The TRV KVLT Wasteland 1 fans thread.

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Yes, Scorpitron is great to improve some skills (AT with spears, Assalut Rifles - if you need them at this stage, or even brawling and pugillism), but even with Power Armours it's pretty nasty with bursts. IIRC I killed it with proton axe - double exp is nice...

I started playing WL1 for the first time a few days ago, and have been documenting what I think of things. Here's where I'm at so far. Apologies if there are minor spoilers in here.

Things I like

- Keyboard support for everything. Difficult to overestimate the value of being able to operate the entire game without a mouse at all. I understand this is a side-effect of the game's age when it wasn't a given that a mouse would be available. However, for me, today, this is a very desireable feature.

- Disband is very interesting, being able to split into more than one party.

- Save system (anytime) is good. In a modern game with more storage options, I might go with a small set of save slots or something.

- Macros are really cool. Wonder if this was the first time this feature appeared in a game.

- Being able to go deliberately into Encounter mode seems interesting. Not sure how useful it will be aside from "forced" mechanics (like Jackie in the cave). i.e. They buried the Hire command in the turn-based machinery. So this is sort of a like/dislike I guess.


Things I don't like

- Conversations are difficult. What do you do? This based on trying to talk to that kid in Highpool before seeing the note in the building. Distinctly reminded me of trying to talk to people in Ultima 4.

- Speaking of not seeing the note.. interesting things are hard to find, there's no visual clue, you have to walk over every bland-looking piece of terrain everywhere. This could also fall into the limited-resources peeve category, I know.

- Don't care for health being the Constitution attribute, it's like a type-mismatch with other attributes. I can use my Charisma or Perception attribute on some situation but what does it mean to use my Constitution attribute on something?

- Attributes: Speed, Agility, Dexterity are all way too similar. Probably don't need one of these three.

- Luck attribute: I personally dislike this in any game. Especially in a modern or future setting. It seems like using the appearance of some superstitious fucknuttery to massage a failure of game mechanics inside. Maybe I'm too harsh on Luck, but it bugs me.

- Highpool cave, Jackie process was a bit obtuse. I did much trying Item/Skill/Attribute on her (as well as just trying to walk onto her square) before finally starting an Encounter in desperation. I'm ok with it being necessary to use Encounter, except that this was not how talking with Bobby went down, so I didn't know what to expect.

- How am I to know what a "Mangler" is? It's not mentioned in the manual and item descriptions are very sparse. Ok, so it equips as a weapon, but it seems like I have to save scum to fire it and see what it's about.

- Ammo reloading, do you lose what's in the gun if it's not 0 when you reload? Assuming yes, considering that unjam loses rest of clip. Should be clearer. And the manual suggests you reload frequently, say when not in combat. Which sounds like they're encouraging you to do something that will lose your ammo.

- Haven't yet had a party member advance, but it's awkward to have no real way of knowing when it's time to use the Radio.

- I almost want to say money should just be pooled by default and allow splitting if/when people leave or you split the party.


Merely peeves

- Save is a bit clunky in that Quit is mixed up in it. Maybe just a "system" menu would have been better.

- Do not like that data is written when you enter new areas, but this was probably hard for them to do much about.

- Shop "Who wants to enter?" is awkward, switching focus party member. This is a pervasive problem, not just shops, Using Item/Skill/Attribute too.

- Inventory management is awkward, partly because of above.

- Taking many "stacked" items, only one at a time. Kind of tedious.

- Healing From 1 to MAX is difficult/time consuming. No way to use item, skill or pay for healing. This is subjective, I know. They decided this is how recovering health works and that's perfectly valid. I haven't had anyone get desperately broken yet and had to use Medic skill. Will probably have more to say on this once I see some field medic action.

- Why is jewelry so valuable? Who gives a shit about jewelry in the post-apocalyptic future?

- Of course, paragraphs text is bullshit. I'm sure it's a combination of tight system resource management and a half-assed attempt at copy protection.

- Not very many monster, etc.. graphics for Encounters and it's even worse on the map view (image of pink non-human thing). Would have liked to see some of these creatures instead of, say, the generic reptile picture when I'm battling a snake. That said, you could get me to pay money for an ncurses Roguelike, so I don't know why I'm complaining about this.

Main probs with wasteland are the lack of NPC interaction (for instance, mayor dude does not react if you have his daughter in party, no one cares if yuo disband them which is the same as a forever delete- retroactive criticism, I know) and the fucked up skill system. I mean, what the fuck do we have throwing knives for? Anyway, it could have been better, but there is a lot of stuff that I have always found endearing about the game, especially the setting and even the graphics.

Well, the game is pretty much based on dice rolls, being a rpg and all...

How do you figure they are too similiar - do you mean just from a conceptual standpoint or do you view their gameplay impact as too similiar in some way?

I liked Wasteland then (when I played it as a newfag somewhere in 2000), and I still like Wasteland. Game's just addictive as hell. Really tough, but also really addictive.

I based that statement solely on reading the game manual. I'm still in the early parts of the game and haven't seen this stuff in the field.

quoted from the Wasteland manual

So, looking at these:

Agility could be just a computation based on Speed and Strength. And I wonder if a whole attr is necessary for what they describe here.

Dexterity seems related to Speed perhaps, unless Speed is only about your feet (which seems kind of narrow for an attribute). Or is it like Reflexes? Which could be more like Dex..

Also, Dex is for "aiming weapons" and is "very important in combat"? How important? Wonder if I could just say screw it with trying to build high Clip Pistol and Assault Rifle skills, have a nice high Dex and throw skill points into Medic or whatever. Here's what the manual says about Clip Pistol (emphasis mine):

Anyway, I was getting the feeling that there's a fair amount of overlap with these three from the descriptions.

Speed is raw speed (The main influence is intiative order in (at least) close combat. Don't recall any races in WL, but it would also factor in there if there were any.). It would include reflex speed, but not the precision of the reflexes.

Agility is about large-movement control. Dodging, acrobatics, chance of landing a hit in H2H combat - that sort of thing.

Strength is brute force - damage in H2H combat, ability to force doors, that sort of thing.

Dex is fine motor control and finesse - sleight of hand, ranged aiming, picklocking, that sort of thing.

Nah - Both are important. Dex and Agi modify your chance to hit, but if you do hit, you need sufficient weapon skill in order for the shot to be effective. I'd have to dig through my Squeezins archive to find the details of the combat system, but I remember that Dex/Agi (and maybe the specific weapon skill) play a roll in determining if you hit, but from the attacker's side only the skill itself (and the weapon in question) is used to determine damage.

I can see how there would be conceptually similiar - they all fall into the category that alot of systems lump as "Agility" or "Dexterity", but from a mechanics perspective, they cover fairly (to my view, at least) distinct areas. Agi and Dex are definately separately useful.

True, but most of times you know what to say (CHAT, TOPEKANS with Engeener in Desert Nomads Camp) etc.

I like it - you have to explore, and sometimes pay for that (minefield... ).

Probably we don't need any of them, and fights should be in real time FPP... Game system uses all of them, so we need all of them - imagine how powerful character could be with only one or two statistics to pump up. Now you need rise your speed and agility for HtH, and DEX for ranged combat. With so overpowered HtH combat (early and mid game) it's good solution for me.

True, but try to llok at LCk as kind of character's overall performance, as it's important to nearly every test in the game.

I agree. It was hard to find out how to rescue Jackie, and no clues at all.

It's kind of AT weapon, so I belive it's kind of sling or sth. (sling goes on my mind because kids in Hartpool should use something like that). IIRC Spears are AT weapon in Wasteland, so it's possible, mangler is kind of primitive weapon.

Game balance I suppose. And very primitive engine - no possibility to remember all clips value in the game, so we have what we have. You will get used to it .

Unimportant, as you can call radio anytime. Just remeber to do this after any hard battle.

Man, this game is so old, and is it so hard to just press "P" button? Unimportant, I think.

That's true, it's sometimes annoying, when you have 3 dying party members and overrwrite your save because moved wrong way :/ .

1. Have canteens in everybodys' inventory.
2. Go to the desert
3. Make a makro.
4. After fewv moments all your party has full CON.

Medic is important when someone is severly wounded or dying (IIRC doctor skill can work with deseases, but not sure), and from Las Vegas sewers to the end of the game you will BE severly wounded very often.

BECAUSE IT'S SHINY! For god sake, why gold is so valuable? We don't eat gold, we don't even use it to something... err... u know, useful...

I like paragraphs. Nice writting, much of humour and hidden story about marsian invasion... Any new game have that?

True, but I believe monster's graphic is quite heavy for game engine and size. Caomplaining about graphics in Wasteland is like kicking an old, drunk and bling guy - all we know game looks ... hmm... not so great, but it is not what we love in Wasteland.

Hey, I'm not complaining about the text itself, which is great, adding texture to the story. Even more of it would have been terrific. This is not a sad cry for FMV cut-scene garbage.

I'm complaining about 60% of the text being outside the game program for the player to look up. The mechanism of how you access the text. I get what you're saying, changing this would have made the decoy story thing difficult/impossible. It reminds me of how they ended up losing the Black Freighter story line entirely to bring the Watchmen to film.

I like the graphics quality just fine, my thinking was that I'd like to see more of it.

These two things, along with a lot of stuff from above, I suspect are partly side-effects of the platform. The real drunk, blind guy I'm unfortunately beating here is this: the game comes from an era with very difficult system constraints. This team did astonishingly well under these conditions.

don't you mean "NOT to do this after any hard battle"? doesn't radioing auto-save the game? could become very hairy if you saved with a bunch of your chars poisoned/in critical condition

Oh, I forgot about autosave when radioing. True - call radio after every hard battle when you are sure your party members are not dying... .