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

[Roguey]

Hopefully InXile goes fully Unreal Engine now.

I've heard that Bard's Tale IV has worse performance than their Unity games. As they say, a poor craftsman blames his tools. inXile has had lousy programmers because their salaries are so low even compared to a company like Obsidian. That may change with the new owner, but I wouldn't get optimistic.

 

[soulburner]

Hopefully InXile goes fully Unreal Engine now.

I've heard that Bard's Tale IV has worse performance than their Unity games. As they say, a poor craftsman blames his tools. inXile has had lousy programmers because their salaries are so low even compared to a company like Obsidian. That may change with the new owner, but I wouldn't get optimistic.

Hmm, you're right. I recall reading a lot about how bad The Bard's Tale IV performed and how InXile tried to fix it by significantly downgrading the graphics. I am ready to believe this was their first Unreal game and they didn't know what they were doing and a much better job will be done on their UE5 game - but yes, "talented" coders can make a text editor slow.

To this day I cannot comprehend how Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 can have such high hardware requirements and insane loading times. Sure, there are nice shaders and stuff, especially in Deadfire, but it still shouldn't cost so much. It's just a flat 2D surface for the world with a bunch of shader layers on top of it and yet I see posts on reddit complaining about big framerate drops on cards like RTX3070.

 

[FreshCorpse]

Incredible number of bugs in this. I just had an endless loading screen after (what I think was) the final battle. Sadly i hadn't saved and CBA to repeat that so giving up on this for a while.

I also had an extremely annoying bug where upon returning to an area I'd cleared previously some npc had turned hostile (probably due to plot developments). Mid-battle with them, some more hostile NPCs spawned in a locked cupboard. You can't open doors in-battle in W3 and you can't shoot through walls AFAIK so that locked me in battle.

I think this DLC will be "ok" when they fix the bugs, but I'm getting stuck repeating quite long encounters and it's no fun right now.

Always regret it when I play anything soon after release.

 

[Tacgnol]

I haven't played an Unity engine based game that didn't have performance issues.

ATOM RPG.

Yes, ATOM had amazing load times and very few FPS drops.

It also didn't suffer from significant save bloating, which is an issue I see in pretty much every RPG on Unity.

I'm still not entirely sure how they pulled it off.

 

[Luckmann]

lol, trust randos on the codex to get triggered by that. Yes I am...try to just carry on with your life though, without this fact causing you too much trauma

People like you who wallow in decline should unironically be beaten.

Incredible number of bugs in this.

NOOOOOOOOOO! YOU CAN'T SAY THIS! IT'S A FLAWLESS MASTERPIECE, YOU'RE LYING AND MAKING THINGS UP! OH NO NO NO NO IT WORKS ON MY MACHINE! NOOOOOOOO YOU CANNOT DO THIS WHAT ABOUT MY HECKIN INXILERINO WHAT ABOUT MY MICROSOFTEROONIES NOOOOOOOOOO!

 

[Saduj]

Was bored so I bought this on Friday and finished last night.

My thoughts after completing:

• If you don't bring characters with social skills, you're going to end up fighting almost everyone eventually. That I can say from personal experience. You will probably also be locked out of reaching the ideal or even a good ending. That, I'm just guessing at b/c I didn't keep playing the game after ending the expansion. Without social skills you will find yourself choosing to support the asshole you hate least and even then, you may eventually have to kill that asshole too.
• The non-lethal combat is a nice change of pace in a small dose but it probably wasn't worth the resources and effort they put into it. I was happy enough to get back to killing stuff once the non-lethal quests were over and would not utilize those mechanics again unless explicitly instructed by a quest giver. It is a bit different but not better.
• I give them credit for trying to add depth with the "elemental shield" mechanic but again, I don't think it was worth the effort. First of all, unless a specific shielded enemy is in a position to be a major nuisance if he isn't killed right away, you are better off just wiping out the non-shielded enemies first and waiting for the shields to weaken/dissipate on the shielded guys. The shields always come in three and there will be no scenario where taking out all three shields first is worth it. You'll be wasting attacks that could be used to take enemies off the board. Secondly, the best way to deal with the shields is to attack first and kill the shield tech during your alpha strike before he can do his thing. The best I can say about this is that it does add to the difficulty a bit (you won't always be able to get to shield guy in the first turn).
• I had forgot that the game allows you to swap characters in and out of your squad and to create new characters mid-game. So if you're like me and wanted to try out some new builds/npcs that option is still available even though this is a mid-game expansion.
• I did not experience any major bugs. One time after saving, the frame rate dropped ridiculously low and I had to exit and boot up the game again.
• New content has been clocked at 3-6 hours by various sources. For me, it was definitely closer to 6 hours. I think not having social skills made things take longer. My party had five people and they went from level 12 to 16-17 during the expansion.

TLDR: The added content is not going to make you like the game if you didn't like vanilla but if you liked W3 and want more content then you'll probably like the expansion. The one thing the expansion seems to do better than the original game is put a higher emphasis on social skills, but I fucked that up by not bringing any characters with those skills. If you're going to bother, bring those skills.

 

[Antigoon]

TLDR: The added content is not going to make you like the game if you didn't like vanilla but if you liked W3 and want more content then you'll probably like the expansion. The one thing the expansion seems to do better than the original game is put a higher emphasis on social skills, but I fucked that up by not bringing any characters with those skills. If you're going to bother, bring those skills.

Are the skill checks also level scaled? For my end game party they were pretty much all 8, for level 25 chars of course no problem. I don't think it took me more than 3 hours to finish the expansion.

 

[Saduj]

TLDR: The added content is not going to make you like the game if you didn't like vanilla but if you liked W3 and want more content then you'll probably like the expansion. The one thing the expansion seems to do better than the original game is put a higher emphasis on social skills, but I fucked that up by not bringing any characters with those skills. If you're going to bother, bring those skills.

Are the skill checks also level scaled? For my end game party they were pretty much all 8, for level 25 chars of course no problem. I don't think it took me more than 3 hours to finish the expansion.

I don't know for sure but I think at least some are. I watched a few minutes of a stream and saw a skill check that was higher than it was in my game, which I assume was due to scaling.

 

[gruntar]

41 reviews on Steam, 4 on GoG after a week. They probably sold about one thousand units of that thing across all platforms.

 

[FreshCorpse]

I feel like the purpose of having two pieces of DLC is as much to allow them to effectively launch a second time with a "definitive edition" and get another load of coverage.

 

[Fedora Master]

The game hasn't changed all that much. I figured some more QoL stuff and balancing would have happened but nope.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.inxile-entertainment.com/post/wasteland-3-original-soundtrack

Wasteland 3 Original Soundtrack

The Wasteland 3 Original Soundtrack is now available where all fine soundtracks are sold and listened to—including Spotify! The soundtrack is available as a dual-album, split between the Original Score by composers Mark Morgan and Alexander Brandon, and a selection of our apocalyptic-covers led by Music Director Mary Ramos in Ballads & Hymns.

Fill your ear holes with the smooth and sultry sounds of a deadly post-apocalyptic nightmare today!

Wasteland 3 Original Score

Wasteland 3 Ballads & Hymns

 

[Fedora Master]

There are a lot of poo poo pee pee jokes in this.

 

[Saduj]

There are a lot of poo poo pee pee jokes in this.

Not sure if you're referring to the quest in the expansion but the sad part there is that there isn't even really a joke to it. It is more like a three year old's mentality where just mentioning a toilet or having to shit is by itself, hilarious.

 

[Fedora Master]

Tons of niggers in Steeltown, too.

e:
Holy shit the game went from "kinda stupid" to "complete Reddit"

PEE PEE POO POO FUNNY! (There's a quest where you gotta kill a bunch of worms so the refugees outside Steeltown can go take a shit!!! BRILLIANT!!)

Right next to the toilet is this reference to fucking Herbie because who needs tone?

TOPICAL (Nice job horribly dating your game!)

Also get this, guys! There's a robot! And it talks... are you ready... it talks like a C A N A D I A N
Because it was made in CANADA! Isn't that HILARIOUS?!

 

[Luckmann]

I genuinely don't understand how any of that shit could be considered worse than anything that was already in the game. The Herbie reference is fucking subtle compared to basically everything else.

 

[Saduj]

Forgot about the talking toilet.

Herbie wasn’t the only TV/movie vehicle in the scrapyard. And at least they served a purpose.

But it is weird that writers old enough to put a “Car 54 Where Are You” reference in the game are also obsessed with poopy.

 

[Luckmann]

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.

As I prepare to give the game another shot, I can't get over this. I was really hoping that this would be fixed by either patches or mods by now, but there appears to be zero interest in the game. The way there's practically zero synergy between the skills aside from some outliers really gets to me, as there could've been some cool things to do, but as-is, there's just not.

 

[Reader]

I'm still not entirely sure how they pulled it off.

As of now Russian science is dead.
While western top programmers work in NASA, russian top programmers make games.

 

[Spectacle]

While western top programmers work in NASA, russian top programmers make games.

If only. Western top programmers either work in finance developing trading bots, or at Google/Facebook developing algorithms to read your mind based on your internet presence.

 

[likash]

Fargo was about to retire untill Bill Gates made him an offer he could not refuse. The game is mediocre at best. The golden era of RPG was 1990-2004.

 

[Luckmann]

I finally started a new game of this last night, and throughout the prologue and the initial area of the base (literally before any of the combat unless you fight the droids), we've already had the game lock up in combat twice and outside of combat twice (once when exiting a dialogue and the other one just straight-up seemingly randomly), with nobody being able to take any action and forcing us to ALT+F4 out of the game and do a restart, which means booting up the game, re-entering the IP (because this is not saved, of course), connecting, loading, and then wait as the game forces you to go through party management again (because this is not saved, of course).

The good news are that those are the only major bugs we've run into so far!

Sooo... progress!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Also get this, guys! There's a robot! And it talks... are you ready... it talks like a C A N A D I A N
Because it was made in CANADA! Isn't that HILARIOUS?!

this actually sounds funny though

probably lost on non-americans/canadians, but it's a funny gag nonetheless.

 

[Barbarian]

Tons of niggers in Steeltown, too.

e:
Holy shit the game went from "kinda stupid" to "complete Reddit"

PEE PEE POO POO FUNNY! (There's a quest where you gotta kill a bunch of worms so the refugees outside Steeltown can go take a shit!!! BRILLIANT!!)

Right next to the toilet is this reference to fucking Herbie because who needs tone?

TOPICAL (Nice job horribly dating your game!)

Also get this, guys! There's a robot! And it talks... are you ready... it talks like a C A N A D I A N
Because it was made in CANADA! Isn't that HILARIOUS?!

The whole series was always like this. Would you claim W1 wasn't just as silly?

Shame about the bugs. I had a good time finishing vanilla after bug patches - will wait for second dlc to drop before doing a replay.

 

[Fedora Master]

I hadn't noticed it as much in vanilla WL3 or WL2. Steeltown somehow stands out.

Frankly after finishing the DLC I dropped the game again. It doesn't really improve anything, it just adds pointless gimmicks.