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

[IHaveHugeNick]

Wulfric Pinewood

Loading times got much better with patches.

 

[Grunker]

Nice - the railgun seems to be bugged. It deals all of 50 damage

 

[Haplo]

Hmm, which gun do you mean?

 

[Grunker]

Hmm, which gun do you mean?

The one for the Kodiak.

 

[Grunker]

This game has some weird writing:

The Dorsey's as a Deluge of Blood batshit insane crazy murderous intestine-as-necklace wearing cult makes sense. It's fun.

As do the Dorsey's as the Patriarch's bad conscience, the family cast out as bandits and raiders who were in fact just trying to reign in the untamed power of the patriarch. It's central to the games thematic components.

Both those concepts works very well. The dialogue with the Jarett and Erastus are pure post apo-crazy goodness. And the dialogue with the dad about his regrets works fine as well.

But the two of them together as one concept? It's hilariously dissonant. How am I supposed to take the plea democracy seriously from the head of an insane murderous cult that wear people's skin as clothing?

It makes sense that the plains made them brutal, but there's sort of very visible line between brutality from necessity and using people's intestines as personal ornaments :D

It's like two different people wrote the Dorsey's and then they just put it all into the game. Dorsey's are one example, there are many of these places where the game's insistence on being OH WE'RE JUST HERE FOR TEH LULZ undercuts its attempts at actual storytelling. I'm don't think the LULZ-parts work at all for the most part (what works is the Mad Max crazy post apo shit, the humor always falls flat), but even if you do, you gotta pick one. You can't have a discussion about (tyranny vs. necessary power) vs. (terrorism vs. freedom-fighting) if you're painting one of those bracket-parts as insane, murderous cultists.

 

[SoupNazi]

Yeah, I remember not liking that weird dichotomy myself.

 

[jackofshadows]

But the two of them together as one concept? It's hilariously dissonant. How am I supposed to take the plea democracy seriously from the head of an insane murderous cult that wear people's skin as clothing?

The Dorsey's are terribly, terribly inconsistent, yeah. Looking forward to your opinion about the final confrontations, there's some highly questionable writing as well.

I wish they'd stick either with tongue-in-the-cheeck or even overboard post-apo mad max lunacy like early Dorsey's, clown mexicans with pigs and other wacky shit OR with serious storytelling like Patriarch and his methods, made his offspring more plausible, expand on the alternatives and all that. In the end it's clear that they failed at keeping the overall tone.

 

[Grunker]

I think overboard post-apo like the Dorsey's AND the serious storytelling could work in the same game - just not *in the same faction*. The "tongue-in-cheek" "humor" is mostly just terrible. Like, have one faction be The Deluge of Blood-Dorsey's and one be the "we wanted elections but were cast out and now we live on the fringes as an Afghan raider tribe because we got no other choice"-Dorsey's.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, one complaint with WL2 is that it didn't have enough crazy in it. In WL3 they went a lot further with the weird and the wacky and overall the game is better for it, but sometimes it's weird in the wrong places.

 

[DeepOcean]

I think overboard post-apo like the Dorsey's AND the serious storytelling could work in the same game - just not *in the same faction*. The "tongue-in-cheek" "humor" is mostly just terrible. Like, have one faction be The Deluge of Blood-Dorsey's and one be the "we wanted elections but were cast out and now we live on the fringes as an Afghan raider tribe because we got no other choice"-Dorsey's.

One easy way to fix that was having the Dorsey's lead the other gangs instead being the whacky gang, it makes sense for a faction on a desperate situation wishing for revenge allying itself with any psycho that wishes to fuck with the Patriarch. Have some crazy priest with the deluge of blood thing being an influential figure for the other gangs that joined his cult and that the Dorsey's tolerate him because it helps them keep some unity on their rag tag army but it is something they dont personally believe.

 

[Grunker]

Oki dokes, done.

The long tl;dr: I half-heartedly praised Wasteland 2 after I finished it. In retrospect, I shouldn't have. Looking back, the contemporary starvation of RPGs and hope in the Kickstarter generation made me praise a game that was sub-mediocre, just because it, in principle, had a lot of the bells and whistles I had been missing so much. Fortunately, I am no longer as RPG-deprived as most codexers are pussy-deprived, and thus, Wasteland 3 can be judged on its own merits. And here's the good news: Wasteland 3 is better than its predecessors. It players better, has much better presentation and has roughly the same sort of quest design - its predecessors only strength, which is probably why Vault Dweller praised it (I know, what a sellout, right?). It has a good amount of C&C though less than it gives itself credit for. So that's a recommend right? Kiiiiiiindda? Sortta? Maybe? A little bit?

tl;dr of the tl;dr: I saw a review headline calling the game "a good but unremarkable RPG." That's pretty close to the truth.

OK onto some more details.

Disclaimer: I played on Supreme Jerk difficulty and went through the entire game without the Explosives skill, meaning I couldn't open combat with a huge explosion that nuked several opponents. Thinking about it now, I think this vastly improved my enjoyment of the combat. I see a lot of posts talking about how easy the game is, and I can only imagine this being the case if you open each fight by one-shotting a group of enemies. The game was not exactly hard, but my Sniper-opener only took out at most one guy (typically actually just 3/4 of that dude's health bar), so enemies almost always got 1 or 2 rounds to try to fight back. You can do a lot to make this game piss easy if you set up fights probably, but go in by just firing a single shot to get the drop on some dudes and there's some decent difficulty there. I did reload a lot of fights early game and some mid game. After that, of course, the game becomes incredibly easy unless you fuck up which does happen. Before I started the game, Haplo recommended I go with just 4 characters. I think that would be fine as well - I went with 6 and no Explosives-skill, and I think the results might be close in terms of difficulty.

The above to say: I may have enjoyed combat more because I had an actual challenge. I imagine Explosives can reduce that significantly.

Positives:

- Surprisingly, an enjoyable enough part of Wasteland 3 is the main plot and cast of characters (yeah I know, did not see that coming). Mainly, the characters have believable enough motivations and ye olde "choose the lesser evil"-strategy used by the game works juuuust fine. I've seen a lot of posts here being mad about their selection of choices during the end game ("Patriarch is an idiot," "Angela Deth's choices make no sense" etc.), but that sounds like a bunch of whining over not being able to choose a "good ending" to me. Yeah the Patriarch is a complete tyrant and even though the game portrays him as brilliant he is still retarded enough to think there's an heir hidden in Liberty, but have you checked history my dudes? If anything, the Patriarch is a bit too much copy-paste over every conqueror ever when it comes to that stuff. Every god damn brilliant warlord ever left his empire to some damn idiot kid. And yes, Angela Deth's "solution" is morally dubious at best and she is so idealistic she completely overlooks the institutions that bring stability to Colorado, plus her idealism gets innocents killed in what can only be described as downright nefarious ways (like her plans with Cordite). That's the whole point of her character - fixating so strongly on one evil it justifies any means in the pursuit of its destruction. But have you dealt with idealists before? The French Revolution gave us democracy and abolished slavery... after a few years of some of the most gaudy villainy in history. And the most evil people were also the most right about a bunch of political idealism - for example, most of the early revolutionaries were against freeing the slaves on Haiti. Among the few who advocated for its abolition, the one with the loudest voice was none other than Robespierre (small fry at the time), who ended up as the most insanely evil fucker of them all (well, apart from people like Saint-Just maybe). So yeah I think the game actually does a decent job of making its hard choices be sensible and not forcing you to do dumb shit for no reason (the DLC excluded - it's retarded). I mean its not poetry or great literature or anything but it's a good, simple story with characters that make sense and have qualities and flaws. It's a dark day when that is praiseworthy but it is not the norm for a video game story to be actually engaging and live up to the most basic criteria of OK writing. About the only thing I found completely mystifying was Connie Zeng being able to convert half the rangers to shoot her brethren in a couple of days and then a handful of refugees (who I had done nothing but help *except* imprisoning their leader) attacking a bunch of armed guys in power armor. But that's minor stuff - beyond that, the plot and characters were simple, but worked. It's your basic power vacuum tale of woe. Nothing crazy, nothing that comes near to even stuff like New Vegas in terms of weaving game mechanics into that tale or anything. But it was functional. I went into this game expecting not to give 0.1 percent of a fuck about the story, and ended up giving it a shrugging "yeah, it's alright." So 1 - 0 Wasteland 3, here.

- The best part of the game, however, was the presentation. I LOVED the Mad Max-inspired feel of everything - the armors, the clothes, the cars, the enemies, the buildings, some of the writing, the voice-acting, just about everything was all Max 2 and Fury Road, and boy it fucking worked. It's been a long time since I really enjoyed an audio-visual presentation in a game this much, an atmosphere, if you will, but I gotta say WL3 really fucking did it for me. I mean just take that opening cinematic with the mines on the lake, leading up to a Mad Max-inspired cultist screaming about the Deluge of Blood, while you kill his people to the tune of a hugely atmospheric and melancholic version of 'Blood of the Lamb.' Now I want every RPG ever to play dramatic remixes of country's best evergreens during key fights. Can we go to Tennesee in Bloodlines 3 and kill some anarchs while listening to a reimagining of Casey's Last Ride, please? It's also been a long time since I've had cause to praise voice acting, which is ironic considering how prevalent voice acting is these days, but many of these characters just sound great and evoke exactly the archetypes they're meant to. A few stand out as fantastic. All in all, WL3's presentation could have been close to Bloodlines' gold standard if it wasn't for the "humor" (see negatives). As is, it's at least as good as Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Dragonfall has WL3 beat on atmosphere and thematic cohesion but obviously loses in terms of graphical presentation. The presentation is also the chief reason that the next point is a positive:

- The gameplay. OK OK listen. It's not great, but it's not bad either to be honest. The combat is fairly simple, it's unbalanced, and the systems are barely functioning. For some reason playing it is just an OK time anyway. I suspect the spotless presentation is the primary reason again - almost every gun feels so satisfying to fire, the sound design is just amazing (the oomph of some of these weapons shames most modern shooters) and the visual feedback is great. But there's also some cool skinner box design. I always felt good leveling up because it almost always made some part of combat easier for that character, or allowed me to use a new item, or go back and complete a skill check, or whatever. Combat (at least without explosives) actually has some amount of tactical diversity, even as simple as it is. Don't get me wrong: great RPG combat this definetely ain't, but to lend a Codex cliché, it's "OK for what it is." And what it is, is enough of an improvement on the WL2 formula that you shrug and go "fair enough." WL2's main problem was the complete lack of anything beyond a basic "Fire" button in terms of tactical choice in combat. Between consumables, perks and weapon abilities, you got a bit more stuff here. Oh, and the enemy design ranges from good to generic. Some enemies are really cool - especially robots, while human opponents almost always boil down to each faction having a melee guy, a flamethrower-guy, a sniper guy, an assault rifle guy, a... you get the gist of it.

- Quest design. It's nothing incredible, but most quests have branching paths and a good number of outcomes. There are very few quests which was a good decision because it means the quests that are there have a sufficient amount of work put into them. They often have a decent build-up, some key highlight stages, some parts that can be approached in multiple ways, and then a few different results based on your choices. Cool. There are even multiple instances where NPCs will recall ALOT of your past decisions and potentially lock you out of future choices depending on your past choice-resume. So in contrast to, say, Pillars of Eternity's choice recall scene (courtroom scene), your past decisions actually do have one or two chances to shine beyond the ending slides. Even if it is just a character dividing them all into "what I like" and "what I don't like" and then summing up to decide your fate.

Whatever:

- The factions, reputation system and "fame." It's mostly window dressing and end slides. There are some compelling choices here and some good thematic storytelling, but there's no Vegas-esque flowchart of player choice to influence faction states. Factions like the One-Hundred Families are really well structured and function well within the story, but they lack engaging characters to flesh them out. Others like the Gippers are taken straight out of Fallout 4 and remind you why the game's worst aspect is its attempts at "humor."

Negatives:
- The braindead "humor", which threatens to completely destroy the strengths of the story and the presentation. Just like the previous games, we're in full Fallout 4-territory here, where the Wasteland is often more fun fair for children than it is the bleak and final stages of a waning humanity. I enjoy comedy (well, mostly dry and laconic sarcasm, but bear with me), but is a golden toaster companion "funny"? Did anyone ever laugh when they saw that? Is there an actual, breathing person out there who saw that golden toaster pop out and went "HEH! NOW THAT IS FUNNY!" while emoting human sounds of surprise at the scathing wit on display? Did Brian Fargo laugh? Did the developers? They must have, right? Someone wrote that and coded it and they all went "that is funny." But I think they did it without laughing. It's one of those things where you and your friend decide something is "funny" because it's "random", but you don't laugh at it, or the laugh is forced, generated by the high spirits of companionship rather than the substance of the joke. It's just the best your feeble unfunny minds could produce when you were put on the spot and had to make a joke. Your cammeradie and the joy of the moment is what made you think it was fun - but anyone who has ever tried telling such a story to others knows the awkward silence after a joke that only works if you were there. Or how about Dog Shit as a crafting component, did that prompt any actual players to laugh? Even just giggle? In WL1 and WL2 it didn't really make a difference that all this silly shit was there because the story and "characters" were ass anyway so who gives a fuck. But WL3 actually wants to tell a compelling story, it wants to discuss SERIOUS BUSINESS POLITICAL STUFF about power and regency and governance and it wants to take notes from Fallout: New Vegas and ask whether democracy is desirable or even possible in a stage of societal degeneracy and shit like that, it wants YOU to feel like you can't just go to your typical RPG-book of "how to do Neutral Good and make everyone win always" but instead THINK about the context of your situation and what choices that situation dictates, and it wants you to FEEL like all your options are shit because realpolitik means that the premise of your decisions force them to be suboptimal and as just one cog in the machine you can't do shit about that even if you are powerful, and aaaaaaaall that just doesn't work when the setting is as implicitly silly and frankly fucking juvenile as Wasteland is. And more importantly, when the silly shit isn't just presented as tongue-in-cheek in-jokes that aren't meant to be part of the actual "realness" of the game's fiction, but is actually taken at face value by the world and the characters who inhabit it - something that your characters can talk about and recognize as "how the world works." I recall distinctly a point where Lucia Wesson, one of the competently written characters with even more competent voice acting, commented on me cloning myself asking: "eh... are we really doing that?" She asked this while wearing a gimp mask featuring two pink dildos as horns, granting her +2 penetration (she's a pistol user, and pistols have shit penetration). This is not Fallout 2's referencial or tongue-in-cheek humor, where the fiction contract often strongly implies that the jokes aren't "real" in the sense that they're not actually part of the fiction that the characters accept as their world. No: WL3's fiction contract strictly tells you that this is a world where cultists worship good manners, clones yell Goose Goose Duck and there is an actual shrine to the art of Toaster Repair. It doesn't happen "outside of the fiction", as the writer winks at you knowingly, it happens within it, CONSTANTLY, sometimes *while* the serious shit is happening. The dissonance this often causes in the game is palpable, and it's a real shame they didn't just cut out 99% of it and wrote more of the good stuff instead. Of course the biggest sin of the humor isn't that it breaks the atmosphere in half: it is that it is patently, awfully, horribly, agonizingly unfunny.

- But didn't I just praise the over-the-top Mad Max-stuff? Well I think what I'm getting at here is that those aren't actually the same at all. The over-the-top stuff like the Dorsey's cries about the Deluge of Blood have a thematic reason to exist, harking back to the godfathers of the Post Apo genre themselves: the fact that post apocalyptic stories are literally about the fall of society and the clash of the remnants of the modern with the return of the ur-instinct, the base, the barbaric. And so post apo lends itself well to thematic environments of hyper-exaggeration (civilization = restraint, so collapse of society = extremism). Plus, in contrast to toasters and dog shit, that exaggerated stuff is just FUN. It's a good time. These are stories, right, so no, a guy with a flamethrower-guitar riding a truck with comically huge sound systems leading the charge of an insane warband in spike-adorned cars isn't realistic, of course it's not, but it's an entertaining take on the excesses of power in a world where raw hard power is all that's left of "society." It's great both because it's fun AND useful to highlight the dichotomy between those who strive to bring back civilization (typically, the protagonists) and the people who embrace the post-apocalyptic state of societal regress. So there's a clear divide between:

1) Thematic elements being way over the top first and foremost in order to be fun but also because its part of that post-apo vibe of exaggerated societal collapse and tribal nostalgia
2) "Random" or "wacky" humor that does the exact opposite: undercuts the thematic components of the setting rather than strengthening them

Or in other words: it's OK if it's metal. It's not OK if it's a 13-year-old's idea of a clever joke.

So that's how I can praise the game's Maxiness (lel) while lambasting its Fallout 4-ness.

- The ending. While I liked the setup to the ending, you kind of want to see all that setup come to a head. You want to see Angela and the Patriarch argue, you want to participate in that argument, you want to see the marshals debate with themselves who they believe in as the most succesful leader, maybe having the option to bribe the corrupt bastards or appeal to their waning sense of duty, you want to see the hundred families being opportunists, you want to see fringe factions at least comment on their desired outcome on the future of Colorado, you want a comment from the children and so on and so forth. You want the Patriarch to go over how well he thinks you did the jobs he asked you too (I killed the Gippers cutting off his oil supply - and even though the game did the whole "THE PATRIARCH WILL REMEMBER THIS"-spiel, there was nary a comment from ole Buchanon about that). Instead what you get is a couple of insanely boring trash fights and then you make two conversation checks (or you don't and fight it out instead) and that's that. No surprises, no wrap-up of the game's political themes. It just... ends (the presentation is still great, of course: the first ending slides are a decently written song about your main quest exploits).

- The character system. Yes, you feel good when you level up, but it's the most base form of satisfaction, like how you feel good after eating a cheap pizza. It simply satisfies the most basic tastes of your poor, human soul before your existance inevitably ends in doom and failure, being the disappointment to your mom that she always knew you would be. You feel good because your characters increased in power in a very tangible way, but it rarely poses an interesting choice or challenge. The system is simply so incredibly simplistic (very reminiscent of something like Divinity: Original Sin's character system) that it can't make your braincells spin for more than a few seconds before you've decided what to do. This is chiefly because of:

- The HORRIBLE perk system. Guys, make a pact with me. We shall hunt down whoever designed this piece of shit, tie him to a chair, keep his eyes open Alex DeLarge-style and force him to rewatch old episodes of Full House for the remainder of his life. Not only does the game have the old divide of "most perks are awful or worthless, a few are OK and then the remaining few are GODLIKE", perks are implicit to the skills. In practice this means you'll often find yourself saving perks or going into completely worthless skills JUST TO GET ONE PERK ON THAT TREE. I cannot express how insane this design is. You'll find yourself getting Small Arms 7 (yes - 7/10!) on almost everyone because the 'Draw!' perk is just that good and inexplicably not tied to using the actual weapons of the skill tree like most other perks are. Yes - you're nearly maxing a skill just to be able to buy one fucking perk. You're using the skill points themselves for literally nothing. In a game where skill points are very scarce, which speaks to how few perks are worth considering. Who thought that was a good idea? Not only that, but this also means you'll have a TON of levels where you either get an unexciting miniscule perk that does almost nothing OR you don't have any perks available that do anything. 0. You will often just run around with character portraits that shine like glowsticks at 90s rave-party because you have 1 or 2 perks pending and nothing to spend them on. This system is so incredibly shit it makes me angry IRL. I'm now going to go kill some cute animals for respite. BRB.

- Alright, I'm back. The crafting. Here's what it wants to be: a fairly involved system that can make almost any items in the game - from weapons to mods to consumables - balanced by a universal resource forcing you to choose carefully. Here's what it actually is: useless. Even in a party with no Barter-skill you have enough money to buy everything you ever want. Crafting is for the odd ammo-dump when you run out or maybe a healing consumable. If you have barter, you won't even use it for that. Why is there a crafting system here? Because modern RPGs have crafting systems. InXile are either incompetent system developers incapable of tieing systems together, or they just don't give a fuck, and the crafting system is the final piece of evidence. Lock 'em up. Fargo for prison. Etc.

- Stability. I rarely if ever give a fuck about bugs and have never understood why gamers are so fixated on that shit, but WL3 was actually annoying enough to make me notice. There are audio- and mixing bugs EVERYWHERE and it fucks with the presentation, which should be the game's only highlight. The game leaks memory like a motherfucker and visual glitches crop up constantly if you alt-tab. We're not talking game-ruining crashes here, but it's enough of a mess that it can get annoying. Also, the game only keeps a single autosave copy, which fucked me over once (the DLC).

- The DLC. Firstly, every single mechanic it introduces falls completely flat:
A) Stacking debuffs with milestones are a neat idea actually and could be a great alternative to the all-or-nothing systems in most RPGs, but in a game where combat lasts 3 rounds *maximum* (more often 1 or 2 rounds) it's a shitty system. No matter how shit you are at the combat you're never gonna stack these.
B) Non-lethal combat in my Mad Max outrageous over the top post-apo? What the actual fuck were they thinking?

I want to be at the meeting where they came up with, much less decided to implement, non-lethal combat in a game whose bread, butter, heart, soul and core is blowing shit up and looking like an 80s metal-fan who took the wrong turn and ended up in the apocalypse. It's so counter-intuitive the only equivalent I could think off is implementing a "DRIVE SLOW AND RESPONSIBLY"-mode in Burnout.
C) Gear that works against specific damage types, are you high? Who is going to equip even the elite versions of that stuff unless they benefit from the damage bonus? Pillars of Eternity: The White March already showed you how to do DLC-exclusive crafting. You allow the scarce DLC-resource to upgrade already existing gear - making each drop of it an exciting loot drop AND a difficult choice - not to craft shit you won't use or will replace quickly. That way, the player will actually hurt deciding between a crafting reward or a desired story outcome. Not shrug and don't give a fuck.
Secondly, the story is terrible. The premise is actually kind of a good mystery setup and makes you go "ooooooh, I'm solving some hidden enigma about what made everything go crazy inside this closed off section of the Wasteland", but it turns out what you're actually doing is mediating the world's most boring worker-dispute. It's one of those rare cases where rather than seeming simple on the surface but revealing a much larger mystery, the story turns out to actually be much more simple and boring than the presentation makes it out to be. After arbiting this banal ass conflict you're presented with a binary choice about whether synths are people too - a choice you've already made several times in the main game by this time, so there's no tension or moral conundrum for you to consider. You already know what your characters are going to choose, because you've made that choice many times now. There's also a subtheme about bureaucracy that never goes anywhere and is actually very poorly explained by the plot. There is a biiiit of cleverness here I suppose - I sided with the idealistic-but-on-the-surface-not-completely-unreasonable Union leader despite a few signs that she was an ideologue, and so when the game punished me for it I could only shrug and go "ah well, they warned me!" But that's one memorable moment from an entire DLC.

Final tl;dr: The main reason I had fun with Wasteland 3 is because it could have been a better game than it is. It is enjoyable when the reasons for that broken promise are on display, mainly in key moments of the presentation, but is rather 'meh' when they are not, which is probably more than half of the time.

In one sentence: I enjoyed my time with Wasteland 3, but not enough to ever replay it.

 

[jackofshadows]

What a great read (I laughed so fucking hard, man). In fact, it's so great that I feel I was too harsh on the game now. The presentation in general, the voice acting and the sound effects are really neat, they do deserve credit. And so does the mad-max aesthetics, and oh yes, I wish they just cut out not overboard post-apo but all the awful silliness which undercuts the former (and everything) greatly, thanks for the proper articulating of their distinction. Imagine what game it might be with better combat and a proper character system, indeed. By the way, I remember their promo vids now and its weird contrast from Dorsey's opening stuff to wacky Scotchmo's songs freaked me out even back then.

I was also pleasantly surprized by the writing and the plot in particular but the gameplay was simply too bad for me to enjoy the game. Again, yes - explosion gimmick affected impression to a degree but I didn't overuse it. Apparently they did fix the game somewhat because back then it was even more incredibly lopsided: 1st round mine - piss easy win (even with a sniper or shotgunner opener). You just shoot stuff and it dies, simple as that. 1st round not mine - I plainly lose or struggling and reviving my chars like a bunch of roly-poly dolls. Once, just for the sake of it I've let Liberty start the fight and she didn't even let me start my turn, game fucking over. And I enjoy this glass-cannon game-style actually in general, but not in this game for sure.

 

[Grunker]

Thanks, mate! Yeah, I noticed many balance-changes - when I looked something up online it would often be nerfed in my actual game. The shotgun everyone touted as OP, Jackhammer, was OK-but-not-insane for me. All high-end snipers were nerfed to 7AP compared to the 6 claimed by the interwebs. Stuff like that. One reason I wonder how much not using explosives affected my playthrough is that everyone online says that Assault Rifles are shit, while they were consistently performing very well for me, to the point where my assault rifler might be my best dude if you look at the game as a whole, from start to finish. Unlike the rest of the gang there was never a point where she was useless.

Though... a big part of that may be that she was my only Serial Killer and along with the AS-perk that just meant she got to do more shit than everyone else.

EDIT: And yeah, the team initiative makes the combat very skewed. High lethality + whole team goes at the same time? Doesn't take a genius to figure out that's gonna cause a few minor issues in how combat plays out in practice.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

which you're presented with a very binary choice about whether synths are people too - a choice you've already made several times in the main game by this time, so there's no tension or moral conundrum for you to consider.

and everyone knows they aren't

 

[Vault Dweller]

But WL3 actually wants to tell a compelling story, it wants to discuss SERIOUS BUSINESS POLITICAL STUFF about power and regency and governance and it wants to take notes from Fallout: New Vegas and ask whether democracy is desirable or even possible in a stage of societal degeneracy and shit like that, it wants YOU too feel like you can't just go to your typical RPG-book of "how to do Neutral Good and make everyone win always" but instead THINK about the context of your situation and what choices that situation dictates, and it wants you too feel like all your options are shit because realpolitik means that the premise of your decisions force them to be suboptimal and as just one cog in the machine you can't do shit about that even if you are powerful, and aaaaaaaall that just doesn't work when the setting is as implicitly silly and frankly fucking juvenile to the 99th degree as Wasteland is.

Precisely.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers, but in the end it was fucking Microsoft that came and saved "RPG experts" from Inxile from making another flop by giving them extra money for all the improved presentation.

It kind of shows you the importance of getting the basics right. When a game looks good and sounds good and has a cracking soundtrack and serviceable enough gameplay, it's kind of hard to actively hate it even if it fucks up a lot of stuff that would normally cause the Codex to detonate.

 

[Grunker]

which you're presented with a very binary choice about whether synths are people too - a choice you've already made several times in the main game by this time, so there's no tension or moral conundrum for you to consider.

and everyone knows they aren't

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I dislike the heavy emphasis on lolrandom humor, don't feel that it really added anything. Gallows humor, deadpan... that would be fine for the setting. But it has to be sprinkled in, not dumped everywhere.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers...

Kickstarter wasn't a rebellion, it was a source of quick and easy money, if the media was on your side. Many developers used it to get the project off the ground, then sell it to a publisher. The smarter ones used it to sell the IPs (Expedition) or even entire studios to publishers (inXile and Obsidian).

 

[Grunker]

It kind of shows you the importance of getting the basics right. When a game looks good and sounds good and has a cracking soundtrack and serviceable enough gameplay, it's kind of hard to actively hate it even if it fucks up a lot of stuff that would normally cause the Codex to detonate.

I almost felt disgusted to admit it, but it's true. And there is Codexian presedence. I wrote another TL;DR fuckhueg post about Bloodlines in this regard. Looking back, yeah you can talk about quests and story and shit, but the MVP of Bloodlines is presentation and atmosphere:

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/vampire-the-masquerade-–-bloodlines-2-vaporware-vtmb-sequel-from-paradox-interactive.126124/page-147#post-6066367

The basic lesson here is that aesthetics matter, or at least they can matter, even if that is grating to the typical sensibilities of the Codex. I enjoy a large quantity of pixelated gameplay-centric RPGs, but they gotta have that sick gameplay doe.

I's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers, but in the end it was fucking Microsoft that came and saved

Heh - I said exactly the same thing in the Chaos Chronicles thread. Remember when we all thought "ShitComposter" (I never used that name, but many did) was the reason that game ended up in development hell?

Turns out maybe the professional business people who know how to run shit might have a better grasp about the realities of development than the 4 PC nerds who just want to make their favourite RPG.

How fucking naive most of us were. But then, we did just come off the back of the largest draught in cRPG releases since their inception. Regardless of how cynical you want to be about the Kickstarter era, the fact is that on the other side of it, things are pretty great as far as quantity goes.

 

[Grunker]

It's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers...

Kickstarter wasn't a rebellion, it was a source of quick and easy money, if the media was on your side. Many developers used it to get the project off the ground, then sell it to a publisher. The smarter ones used it to sell the IPs (Expedition) or even entire studios to publishers (inXile and Obsidian).

Yes, but loathe as I am to give Fargo any credit whatsoever, he was right that the whole gold rush did prove the lasting viability of midrange teams producing epic scale RPGs. Even if the actual reason for that development has more to do with Larian's successes (maybe my least favourite of the large K-era developers, incidentally...) than it has to do with InXile's development ineptitude.

Thus, we have a yearly bundle of new RPGs to label as decline and scoff at

 

[rusty_shackleford]

People also underestimate how much games with quality presentation take to create. IIRC, Kingdom Come: Deliverance crowdfunding(KS+post-KS) raised a total of ~3% of their development budget despite being one of the most successful video game crowd funding projects at the time. The entire reason for it was to actually get a publisher on board by showing that there was interest.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers...

Kickstarter wasn't a rebellion, it was a source of quick and easy money, if the media was on your side. Many developers used it to get the project off the ground, then sell it to a publisher. The smarter ones used it to sell the IPs (Expedition) or even entire studios to publishers (inXile and Obsidian).

Yes, but loathe as I am to give Fargo any credit whatsoever, he was right that the whole gold rush did prove the lasting viability of midrange teams producing epic scale RPGs.

Funding + built-in marketing + distribution platform that recently dropped all admission restrictions (i.e. everything the publishers used to provide and control access to). Without Steam opening the doors none of it would have happened.

 

[Grunker]

It's funny how the Kickstarter era started as a rebellion against big publishers...

Kickstarter wasn't a rebellion, it was a source of quick and easy money, if the media was on your side. Many developers used it to get the project off the ground, then sell it to a publisher. The smarter ones used it to sell the IPs (Expedition) or even entire studios to publishers (inXile and Obsidian).

Yes, but loathe as I am to give Fargo any credit whatsoever, he was right that the whole gold rush did prove the lasting viability of midrange teams producing epic scale RPGs.

Funding + built-in marketing + distribution platform that recently dropped all admission restrictions (i.e. everything the publishers used to provide and control access to). Without Steam opening the doors none of it would have happened.

You know more about the specifics than me, but I'd put real money on the fact that we would have less midrange RPGs being developed - or at least their budget would be smaller - if Divinity: Original Sin hadn't happened.

 

[jackofshadows]

The shotgun everyone touted as OP, Jackhammer, was OK-but-not-insane for me.

Well, it wasn't ultra-OP w/o long-range mods I'd say but with it and high crit chance? Broken. Glad they fixed it.

All high-end snipers were nerfed to 7AP compared to the 6 claimed by the interwebs.

Also a good change, sniper behaviour was clearly designed rather around 1-2 shots per turn MAX when it could've been up to 4 with luck procs. I imagine a new sniper build with some complimentary weapon in the other slot, if only the game's build system wasn't so damn stupid...

everyone online says that Assault Rifles are shit, while they were consistently performing very well for me, to the point where my assault rifler might be my best dude if you look at the game as a whole, from start to finish. Unlike the rest of the gang there was never a point where she was useless.

That's because ARs were really the worst, they absurdly nerfed them after the WL2 feedback (?!) good that they came to their senses at least now. Shame that I just don't feel like replaying this, personally. Guess folks who were determined to literally wait a year or two were actually right.

And yeah, the team initiative makes the combat very skewed. High lethality + whole team goes at the same time? Doesn't take a genius to figure out that's gonna cause a few minor issues in how combat plays out in practice.

Yeah I'm pretty sure they introduced team initiative with the co-op mode in mind and their encounter design most of the times implies pretty close range engagement (you gotta make melee viable, amirite?) so combined with the SJ high lethality it gives some awful results. What can you do when a game which somewhat mimics as an old-school actually oriented (and looks like it was made for) towards consoles with its approriate audience.