I believe I may have an answer to this problem and a possible (but virtually improbable solution). Let me explain. Sorry about the length:
I am not a programmer but back in the eighties played the hell out of Wiz 1, 2 & 3 (and a little of 4) on Apple 2+, 2E and 2C. I am extremely familiar with the gameplay of the first three games. The images you have posted are not the original versions of Wizardry. I assume they are remake versions, possibly for the SuperNintendo or IBM. Inherently, nothing has changed except the graphics. I recently completed both 1 & 3 on these versions with no problems.
Which brings us back to Wiz 2…
I continually came across the same problem you did and could not work out a solution, nor find one on the internet. So, I “obtained” the original apple versions (circa ’81) and played them through an apple emulator. Everything worked perfectly. Completed Wiz 1 and got all pieces of KOD’s armour in Wiz 2. Then, tragedy
*NOTE* Make back-ups of your dsk files often!
I decided to teleport to the bottom floor of Wiz 2, having already visited that floor. Any experienced wizardry player knows that if you teleport into rock your party is instantly destroyed. I messed up my co-ordinates and my party was entirely deleted.
*NOTE* Your party does not exist while you are in camp above the first floor stairs (or quite possibly in any camp). If you make a back-up of your disk at this point, which I did, your party will not exist when you attempt to recover! So, I had to start all over again with new characters from Wiz 1 (this is important!).
Ok, I know this is long, but all this will make sense shortly.
Jumping in our De Lorian and traveling back to the early eighties, computers did not have hard drives. All information had to be saved to your floppy disk. When you bought an original apple version of Wizardy the manual said that you should not play on the original, but rather make a duplicate copy and play on that. If anything went wrong you could make another duplicate of the original, salvage what you could and keep going, or, as in my case, start from scratch.
The reason for playing on the duplicate is that the Wizardry program re-writes some of it’s data/programming as you progress through the game.
Now… remember my deleted Wiz 2 party? When I finally got my new characters to Wiz 2, guess what - there were flaws in the game. It didn’t crash, but some graphics did not display properly and the KOD’s gear did not exist. Why? Because the program had re-written itself to say these items did not exist and thrown in a few flaws just for the hell of it.
Suddenly I had flashbacks of similar things happening to me in the eighties.
Cutting this story short I loaded my new party from the duplicate version and then switched drives on the emulator so that now the original was loaded. I removed my party and switched drives back. You have to do it this way because Wiz will not let you transfer chars between duplicates. My party now existed on both copies.
*NOTE* Quite often the last character you remove at Gigamesh’s does not save. If you are doing stuff like this always reload a character and then re-remove them. This guarantees the program will save your characters properly. Going to ‘Edge of Town’ or ‘Leaving’ the game works, but sometimes you don’t want that (for example, what if one character gives a rare item/gold to another character. You save the second character, load/remove them, and then end the game without removing the first character who gave the item. When you recover both chars have the item. I digress…)
I had to recover my party on both duplicates…. but, success!
When I played the game on the master version all the flaws were gone and the KOD armour existed again!
So, here is a solution to the problem you have posted. The version we have all been trying to play on is a pre-played Wiz 2. It contains embedded flaws. The only way to be able to play it is to find a version that has never been played before. Told you, improbable. Although if someone has another solution I'd love to hear it.
Lastly- moving characters around is not a problem, despite other comments. I create my chars in Wiz 1 and immediately import them to Wiz 3. I then perform the ‘rite of passage’. Booting Wizardry 1 I import them back and begin playing. I am still using those characters on Wiz 2 and as of this morning have collected all 5 pieces of KOD’s gear. No problems.
