Yeah, the backer skill is just for background fluff about the original Wasteland and the southwest in general. There are a couple neat bits that explain how real locations and history tie into Wasteland canon, but it's just a flavor thing.
Nice. Near the end myself, but this'll make my eventual replay much smoother; some of California's quests did get pretty janky. Though I've been pretty lucky with bugs, besides that weird shadow camera issue during battle - where panning seems to move the shadows but not the actual camera position until you attack or move. Most of my gripes are design issues, quest resolution problems, overall balance, and so on. Technically the game's been pretty stable so far. Not perfect, but it hasn't crashed or anything, knock on wood.
Hell, I remember when Fallout 2 finally got its major patch, which addressed things like "containers randomly deleting their contents" and "NPCs turning hostile for no reason." How far we've come.
Nice. Near the end myself, but this'll make my eventual replay much smoother; some of California's quests did get pretty janky. Though I've been pretty lucky with bugs, besides that weird shadow camera issue during battle - where panning seems to move the shadows but not the actual camera position until you attack or move. Most of my gripes are design issues, quest resolution problems, overall balance, and so on. Technically the game's been pretty stable so far. Not perfect, but it hasn't crashed or anything, knock on wood.
Hell, I remember when Fallout 2 finally got its major patch, which addressed things like "containers randomly deleting their contents" and "NPCs turning hostile for no reason." How far we've come.
That fucking car trunk bug where the car disappears leaving the trunk and never comes back. I probably lost 10 hours alone because of that one. FO2 was the game that I think turned me into a compulsive and highly organized saver.
+3
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Nice. Near the end myself, but this'll make my eventual replay much smoother; some of California's quests did get pretty janky. Though I've been pretty lucky with bugs, besides that weird shadow camera issue during battle - where panning seems to move the shadows but not the actual camera position until you attack or move. Most of my gripes are design issues, quest resolution problems, overall balance, and so on. Technically the game's been pretty stable so far. Not perfect, but it hasn't crashed or anything, knock on wood.
Hell, I remember when Fallout 2 finally got its major patch, which addressed things like "containers randomly deleting their contents" and "NPCs turning hostile for no reason." How far we've come.
That fucking car trunk bug where the car disappears leaving the trunk and never comes back. I probably lost 10 hours alone because of that one. FO2 was the game that I think turned me into a compulsive and highly organized saver.
I was that way after all the horrors I experienced in the PS3 version of Fallout 3.
I can't trust video games anymore. I quick save every thirty seconds as an instinct/reflex now.
Was just playing and when I quit out saw a button for achievements. Doesn't look like anyone's actually got them yet but there's a list and I guess they must be coming soon.
Edit: The list
Call Of The Wild
Scavenger
Locked And Loaded
Moo, I Say
Goat Simulator
Sweet, Sweet Squeezins
Sinister Legacy
Ezekiel 18:20
Cat Burglar
Not Monkeying Around
Know Your Roots
Son Of A Motherless Goat
Better Left Buried
East Of Eden
Back Where It All Began
A General and a Gentleman
Pushed The Button
Elbow Grease
Butterfingers
Relics Of A Bygone Age
Skin 'O Yer Teeth
Oops
Wasteland Historian
Pop Idol
Some Help You Are
Fight Fire With Fire
Embrace The Glow
Red Wire, Blue Wire
Fateful Reunion
A Gentle Heart
Tasty!
Wasteland Justice
A Night To Remember
What Does This Button Do?
They Walk Among Us
Peace On The Rails
Under Old Management
Hell Bent For Leather
Too Much Time On Yer Hands
I Am Legend
Blast From The Past
Strength Of One
Sinners And Saints
Religious Persecution
Self Actualized
How Rude
Civilized
Divine Retribution
Finished wasteland.
Other than the disappointingly low difficulty level for the final encounters (the toughest fight in a game shouldn't be some random encounter with mooks...) I enjoyed it a lot.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I didn't find the helicopter, where is it and is Angela savable?
If I remember it correctly I found the helicopter wreck in Seal beach. No sign of angela.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Seems like they're adding steam achievements to this, 49 locked now show up on the game page in my library. Kinda annoying I'm over halfway through already.
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
+1
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
My boxed copy shipped last Tuesday, but I still haven't received it yet. Getting antsy!
I really wish they'd have done priority mail or some such. Something with a tracking number. :P
Is there a use for the gold you get from Silo 7 or is it safe to sell?
Probably safe to sell; I stuffed it in a locker until the end and it never came up again.
So much stuff I'd hang onto. Couldn't afford fancy laser guns or armor, but eventually someone's gonna want all these Tiger handhelds, and then who's gonna look prepared?
Gah, combat can be so frustrating. My melee guy routinely misses 60%+ hits to the point that I'm starting to wonder if hit percentages are bugged. And if I line a shotgun cone of fire up that has an enemy at 70% in the middle, and a squad member at 35% off to the side, the shot misses the enemy yet hits the squadmate EVERY time.
Gah, combat can be so frustrating. My melee guy routinely misses 60%+ hits to the point that I'm starting to wonder if hit percentages are bugged. And if I line a shotgun cone of fire up that has an enemy at 70% in the middle, and a squad member at 35% off to the side, the shot misses the enemy yet hits the squadmate EVERY time.
Make sure you manually aim shotguns by holding down Ctrl.
My boxed copy shipped last Tuesday, but I still haven't received it yet. Getting antsy!
I really wish they'd have done priority mail or some such. Something with a tracking number. :P
If it's any consolation, I haven't heard shit about the special edition box set I paid $100 for...
I haven't either.
I mean there was a backer survey thing ages ago iirc but I don't recall seeing anything since then.
From the email I received last week:
P.S. Signed collectors editions, badges, survival kits, etc. have not started shipping. We will send additional emails to people receiving those rewards.
Yeah, I haven't heard a timeframe for delivery yet, but I know the physical stuff from Shadowrun Returns took a while to deliver. The game originally released in July of last year, and I think I didn't get my physical copy+goodies until sometime in October. I imagine a lot of developers just underestimate the time it takes to package and ship stuff.
In fact, I'd like to dedicate this next song to my friends at inXile:
Got my boxed copy yesterday! I'm so happy, I gave away my two Steam keys to my brother and my friend, so I'm finally able to play it. Seems great so far, although no support medic/surgeon means I will probably die in a hail of gunfire.
Got my boxed copy yesterday! I'm so happy, I gave away my two Steam keys to my brother and my friend, so I'm finally able to play it. Seems great so far, although no support medic/surgeon means I will probably die in a hail of gunfire.
If it's anything like my first attempt, you will lose a guy to a freak max damage animal bite within the first 10 minutes with the rest of team shortly following thereafter.
First Aid and Surgeon (and preferably a 2nd person with at least one rank in Surgeon) are probably the two most important skills in the game. Well, you know, along with having weapon skills.
Unless you're playing on easy. Then you can safely do whatever.
Hey where do I buy explosives? The people at ranger citadel say there's a vendor named "TNT" something but I've looked all over and can't find him/her.
Hey where do I buy explosives? The people at ranger citadel say there's a vendor named "TNT" something but I've looked all over and can't find him/her.
He's in a side room in the hall with the big stairs.
He's got all sorts of shit and you can even bring him shit.
Good shit.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I never did unpack my thoughts about Wasteland 2. No doubt some of this has changed or been smoothed out since the patch, but given the game's size it may be a while before I get to a second playthrough. I will eventually, of course, for reasons outlined below. Hidden for length and some endgame spoilers.
Did they pull it off?
I've said before that I don't quite know what I was expecting when I first backed the Kickstarter. Wasteland was a beloved classic, my first proper PC game, and it showed me just what games were really capable of. Problems with more than one solution, missions that could be failed without forcing a game over, the player's responsibility to build a balanced team, the combination of descriptive paragraphs with the limited graphics to paint a more vivid picture; the experience blew my fragile little mind at the time. A contemporary title can do many or even all of those things, but whether they can match that feeling - the impression that I'm playing something truly groundbreaking - is a much more loaded question.
Many positive reviews of Wasteland 2 frontload the criticism, ending with some variant of "but I liked the game anyway because etc." It's easy to see why: bugs still being ironed out, a rather clunky interface, widespread locks and traps with long skill use animations, overuse of a limited pool of music, some weak story elements, some poorly designed areas, large chunks of wasted space (especially in Arizona)... you don't have to look too hard to see some serious flaws. The enjoyable aspects are likely to be subjective: how well the combat clicks for the player, whether they like the setting and overall fiction, the extent to which building a proper team is enjoyable, and so on. Indeed, in their bid to create a classic-sized PC RPG, it seems inXile could have made the game play better without sacrificing its hardcore appeal.
For instance, the locks and traps thing: consider the Baldur's Gate games, which also made use of frequent locks and traps on obstacles. Where BG has the advantage is that skill usage is practically instantaneous; the character moves to the trapped item and, if successful, the trap field simply disappears. WL2 added some needless visual flair to the process - your ranger rubbing their hands before working on the object, or kicking it repeatedly as a meter fills, or whatever - which adds a few seconds to each skillcheck. In a game with hundreds of them, those seconds start to add up. Little changes to things like that could have smoothed out a lot of reviewer complaints, with few if any adjustments to the core mechanics.
I mentioned the objectivity thing earlier. It's hardly a secret that I put a fair chunk of change into the Kickstarter, and I can feel the little nagging doubts in the back of my head. Would I be fair if I saw something that bugged me, or read criticism? Would I go easy on the game, knowing that some of my own money was somewhere inside? Would my opinion be more biased than others? It's a reasonable question, and I never did come up with a good answer. Even putting that aside, I'm not gonna deny I was a little nervous when this came out. It's been a long time since the Infinity engine was king of the hill. Did I still have the stomach for a big PC game? What if my appetites had simply moved on? Doubts upon doubts upon doubts.
Did they pull it off?
Like putting up with the asshole wizard at the Friendly Arm Inn while you're still level 1, the appeal persists; a game that won't pull its punches, that will try its best to bring me down. WL2 definitely has the spark of those classic RPGs, that hard-to-define something that makes them hard to put down once I start. Fights were tactical, kinetic affairs: cover got destroyed, enemies repositioned, backup weapons were handy, well-timed explosives turned the tide, and even a difficult encounter could be mitigated with the right preparation. Environments presented their own challenges, and with several ways through a given obstacle I was more often than not encouraged to work around a failed skillcheck rather than savescum. Uncooperative plot elements or even bugged out triggers could be answered by force-firing, and there was no problem that the right size bomb could not solve.
Arizona did drag and suffer from design problems - the Prison being chief among them - but it also held its own curious charms, and it presents a neat contrast with California. At the start, Echo Team is just a bunch of scrubs whose mission rapidly spirals out of control. They start in known territory and gradually push the boundaries, earning their stripes in the process. Water is precious, communities are scarce, civilization is on the knife's edge atop a pile of late 80s-early 90s rubble. By the time I did get to California, Echo felt every bit the veteran ranger squad, doing what rangers do best: venture into wild territory and bring down the law. Fitting, because there the script is flipped. Water is everywhere, people are everywhere, and it's on us to put our best foot forward. Every arrival the Santa Fe base, every interaction with the public, every time we stepped in to right some wrong felt like it mattered somehow, like it could have gone differently - and like everything we'd done before had shaped us for that encounter.
That's a key spice to those old titles: variety. What happens if I do this instead of that? What does this guy say or do if I mention this? What if I didn't have that skill, item, or party member? What are the consequences if we just kill everyone? Is there a way to get what I want peacefully, and if so how bad do I want it? I was constantly asking myself those questions during Wasteland 2, and it's for those reasons that I know I'll be back. There's more to see, even if I think I've seen it all; there's more to try, even if I've already sunk some 80 hours into the campaign. Old PC RPGs sometimes get a shot of life from modding communities, but even before I had heard thing one about mods, there were some games where I knew - just knew - that I'd be back, just to see what happened this time.
And god help me if I didn't get drawn in at times, just a little. I searched the warehouse frantically in Damonta, wondering if there even was a third option between 'take down the synth' and 'save the hostage.' I listened carefully as Angie's chopper was shot down, and read every word of the text in our own flyover. I paid attention to the radio broadcasts in LA, making mental notes of who's who in the neighborhood. Matthias wasn't much of an antagonist - there were moments of good writing, but his was a stock grand scheme - but there was a respectable sense that something was tracking Echo and the Rangers. There's a strange appeal to being stuck in uncharted territory, surrounded by potential enemies, with friends well out of reach and one hell of a longshot goal ahead of us. It's predictable in the end, but not without its highs; as @rockrnger mentions, the trick of bringing back everyone you've made friends with for the final battle is an old one, but no less effective. A shame it was limited to your exploits in Arizona.
Sometimes it's not the game I'm after, but the adventure, the challenge. Sometimes it's the sense that I am probably going to fucking die if I play this game like I play every other game. So it was with games like Arcanum; flawed to hell and back, difficult to recommend, but special in a way that most games simply aren't for me. So it is with Wasteland 2.
So which skills do you assign to each guy?
Faceman Peck is obviously the faceman and BA Baracus should have repair, weapon smithing and Brute force, but how do you divide skills between the other?
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Posts
http://wastelandrpg.tumblr.com/post/99930440396/wasteland-2-patch-2-58154-release-notes
There's a ton of little fixes though.
I seems like he gets a turn every other battle.
Nice. Near the end myself, but this'll make my eventual replay much smoother; some of California's quests did get pretty janky. Though I've been pretty lucky with bugs, besides that weird shadow camera issue during battle - where panning seems to move the shadows but not the actual camera position until you attack or move. Most of my gripes are design issues, quest resolution problems, overall balance, and so on. Technically the game's been pretty stable so far. Not perfect, but it hasn't crashed or anything, knock on wood.
Hell, I remember when Fallout 2 finally got its major patch, which addressed things like "containers randomly deleting their contents" and "NPCs turning hostile for no reason." How far we've come.
That fucking car trunk bug where the car disappears leaving the trunk and never comes back. I probably lost 10 hours alone because of that one. FO2 was the game that I think turned me into a compulsive and highly organized saver.
I can't trust video games anymore. I quick save every thirty seconds as an instinct/reflex now.
Other than her and a couple plot points from rose it's just scotchmo craping his pants.
Ralphy has some GREAT lines when you get to Hollywood and start looking around the brothel.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Edit: The list
Scavenger
Locked And Loaded
Moo, I Say
Goat Simulator
Sweet, Sweet Squeezins
Sinister Legacy
Ezekiel 18:20
Cat Burglar
Not Monkeying Around
Know Your Roots
Son Of A Motherless Goat
Better Left Buried
East Of Eden
Back Where It All Began
A General and a Gentleman
Pushed The Button
Elbow Grease
Butterfingers
Relics Of A Bygone Age
Skin 'O Yer Teeth
Oops
Wasteland Historian
Pop Idol
Some Help You Are
Fight Fire With Fire
Embrace The Glow
Red Wire, Blue Wire
Fateful Reunion
A Gentle Heart
Tasty!
Wasteland Justice
A Night To Remember
What Does This Button Do?
They Walk Among Us
Peace On The Rails
Under Old Management
Hell Bent For Leather
Too Much Time On Yer Hands
I Am Legend
Blast From The Past
Strength Of One
Sinners And Saints
Religious Persecution
Self Actualized
How Rude
Civilized
Divine Retribution
Other than the disappointingly low difficulty level for the final encounters (the toughest fight in a game shouldn't be some random encounter with mooks...) I enjoyed it a lot.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I really wish they'd have done priority mail or some such. Something with a tracking number. :P
If it's any consolation, I haven't heard shit about the special edition box set I paid $100 for...
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Probably safe to sell; I stuffed it in a locker until the end and it never came up again.
So much stuff I'd hang onto. Couldn't afford fancy laser guns or armor, but eventually someone's gonna want all these Tiger handhelds, and then who's gonna look prepared?
I haven't either.
I mean there was a backer survey thing ages ago iirc but I don't recall seeing anything since then.
Make sure you manually aim shotguns by holding down Ctrl.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
And I haven't heard anything about my $100 box either.
From the email I received last week:
In fact, I'd like to dedicate this next song to my friends at inXile:
If it's anything like my first attempt, you will lose a guy to a freak max damage animal bite within the first 10 minutes with the rest of team shortly following thereafter.
Unless you're playing on easy. Then you can safely do whatever.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Thoughts
For whatever reason Hollywood didn't fire for me. No prompts from Victoria to start the main quest.
Last bit was actually kinda cool. Seeing the people you helped help you is an old trick but still neat.
I was disappointed at the unique weapons. This is a knife and the energy unique were the only ones I actually ended up using.
Overall, I liked it quite a bit. Not for everyone but scratched an itch.
He's in a side room in the hall with the big stairs.
Steam Profile
3DS: 3454-0268-5595 Battle.net: SteelAngel#1772
Good shit.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I've said before that I don't quite know what I was expecting when I first backed the Kickstarter. Wasteland was a beloved classic, my first proper PC game, and it showed me just what games were really capable of. Problems with more than one solution, missions that could be failed without forcing a game over, the player's responsibility to build a balanced team, the combination of descriptive paragraphs with the limited graphics to paint a more vivid picture; the experience blew my fragile little mind at the time. A contemporary title can do many or even all of those things, but whether they can match that feeling - the impression that I'm playing something truly groundbreaking - is a much more loaded question.
Many positive reviews of Wasteland 2 frontload the criticism, ending with some variant of "but I liked the game anyway because etc." It's easy to see why: bugs still being ironed out, a rather clunky interface, widespread locks and traps with long skill use animations, overuse of a limited pool of music, some weak story elements, some poorly designed areas, large chunks of wasted space (especially in Arizona)... you don't have to look too hard to see some serious flaws. The enjoyable aspects are likely to be subjective: how well the combat clicks for the player, whether they like the setting and overall fiction, the extent to which building a proper team is enjoyable, and so on. Indeed, in their bid to create a classic-sized PC RPG, it seems inXile could have made the game play better without sacrificing its hardcore appeal.
For instance, the locks and traps thing: consider the Baldur's Gate games, which also made use of frequent locks and traps on obstacles. Where BG has the advantage is that skill usage is practically instantaneous; the character moves to the trapped item and, if successful, the trap field simply disappears. WL2 added some needless visual flair to the process - your ranger rubbing their hands before working on the object, or kicking it repeatedly as a meter fills, or whatever - which adds a few seconds to each skillcheck. In a game with hundreds of them, those seconds start to add up. Little changes to things like that could have smoothed out a lot of reviewer complaints, with few if any adjustments to the core mechanics.
I mentioned the objectivity thing earlier. It's hardly a secret that I put a fair chunk of change into the Kickstarter, and I can feel the little nagging doubts in the back of my head. Would I be fair if I saw something that bugged me, or read criticism? Would I go easy on the game, knowing that some of my own money was somewhere inside? Would my opinion be more biased than others? It's a reasonable question, and I never did come up with a good answer. Even putting that aside, I'm not gonna deny I was a little nervous when this came out. It's been a long time since the Infinity engine was king of the hill. Did I still have the stomach for a big PC game? What if my appetites had simply moved on? Doubts upon doubts upon doubts.
Did they pull it off?
Like putting up with the asshole wizard at the Friendly Arm Inn while you're still level 1, the appeal persists; a game that won't pull its punches, that will try its best to bring me down. WL2 definitely has the spark of those classic RPGs, that hard-to-define something that makes them hard to put down once I start. Fights were tactical, kinetic affairs: cover got destroyed, enemies repositioned, backup weapons were handy, well-timed explosives turned the tide, and even a difficult encounter could be mitigated with the right preparation. Environments presented their own challenges, and with several ways through a given obstacle I was more often than not encouraged to work around a failed skillcheck rather than savescum. Uncooperative plot elements or even bugged out triggers could be answered by force-firing, and there was no problem that the right size bomb could not solve.
Arizona did drag and suffer from design problems - the Prison being chief among them - but it also held its own curious charms, and it presents a neat contrast with California. At the start, Echo Team is just a bunch of scrubs whose mission rapidly spirals out of control. They start in known territory and gradually push the boundaries, earning their stripes in the process. Water is precious, communities are scarce, civilization is on the knife's edge atop a pile of late 80s-early 90s rubble. By the time I did get to California, Echo felt every bit the veteran ranger squad, doing what rangers do best: venture into wild territory and bring down the law. Fitting, because there the script is flipped. Water is everywhere, people are everywhere, and it's on us to put our best foot forward. Every arrival the Santa Fe base, every interaction with the public, every time we stepped in to right some wrong felt like it mattered somehow, like it could have gone differently - and like everything we'd done before had shaped us for that encounter.
That's a key spice to those old titles: variety. What happens if I do this instead of that? What does this guy say or do if I mention this? What if I didn't have that skill, item, or party member? What are the consequences if we just kill everyone? Is there a way to get what I want peacefully, and if so how bad do I want it? I was constantly asking myself those questions during Wasteland 2, and it's for those reasons that I know I'll be back. There's more to see, even if I think I've seen it all; there's more to try, even if I've already sunk some 80 hours into the campaign. Old PC RPGs sometimes get a shot of life from modding communities, but even before I had heard thing one about mods, there were some games where I knew - just knew - that I'd be back, just to see what happened this time.
And god help me if I didn't get drawn in at times, just a little. I searched the warehouse frantically in Damonta, wondering if there even was a third option between 'take down the synth' and 'save the hostage.' I listened carefully as Angie's chopper was shot down, and read every word of the text in our own flyover. I paid attention to the radio broadcasts in LA, making mental notes of who's who in the neighborhood. Matthias wasn't much of an antagonist - there were moments of good writing, but his was a stock grand scheme - but there was a respectable sense that something was tracking Echo and the Rangers. There's a strange appeal to being stuck in uncharted territory, surrounded by potential enemies, with friends well out of reach and one hell of a longshot goal ahead of us. It's predictable in the end, but not without its highs; as @rockrnger mentions, the trick of bringing back everyone you've made friends with for the final battle is an old one, but no less effective. A shame it was limited to your exploits in Arizona.
Sometimes it's not the game I'm after, but the adventure, the challenge. Sometimes it's the sense that I am probably going to fucking die if I play this game like I play every other game. So it was with games like Arcanum; flawed to hell and back, difficult to recommend, but special in a way that most games simply aren't for me. So it is with Wasteland 2.
Did they pull it off?
Yeah, I think they pulled it off.
Faceman Peck is obviously the faceman and BA Baracus should have repair, weapon smithing and Brute force, but how do you divide skills between the other?
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden