling like in lone wolf books and I love replay it until I rule the world for me is great

@ririruetoo Try setting yourself a goal, and then set out to achieve it. That’s where the addiction, and the replayability, and the “Oh God I’ve spent too many bloody hours playing this” come in.

Yeah, it’s not a game about characters – it’s about that bloody list of achievements at the end. :slight_smile:

I did it!!! I did it!!! I WIN I CONQUEST THE WORLD and become a litch !!!

@MaraJade: Great. What character type did you go for, if I might ask?

Honestly, I’m not terribly impressed. As Ririruetoo says, the actual writing is pretty lackluster, with no characters or relationships that feel meaningful. Even your own child is mostly kept at arm’s length. It seems like this is due in large part to how versatile the ‘story’ tried to be, or at least, that the attempt at that versatility would have stood in the way of any significant characterization. Your ‘party members’ were selected from a large pool of possible people, which affords you choices, but prevents them from having any real face in your interactions with them.

Evaluated simply as a game, not as a story, there’s one really significant flaw that rubs at me the wrong way - the whole thing is riddled through with ‘wrong choices,’ and with positive and negative feedback loops.

For the first part - things like having an imaginary friend instead of a real one in childhood are flat-out, 100% bad. They decrease a one-dimensional stat that you never want decreased, and they deny you a later ally. It’s okay to have suboptimal choices in a game like this, but it’s really dubious to have something that provides only detriments, that no one would ever take except for the sake of the achievement at the end.

The other part, the feedback loops, are less dramatic but perhaps a more serious issue. In virtually every ‘challenge’ of the game, you have to check your level in one of a small set of skills against some target number. If you succeed, you further develop the skill you picked. If you fail, if none of the skills qualify, then you get nothing, and can even suffer skill penalties. This sets up a nasty situation where characters who develop skills early can rapidly build up into unstoppable monsters, while those who founder early on get locked in a spiral of failure, unable to effectively progress.

Moreover, since the principal reward of a successful skill check is just developing that skill, and since skills are capped at 100, there’s also a counterintuitive outcome where once you master something, you never actually want to use it again unless you have no other options, since it provides no benefit.

I’d say three things:

  1. The rewards for successful use of skills should probably be more story-based, rather than skill-based.
  2. FAILURE, on the other hand, should probably allow more personal development. Learning more through adversity than through triumph, and such.
  3. Limiting options allows them to be more fully explored. I had a sinking feeling when I saw how many races you could choose from (for every single bloody person you encounter, practically), because it meant that there would be no way it could actually matter, beyond a one-off line here or there.

@Dominic - Don’t forget the positives! It was a good story, even though it may have been a bit narrow, but the Versatility DOES help in a fantasy game like this. Especially with the races. The game was also quite addictive for awhile. I do agree that the Character Development was kind of bad, though.

Eh. I’m looking through the source now. Some of the decisions made are just baffling to me, like making unique choices opened up by picking rarer races simply being terrible. For example, if you’re a full-blooded orc, a troll, or a a goblin, you can attempt to deal with the bully by scaring them off - only to be hit with a -5 personality penalty if you do. It’s a great way to throw cold water on what should be the fun of playing through as something new.

It does look to be pretty cleanly-produced and free of bugs, though. That’s one good thing about it that I can say.

@Ramidel a evil litch no necromancer freak wizard. I choose I want study healer and pick extra lessons but without ending specialized in anything picking always learn about all and high body and personality and picking evil choices

This is a seriously great COG, best I’ve played so far.
Managed to conquer the world via Lichood, but Golden Age is really tough to pull off. Anyone managed it?

I managed it with both a lich and a non lich.

@empath: Yes. The way to do it is to make sure you have friends and family from the 3 races (to send guards to the racial rulers), and build a relationship of at least 35 with each race (or 100 if you don’t have allies of the appropriate race); that’s the big sticking point. If you can build up a strong army, you can probably build enough Peace Power for the Golden Age too.

Yeah that requiring friends from all three races strikes me as a little bit of fake difficulty.

I mean as if the dwarfs would be offended if you send in your golem to guard the dwarf king? Why, is this suddenly a discworld novel? lol

Well, I just played Life of a Wizard due to the great reviews, and I thought it was fantastic.

I loved the length and the many options provided. I loved how it covered different things (adventuring life, then kingdom management). I found the story enjoyable and liked the characters.

For the negatives, I do agree with Dominic; there is very much a feedback loop. Also, as others have mentioned, I do wish the characters in general were more fleshed out. That’s a big part of CoGs for me are the characters. Jim’s Zombie Exodus is a great example of well-developed characters.

That being said, it simply comes down to more options/less characterization or less options/more characterization. I do recognize that. So, someone can customize their friends but have them be more generic, or the writer can make entire characters but not have a lot of customization. Personally, I’m more for the latter. I prefer the Zombie Exodus style, or for another example, the first officer from The Fleet. Only three choices (I think?) for that, but they each have a distinct personality, which I found enjoyable.

Regardless, those are just my thoughts; I still think Life of a Wizard is fantastic, one of the best CoGs available. It seems like a lot of love and effort went into this project, and I appreciate that.

How do you become a lich anyway? Archbishop?

In one of the later encounters, during the kingdom phase, you can discover an abandoned lab that can be used to turn yourself into a lich. I believe you need 100 Necromancy, though I forget what other skills.
For archbishop, you just need to be a priest (this is only an option if your parents died in the beginning of the game), then remain a priest throughout the game, being true to whatever gods you started worshiping.

And yes, you can become a Lich Archbishop. Pretty hilarious, actually.