In the Grandmaster Ending of Wizardry IV, Werdna—the villainous protagonist—ascends beyond good and evil, beyond gods and mortals. The game essentially rewards the player for mastering its brutal mechanics and obscure puzzles by letting Werdna transcend the game world itself. The ending text reportedly reads something like:

“You have become one with the cosmic forces. You are now omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. You are the game.”

No gods, no masters—just pure, self-realized intelligence. It’s the kind of ending that feels like it was written by someone who just finished reading Nietzsche and then coded a dungeon crawler in a caffeine haze.

Wizardry IV may well be the first to canonize that kind of cringey-glorious sentiment in a game ending. And it did so in 1987, long before the internet gave us the meme version.

>>11862857 (OP)
Most of the Sirtech folk were very new age back then. Many of the puzzles require you to be tuned in to the same philosophies/new age scams that they were.

>>11862857 (OP)
>No gods, no masters—just pure, self-realized intelligence.
In this moment I am euphoric...

>>11862857 (OP)
>“You have become one with the cosmic forces. You are now omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. You are the game.”
Dunno where you heard this made up bullshit, but that's not the ending text at all. The final text is:
>You are the master of your fate, and the winding paths of the Tree of Life illuminate the shape of your destiny!

And I can bet you money no one actually reached that ending honestly back then, nor the god werdna ending, or any ending.
>>11862864
I just think a lot of RPG guys were just really into weird lofty things like that. Ultima IV is a less pretentious, though kinda still, version.

>>11862857 (OP)
I thought ShartGPT could read images these days? It clearly failed here.

I've heard Wizardry 4 is one of the hardest RPGs of all time and I've been curious about giving it a try but I mostly play stuff like Robotrek and Mother 1 so I'm probably not cut out for it

>>11863093
it's "hard" in the sense that it has to be played in absolute rote if you're not going to trial and error to oblivion. People who beat it in one go back then probably looked a the code or some shit.

>>11863093
You can't even leave the first room unless you do some really obscure stupid shit that you would never think to do. The design is awful.

Like, imagine if in Super Mario 1 you couldn't beat the first level unless you jumped on only 3 goombas, and then stood on a specific pipe and pressed down 23 times to find the hidden exit. Those are the types of puzzles you'll find in W4. I think even the original creators have disavowed it.

>>11863093
You don't have any direct control over your party.
You choose your monsters at the pentagram and from that on you are at the mercy of the dice. The hero (do-gooder) parties were sent in from real players and are the result of hours of grinding and perfectioning. They will show no mercy.
The game has some very interesting and innovative ideas tho, like turning the field "upwards" to represent a ziggurath (forward is up, and if you go too much to the left or right you "fall" all the the way back to the "ground") or a 3 dimensional floor going over 3 connected floors.

>>11863093

>>11862857 (OP)
>Werdna—the villainous protagonist—ascends beyond good and evil, beyond gods and mortals
And ironically forgets what he was even doing in the first place.

>>11863267
>You can't even leave the first room unless you do some really obscure stupid shit that you would never think to do.
It's a 2x2 room, and one of the four tiles is the summoning circle. You can summon monsters, and only two of the first batch are spell-casters, LVL 1 Priests and LVL 1 Mages. Unless you went full-retard with a melee-only party, there's good odds you summoned both the priests and the mages, or at least you grabbed the priests so you could get healing for your party. After 1-3 battles, odds are one of those priests is going to cast the light spell you need.
Wizardry 4 doesn't actually become a fucked up nightmare until you reach the floor just prior to the Cosmic Cube. Everything prior to that is just dealing with the RNG while you map out the floor and figure out what you need to do. Then the floor prior to the Cosmic Cube is designed to stick you in an unwinnable state, and the Cosmic Cube has sections that can only be beaten by pure luck. The most evil of all is before you reach the exit of the Cube.
The game puts you in a room full of spinners, and you need to reach a specific spot in the room, which is surrounded by teleporters that will either throw you backwards in the Cube, or into a section of the Cube with no actual exit. The spot you need is in the center of the room, where you can't see the walls to orient yourself. So you have absolutely NO idea which direction you are facing, or where you are standing in the room. You literally have a 1/4 chance of making the correct move, and you have to do about 6-8 of these 1/4 chance moves correctly IN A ROW in order to move forwards. The PS1 version lets you see the floor and shows your view spinning, so you can actually tell what direction you are facing if you pay attention. The original computer version does neither, making it pure RNG.

>>11862857 (OP)
Wizardry IV was created by Roe R. Adams III, who also designed UltimaIV and laid the groundwork for UltimaV and VI (the first three Ultimas were an incoherent pile of crap that Richard Garriott stuffed with every idea he could think of). He even worked on The Bard’s Tale. A true legend.

>What Roe R. Adams III Did (by Hiromasa Iwasaki):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CzhUPh4ZjIkL8t5d0o4CHip8WkgALPqv0XnPNEu7l_I/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.btqxcvb7zuel

>>11863652

I think you are supposed to use the position spell. But with your limited spells it's still tough as shit.

>>11863806
You can, but using Dumapic or otherwise going into and out of the menu causes you to spin again. On the PS1 version, you don't need it. On the computer originals, the info you get will be outdated by the time you get it, and your next step forward will still be RNG if you went the right way or not.

>>11863472
Doesn't sound difficult just tedious. Like saying that there's a game where you have to roll 20 D6s and have them all result in a 6 to win the game, then saying "OMFG THIS GAME IS SO HARD THE HARDEST GAME EVER MADE!!"

>>11864027
>Winning at the lottery isn't hard

>>11864029
The term difficult should mean "Requires a lot of skill", not "Requires a lot of luck" or "Requires a lot of endurance".

>>11862857 (OP)
Nice post, Grok

>>11864027
What a stupid and silly opinion.

>>11863494
>And ironically forgets what he was even doing in the first place.
What are you even talking about?
The entire plot of Wizardry 1 was Werdna had taken the amulet from Trebor and was trying to unlock it's secrets, and Trebor sent you to take Werdna out and get the amulet back. Wizardry 4 starts with you being pissed off at the adventurers from 1 who took you down, and swearing you will get your amulet back. The Grand Master ending of Wizardry 4 is getting the amulet back in your possession, and figuring out what it is finally. The answer is, the amulet is a death-trap device, so you nuke it from existence and move onward.
There are other endings, like the 'good' ending, where you don't get the amulet back since you never enter the temple and take on the god statue holding it, but the game out right tells you "aren't you forgetting something?".

>>11864062
I feel so stupid for not being able to spot AI posts

>>11862894
>>11862857 (OP)
based but i still won't play it. i don't want BS difficulty