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

[Luckmann]

Alright, I attempted to play some with my gf today, and oh wow, what a fucking clusterrfuck this game is. The multiplayer was clearly forced into the game in the last weeks of development, and the game hasn't been playtested at all. This goes well and beyond the new-shit "hurr durr games are always released in an unfinished state these days". A small selection from just the tutorial section of the game (I call it the tutorial section, but, for whatever reason, the tutorial flat-out doesn't work when playing multiplayer):

• When first checking out the multiplayer options, I clicked "Lobby Browser" and was immediately met by a grey screen. Nothing else. No option to go back. Just a grey screen, nothing happening, but the game was obviously still running, it wasn't locked up or anything. Had to alt-tab out of the game and end the process manually, and restart the game. We were obviously going to run Direct Connect, but the fact that this happened set the tone for the experience.
• Constant disconnects. Mind you, we are literally in the same room, connected to the same access point, and we very regularly play other games together with no difficulty, sometimes for hours, with a bit of lag at worst. And what's worse, when the connected player disconnects, the game also shuts down for the host, forcing you to re-host the game, re-connect to it, load the game, and then wait the 30-odd seconds after the game has loaded to divide the team (...all two members of it) again and for both to press ready.
• A frustrating lag when making any choices in dialogue, and the (lolhueg) dialogue simply not working for the connected player. Switched controls over to her and she couldn't actually choose anything. All she could do was to switch it back to me. This happened twice during the tutorial section.
• The game randomly switching between forcing you to press something to advance dialogue and carrying on by itself. For example, most dialogue in the game seem to stop at the end of a sentence, waiting for you to press something to advance, but then in the conversation with the Patriarch, if you act upon this established pattern, you'll suddenly be skipping dialogue as you get tricked to press when he's done talking, even though he's moving on automatically.
• Connected player not getting the advantages of Lucky Actions. On at least 5 occasions - again, we're just doing the tutorial section here - both me and my gf saw my gf get the horse shoe, and she's not supposed to consume AP, but 'lo and behold, on my screen it says 7 AP left and on her screen it says 3 AP left, and she is limited to 3 AP. Absolutely stellar programming, guys.
• Same with the benefits from Leadership and Serial Killer. Everything displays correctly (and works correctly) for the host, but the connected player actually gets jack shit. The game has no trouble giving her the -1 AP, though.
• No indicator whatsoever when someone else picks something up. We had to sit and constantly inform each other what we picked up.
• You can't even check each other's characters out. You have no idea or indication as to what skills your partner is building.
  
• The connected player had to, every single time we loaded and then also switched area, manually turn her equipment display settings on/off.
• ...not that it mattered, because no matter what she did, it still displayed to me as if she'd done nothing at all.
• At one point there were black bars and shit that had something to do with the floating dialogues from NPCs in combat. This persisted above everything else, literally blocking the connected player from seeing the dialogue with the Major at the end of the tutorial.
• The Patriarch, during the entire dialogue with him, kept flickering in and out of existence for her, leaving a floating hammer and all.

What an absolute shit-show. Inexcusable garbage.

 

[Roguey]

The multiplayer was clearly forced into the game in the last weeks of development,

Not at all, Ziets alluded to how Fargo's insistence on multiplayer really screwed him over design-wise https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...ncy-entertainment.130360/page-21#post-6415228

 

[Luckmann]

The multiplayer was clearly forced into the game in the last weeks of development,

Not at all, Ziets alluded to how Fargo's insistence on multiplayer really screwed him over design-wise https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...ncy-entertainment.130360/page-21#post-6415228

I don't see how that changes the fact that it was forced into the game in the last weeks of development.

 

[Roguey]

I don't see how that changes the fact that it was forced into the game in the last weeks of development.

It was there from the start. I don't call inXile ineptile for nothing.

 

[Luckmann]

I don't see how that changes the fact that it was forced into the game in the last weeks of development.

It was there from the start. I don't call inXile ineptile for nothing.

Nothing is in a game from the start.

 

[Daedalos]

Co-Op was, is and will always be a mistake in RPGs. Just stop it. It was shit in larian games, which did it best, and its shit everywher eelse.

It's such a disappointment and detractor fro mthe main game. they could have expanded the main game by 10 new areas and quests intsead of tryin to implement some dumb retarded multipalyer coop bullshit

And the coop is exactly the most buggy shit in the entire game, so they ALSO have to spend the majority of bug fixing in fucking coop too..

Disgrace.

 

[Luckmann]

Co-Op was, is and will always be a mistake in RPGs. Just stop it. It was shit in larian games, which did it best, and its shit everywher eelse.

It's such a disappointment and detractor fro mthe main game. they could have expanded the main game by 10 new areas and quests intsead of tryin to implement some dumb retarded multipalyer coop bullshit

And the coop is exactly the most buggy shit in the entire game, so they ALSO have to spend the majority of bug fixing in fucking coop too..

Disgrace.

Nah it worked great in D:OS1. That said, probably not worth it, no, because every other implementation I've seen have been shit.

But Wasteland 3 is simply a disgrace.

 

[Goral]

Over 3 weeks ago I've asked on inXile forums what was Chris Avellone's contribution to Wasteland 3 and few days ago someone has posted this:

According to one of the art leads who used to work with him, Avellone worked on four area designs, but only the Psychopath area made it in because they were cutting locations left and right.

He also worked on the quest lines for Frost Point, apparently, be interesting if they end up cutting him from the credits for that as well. I'll keep poking for more info.

Hopefully we will see those cut areas in DLCs/expansions and MCA in the credits then. We know for certain that he did work on it from Chris himself:

I finished up my work on WL3 some time ago, and had a lot of fun working on it, esp getting the chance to work with
@gziets
again

G Ziets
Maybe you could share with us what has Chris Avellone written?

 

[DeepOcean]

Man, hell has a special place for traitors and cowards, those cocksuckers that removed Chris from the credits on the games he worked on should be roasted with a stick on their ass for all eternity.

 

[Roguey]

Pretty convenient for inXile that Avellone's areas were so easy to cut.

 

[Daedalos]

If they really cut Avellones writing, Fuck you Inxile, and fuck you Fargo, you spineless faggot.

 

[Haplo]

I'm tempted to start again with primary char specializing in automatic guns, planning to use the Meat Maker harpoon with Draw! Perk from small arms and Advanced Material Mag. for -1 AP reload cost. It has only 1 bolt loaded at a time, so you end up attacking for free after each 1 AP reload. With Double Tap, every 2nd attack is a crit. Bonus to hit enemies in cover with Gopher Hunter. Bonus AP on kill with the final Auto Perk. Lots of Strikes too. Maybe modded with HE Linkage (with supporting skill and abilities) for extra punch. Bison Ranch comes late, but apparently the Monster Army random merchant can gift it to you if you're liked by the Monster Army (maybe need Kiss Ass check?). So plan is to avoid road shops untill I finish Bizzare, then go looking for it.
Adv. Mat. Mag. should be gotten early in the Survivalist's Bunker also.

 

[Luckmann]

Californians:

 

[Haplo]

Well, it made no sense to make a separate weapon category for 2 weapons, so they had to classify them somehow. Small arms could make more sense - but the Perks under that category are rather shotgun or handgun specific.
Its a design compromise, sure. But one I'm quite okay with.

 

[Luckmann]

Well, it made no sense to make a separate weapon category for 2 weapons, so they had to classify them somehow. Small arms could make more sense - but the Perks under that category are rather shotgun or handgun specific.
Its a design compromise, sure. But one I'm quite okay with.

The solution would've been to not be overly specific with the function of perks, then. Saying "Oh, well, it's a compromise because of these, uh, mechanics" is just a post-hoc rationalization of pre-existing bad game design, when in reality the mechanics did not have to be like that to begin with. This situation is not that of a modder that wanted to glue some oddball weapon onto the game and had to contend with the game as it is.

Edit: And tangentially related, I just realized how arbitrarily and absurdly limited many perks are. Limiting perks to given skills is fine, but in so many cases, there is no logic as to why a given perk would be limited to only a single type of weapon. Puncturing Shot (Automatic Weapons 2) is limited to only Assault Rifles, although it would make just as much sense to be usable by Sniper Rifles as well; Steady Shot (Big Guns 7), same thing. Another example is Move Up! (Big Guns 2), which apparently only works when using big guns, even though it would make sense with fucking everything. Meanwhile, Draw! (Small Arms 7) works with everything, despite making small thematic sense with most other weapons and being considerably more powerful than the other mentioned perks.

 

[Belegarsson]

holy fuck the music in this game is out of this world

 

[Luckmann]

You can't name your character 'nigger' but you can name it 'czarnuch' so there's less censorship than in TOW.

I had no difficulties naming a character Nigger.

So I guess that's a +1 for the game. So we're at something like +2/-527.

holy fuck the music in this game is out of this world

It would be nice if it wouldn't be over-compressed garbage.

 

[Abu Antar]

If they really cut Avellones writing, Fuck you Inxile, and fuck you Fargo, you spineless faggot.

Oh, there are a lot of stuff that was shown that didn't make it into the final game. I have no doubts that it was his stuff on the cutting board.

 

[Luckmann]

I literally cannot boot up this game without running into new game-breaking bugs.

I was just messing around, trying to find ways to export/import characters/recruits in case the game ever enters a playable state, and apparently, creating new recruits, putting them into the party, then putting them back into the pool, and then putting them back into the party... presto! -7 Attributes left to distribute.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a negative 7. Doesn't matter if I have attributes to distribute or not, it goes straight to -7.

 

[jackofshadows]

I was just messing around, trying to find ways to export/import characters/recruits in case the game ever enters a playable state, and apparently, creating new recruits, putting them into the party, then putting them back into the pool, and then putting them back into the party... presto! -7 Attributes left to distribute.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a negative 7. Doesn't matter if I have attributes to distribute or not, it goes straight to -7.

They didn't fix that in 1.1? Lul

 

[Luckmann]

I was just messing around, trying to find ways to export/import characters/recruits in case the game ever enters a playable state, and apparently, creating new recruits, putting them into the party, then putting them back into the pool, and then putting them back into the party... presto! -7 Attributes left to distribute.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is a negative 7. Doesn't matter if I have attributes to distribute or not, it goes straight to -7.

They didn't fix that in 1.1? Lul

No, no, let me just drive home just how violently fucking fucked this game is:

I cannot end my turn using Prepare. Because I'm out of range.

I am out of range in ending my turn to save my Action Points.

I am out of range to myself.

 

[Jrpgfan]

Are you still going on? Do you have autism?

I don't know what you're trying to achieve here. Almost everyone itt has most likely already played the game and agreed that it was okay.

Just move on.

 

[Luckmann]

Rate the game from 0 to 10.

-3.

Btw, I forgot about sneaky shit. It's pretty much a mandatory skill for snipers. You get double the damage at max lvl on sneak shots and 40% more initiative.

It is really not. It only affects the first shot and Initiative is literally useless. You only need it on one person.

Is there a way to see a companion's disposition towards you? In WL2 you had companions going psychos and lose control of them or leaving you if you are not careful. Someone said that is still present in WL3 but I can't find it.

How the fuck did you manage to get companions going psycho or to lose control of them in WL2? Or do you mean when they wig out in combat because you've got shit Leadership? That was never a Disposition thing, or at at least not in a way that mattered.

The game needs a fast travel option. Ain't nobody get the time to sit through 2 extra loading screen just because there is a random encounter happen on the road.

The game ... absolutely needs a fast travel option.

The Codex 2020. Asking for fast travel to circumvent bad game design and development. Stop that.

To be fair the weapon is fucking hilarious. When I first saw Patriarch swinging it I immediately thought "I.want.this".

My first thought was "Man, that thing just looks fucking stupid". As does a solid 60-70% of weapons and armor that I've seen so far.

Does the game has any gamebreaking bugs, like bugs that will not make you solve a quest, crash preventing you from going further? I see on my favourite pirate site there's j2340 version of GOG release(40863), i guess it already has day zero patch, with most bugs squashed?

Just about a month later and this post stands out to me as hilarious, because nothing tangible has improved. "Day zero patch, with most bugs squashed" would be a utopia, my man.

Congratulations to inXile for not making a Deadfire-tier sequel. Unfortunately it seems like Ziets was right and co-op was a mistake given how its bugginess appears to be a major source of complaints.

Co-op is the new voiced dialogue, a waste of money that could have gone to better things during development

Blame Swen for this.

Oh, I do

Swen is a piece of shit, but he's not responsible for this. He didn't put a gun to Fargo's head and force him to do an extremely poor facsimile of D:OS2's co-op (it itself a poor facsimile of D:OS1's co-op).

How DARE you CRITICIZE this PERFECT gem!? LEAVE INxILE ALONE!!!

Fuck you. The thread has plenty of criticism in it, and pretending that there's a positive consensus regarding it just because everyone that isn't slurping the cum of this shitstain has left only makes you look like an overt cocksucker. There is no reason to whiteknight this unplayable piece of shit. You realize that no matter how badly you want Fargo to have sex with you, it won't happen, right?

There's nothing more pathetic than religious loyalty to an entertainment product, especially a failed one.

 

[Haplo]

You seem to have awfully strong feelings towards this gem. Did Fargo hurt you when you were a kid, or something?

Btw. I applaud your autism for going trough the thread about this dreaded game again and handing out ratings.

 

[Luckmann]

Anyone know what the LouisianaEntertainment.gov logo in the splash screen is about? What part of InXile is based there?
Infinitron ?

If I recall correctly, Fargo opened up a Q&A department there, something to do with government incentives.

So tax dollars might have been used for development?

Gotta get that third pool.

But where on earth do you get the numbers for assuming 10s of thousands of players? It’s a rental service and “because”?

Microsoft has not revealed exact subscriber numbers for Game Pass, but we have learned that there are currently some 9.5 million monthly users.

You think fewer people are playing a new rental over paying $60? Come on.

What we think is really beside the point. There are tons of other "new rentals", too, after all. We can't just assume that Xbawks Gaypass has the same user base as Steam, either. We have to tick a couple of very hazy boxes in order to assert that Wasteoftime 3 has as many concurrent players there as on Steam. With Steam we have some degree of transparency.

Honestly the whole CO-OP schtick should have been discarded from the get-go, didn't they learn anything from Larian?

it is there because they learned from larian lmao

Too bad they didn't learn to do it competently. Literally every aspect of the co-op is pasted-on and poorly thought through. No dialogue resolution, no cooperative dialogue, no indicators or logs, no UI elements to facilitate co-op (the entire UI is really bad, either way), no way to check eachother out or compare things, etc. Even looking in on eachother's dialogues is clunky as shit compared to the very simple way to join in on the conversation(s) in D:OS1. You can't even scroll the fucking dialogues to see what has been said, instead anyone joining in has to click through it step-by-step. It's designed by a bonafide retard.

is there a way to move with left mouse button?

No, this is a console game.

1) Weird Science weapons are weird yes, but don't seem entirely useful, more like novelty items. This is especially true of the various "rocket launcher" type weapons. Frozen Ferret Launcher and Meson Cannon both clearly state they are rocket launchers. So area of effect / splash damage right? Wrong! They are single target weapons which makes no sense since they are literally shoulder fired cannons. *shrug* If you are playing for the role-play effect go crazy, but the 'normal' weapons of the same rank are much better from the looks of it.

Why on Earth would you assume that just because something is shoulder-mounted, it would do splash damage? The frozen ferret launcher is clearly a joke (...just like the game itself), but the Meson Cannon was always a single-target thing, and I have no problem imagining single-target heavy weapons like that, especially when we bring in "weird science" laz0r-beam type stuff. It's fairly iconic, honestly.

There's the explanation why is W3 the only major recent American game without a whiff of wokeness.

It was written years ago.

Cassandra Khaw and the Torment: Tides of Numenera writing team thank you for the vote of confidence! "Years ago" here means 2016-2018, it's not some Obama era thing.

Though interestingly, the Writers section is way down below the Senior Writers in the credits, as if they're far less important.

I think this says more about the Jewish principle of the big lie than anything else. Make a lie, make it big, and keep repeating it, and eventually it will become "true". It is essentially what these people are doing. They've concocted a world-view of literal lies, and they just repeat it until people are no longer reacting to it.

So, judging from the quest strings ripped out of the game, quite a bit of content seems to be cut - something like 3 locations. Library (that one looks especially big), Steeltown, Cheyenne Mountain. 1 or 2 companions (one new and second one may be Ralphy, but that one is not guaranteed, though). DLC fodder, for sure.

Most likely cut specifically so that they can release it as DLCs later.

Regarding wokeness, character creation is at least funny.

Colorado demographics:

84% white
4% black
4% other

Out of the 36 portraits with visible faces:

11 white
14 black
9 Asian
1 mime
1 clown

W3 is set in the future white boy

In a world that practically ended in 1998, have suffered no mass influx of the brown sludge, and where sub-saharans should've died en masse due to being less capable of forethought and long-term planning than the garden-variety squirrel that nests for winter.

what's the purpose of quick slots if it costs no action points to enter inventory during combat and put items into those slots?

I think you're sorely overestimating modern game-designers. Quick-slots aren't in the game to serve a meaningful purpose, they're there because it is expected. They don't need to serve a function, they don't need to make sense, they don't need to add anything tangible. They're just there, because if they weren't, their absence would be noticed. Their actual function has long since been forgotten, the logic behind them removed in an ever-intensifying effort to dumb things down "streamline" further and "muh QoL".

Am I the only one who finds it weird there are no portraits during dialogue?

It is weird as hell, but the entire UI is shot to shit, so I can't say I missed it. Having the dialogue not cover a full half of the screen for one line of dialogue at the time is of so much higher priority that portraits don't even register. Or, you know, basic-bitch stuff like being able to check conversation history, and so on and so forth.

...
- together with Mankind Divided it's the best writing coming from a Western developer in the last 5 years.

I find this hilarious as a "pro", because Mankind Divided was atrocious, especially in terms of writing. I played through that entire thing and it was so forgettable that I quite literally cannot remember most of it anymore.

Really liked Wasteland 2, I'm sure I'll like Wasteland 3 too. But right now, just can't bring myself to really give it a go.

Mainly because of the dialogue system, I hate the way dialogue is presented. I could swallow the lack of a visible dialogue box. But being limited to seeing just three options at a time is really aggravating the heck out of me.

[...] Luckily WL3 has not an huge amount of text, at least not as much as POE 1&2 for example (and there the text presentation is even worse).

Are you fucking high? In no universe is the text representation worse in PoE1/2 than in WL3. WL3 has the single worst UI of any CRPG in recent memory, especially in terms of dialogue. I know some of you people are in deep-ass post-purchase rationalization mode, but this is just getting ridiculous.

Btw. I applaud your autism for going trough the thread about this dreaded game again and handing out ratings.

What are you on about? I'm still working my way through the thread. It's only ~50 pages and practically dead, so I thought to myself "why the hell not"? It's not like there's a playable game to indulge in.