Wasteland 2

[dkersten]

Perhaps this is old news, but I just got an email that showed Wasteland 2 for sale, and I got a little excited and followed the link, hoping it was actually the sequel to the original game from 1988.  It is, and it turns out it is a kickstarter game that was completely funded by about 70,000 gamers.  The team that made it is mostly original game designers from Wasteland and from Fallout.

Back in '88 I absolutely LOVED Wasteland.  I am a huge fan of the "post-apocalyptic" genre, in everything from books to games, and on top of it, I loved the turn based RPG games of old.  The "sequel" of course was Fallout and Fallout 2, which are two of the most iconic games in my past.  I have gone back to playing Fallout 2 about 3 times over the years just because it was so fun to play.  Fallout 3 turned into an FPS, and while it was fun to revisit the world from the new perspective, I just couldn't stay involved.  To get to go back to turn based isometric RPG gaming with modern graphics will be an interesting experience.  I might like it, I might hate it, but either way I am trying it out.  I went home at lunchtime and purchased the game with all the extras on Steam and started the download  ($39.99 for the game, $59.99 for the game with the extras).  I got Wasteland 1 with the extras, along with the remake of Bard's Tale (thought it was the original, but it is way too big so it must be the remake), and I get an e-book of all the concept art for Wasteland.  For the extra $20 just to be able to play the original game again was worth it to me.

If you are a fan of Bard's Tale, Wizardry, any of the D&D games of old, or more importantly, the first 2 fallout games, this might be a good game to play.  I will post a little review once I have a chance to play.

https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/

[Slippyblade]

Make sure we get a review.  I've actually been following this since the Kickstarter launched and have been very curious.

[dkersten]

UPDATE:

So, if you like Fallout 2, you will LOVE this game.  It plays pretty much EXACTLY the same, with far more detail, options, flexibility, etc, as well as a different story of course.

You control 4 characters in your party, and more can join (I think 2 more, but maybe 3).  You have no restrictions on how you allocated your points in character creation, but you can't do everything even with a perfectly rounded team, and the more you try to be a "jack of all trades", the more you lose out on being strong in any one area.

There are 3 skills for conversations that can come into play, and conversations can alter the direction of the game.  You can take skills in "Kiss Ass", "Kick Ass", and "Smart Ass", and throughout conversations if you are highlighting a player with one of these skills, you will get options to use those skills and potentially change the conversation outcome.  The higher your skill, the more likely a favorable outcome.  Your personality will come into play here.  There are other choices that can alter the way the game goes.  I have not explored this enough to know how much impact, a lot of choices even early on.

There are different modes of difficulty, and it looks like one of the factors is whether conversations will point out key words or not.  You can type different key words when conversing and end up with different results.  In the rookie mode, these are highlighted in the conversation and you can just click to respond, but I believe as you jack up the level, you have to manually type your responses and the key words aren't highlighted.  Your skills might also play a role in what gets highlighted in a conversation, not sure yet.

There are a lot of weapon choices, and you have to decide if you want to focus on one type, which is interesting when you have no experience in the game, so you might allocate points in skills you don't end up needing and suffer in other areas.  There are some "prerolled" characters you can use, or you can just create your own (or mix and match for your 4 player team).

Combat is turn based and uses action points just like Fallout 2.  Range plays a major role, as does positioning.  Friendly fire is completely possible (particularly with shotguns and explosives) so there is a lot of strategy in fights.  It takes action points to reload, to move, and to use an item.  There are pain pills to heal a little that anyone can use, there are med packs that a character with field medic skills can use on themselves or others that are more effective, and there are surgeon skills for players who are incapacitated or bleeding.  Resources are fairly scarce so you have to conserve where you can.  You can avoid battles in some cases, and even kick fights off by taking a first shot (which puts you into battle mode)

If you like to explore and loot, there is plenty of that.  There are even skills you can take to help with perception and pick out stuff you might miss.  The view is "isometric" but you can zoom out to a full overhead view or in to a third person "over the shoulder" view.  I chose about halfway for the classic 3/4 overhead view.  The graphics are very good, and there is a special sound driver that you can install that uses psycho-acoustics to turn even stereo speakers (or headphones) into 7.1 surround.  I turned on 5.1 and so far the ambient sounds are pretty darn good.  I am temped to turn off the lights while I play just to immerse myself more.

There are quite a few skills you can take, and only so many points.  So far I haven't noticed a correlation between attributes and skills, so I am not sure they come into play (I don't think they do).  So Intelligence doesn't add to your ability to crack a safe better.  But Intelligence gives you more skill points per level to allocate.  You can take lockpicking, safecracking, explosives (trap disarming), computer science (hacking), mechanical repair, toaster repair, and a few others.  And ALL come into play regularly, which makes it hard to choose what to focus on (or if to be a "jack of all trades").  There are critical failures, which can permanently disable something you are trying to get past.  But say you critically fail on a lock pick, it jams it up, but if you have a character with mechanical repair, he can repair the lock and you can pick it again.  Perception skill allows you to better spot traps, loot, etc. 

There are other skills, like animal whisperer that allows you to befriend animals and some will even join you and give added benefits to the group.  But be careful with shotguns, it is easy to accidentally shoot your own animal friends in a fight, lol.  (oops)  Water plays a big role in traveling, so having a character with the skills to find water is good.  There are other skills that I haven't even investigated yet. 

You can also do weaponsmithing, and when you find weapons you can sell them or break them down and possibly get upgrades that a weaponsmith can install on a weapon and make it better/different. 

I played from 8 pm until 1:30 am last night, and it was WAY too easy to lose track of time (I am dragging ass this morning).  You can save at any point, except when in battle.  So you need to remember to save after any point you want don't want to lose progress.  I believe when you leave a major area it autosaves, so if you forget you might not lose too much after a failed battle.

This is such a throwback to a great game style that I particularly enjoy.  The action can be fast paced or you can take your time to strategize.  It is a role playing game, so you need to enjoy character building and there is a fair amount of "spreadsheet" gaming (ie what works against what), and there is a LOT of reading.  You can enable text to speech, but I haven't done that yet to see how good or bad it is.  I am hooked on this game, and I know it doesn't bode well for me for the next few weeks at least.  A lot of things are going to get put on the backburner to allow me to play, lol.  I am OK with that, it has been a while since a game really captured my attention like this.

[Slippyblade]

Nice review!  Thank you.

Looks like one I need to save my pennies for.

[dkersten]

Just another quick update after another 7 hours of playing. 

For all the good, there is some bad.  The following are not game breaking, but frustrating annoyances and a lack of game polish that should have been addressed (and in some cases will get addressed).

The quest system is not clear enough.  You can have conversations that tell you vital information, but even when given a clear goal, if you don't remember the exact text, you could have a difficult time completing the task.  I spent at least 2 hours re-exploring multiple areas I had already cleared looking for something I missed, and then looking for where the person wandered off to I needed to talk to, and then looking for something I had already found once before.  It wasn't that they didn't tell me where it was, just that after 40 other conversations, I lost track of who went where and where this one thing was.  It was getting frustrating, and could have been cleared up with a better quest log with clearer mission goals.  (ie instead of saying "you need to purify the water", say "you need to talk to doctor X who is in her office in the west corridor to get the purifying agent, and then put it in the reservoir in the east corridor", all information they gave you in conversations but stuff that is easy to lose track of).  I was running in circles trying to relocate something I had already come across but hadn't completed another step yet because I couldn't find a person, and then I couldn't find the thing I came across. 

At the least, any time you come across something you are looking for, it should mark it on the map clearly.

I am at the point where I might have to keep a journal separate from the game, which to me is way too "old school".

Also, the conversation system is great, but it is lacking in a few areas.  Primarily, if you have already figured something out, it should lock out other key words so you aren't repeating conversations.  You can ask some questions, learn something, and then later be talking about something else entirely and it is as if you never made the first discovery, even if you and the party you are talking to had the conversation.  Sometimes this does work, and it is nice, but too often there are things coming up that you have already talked about.

A couple other things that annoy me are: there are some mini-quests that won't complete even if they are done.  This is minor but if you are a completionist, it is frustrating to know that something either is buggy or wasn't triggered right.  The problem is it won't tell you what you haven't done, because the quest tracking logs don't detail anything.  The "chance" to do things is not working right, but I think this is a bug that is being addressed.  I could have a 74% chance to hit someone in battle, yet miss 9 out of 10 shots.  I have had at least 10 critical failures out of about 50 tries at things, even though the critical failure percentage has averaged well below 5%.  Either I am the most unlucky player in the world or the rolling system isn't quite right.  And finally, the targeting system can be a little slow.  It sometimes doesn't respond to clicks, or you might go to click on an enemy to shoot or hit him but there is a dead enemy at his feet and you end up selecting the corpse to loot.  Frustrating.  You sometimes click a skill on someone and nothing happens, and you click it again and it works.  Just little annoyances like this reflect the lack of polish you expect from the big game companies.  I think there is a patch coming out later this week to address some things, and I look forward to it.

I managed to turn it off before midnight last night.  The last hour of play I had finally moved past a major area that took way too long because of the running in circles looking for things that I shouldn't have had a hard time finding.  Once past that, it was more fun again and I felt like I was moving forward.  I wanted to keep playing.

My only fear is that the game will be too short.  I can't see completing the area I did in less than 3 or 4 hours (even though I spent about 7), and they claim 80 hours of gameplay, which tells me that there is only maybe 20 main quests, of which I have completed a few already.