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

[Roguey]

Yeah, the game never told me that. I assumed it was a regular turn-based system because there are stats called Initiative and Combat Speed, and the game doesn't explain what any of that shit does.

Click "Attributes" click "Show Stats" and then highlight stats for an explanation of everything.

 

[Faarbaute]

For the people who thought the game sucked, how many of you played on the highest difficulty? Also, did you rely on spamming turrets, decoys and/or alpha strikes?

Just something I'm curious about.

 

[Butter]

Playing Wasteland 3 more, it really feels like Josh Sawyer designed all these systems. Upgrade your Automatic Weapons skill and you get an entire +3% hit chance with assault rifles and SMGs. Sometimes you unlock a perk like "+15% SMG damage while not in cover." Half the time my characters level up I'm more excited about the full heal than I am about any of these upgrades.

It also contributes to a weird paradigm where non-combat skills feel inherently more valuable than combat skills... in a tactics game. +3% hit chance isn't likely to make any difference in a fight, but non-combat skill checks always use hard thresholds, so being 1 point short is just as bad as being 5 points short.

 

[Roguey]

It also contributes to a weird paradigm where non-combat skills feel inherently more valuable than combat skills... in a tactics game. +3% hit chance isn't likely to make any difference in a fight, but non-combat skill checks always use hard thresholds, so being 1 point short is just as bad as being 5 points short.

Say that after trying to use weapons without meeting the weapon skill requirements.

Additionally, while Wasteland may be a game with party based-tactical combat, it isn't a tactics game as noted by inXile higher-up Thomas Beekers https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...llow-up-on-the-prison-demo.86352/post-2863600 https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...llow-up-on-the-prison-demo.86352/post-2864064

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

That guy's a hardcore racist and you shouldn't listen to anything he says.

 

[Dhaze]

Playing Wasteland 3 more, it really feels like Josh Sawyer designed all these systems. Upgrade your Automatic Weapons skill and you get an entire +3% hit chance with assault rifles and SMGs. Sometimes you unlock a perk like "+15% SMG damage while not in cover." Half the time my characters level up I'm more excited about the full heal than I am about any of these upgrades.

Claiming that is disingenuous at best. Not sometimes, but rather more often than not, a level gained in any given weapon skill will grant a perk; and weapon perks' usefulness range from situational to gameplay-dictating.

Taking your example of Automatic Weapons, levels gained there grant the following perks:

– Puncturing Shot (one shot that pierces all in its path, inflicting +100% damage on enemies suffering from Stunned or Damage Armor status);
– Gopher Hunter (enemies get 40% less benefits from cover);
– Double Tap (attacking the same ennemy twice in a row guarantees a crit);
– Trigger Happy (killing an enemy grants 3AP);
– and Stormer (move more than five spaces and your next attack costs no AP).

All these combined make any member of your team with an Assault Rifle a highly mobile, efficient killing machine who excels at moving about the area to zero in on one particular enemy. That's an entire playstyle dictated by perks; a far cry from supposedly only getting +x% hit chance.

 

[Butter]

Playing Wasteland 3 more, it really feels like Josh Sawyer designed all these systems. Upgrade your Automatic Weapons skill and you get an entire +3% hit chance with assault rifles and SMGs. Sometimes you unlock a perk like "+15% SMG damage while not in cover." Half the time my characters level up I'm more excited about the full heal than I am about any of these upgrades.

Claiming that is disingenuous at best. Not sometimes, but rather more often than not, a level gained in any given weapon skill will grant a perk; and weapon perks' usefulness range from situational to gameplay-dictating.

Taking your example of Automatic Weapons, levels gained there grant the following perks:

– Puncturing Shot (one shot that pierces all in its path, inflicting +100% damage on enemies suffering from Stunned or Damage Armor status);
– Gopher Hunter (enemies get 40% less benefits from cover);
– Double Tap (attacking the same ennemy twice in a row guarantees a crit);
– Trigger Happy (killing an enemy grants 3AP);
– and Stormer (move more than five spaces and your next attack costs no AP).

All these combined make any member of your team with an Assault Rifle a highly mobile, efficient killing machine who excels at moving about the area to zero in on one particular enemy. That's an entire playstyle dictated by perks; a far cry from supposedly only getting +x% hit chance.

You're being disingenuous by suggesting that those perks are given to you as a result of investing in Automatic Weapons. They're not. Upgrading the skill only unlocks the option to later buy the perks using perk points.

 

[Dhaze]

That's... a very weird gripe. Somewhat akin to complaining by saying, "I don't like Automatic Weapons; I thought they would allow me to shoot enemies but I have to spend bullets."

Yes, in Wasteland 3 you have to spend points to unlock Perks and the two systems, Perks and Skills, go hand in hand. And you get so many Perk Points that you should more or less always have one when a Perk you fancy becomes available. At least I know I very often floated one or two such points, waiting to spend them, and past the first half of the game I actually had so many points I even took generic, rather useless perks like Hardened.

I mean, do you play something like Pathfinder, and bemoan that leveling your character up is unexciting because all you get is a bit of HP, BAB, and higher saves, but then you have to spend 'Feat Points' to actually develop your character?

 

[Butter]

Dude, you're the one who brought up the perks. You said that leveling up the skill gives you those perks, which is false.

 

[Dhaze]

Well, if you want to ignore that Skills and Perks are intrinsically linked, so that you can deplore how unexciting Skills are... have fun with the game, I guess?

 

[toro]

I just finished the game. 50 hours for the entire run on SJ and I think I got the good ending.

Spoiler

Like I've posted before, I got frustrated after a certain point but I wanted to finish the base game in order to be able to form my final opinion about it.

Now I can say with 100% confidence that the game is garbage because (1) the combat is a burning pile of shit and (2) the writing is sub-par.

I will just dump whatever crosses my mind:

• Some combat mechanics are surprisingly pointless. What's the point of per character Initiative when the combat turns take place between teams? In fact the entire Initiative "mechanic" can be bypassed by attacking first.
• Some social skills are simply retarded. Leadership buffs/debuffs were automatically applied in W2 but in W3 you have to waste 4 AP to trigger Rally. Just why?
• The Perks system is unbalanced. Some perks are way more usefull than other perks. By many orders of magnitude. Charm Animals or Hack Robots are instant win buttons in certain scenarios.
• There is no reason to have a SJ difficulty because this difficulty just proves how poorly designed the combat mechanics are. I honestly believe that the game could have been enjoyable on a lower difficulty but the combat experience is absolute crap on SJ. This is the opposite of Underrail's Dominating difficulty which proved how well thought the combat mechanics were.
• Enemies HP is absolutly retarded on SJ difficulty. It's so retarded that it nullifies the last perk (lvl10) for a sniper build - Chain Ambush. Basically I could not use that perk because even with the best sniper rifle in the game I could not one shot most enemies. On SJ difficulty the last perks for Automatic Weapons - Stormer and Trigger Happy - are way more usefull than Chain Ambush.
• There are weapons like Shotguns and Flamethrowers which cannot be used on SJ difficulty because of friendly fire. I mean you can use them OR you can have alive pets.
• Armor is completly pointless on SJ because any mob will absolutly rekt your characters. I don't know how it works but my best tank with 69 armor was downed by almost any enemy.
• The damage calculation formula is pure RNG. Honestly I did not look for it but the way it works is retarded: from the same character with the same weapon targeting the same mob you can have anything betwen 200 damage and 5000+ critical damage. There is no middle ground, there are no defined damage ranges, there no way to know what will happen when you trigger an action.
• The tactical layer of the game is thinner than a foreskin cause there is only one tactic -> do as much damage as possible. The only tactical decision before fight was to pre-position my characters to do the most damage to the most dangerous enemy in the first round otherwise it's game over. That's it cause once the fight starts it's complete chaos: spam deployables, have pets with insane HP and pray that the AI will not attack your characters.
• Almost all encounters in the game are trash encounters because all of them evolve in the same way. By the end of game there is not one memorable or really outstanding fight.
• There is no need for manual traveling on the worldmap because by the end of game the world becomes empty. Fallout like travelling would hide this sad view.
• The game's factions don't make sense in a post-apocaliptic environment. I mean the tone of the game is completly off. How could someone enjoy the story when everyone is weird, wacky or sadistic just for the sake of it? I understand that Wasteland setting was always over the top but the comedy simply didn't work for me. The jokes are infantile and without good punchlines in most cases.
• There is C&C but - with few exception - the experience is quite linear and the quest design is very weak. Most of the time there is no way to make an informed decision.
• Except Lucia, most companions don't have personal quests. They butchered Angela Deth's character and I absolutly hate Denver and Yuma. And what the fuck was all that stuff about Reagan? I couldn't care less about any character in the game.
• It took me 3 (!?) dialog choices to imprison Liberty and 3 (!?) dialog choices to exile the Patriarch. While I enjoyed that they cut it short I could not shake the feeling that the game is not finished.
• There are still bugs. Lost my pets for no reason, map locations remained undiscovered, pets stuck in combat and so on.

In the end, I think the game suffers from the same disease as PoE: it's bland, shallow and completly forgettable. It's sad but W3 feels like a regression from W2. There is nothing more I can say.

 

[toro]

Playing Wasteland 3 more, it really feels like Josh Sawyer designed all these systems. Upgrade your Automatic Weapons skill and you get an entire +3% hit chance with assault rifles and SMGs. Sometimes you unlock a perk like "+15% SMG damage while not in cover." Half the time my characters level up I'm more excited about the full heal than I am about any of these upgrades.

Claiming that is disingenuous at best. Not sometimes, but rather more often than not, a level gained in any given weapon skill will grant a perk; and weapon perks' usefulness range from situational to gameplay-dictating.

Butter is right about the skills. You are just conflating skills with perks.

Gopher Hunter, Double Tap, Stormer and Trigger Happy are the fundamental perks for Automatic Weapons builds but they are not granted automatically because reasons.

 

[Roguey]

What's the point of per character Initiative when the combat turns take place between teams?

Random encounter/scripted ambushes.

 

[Roguey]

For the people who thought the game sucked, how many of you played on the highest difficulty? Also, did you rely on spamming turrets, decoys and/or alpha strikes?

Just something I'm curious about.

Yes, I am certainly getting the impression the people who play on the difficulty that doubles enemy health and damage are shocked and angered when this forces them into a specific playstyle they don't enjoy. The game wasn't balanced for these numbers. inXile wasn't kidding when they described it as "a soul-killing nightmare of brutality. Not even remotely fair."

 

[toro]

What's the point of per character Initiative when the combat turns take place between teams?

Random encounter/scripted ambushes.

Random encounters are completly optional.
Scripted ambushes are a big design flaw.

Are you sure you want to defend the combat in W3?

 

[Roguey]

Random encounters are completly optional.

Depends on what skills you have in any given area.

Scripted ambushes are a big design flaw.

Nah, it's completely appropriate to occasionally force players into a situation where the enemy gets the drop on them.

Are you sure you want to defend the combat in W3?

Yes, it's fine for what it is.

 

[Dhaze]

Playing Wasteland 3 more, it really feels like Josh Sawyer designed all these systems. Upgrade your Automatic Weapons skill and you get an entire +3% hit chance with assault rifles and SMGs. Sometimes you unlock a perk like "+15% SMG damage while not in cover." Half the time my characters level up I'm more excited about the full heal than I am about any of these upgrades.

Claiming that is disingenuous at best. Not sometimes, but rather more often than not, a level gained in any given weapon skill will grant a perk; and weapon perks' usefulness range from situational to gameplay-dictating.

Butter is right about the skills. You are just conflating skills with perks.

Gopher Hunter, Double Tap, Stormer and Trigger Happy are the fundamental perks for Automatic Weapons builds but they are not granted automatically because reasons.

Exactly, they're "not granted automatically because reasons," but they might as well be, since Skills and Perks and Perk points are each a different aspect of a single system. It's so odd to compartmentalise them. I guess that, once isolated and thus truncated, it becomes easier to shit on them, but it might be the aldermost of nitpicky attitudes I've ever seen.

Wasteland 3 has enough genuine failings (for instance: grievous line-of-sight issues); there's no need to imagine more where none exist.

Reading your post-completion post—and on this I join in Faarbaute and Roguey's suspicions—I get the definite impression you had a shitty experience because of the Supreme Jerk difficulty, and it bled onto the rest of the game to paint it an unflattering color.

I'm not keen to spend much more time on this, but for example your point about the tactical layer of the game being "thinner than a foreskin" is rendered moot on difficulties below Supreme Jerk. You can actually use things like Demoralize, followed by Suppressing Fire or Terrorizer, then sending one big meaty armored tank out in the open to attract enemy fire; and said tank will survive just fine. There are nice tactics you can employ that go beyond the confines of strike first, strike hard, and pray.

It's a fun game, if you let it be fun.

 

[jackofshadows]

It's a fun game, if you let it be fun.

At least on SJ it feels demanding for some time (in my case until 8-9 lvl or so). Based on that experience I assumed on any difficylty lower than SJ it's just. Too. Easy. And therefore not fun at all. To each their own I guess.

 

[Dhaze]

The way I see it there's a blight on today's videogaming landscape: many people—both players and developers—have come to mistake tediousness for difficulty.

For me, difficulty is playing Accent Core and landing a character-specific combo that requires almost frame-perfect execution. But a game like Wasteland 3? In no way is it difficult; not in Rookie difficulty, nor in Supreme Jerk. But it is tedious in SJ since it all but forces you to min-max, thus drastically reducing your number of worthwhile options, all the while making the numerous combat encounters a drag via things like HP bloat.

Every single time without fault, when a game's so-called 'difficulties' are nothing more than inflated numbers, I find it's not worth it to try and play on anything other than whatever the intended, normal difficulty is called.

Also, if difficulty is an imperative pre-requisite to fun, play in Supreme Jerk with only two non-optimised characters; surely that's bound to be difficult in one way or another. You can easily roleplay it even: your two rangers are the only survivors of the expedition, and something something PTSD, something something deep-seated mistrust of strangers... so they're going at it alone. It's fun to make your own fun.

 

[copebot]

Tried this out on Ranger difficulty. Didn't play Wasteland 2. So far, I like the way that combat looks and feels.

The art's pretty good in parts, but the game never really seems sure if it's going for gritty and realistic or ostentatious and ridiculous. I find the writing mostly annoying, same with the over-the-top feminist casting. The combat challenge also seems to be all over the place. Most combat is pretty easy. Then occasionally you will get an encounter that makes no sense that most of your weapons are useless for, and the enemies have lasers that can penetrate your armor and chunk your dudes. But maybe that's just me not equipping high enough level weapons, or leveling up so fast that I didn't realize my lowbie stuff wasn't good enough or that I really should have had grenades ready for the encounter.

There have also been a lot of weird situations where enemies can shoot through walls, or they can shoot through a wall and I can't shoot through the wall, and so on. There are other stupid things like if the enemy throws a smoke grenade in an area, you cannot throw a grenade in that area because it's marked as "out of line of sight." There are also lots of situations where if you fight in an area where the game didn't intend for you to fight, there is no cover for many squares where there should be cover.

Part of this is also just being completely unfamiliar with the game system. Armor seems to be great if you stack it, but if half of your squad is unarmored, you can't really play around the fact that you have it on some characters.

Despite all this, the game's growing on me.

 

[D!!]

Does passing both speech skillchecks for saving life of Angela Deth affect ending slides? For me, it still tells that

Spoiler

Angela Deth and her team were officially declared dead

 

[Roguey]

Does passing both speech skillchecks for saving life of Angela Deth affect ending slides? For me, it still tells that

Yeah, that's working as designed. "Declared" doesn't mean it's so.

 

[Anthedon]

I'm about 15 hours in and enjoying it very much, seems to be a step-up from Wasteland 2. Which is a dim memory at this point, but still.

Are any of the DLCs worth it? They are on sale at the moment.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I'm about 15 hours in and enjoying it very much, seems to be a step-up from Wasteland 2. Which is a dim memory at this point, but still.

Are any of the DLCs worth it? They are on sale at the moment.

I liked battle of steeltown, but few fights are a drag and the final fight is bad (basically endless wave of enemies until you have some objective). i like the story and setting complement the overall partriach story. 6 or 7 solid.

The second DLC is a slog all the way. Remember when i said last battle of steeltown is bad? Well the atom cult one takes the concept, and makes 90% of the story encounter waves of objective based gimmick encounter. And the enemies are the most spongy in the whole game. The story stick out like sore thumb because it doesn't relate to any of the politics in colodado.

 

[Yosharian]

The DLC aren't worth it IMO