Wasteland 2: MEH

[BloatedGuppy]

So I finally finished off Divinity: Original Sin after 80 hours or so, at least 60 of which were spent trying to unravel that game's hilariously obtuse quests, and have moved on to Wasteland 2, which I was a backer of. Maybe it's just that it measures up poorly against Divinity, but for a game that was in many ways one of the poster children for the Kickstarter movement it's really a big pile of bleargh.

Where to begin?

CHARACTER CREATION IS FUNDAMENTALLY BROKEN

In a pen and paper game like Shadowrun, your skills are gated by your attributes. It's all very well and good to take acrobatics, say, but a guy with garbage dexterity is going to be terrible at it no matter how much they practice. Not so in Wasteland 2, where your 1 strength guy with 3 skill points in bashing things will be better at bashing things than your 10 strength guy with 1 point. Attributes are completely divorced from skills, and most of them are completely worthless, meaning raise INT as high as possible, get your AP generating ones up a bit, and then dump everything else.

Add in that of the panoply of secondary skills you can take, over your four characters you can and will take almost everything, passing over only completely worthless abilities like barter. So there are no "hard decisions". Encounter a locked door? You will select your lockpicker and unlock it. Game play!

The end result is the "proper" way to roll a party is give everyone an identical stat allocation, and make sure you have all the skills covered over your four characters.

THE CHARACTERS ARE HIDEOUS

The concept art is nice, but the 3D models for the characters are quite literally the ugliest RPG character models I've seen since the 90's, and even that is a stretch. They are YOWLINGLY hideous. There is no explanation for how bad they look. Even the copy of Pool of Radiance I played on the C64 had better character creation than this, at least I could choose the color of my goddam outfit.

COMBAT IS SCREWED UP

Everyone just moves too fast. See that shambling zombie man who explodes when killed? I bet you need to kite him around, right? Nope, he will sprint across the entire screen and be cuddling your party in a single turn. This is mitigated somewhat with cover and firearms, but the cover is entirely binary and the shooting is "meh". This is no Jagged Alliance.

DIALOGUE FEELS A BIT QUANTITY OVER QUALITY

Much as in Divinity this game has some CHATTY motherfuckers, but a lot of what they have to say is just clunky exposition. In a game that relies SO heavily on the quality of the writing (because so much of what else is on offer is so naff) you'd really think there would've been more on offer here. It makes me more than a bit sad that this studio is in charge of the spiritual successor to Planescape.

UNITY SUCKS

The game has Shadowrun Returns disease, in that everything is a bit fuzzy and muddy looking, and maps might look busy but very, very little is actually interactive. And it can be hard at a glance to determine what is "walkable" ground vs "scenery" ground, resulting in clicking in a field and wondering why no one is moving.

I don't *hate* the game...I'm a sucker for post apocalyptic settings, and I like isometric RPGs, and I absolutely adore turn based tactical combat, even when it's shitty like this, but holy cow, some of this shit there just isn't an excuse for. How on EARTH is the stat and skill system underpinning the game so completely broken and worthless? This isn't even alpha quality work, this is more "guy does not understand math" work. How are the character graphics this hideous? Is it an inside joke? This might have been a shoe string budget to some extent, but it was still a high profile game. Too many balls dropped. Too many.

 

[Darks63]

Well that's a shame is there any hope that these issues can be fixed with patches/mods?

Otherwise if it is as you say a Shadowrun Returns like game than i can wait till it is 10 bucks or less on steam.

 

[hazabaza1]

Yeah it didn't seem great.
I suppose if the core game to compare to is Shadowrun Returns it's no real surprise though, that game was... awful. Really bad. Divinity was alright but got really repetitive really quickly, but let's hope Pillars of Eternity is better.

 

[small]

the models in the character creator ire really low quality, but considering the camera is far out in game i dont really notice it, as for the graphics being generally hideous.. hmm we must be playing different games.

im quite enjoying it. good sequel to the original for me. money well spent

 

[Vault101]

the models in the character creator ire really low quality, but considering the camera is far out in game i dont really notice it

I guess I've played to much XCOM but I would like to have had a little more intimacy with the camera (uhhh yeah...) like anaction cam or something,

[quote/]as for the graphics being generally hideous.. hmm we must be playing different games.
[/quote]

I think the graphics look generally decent but I agree with the OP in that the character models and such could use a little (a lot) more polish

also doesn't help with that incredibly ugly bright green/red outlining around models....blegh

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

you know, I completely agree with all of these...but at the end of the day, I'm surprisingly still enjoying the game alot. Which is odd, considering how fucking annoying it is in gameplay to have the enemies be broken (completely off screen characters reach me in one turn? fuck that shit. what the fuck is the point of my sniper who cant even SEE THESE THINGS if they can run up to me in that one turn?)


discobots anyone? fuck those little things.

I think they are working on the modding tools now though...so hopefully once those come out, alot of these things can be fixed (yes yes i know, these things should be fixed by the devs, but whatever, if the community fixes them then I'll still enjoy it.) and as we know with bethesda games, modders are stubborn as hell about getting graphics up to speed.

 

[Fappy]

I'm feeling rather "meh" towards it as well. I do have to ask though, why call out the Unity engine? Many developers love it and it seems like it does the job rather well for this sort of title. I'd assume it's user error (on InXile's part) before I fault the engine.

 

[Sack of Cheese]

The other thing would be the characters. Yeah, the 3d model is ugly as shit, but it's quite RTS-like; You're only ever meant to see them from afar. Which is why I was so baffled that many people on forums were like "Why does my portrait not match my 3d model?!" To me, the portrait was the true face of my character, as it was in Baldur's Gate, or Neverwinter Nights. There were some real nice ones too, like this one:

The character customisation is glitchy as heck. I wanted to use that one for one of my Rangers, but it disappeared from the selection menu and got swapped with an old man's portrait.

 

[Dark Prophet]

Yeah the characters are somewhat ugly and combat is sorta weird when all 4 of your rangers miss a point blank shot and a melee bandit can hit 2 of your rangers for something like 15 hp each in one turn. I can overlook a lot because it's Wasteland but most of all it's the talking there is too fucking much of it and you kinda need to exhaust all dialogue options to get all the info which is buried under tons of pointless talking, I thought Mass Effect was bad this is way worse.

 

[Denamic]

Yeah the characters are somewhat ugly and combat is sorta weird when all 4 of your rangers miss a point blank shot and a melee bandit can hit 2 of your rangers for something like 15 hp each in one turn. I can overlook a lot because it's Wasteland but most of all it's the talking there is too fucking much of it and you kinda need to exhaust all dialogue options to get all the info which is buried under tons of pointless talking, I thought Mass Effect was bad this is way worse.

Guns are ranged weapons and don't generally do well in melee range. Few guns outside of shotguns and pistols work well at point blank. That's what melee is for. Also, if you've only got 4 rangers, you're very early in the game, so your weapons skills are going to be on the low end. Missing is only to be expected.

And really? Complaining about having lots of dialogue? Really? Out of all games released in the last 5 years, how many of them were actually dialogue heavy? Just let people who enjoy dialogues catch a break now and then without you whining as soon as characters have more than a couple of sentences to speak.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

And really? Complaining about having lots of dialogue? Really? Out of all games released in the last 5 years, how many of them were actually dialogue heavy? Just let people who enjoy dialogues catch a break now and then without you whining as soon as characters have more than a couple of sentences to speak.

It'd be a different story if the dialogue was good.

It's just ye olde RPG exposition laden babble. Planescape Torment this is not.

 

[lacktheknack]

And really? Complaining about having lots of dialogue? Really? Out of all games released in the last 5 years, how many of them were actually dialogue heavy? Just let people who enjoy dialogues catch a break now and then without you whining as soon as characters have more than a couple of sentences to speak.

It'd be a different story if the dialogue was good.

It's just ye olde RPG exposition laden babble. Planescape Torment this is not.

Uh oh. I hope inXile clean up their writing for Torment: Tides of Numenera (which I'M a backer of...).

 

[Jandau]

While I haven't played the game myself, I looked at quite a few gameplay videos when it came out and my reaction was "That's it? That's all?". Visually, the game was ugly. And I don't just mean bad models, the visual design aesthetic was unpleasant, and not in the "It's post apocalyptic, so it's supposed to be that way" style, but rather just poorly done. The gameplay looked like stripped down X-Com and when I started hearing all the complaints regarding the stat system and the underlying mechanics, I pretty much pushed the game into the "Maybe one day..." category.

Man, this "return" of the isometric RPGs isn't working out that well, is it? Wasteland is bollocks, I couldn't get into Divinity (felt too generic in the setting, the interface was clunky, too much bad writing in massive chunks)... Turns out that Shadowrun was (for me) the best of the bunch thus far, even though I found it to be OK at best. Well, at least I still have Pillars and Torment to hope for...

 

[1Life0Continues]

Many people are complaining that the AI has an unfair advantage, in that they are able to move from one end of a map to another in one turn. The Steam forum has a particularly notable case of a huge MG wielding brute somehow managing to move way too fast and far in one move.

The seem to have nailed it down as that the enemies are built for single encounters, so their stats are skewed for those encounters, rather than being naturally rolled so to speak. So basically, none of these guys has points in charisma, so pour the points into movement. Which is pretty shoddy if true.

My issue is that it just feels a little like the advantage is too much out of my favour. Granted, this might be the point, but when the first boss I encountered at the Agro, can get off FOUR pistol shots in a row, CAN hit me from point blank range EVERY time, and never seems to run out of bullets anyway, all while playing on 'piss easy' I get the feeling I'm being taken for a ride. I can't imagine the hell some people are experiencing on harder difficulties.

Or maybe it's just me not playing the game properly. It's savagely unforgiving, and I guess that's the draw, but having my brand new, never been used pistol jam immediately I try to use it feels a little cheap.

I dunno. Something feels off is all.

 

[The Madman]

I haven't played it yet myself, although I have every intention of buying Wasteland 2 sooner or later, but from my understanding from what I've heard and read from others Wasteland 2 is one of those games that starts out weak but gets gradually better and better. One person threw the number at being around 20 hours worth of gameplay before, to paraphrase what he said, 'the game really opens up and the story becomes interesting'.

That's a lot of time to invest in a game before it starts getting good, but then those same people were also pretty damned happy with the game despite that so there's got to be something to it. In any case something to consider. I can't imagine that if you truly dislike everything about the game it will ever really become amazing to you no matter how much it improves over the course of time, but for someone like me that's a sucker for these sorts of games, I'm willing to put up with a bit of a slog to see if it really is a bit of a diamond in the rough.

If you're looking for an isometric rpg to play might I suggest Shadowrun: Dragonfall? The devs just released a standalone version of Dragonfall, which previously was a dlc for the base (And merely alright) game, and it's pretty damned good. I've been replaying the game for the standalone version and it's thoroughly enjoyable even for a second playthrough.

 

[Frankster]

I'll have to agree big time the RPG stats and mechanics are just atrocious..

And OP isn't going far enough, what s/he neglects to say is some stats are just useless (charisma and luck to be specific) and attempts to make a themed character like a charismatic leader or a smart scientist just fall flat, there is no character customization as much as a "right" way to build your characters (dump EVERYTHING into intelligence and strength) and a wrong way to build them (investing in any other stat then int and strength).

I've actually stopped playing half way through as the RPG mechanics seemed so shallow to me, waiting on a mod that will hopefully help fix these niggles.

 

[Zhukov]

I would just like everyone to know that I called it from the first publicly available gameplay video.

Well, okay, I didn't predict the character creation being shit, but hey, I didn't have much to go on.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

discobots anyone? fuck those little things.

Whaaaaat? Discobots are awesome! They just roll up to you and "unce, unce, unce, unce, unce, unce, unce, unce, unce..."
Slicer Dicers can fuck right off though, as can any "X Lobber", especially late-game when they "lob" LAWs.

...Oh and, fuck Suicider Mad Monks especially, with their stupid movement and "next-turn" nuke bullshit.

Hah that's what I thought the first time, until the next turn when the enemy would light my party the fuck up from those disco lights -_-

Seriously, the speed on those things are godlike, 2-3 of them can reach your party instantly no matter where they are off screen, so if you don't take those little bastards out, the next turn your party is going to be hurting...badly.


The suicide mad monks could be REALLY bad, but I usually used them to my advantage and would have one of my party members basically be "sacrificed" and kill the mad monk with a bunch of goons around, that way the baddies would get nuked to hell to and the rest of my party would come in and finish em off.