Wizardry or Ultima? Which one was better, and which one had a greater impact on gaming?

Might & Magic feels to me like a mix between Wizardry and Ultima: you have your first-person dungeon crawling perspective and a fully open world to explore. Neither element is as fleshed out as they are in Wizardry or Ultima, but they got the mixture right. The interface of the first two is really clunky though, the third one is the first I was able to actually get into.

Diablo is mostly a real-time roguelike. In fact, the original game was originally intended to be turn-based like a roguelike, but it was Blizzard who wanted it to be realtime instead.>You're right, I forgot about the M&M series. Same questions for it.

Ultima Underworld > Might and Magic > Wizardry > mainline Ultima is my personal opinion in terms of preference.

For impact it gets a little more complicated. M&M came five years after the other two and arguably sort of owes its existence to them both. So that just leaves Ultima vs Wizardry, and for that pair I'd say they just had different impacts.

Ultima ultimately (hehe) led us more down the direction of top down and isometric heavily story driven RPG's, whereas Wizardry went more with the idea of dungeon crawling adventurers in a generally sort of open world. Which is not to say that they were devoid of story, but it frequently took a back seat to raw exploration and combat.

So I guess I'd have to call Ultima the more influential of the two as it seems to have done more to inspire games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and the SSI RPGs, where Wizardry spawned somewhat more niche games like Lands of Lore and Realms of Arkania.

And of course, Ultima had the Underworld games, which were stupidly ahead of their time and are in one way or another the grandfather to so many of PC's best games, as well as TES series see what I did there?

Might and Magic

Ultima was the "TECHNOLOGY" series, but it really wasn't anything special as time went on. As in to go with pioneering technological tricks, it had all of these neat gameplay ideas but their execution was pretty weak. Each one sort of tried a few different things, but they never really stand out, except for maybe Ultima 7, arguably the best of the numbered lot and one of the better examples of a good open world. One exception being Ultima Underworld which was both crazy advanced for its time and pretty good.

Wizardry was good, but didn't really change that much over the course of the series all the way up until Wizardry 8, which was fucking great. Wizardry 8 was a colossal leap in quality and design. Nearly every game in the series was extremely "hard" in that most enemies could instantly kill you in one turn by sheer chance (Japan took to this shit like crack and have made countless tile based movement games with deliberately asshole-ish enemies and fucked up maze dungeons, including their own spinoff of Wizardry). Wizardry 4 gets an honorable mention for being preposterously cryptic as fuck for its puzzles. Wizardry 5 was the peak of the series next to 8.

Might & Magic, coming along later was the series that had style and polish. It kept it simple and did it well, the games were gold from nearly the beginning up to 7, at which point it never really went anywhere and just kept rehashing Mandate of Heaven's engine even when everyone else had evolved beyond it. The things M&M did over the course of its series was improve the core gameplay and take a couple notable evolutions - first being Xeen with its hybrid ranged/encounter combat and the second being Mandate of Heaven which went full real time. Where Ultima dropped the sci-fi stuff (besides the MC Avatar being a dude from a 1990s American trailer park transported to Britannia) and Wizardry never touched upon their sci-fi until 7 (after Japan stuck to the classics), M&M embraced the wacky fucked up mystical science cube-shaped world… and then Ubisoft bought the series, erased the world of Xeen and stuck to the Heroes of M&M universe (Heroes is also really cool).

Best of their respective series:
World of Xeen
Wizardry V
Ultima VII Though I love the Worlds of Ultima games

Riddle me this; Why are both dead? No, I understand why they stopped with Ultima, but why does no one care to revive them (for good and probably bad). What makes them untouched relics now?

Wizardry, specifically 6, 7 and 8.

Hardcore gameplay and intimidating to new players (they see '8 games from decades ago' and run away, same reason modern sequels hide the number).

No idea on wizardary, but you can pin ultima dying on EA.

Technically Wizardry didn't die, as games are still being made of it in Japan.

no, I mean the game was directly inspired by Ultima 8. the camera, the combat, the interface and even the tone. all of it was taken almost directly.

Ultima for sure. It tried new things as the series went on, for better and worse. In the end, the games feel more like full on role playing games.

Wizardry was just the same old dungeon crawling the whole way through. You've played one of the games, then you've played them all. Exceptions being 4 and 8, which tried to do new things.

If you're referring to Dragon Quest, it's both. Wizardry's combat and spell system with Ultima's exploration, viewpoint, and puzzle style.

While their impact isn't felt quite as much in modern western releases, it's still felt in the japanese releases, where they still use Dragon Quest, Megami Tensei, and FF - games all influenced by Ultima and Wizardry - as the standard for making RPGs.

I'd probably say that Ultima had some more lasting impact in the west due to the non-combat elements, while Wizardry had more lasting impact in Japan with its combat system.

Reminder that there are source ports for Ultimas IV,VI,VII,& VIII

Ultima is dead and its clones are pretty much gone too
Wizardry still gets clones and the last Wizardry game was released in 2011.
Not to mention that Wizardry focuses itself on gameplay and puzzle solving first meaning the games aren't outdated 5 years down the line whereas Ultima focused itself on half baked plots and moral stories which don't make much sense if you put any thought into them. The worst example of this is Ultima 6, absolutely groundbreaking for its time but absolutely trash nowadays.

So, what actually killed Sir-Tech? I never managed to figure out how such a company could go bankrupt. Is it the really dire looking games they published, like "Armed and Delirious"?

Time is what killed them
Basically as the costs of making games improved their audience didn't.
While many will swear Jagged Alliance 2 and Wizardry 8 as a masterpiece, they didn't have enough of a market share to keep up with the increasing standards.