Wasteland Wasteland 3 + Battle of Steeltown and Cult of the Holy Detonation Expansions Thread

[Daedalos]

It amazes me that the makers of Atom RPG did more with 1/100th the budget.

Longer development time, 1 man making decicions, so less fighting, its got more bugs and worse QA, ATOM have way way way lower production values and looks like a game from 2002 on playstation 2 or whatever.

It has much worse combat, animaitons, even the story is super boring and carbon copy of a worse fallout by far.

So did more? hardly. Yes cheaper obviously.

 

[MF]

Wasteland 3 is fun! I liked Wasteland 2 and I thought this would be worse, but it's good. Itemization is wonky and the shotgun trivializes the combat, but especially Denver is an excellent execution of an RPG location.

The story's premise is (literally) far-fetched but decent and the moral conundrum you have to navigate is actually interesting for a change. The obvious 'goody two shoes' choice isn't so obvious and siding with the dictator seems to be the better option. I like it. That's what exploring the ethics of a post apocalyptic society should be about.

The loading times are atrocious, but that's a Unity thing. Makes me feel better about the loading times for some of the bigger locations in Titan Outpost. I optimized the fuck out of that, but it's still slow. If a team with a budget like theirs can't fix it...I can see a couple of things they could do to improve it maybe 50%, but it's still going to be a pain. I wouldn't expect any magic there. In PoE and DE it's relatively fast because there's almost nothing going on in those games. Just a static 2D background gameobject stitched together and a few objects superimposed on that. Oh well, performance is still better than Battletech.

 

[BBMorti]

Rename it Wait-land 3. No idea why they thought it would be endearing gameplay with that absurd amount of loading screens and the time each of them takes is atrocious.

Let's do a quest..
brb. go into lux apartments to speak to someone (1 min loading time) go out again 30 seconds after to speak to another (1 min loading time), go in again to speak with someone again to finish quest (1 min loading time).. leave again to continue with some other quest (1 min loading time). Absurd game design.

Why do these tiny 36 square rooms have to be behind enormous loading screens anyways? Like that mechanic garage in the first city, its literally a tiny square room.

 

[MF]

Why do these tiny 36 square rooms have to be behind enormous loading screens anyways? Like that mechanic garage in the first city, its literally a tiny square room.

Unity scene objects are loaded into memory all at once for a given scene. Having that tiny room with all the characters and objects in the Downtown hub would increase loading time for the hub. Since you have to be in the downtown hub all the time, and only have to visit the garage once, it's an easy win. Believe it or not, separating that garage, the Sans Luxe apartments, and the Little Vegas casino was done to optimize loading times.

Of course, even the tiny garage takes a long time to load, which leads me to believe they still have room for optimization. For one, I think they're serializing from a temporary save game each time you load a scene. That's an easy way to handle persistence, but also a little lazy and unoptimized.

Precaching asset bundles, putting the player character assets in persistent memory, using serialized prefabs for the talking heads instead of loading them at scene time, etc. etc. So many things. All technically difficult and prone to bugs, though. I'm sure they have people on staff capable of doing that. They obviously load the Kodiak asynchronously, they didn't hide that very well as you can see it being textured before your very eyes, so they know how it works, but they might have been busy with other things.

Also, an X-box only has like 9GB of RAM available and no virtually unlimited swap file fallback, so they have to be stringent with what they load as persistent data. That's not the main problem, though, it just aggravates the issue.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.inxile-entertainment.com/post/patch-progress-update-for-wasteland-3

Patch Progress Update for Wasteland 3

Greetings Rangers,

We launched Wasteland 3 just two weeks ago, and if it was a nonstop effort before we launched, it’s definitely been nonstop since. In a lot of ways launching a game is not when work stops, but when it starts, and we got right to work on taking in bug reports, feedback, and working toward making fixes and improvements as quickly as possible. One thing we discovered as bug reports came in is that our testing process had been too focused, and not enough time had been spent playing the game naturally as an end user would. We’re going to have some deep discussions and post-mortems on our processes going forward, but what’s important right now is getting issues addressed.

None of this is intended to minimize the issues, but we want to share more details about what we’re seeing and how we’re working hard to address the most impactful ones. For those of you that have had a poor experience, or outright couldn’t play, we sincerely apologize, and are making fixes and improvements as quickly as possible.

We’ve already released a hotfix and the 1.1.0 patch, and the next one—update 1.1.1—will be out toward the end of next week. Rest assured, as soon as we have a fix for a major issue we’re doing our best to get a patch out. We’ll certainly have more that we want to address after this update, but ensuring major blockers and crashes are resolved is our number one priority.

Some of the most challenging issues have been for our Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players, with general game stability. While we’ve made some improvements with the two patches since launch, we know there’s more to do. In the next update we’ll have a fix for most (not all) of the issues leading to crashes, and they should go much further in helping improve game stability. We know this has been frustrating for many of you, and we’re going to continue devoting time and effort toward it for as long as we need to.

Another annoying bug we’ve been trying to squash has been the co-op “33% loading” issue, where in co-op you may not be able to load into a new map and get stuck at the 1/3 mark. We thought we had this one fixed, but it’s been difficult because we just weren’t able to reproduce it internally more than one or two times. We got desperate enough that we actually put out a bug bounty internally to the first employee that could reproduce it. We also enlisted some of you to help, and worked directly with co-op teams out there to get more in-depth logs using development builds. Thanks to those efforts we’re pretty sure we’ve finally been able to nail this one down.

These obviously aren’t encapsulating all the items we’re working on or that will be in the 1.1.1 update, but we wanted to give you some insight into our focus and process supporting Wasteland 3 and its players into the foreseeable future. Hopefully before too long we’ll be able to start sharing some of our ideas for how we want to add to and expand the experience, but right now we’re focused on ensuring you can enjoy the game as it is.

Keep the bug reports and feedback coming, and we’ll see you in the wasteland.

- Wasteland 3 Dev Team

 

[Owlish]

Longer development time, 1 man making decicions, so less fighting, its got more bugs and worse QA, ATOM have way way way lower production values and looks like a game from 2002 on playstation 2 or whatever.

It has much worse combat, animaitons, even the story is super boring and carbon copy of a worse fallout by far.

So did more? hardly. Yes cheaper obviously.

Wasteland 3 looks like shit, and in most ways is inferior to its predecessor. You can't even click on the map to move your team when you could in WL2. The technology seems to have regressed. Did you think that the story and writing in this game were good? Are you 14 or just a reddit neckbeard? Even WL2 had more interesting characters and scenarios, just compare the same gimmick moment in each game where you have to make the choice on what to save.

The devs of Atom RPG were clearly inspired by Fallout, but that's no different than Fallout being inspired by Wasteland. I don't see how it's a "carbon copy" of the story. Unless WL3 is New Vegas King Lear?

Why is it that when every single game releases it's 99% fanboys discussing it? Then 1 year later people come and make the same observations I made getting updooted.

 

[Daedalos]

Longer development time, 1 man making decicions, so less fighting, its got more bugs and worse QA, ATOM have way way way lower production values and looks like a game from 2002 on playstation 2 or whatever.

It has much worse combat, animaitons, even the story is super boring and carbon copy of a worse fallout by far.

So did more? hardly. Yes cheaper obviously.

Wasteland 3 looks like shit, and in most ways is inferior to its predecessor. You can't even click on the map to move your team when you could in WL2. The technology seems to have regressed. Did you think that the story and writing in this game were good? Are you 14 or just a reddit neckbeard? Even WL2 had more interesting characters and scenarios, just compare the same gimmick moment in each game where you have to make the choice on what to save.

The devs of Atom RPG were clearly inspired by Fallout, but that's no different than Fallout being inspired by Wasteland. I don't see how it's a "carbon copy" of the story. Unless WL3 is New Vegas King Lear?

Why is it that when every single game releases it's 99% fanboys discussing it? Then 1 year later people come and make the same observations I made getting updooted.

I don't think WL3 looks like shit, next-gen? No, but certainly not bad, and much better than WL2, and MUCH better than ATOM, which looks like dogshit on a stick.

Obviously the game needs a few more Quality of life improvements, as I've stated, yes, that's unfortunate, but ATOM has been worked on for far longer, and has shorter dev cycles, so its easier to cram in qol changes all the time.

Story and writing were fine, good even in some places. Better than Wl2 for sure, more zanzy and wacky? sure but that's the fresh and fun part.. not another remake/copy of fallout with a shittier story and setting which ATOM has, and FAR more borrring with obscure russian references, that literally nobody cares about other than slavs. so yeah
WL2 might have had an overall better story (not really) and some characteres were better, but WL3 has alot of good stuff which leaves WL2 in the dust.

ATOM is not inspired by fallout, lol, it's literally trying to copy it 1:1 even down to the original sounds, give me a break. ATOM is an original as a feminist at a SJW rally, and incredibly boring on top. If I wanted to play fallout, I would just play fallout, instead of an inferior russian 1:1 clone.

At least WL3 feels new and fresh.

Lots of different people are discussing this game atm, it's fine. You didn't like the game, that's fine. Move along.

 

[jackofshadows]

much better than WL2, and MUCH better than ATOM, which looks like dogshit on a stick.

Sounds biased. I'm far from being a fan of ATOM but just look at these:

Spoiler

VS

Thouse just mine random screenshots, you're welcome to counter-nitpick but imo ATOM looks way better simply thanks to later Unity version and higher quality assets. If you were talking more about art-direction... than I'd say it's kinda shit in both games ^_^ As for WL3, its not far from them, they just poured some effects over to round the edges but the result is not exactly impressive.

 

[Shadenuat]

Also, an X-box only has like 9GB of RAM available and

but why do you need all this if you spend most of the game either inside character screen/inventory, or dialogue screens, or zoomed out clicking on removing mines and little dudes shooting other dudes also zoomed out? The pretty map and tractor do not even have enough locations to explore either.

wouldn't it better for an rpg to just have cheaper graphics and focus on ease of play and remove loading times, providing pleasant questing gameplay and no lag or any other issues during exploration and combat?

this sort of level design

is not even interesting enough to spend time on it to make it pretty.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh yeah, how is the loot randomization in this game? Same thing as WL2, with the different container types?

 

[Daedalos]

Oh yeah, how is the loot randomization in this game? Same thing as WL2, with the different container types?

Still RNG, but alot more handplaced loot, this time around, like ALOT more, behind several skill checks ofc but still.

Loot is better balanced, but there's just too much of it, and some loot if much rarer to get than others, even basic items.

 

[Fedora Master]

It's a game that requires console parity and you people wonder why the design is regressive.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

This is Brygo's favourite IP, after all, and he desperately want it mimic and rival fallout games, which he was "forced" to sell the rights to, to bethturd

I can't say that I find the Wasteland world as engaging as the Fallout one (Fallout 1, 2, FNV). It feels more random and nonsensical, especially 80s punk/pop culture stuff
And so much seems to exist only to be shot.

 

[Shadenuat]

Oh yeah, how is the loot randomization in this game? Same thing as WL2, with the different container types?

it ends up meh because it's just same stuff you use from the beginning but more damage (same range on all weapons inside one class bothered me the most.) with absurd amount of damage you do through sheer stats it all turns into a same pattern. I liked energy damage from previous game more, in this one i do thousands of damage with regular damage against mechanical enemies just as I would do with energy. I am also not sure why heavy weapons are a thing because other weapons do not suffer from having weak AOE at all (shotguns, smgs). some guns also bugged.
there's ton of RNG generated garbage which is only good to strip/sell
armor is generally useless aside from buffs to crit/speed
high level upgrades/modifications take away too much to consider them (was there ever a game where item which gives you a bit more armor but takes away action points was interesting to players at all?)

consumables and weird science things were high points of itemization for me. well add things like "this pistol shoots fire, give to char with toaster repair" things.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

They'll add DLC and ui speed changes so there's that right? And doesn't it have co-op like BG3 will?

 

[Saduj]

Disappointed the optional hunt the synths quests don't really have payoff C&C wise. It is set up in an interesting way only to fizzle out.

Spoiler

Wolfe is a fanatic and a condescending ass and the first synth he sends you after doesn't seem like too much of a threat. The little kid voice can either be regarded as sympathetic or deceptive. I decided to kill it because a Ranger would think that the risk of it helping revive Cochise far outweighs the risk of the synth being "innocent". But I thought the game may recognize that as the "bad" choice. Either way it seemed like something that would have consequences in the game world.

The next three synths you're sent after are much more clear cut. Two openly voice support for Cochise and the other is a hostile as soon as you see it. They all need to go and it makes you feel better about killing the first one. But the game only recognizes their deaths with small cash rewards and Wolfe sticking around to help in the first phase of the final fight. They didn't either bother with an ending slide for this. Just seems lazy.

Also, having a synth in the Bizarre and the game just ignoring that your team is hunting synths (if you made that choice previously) when you find him was nonsensical. He doesn't add anything to the game and it doesn't make sense that he not be connected to the synth hunting subplot in any way so why is he there?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Disappointed the optional hunt the synths quests don't really have payoff C&C wise. It is set up in an interesting way only to fizzle out.

Spoiler

Wolfe is a fanatic and a condescending ass and the first synth he sends you after doesn't seem like too much of a threat. The little kid voice can either be regarded as sympathetic or deceptive. I decided to kill it because a Ranger would think that the risk of it helping revive Cochise far outweighs the risk of the synth being "innocent". But I thought the game may recognize that as the "bad" choice. Either way it seemed like something that would have consequences in the game world.

The next three synths you're sent after are much more clear cut. Two openly voice support for Cochise and the other is a hostile as soon as you see it. They all need to go and it makes you feel better about killing the first one. But the game only recognizes their deaths with small cash rewards and Wolfe sticking around to help in the first phase of the final fight. They didn't either bother with an ending slide for this. Just seems lazy.

Also, having a synth in the Bizarre and the game just ignoring that your team is hunting synths (if you made that choice previously) when you find him was nonsensical. He doesn't add anything to the game and it doesn't make sense that he not be connected to the synth hunting subplot in any way so why is he there?

Spoiler

all synths are bad, dummy

 

[Saduj]

Disappointed the optional hunt the synths quests don't really have payoff C&C wise. It is set up in an interesting way only to fizzle out.

Spoiler

Wolfe is a fanatic and a condescending ass and the first synth he sends you after doesn't seem like too much of a threat. The little kid voice can either be regarded as sympathetic or deceptive. I decided to kill it because a Ranger would think that the risk of it helping revive Cochise far outweighs the risk of the synth being "innocent". But I thought the game may recognize that as the "bad" choice. Either way it seemed like something that would have consequences in the game world.

The next three synths you're sent after are much more clear cut. Two openly voice support for Cochise and the other is a hostile as soon as you see it. They all need to go and it makes you feel better about killing the first one. But the game only recognizes their deaths with small cash rewards and Wolfe sticking around to help in the first phase of the final fight. They didn't either bother with an ending slide for this. Just seems lazy.

Also, having a synth in the Bizarre and the game just ignoring that your team is hunting synths (if you made that choice previously) when you find him was nonsensical. He doesn't add anything to the game and it doesn't make sense that he not be connected to the synth hunting subplot in any way so why is he there?

Spoiler

all synths are bad, dummy

OK, so if the choice is clear cut does the game recognize if you've made the wrong choice?

 

[Belegarsson]

So I left the parrot and major Tomcat down in Warrens because the pyromaniacs were a bit too much for them. Fought, won but left quite heavily damaged, so I went up and get some heals, but now they're no longer in the place where I left them. Guess I'm out of luck?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

So I left the parrot and major Tomcat down in Warrens because the pyromaniacs were a bit too much for them. Fought, won but left quite heavily damaged, so I went up and get some heals, but now they're no longer in the place where I left them. Guess I'm out of luck?

load an old save and retrieve them

 

[Shadenuat]

Disappointed the optional hunt the synths quests don't really have payoff C&C wise. It is set up in an interesting way only to fizzle out.

Spoiler

Wolfe is a fanatic and a condescending ass and the first synth he sends you after doesn't seem like too much of a threat. The little kid voice can either be regarded as sympathetic or deceptive. I decided to kill it because a Ranger would think that the risk of it helping revive Cochise far outweighs the risk of the synth being "innocent". But I thought the game may recognize that as the "bad" choice. Either way it seemed like something that would have consequences in the game world.

The next three synths you're sent after are much more clear cut. Two openly voice support for Cochise and the other is a hostile as soon as you see it. They all need to go and it makes you feel better about killing the first one. But the game only recognizes their deaths with small cash rewards and Wolfe sticking around to help in the first phase of the final fight. They didn't either bother with an ending slide for this. Just seems lazy.

Also, having a synth in the Bizarre and the game just ignoring that your team is hunting synths (if you made that choice previously) when you find him was nonsensical. He doesn't add anything to the game and it doesn't make sense that he not be connected to the synth hunting subplot in any way so why is he there?

Doesn't Denver supercomputer have a say about you killing them?

 

[Saduj]

Doesn't Denver supercomputer have a say about you killing them?

Yes

Spoiler

but it doesn't disqualify you from working with the AI commune

 

[DeepOcean]

Okay, have to say that Animal whisperer is fun, Major TomCat giving the equivalent bonus of 5 intelligence points in terms of crit rate is nice and the thing is a beast. Have a spiky honeybadger thing that I saved from some wolves and who would have thought, chicken give a 6% xp bonus as they are really experienced on the ways of the world. It is the first time on a RPG where the first thing coming to my mind when I get to an area is where are the street cats to enslave for that sweet crit bonus, it is a cat lady simulator.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Okay, have to say that Animal whisperer is fun, Major TomCat giving the equivalent bonus of 5 intelligence points in terms of crit rate is nice and the thing is a beast. Have a spiky honeybadger thing that I saved from some wolves and who would have thought, chicken give a 6% xp bonus as they are really experienced on the ways of the world. It is the first time on a RPG where the first thing coming to my mind when I get to an area is where are the street cats to enslave for that sweet crit bonus, it is a cat lady simulator.

Spoiler

There are NPCs that comment on the pets following you, especially Major Tomcat.

 

[Shadenuat]

Okay, have to say that Animal whisperer is fun, Major TomCat giving the equivalent bonus of 5 intelligence points in terms of crit rate is nice and the thing is a beast. Have a spiky honeybadger thing that I saved from some wolves and who would have thought, chicken give a 6% xp bonus as they are really experienced on the ways of the world. It is the first time on a RPG where the first thing coming to my mind when I get to an area is where are the street cats to enslave for that sweet crit bonus, it is a cat lady simulator.

the badger you can tame from special location on world map has 12000 hp. although I think its just invulnerable to damage for some reason.