Wasteland 3 Review Thread

[Phoenixmgs]

I gotta say this game looks pretty fucking awesome. I love that the story is really small scale and intimate vs some tired save-the-world storyline. The decisions seem to be really impactful. I really like how SkillUp described the interconnectivity of game's locations like as one big fucking skyscraper where everyone lives and wants to kill each other whereas most other RPGs have cities/towns that feel totally unaware of other cities/towns. I'm probably going to pick this up after I finish up Ghost of Tsushima.

 

[Agema]

I'm not sure it's as good as Wasteland 2 narratively, but it's definitely a cut above most RPGs.

You certainly have lots of room to pick your course, and the nice thing is that there often aren't very satisfactory endings. I do love the Gippers, though. They're a cult based around Reagan, obsessed with hating Communists. Make sure, when the chance arrives, you click on the option to ask them what Communism is.

I find some of the weapon stuff a little annoying. You seem to have this endless stream of new and improved weapons available, and it feels like you're constantly dumping the old stuff in favour of the new. Coupled with the weapon upgrade system it ends up sort of annoying, as it feels pointless to stick mods on a weapon you're just going to dump in short while anyway.

 

[BrawlMan]

I think my brother bought this on Steam and is liking it. I'm not in rpgs much anymore, but have fun, good sir.

 

[wings012]

I'm having fun and I'm super glad they combined a lot of skills together. ARs and SMGs are one skill. Pistols and Shotguns are one skill. Sniper Rifles still get to be their only skill. Bladed and Blunt are combined. Alarm Disarming got folded into Sneak. All the hacky electronic stuff got folded together. No more safe disarming, there's just a lockpick. Energy weapons now fall under the various weapon categories, though there's a Weird Science skill which increases Energy Weapon damage while serving as a skill check for various things.

It's also kinda really jank in some ways. You can create a new Ranger at any time at your base and he will come at the level of your party. Allowing you to customize him as you see fit and also serves as a sorta way to 'respec' I guess(you can gain permanent perks and stuff while on the field so it's not a true respec). This encourages you to create specialized mule characters that you never take out on the field. I have a Barter guy who I only grab to go buy/sell stuff within my own base. I got a Toaster Repair man, though I have to purposefully take him out to areas I've previously cleared just to fix up toasters for loot. I have a Weapons/Armour Modding person - not much sense building their skills into your main team. Just sort out all your modding at base, leave that guy behind.

I sorta hate that this is a 'thing', but will gladly abuse it all the same.

I still think balancing could do with smaller numbers and being tighter overall. Yes it can be exciting to find a weapons that do a huge increase in damage over the previous weapon. Which is largely offset by enemies going through huge HP bloat. I'd prefer the numbers to be tighter and equipment less tiered with more meaningful variety.

The loading times are absolute hot garbage and I wish they were better.

I do love the Kodiak, but it's pretty OP in how it can run over enemies while taking minimal damage in return. Meet a Scorpitron while being significantly under leveled or geared for the encounter? Just slam the Kodiak into it.

 

[Agema]

It's also kinda really jank in some ways. You can create a new Ranger at any time at your base and he will come at the level of your party. Allowing you to customize him as you see fit and also serves as a sorta way to 'respec' I guess(you can gain permanent perks and stuff while on the field so it's not a true respec). This encourages you to create specialized mule characters that you never take out on the field. I have a Barter guy who I only grab to go buy/sell stuff within my own base. I got a Toaster Repair man, though I have to purposefully take him out to areas I've previously cleared just to fix up toasters for loot. I have a Weapons/Armour Modding person - not much sense building their skills into your main team. Just sort out all your modding at base, leave that guy behind.

I sorta hate that this is a 'thing', but will gladly abuse it all the same.

I personally don't really care to waste my time that way for such a modest benefit, but I agree that it is pretty unsatisfactory. It's also immersion-breaking, because you've filled your base with recruits. Although I suppose, nominally, the excuse can be made that they're pulled in from the area, so some may have experience from their time as a marshal, gang member or whatever else.

I didn't much love the sheer uselessness of the Rangers in the start scene either. The Rangers appear to have mostly been a bunch of feeble, squealing incompetents, which is not consistent with the hard-ass primary power in Arizona that they are supposed to be.

I still think balancing could do with smaller numbers and being tighter overall. Yes it can be exciting to find a weapons that do a huge increase in damage over the previous weapon. Which is largely offset by enemies going through huge HP bloat. I'd prefer the numbers to be tighter and equipment less tiered with more meaningful variety.

Agreed. I also feel a twinge of dislike at the many uniques the game throws at you. I feel uniques are often a bit cheapened if you run across them too frequently. Although nothing is worse than what Bethesda did in Fallout 4, where all the "unique" weapons don't feel remotely special seeing as they're dime-a-dozen and you can craft equivalent stuff.

I feel Wasteland 2 got it just right. Wasteland 3 looks to me like it has modernised by drawing ideas from Pillars of Eternity (if I remember rightly inXile and Obsidian are very close and have helped each other out by loaning staff), but unfortunately not to its benefit.

 

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[Agema]

But my main problem is how swingy the combat is, especially in the late game. To paint a picture: My main sniper had 40+% crit chance and when she critted she unleashed anywhere between 1700 to 2500 crit damage, so on a good opening turn she could murder any two non-boss enemies, but if she didn't get her crits she took maybe half a HP bar of a single guy.

I haven't got to the late game, but I certainly have noticed how extreme the criticals are. There's always a big risk that a crit-heavy combat system becomes an RNG-fest.

 

[wings012]

I feel Wasteland 2 got it just right. Wasteland 3 looks to me like it has modernised by drawing ideas from Pillars of Eternity (if I remember rightly inXile and Obsidian are very close and have helped each other out by loaning staff), but unfortunately not to its benefit.

I don't mind some of the changes. But a lot of things were like a step forwards and two steps backwards.

For example, I don't enjoy inventory management in general. So I welcomed infinite inventory space in WL3. Problem is now that you have a clusterfuck of an inventory, it becomes really hard to search for specific items. Item categories help, but there's no category for accessories and no ability to sort so there's clearly a horrible UI/UX design problem going on here. Also weird stuff like having to switch menu screens to confirm level up allocations, compounded by the fact the game lags when going in between menu screens.

I also don't mind the streamlining of skills cause shit like Brute Force and Alarm Disarming were so superfluous back in WL2. I thought WL3 had better written dialogue as well, I remember WL2 being massive exposition dumps that you had to read through and my eyes would just glaze over as I just sped read my way through everything.

I don't mind how WL3 ticks for most part, but it has crappy balancing and a lot of control/interface issues.

I also wish the game improved the equipment modding system. It somehow got worse from WL2 where you could at least remove weapon mods. You can't seem to do it at all in WL3? I don't know why we can't have a sensible modding system where you can just attach and remove mods at will, and then maybe equipment mods can be more valuable rarer items. Instead of the weird RNG wanky system of having to disassemble gear to MAYBE get a mod. It was terrible in WL2, it's even more terrible in WL3.

There's a lot of things WL3 could've improved upon from WL2. It did in some ways, went backwards in other ways, and also left alone a bunch of other things.

I still haven't finished the game so I'm not going to judge the story as a whole yet.

 

[Dalisclock]

So, I'm gonna be that guy and ask.

As someone who is kind of curious about this one, Do you miss anything if you haven't played WL2 or even WL1 before playing WL3, other then a few references?

 

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[SilentPony]

I found Wasteland 2 to be a huge sloppy slog. The mechanics were so clunky, the audio mixing and dialogue assignment was fucked, and there was a clear party build the game practically mandated. You could choose anyone to do anything, but if you didn't make someone good at repairing and lock hacking you weren't going to get past the second mission. And god help you if you picked someone good at melee or lasers.

 

[Agema]

I found Wasteland 2 to be a huge sloppy slog. The mechanics were so clunky, the audio mixing and dialogue assignment was fucked, and there was a clear party build the game practically mandated. You could choose anyone to do anything, but if you didn't make someone good at repairing and lock hacking you weren't going to get past the second mission. And god help you if you picked someone good at melee or lasers.

Melee is okay, you just need to build your spec okay. I didn't bother with one in my core party, but used one of the spare ally slots as a melee for a while. I didn't play the director's cut, but lasers were perfectly viable. My general view is that if you take a look at a game like that and don't pick skills like lockpicking as a priority, you need a godalmighty slap round the chops. You have all those party members to cover all those bases - it's like in a classic fantasy party RPG you make sure you have a fighter, a priest, a mage and a rogue (unless you're dicking around with some sort of nerdy experimentation).

But you do have room to think about how you assign values to characters. For instance, a high INT character will have tons of skill points, but they are always going to be limited in combat because you can't get your other main stats that high.

 

[SilentPony]

Melee is okay, you just need to build your spec okay. I didn't bother with one in my core party, but used one of the spare ally slots as a melee for a while. I didn't play the director's cut, but lasers were perfectly viable. My general view is that if you take a look at a game like that and don't pick skills like lockpicking as a priority, you need a godalmighty slap round the chops. You have all those party members to cover all those bases - it's like in a classic fantasy party RPG you make sure you have a fighter, a priest, a mage and a rogue (unless you're dicking around with some sort of nerdy experimentation).

But you do have room to think about how you assign values to characters. For instance, a high INT character will have tons of skill points, but they are always going to be limited in combat because you can't get your other main stats that high.

See my experience was of a game that clearly meant to be played a certain way. I remember the loot system was abysmal; I distinctly remember finding shotgun shells all the time, and never a shotgun. So I'd be in a desperate shootout with plant monsters and my rifle sniper and pistol girl had to melee with knives because all we had were shells for a gun we never found.
Same with laser guns - I have 15 hours in that game according to steam and I never found a laser gun or ammo. So the points into lasers was just wasted space.

 

[wings012]

Melee is okay, you just need to build your spec okay. I didn't bother with one in my core party, but used one of the spare ally slots as a melee for a while. I didn't play the director's cut, but lasers were perfectly viable. My general view is that if you take a look at a game like that and don't pick skills like lockpicking as a priority, you need a godalmighty slap round the chops. You have all those party members to cover all those bases - it's like in a classic fantasy party RPG you make sure you have a fighter, a priest, a mage and a rogue (unless you're dicking around with some sort of nerdy experimentation).

But you do have room to think about how you assign values to characters. For instance, a high INT character will have tons of skill points, but they are always going to be limited in combat because you can't get your other main stats that high.

My issue with Wasteland 2 is that lockpicking wasn't even good enough. That door had an alarm so I need alarm disarming. And it's also trapped! So I need demolitions. I get into the room, and there's a bloody safe which needs safecracking. And hey look, a chest that's electronically locked so I need computer science. WL2's skill system was such utter wank.

See my experience was of a game that clearly meant to be played a certain way. I remember the loot system was abysmal; I distinctly remember finding shotgun shells all the time, and never a shotgun. So I'd be in a desperate shootout with plant monsters and my rifle sniper and pistol girl had to melee with knives because all we had were shells for a gun we never found.
Same with laser guns - I have 15 hours in that game according to steam and I never found a laser gun or ammo. So the points into lasers was just wasted space.

I agree with you for a bunch of things, but energy weapons do get useful towards the latter half of the game. The conductive mechanic was a bit bananas - where they did more damage if the enemy had more armour. But you fought a lot of high armour robots and stuff later on and I made heavy use of the Neutron Projector. I think I also found some uses for the Meson Cannon. They did change the conductive mechanics in the Director's Cut though which made them a lot more usable vs a variety of targets. But less OP against the specific bracket of armour they used to really demolish.

But yes if you focused a guy solely on energy weapons, he was going to be pretty useless in a large majority of fights. It's quite decent as a second weapon skill though. I did put skill points in really random weapons early on just so I could use the ammo I had for that weapon type cause I was running low on my main weapons. But eventually you get to a point where ammo isn't as big a deal anymore and you realize Assault Rifles are downright OP. My whole Ranger party at the end of the game were packing ARs as their main.

 

[Trunkage]

See my experience was of a game that clearly meant to be played a certain way. I remember the loot system was abysmal; I distinctly remember finding shotgun shells all the time, and never a shotgun. So I'd be in a desperate shootout with plant monsters and my rifle sniper and pistol girl had to melee with knives because all we had were shells for a gun we never found.
Same with laser guns - I have 15 hours in that game according to steam and I never found a laser gun or ammo. So the points into lasers was just wasted space.

You just gotta git gud

 

[Agema]

See my experience was of a game that clearly meant to be played a certain way. I remember the loot system was abysmal; I distinctly remember finding shotgun shells all the time, and never a shotgun. So I'd be in a desperate shootout with plant monsters and my rifle sniper and pistol girl had to melee with knives because all we had were shells for a gun we never found.
Same with laser guns - I have 15 hours in that game according to steam and I never found a laser gun or ammo. So the points into lasers was just wasted space.

I don't recall having any particular problem. But you could always buy them. Mind you, I also started with a laser weapon character.

Wasteland 2 was supposed to give you the idea of having to scrape and search for stuff in a high scarcity environment: you might not have the right ammo for the right weapons. You can run out of ammo for key weapons you over-rely on even mid-late game, so you should try to be economical (that's one of the main plusses of melee). Do you want a super-specialist who may become useless if the ammo runs out? Or have characters using differing ammo types and reserve weapons / skills, but slowing their ability to specialist? Or, of course, you can spend loads of money buying ammo.

My issue with Wasteland 2 is that lockpicking wasn't even good enough. That door had an alarm so I need alarm disarming. And it's also trapped! So I need demolitions. I get into the room, and there's a bloody safe which needs safecracking. And hey look, a chest that's electronically locked so I need computer science. WL2's skill system was such utter wank.

Here again, I think the idea is that you may have to make hard choices, not that you can do everything. You might need to come back and open that safe or repair that toaster later. Maybe you just need to set the alarms off or send in a patsy to suck up the pain from the trap. Keep these skills up with requirements of the areas you should be in means you often can't max out your weapon skills.

I'm certainly not against some of these skills being merged in Wasteland 3 - lockpicking now also does safes, for instance; alarm disarming is rolled into sneak.

 

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[Agema]

The sorry state of WL2 was always that Assault Rifles (with a sniper or two) were the hands down best weapons for pretty much any situation.

As it should be. After all, that's why we equip the vast majority of the army with assault rifles.

Funnily enough, I find assault rifles quite sorely underwhelming in Wasteland 3.

I'm not terribly bothered about cheesing one's way through a game, unless is really is absurdly easy to do so. The nature of any game is that there will be exploits - oddities in mechanics and AI behaviours and so on - that an experienced player will use to win.

 

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