Frau Bishop
Erudite
Fun time. Thanks. 
-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Let's play Wasteland: Complete
- Thread starter Admiral jimbob
- Start date
Admiral jimbob
gay as all hell
My Thoughts
So, we come to the end of this Let's Play. Now, most of you are hairless little girly-men who're still scared of 16-colour sprites and paragraph books, and I feel it's my duty not only to show you the wonders of this old gem, but also sell it to you, and give those who've played it an insight into what one of those newfangled 3D-raised kids thought of it. Cassidy said earlier in the thread that, after a few updates, he was more interested in playing the game himself than following the LP further. Good. As long as he comes back to finish reading after he's done, anyway.
You can pick up most of the information about the game's mechanics/plot/tone from the LP itself, so I'll skim those. On to the meat of the game; the skills, their integration into every aspect of the game, and the combat itself.
Skills
The skills are, frankly, a mixed bag. Some are utterly, utterly useless, especially those which simply serve the same purpose as stats; if there's any point where confidence will get you something that charisma won't, I missed it. And I also missed more than one or two opportunities to use charisma. Some, on the other hand, are just shite. Your party starts off with knives and pistols, so I figured it would be a smart move to give one bro the clip pistol skill, hoping that we'd pick up improved weapons of that kind as we went along. We... well... didn't. The two models of pistol you start the game with? Yeah, that's all of them. It gets outclassed quickly. Knife fighting is a similar one, though I think those could be useful for longer. Rifle as well; this might depend on your approach to the game, you might take a path where you have rifles for a while without picking up any assault rifles. I didn't. As soon as you get assault rifles, you'll be using them until the endgame, and that's well over half the game. It's not quite trial-and-error gameplay - worst comes to the worst, drop any hopelessly dud characters and grind the new ones up very rapidly in the Las Vegas sewers or something - but a few more models of pistol or rifle would have been nice. And then we have... metallurgy? Forgery? Acrobat? When were we supposed to use these? Finally, there was one called... er... "combat shooting". It was only available in character generation, and none of the libraries taught it. From what I can glean from websites and walkthroughs, it only exists in the PC version and doesn't actually do anything at all.
In short, there's no shame in getting a bit of guidance when picking your skills; you could think you're being wise and covering most reasonable eventualities, only for it to turn out that you have a useless band of doddering morons who can't climb a cliff, can't repair anything and keep setting off bombs, but are really good at mining the one ore vein in the world for decidedly minor rewards. But, again, even if you get off to a rough start, it's salvageable; you can't learn assault rifle and energy weapons until later anyway, and when you get those, well... trip all the alarms you like. It's not threats that respond, it's free experience.
Skill usage
On a more positive note, we have the actual (non-combat) usage and integration of the skills into the gameplay. Very much the meat of the game outside of combat, I'm fairly sure this was the first game to make use of character attributes in such a central way, and certainly one of the best implementations of it I've seen. More than anything, this is the sense in which Fallout was Wasteland's spiritual successor.
It can be a little confusing at first. To use a skill or attribute, you press "U", select a character, select the skills menu, select the skill, then press the direction key in which you'd like to use it, or press space to use it on the spot (this latter point confused me for a while). It's the usual skill roll, and for some things (such as safecracking or lockpicking), you might want to set up a macro to use the skill over and over until it succeeds. Skills are trained either through libraries or through use, and unless you have the 40-odd skill points (each one earned by each valuable stat point invested in IQ) to blow on the latter, I'd recommend this approach. Some uses are obvious, such as picklock on locked doors; others are more imaginative, such as using luck in Finster's brain or training AT Weapons by mucking about with a howitzer in Needles. Item usage works much the same way, with items as another option when you enter the use menu for a character; for example, if you have to deliver a Visa card to a chap at a bar, you have to sit in the chair across from him and "use" the card to give it to him.
While this could be an unwieldly and tricky system to get to grips with, it's implemented so straightforwardly and intuitively that you'll have it picked up in an hour or two at most. The key to understanding Wasteland's world interaction is to stop thinking in game logic, step back and think about what you would do. Picklock not working on the door? Try strength. Nobody strong enough? There's a crowbar in your inventory... give a man a big enough lever and he can move the world, right? I can count maybe one or two situations in the game where the solution didn't reveal itself upon some careful examination of the stats and options available to me, and when the bulk of the game is build around environment interaction in - let's face it - a very primitive engine and environment, that's damn impressive.
Combat
Finally, the combat. Wasteland's combat, as shown in the LP, is something of a hybrid; blob-based, but with the ability to move and split up your characters as you see fit. It does this by allowing you to leave and enter combat mode at any time; if you choose to run or move, the game will shift to the exploration screen, and allow you to move one square in whatever directions are available to you. If you move out of sight of any enemies, combat ends. If not, it returns to the combat screen and you get shot to pieces. Repeat. If your party is disbanded, then each separate group takes its turn in... er... turn. Which is kind of annoying when one guy is fighting in Finster's brian and the game repeatedly gives you the option to execute a combat round with the party standing around the machine in the real world shuffling their feet. Again, primitive engine and all that. I never really made use of this option, but it seems to allow for some interesting approaches; using one team as a decoy while two heavy hitters sneak up on the Scorpitron, perhaps? It's an option for anyone wishing to tackle tough challenges early in the game, and and we all like that.
The meat and bones of the combat are fairly straightforward. You pick options for all your characters, then the game plays out a "simultaneous" turn, with combat feedback scrolling past in the top-right window and participants firing/striking in order of Speed. If you're using guns, you have the additional options of single fire, burst fire, and full auto, which empties the clip. Single and burst fire both seem to only strike one or two enemies, whereas auto can hit all enemies in a group, and - as far as I can tell - any groups adjacent to them, if you're lucky. It can rack up some truly impressive damage, and will completely shred any unfortunate soul you unleash it upon early in the game. This would be another area in which Fallout was its true spiritual successor, but Wasteland sadly lacks that fucking bone-nosed tribal taking careful aim and tearing your character apart at the culmination of a perfectly set-up and lucky turn. Saddening, right?
Skill use in combat is an option, but is fairly minimal. I never encountered any opportunity to use anything but medic and doctor, but you'll be using those more than enough. When a bro dips below 0HP, they'll be unconscious; if they were hit hard enough, they'll be serious, mortal, comatose or dead. Too many rounds before healing - and this goes also for steps on the overworld - and their state will deteriorate, making them both harder to heal and closer to death. This can lead to some escalatingly frantic situations, where more and more hands are kept busy healing the wounded, leaving only one or two bros desperately fending off the hordes that already had the advantage.
At any rate, the combat is of schizophrenic difficulty. The early game is manageable, then you stumble into the abandoned mine and pick off a few enemies at a time in between fleeing to the desert to heal. Quartz isn't too bad, but take care, because here you'll start encountering both enemies with guns and enemies capable of knocking a character down to serious injury or worse. Hope you brought a medic. Needles is where things start to get downright dangerous, but is also where you'll acquire some assault rifles; a bit of training with those and you'll make it out alright. And then you hit Las Vegas. Vegas is something of a vertical difficulty slope; you will be drawn in, beaten, humiliated and left out to rot. Then you'll dust yourself off, do your job there, head to the Guardian Citadel, and after a tense struggle there, you'll find power armour. From then on, the difficulty will plummet until you hit Base Cochise at the endgame.
This was simply my approach, of course. The enterprising player is welcome to ignore the Guardian Citadel's warnings and brave its walls with uzis and assault rifles, if they so wish it. Still, I believe I followed - roughly - the order in which you're expected to do things, and overall, the game presented a fun and fair challenge. It's worth bearing in mind that any mistakes are permanent, as the game saves every time one goes through a map transition; if you lose a bro, better quit and restart the game immediately, because if you go through that door to safety before trying to heal him and discovering it's too late... well, too bad. No idea what happens if your whole party dies, or all but one (leaving you in an unwinnable and unsurvivable situation), come to it. I'd suggest avoiding it, personally.
Final Points
One point that I feel I'd be amiss not to mention is one that I also don't feel particularly qualified to write about. Wasteland came at a time of huge upheavals for the RPG industry; Ultima IV showed us that RPGs could be about more than killing foozles and stealing their loot, The Gold Box games were giving us tactical combat on an unprecedented level, and Interplay themselves brought us The Bard's Tale. Other than Ultima IV, these are all games I've yet to experience, but to me, Wasteland seems like a mix of the core concepts of all of these; it took and refined the combat and interface of The Bard's Tale, combined it with Ultima's top-down exploration view, and took RPGs even further back to their roots by presenting itself as if it were a real DMed pen and paper game. Texts from the paragraph book elaborate on the story and particularly important areas, slain enemies explode like blood sausages and have holes blown in them, and - most of all - you can be certain that, wherever you go and whatever you examine, the dry and omnipresent narrator will describe it all in wonderfully atmospheric and concise snippets. It's a trite thing to say, but skim through any update from this thread for examples if you don't believe me... modern graphics do not compare. And half of those described objects can be looked at further, interacted with, blown up; if something comes to mind that you could or would want to do to it, give it a try. Even if it doesn't advance the game in any meaningful way, they might have put it in just for fun. See the crystal ball in an old occult shop that, when examined, reveals a grumpy wizard shouting at you that this isn't The Bard's Tale. If the pen-and-paper and CRPG styles ever hit a sweet spot together - to the best of my limited knowledge - it was Wasteland.
If the above didn't convince you to play Wasteland, my final words probably won't either. But if you really want to keep your Kodex Kool Kredits... are you really going to turn down a game as "too old and primitive" that even someone who liked New Vegas managed to play and love?
So, we come to the end of this Let's Play. Now, most of you are hairless little girly-men who're still scared of 16-colour sprites and paragraph books, and I feel it's my duty not only to show you the wonders of this old gem, but also sell it to you, and give those who've played it an insight into what one of those newfangled 3D-raised kids thought of it. Cassidy said earlier in the thread that, after a few updates, he was more interested in playing the game himself than following the LP further. Good. As long as he comes back to finish reading after he's done, anyway.
You can pick up most of the information about the game's mechanics/plot/tone from the LP itself, so I'll skim those. On to the meat of the game; the skills, their integration into every aspect of the game, and the combat itself.
Skills
The skills are, frankly, a mixed bag. Some are utterly, utterly useless, especially those which simply serve the same purpose as stats; if there's any point where confidence will get you something that charisma won't, I missed it. And I also missed more than one or two opportunities to use charisma. Some, on the other hand, are just shite. Your party starts off with knives and pistols, so I figured it would be a smart move to give one bro the clip pistol skill, hoping that we'd pick up improved weapons of that kind as we went along. We... well... didn't. The two models of pistol you start the game with? Yeah, that's all of them. It gets outclassed quickly. Knife fighting is a similar one, though I think those could be useful for longer. Rifle as well; this might depend on your approach to the game, you might take a path where you have rifles for a while without picking up any assault rifles. I didn't. As soon as you get assault rifles, you'll be using them until the endgame, and that's well over half the game. It's not quite trial-and-error gameplay - worst comes to the worst, drop any hopelessly dud characters and grind the new ones up very rapidly in the Las Vegas sewers or something - but a few more models of pistol or rifle would have been nice. And then we have... metallurgy? Forgery? Acrobat? When were we supposed to use these? Finally, there was one called... er... "combat shooting". It was only available in character generation, and none of the libraries taught it. From what I can glean from websites and walkthroughs, it only exists in the PC version and doesn't actually do anything at all.
In short, there's no shame in getting a bit of guidance when picking your skills; you could think you're being wise and covering most reasonable eventualities, only for it to turn out that you have a useless band of doddering morons who can't climb a cliff, can't repair anything and keep setting off bombs, but are really good at mining the one ore vein in the world for decidedly minor rewards. But, again, even if you get off to a rough start, it's salvageable; you can't learn assault rifle and energy weapons until later anyway, and when you get those, well... trip all the alarms you like. It's not threats that respond, it's free experience.
Skill usage
On a more positive note, we have the actual (non-combat) usage and integration of the skills into the gameplay. Very much the meat of the game outside of combat, I'm fairly sure this was the first game to make use of character attributes in such a central way, and certainly one of the best implementations of it I've seen. More than anything, this is the sense in which Fallout was Wasteland's spiritual successor.
It can be a little confusing at first. To use a skill or attribute, you press "U", select a character, select the skills menu, select the skill, then press the direction key in which you'd like to use it, or press space to use it on the spot (this latter point confused me for a while). It's the usual skill roll, and for some things (such as safecracking or lockpicking), you might want to set up a macro to use the skill over and over until it succeeds. Skills are trained either through libraries or through use, and unless you have the 40-odd skill points (each one earned by each valuable stat point invested in IQ) to blow on the latter, I'd recommend this approach. Some uses are obvious, such as picklock on locked doors; others are more imaginative, such as using luck in Finster's brain or training AT Weapons by mucking about with a howitzer in Needles. Item usage works much the same way, with items as another option when you enter the use menu for a character; for example, if you have to deliver a Visa card to a chap at a bar, you have to sit in the chair across from him and "use" the card to give it to him.
While this could be an unwieldly and tricky system to get to grips with, it's implemented so straightforwardly and intuitively that you'll have it picked up in an hour or two at most. The key to understanding Wasteland's world interaction is to stop thinking in game logic, step back and think about what you would do. Picklock not working on the door? Try strength. Nobody strong enough? There's a crowbar in your inventory... give a man a big enough lever and he can move the world, right? I can count maybe one or two situations in the game where the solution didn't reveal itself upon some careful examination of the stats and options available to me, and when the bulk of the game is build around environment interaction in - let's face it - a very primitive engine and environment, that's damn impressive.
Combat
Finally, the combat. Wasteland's combat, as shown in the LP, is something of a hybrid; blob-based, but with the ability to move and split up your characters as you see fit. It does this by allowing you to leave and enter combat mode at any time; if you choose to run or move, the game will shift to the exploration screen, and allow you to move one square in whatever directions are available to you. If you move out of sight of any enemies, combat ends. If not, it returns to the combat screen and you get shot to pieces. Repeat. If your party is disbanded, then each separate group takes its turn in... er... turn. Which is kind of annoying when one guy is fighting in Finster's brian and the game repeatedly gives you the option to execute a combat round with the party standing around the machine in the real world shuffling their feet. Again, primitive engine and all that. I never really made use of this option, but it seems to allow for some interesting approaches; using one team as a decoy while two heavy hitters sneak up on the Scorpitron, perhaps? It's an option for anyone wishing to tackle tough challenges early in the game, and and we all like that.
The meat and bones of the combat are fairly straightforward. You pick options for all your characters, then the game plays out a "simultaneous" turn, with combat feedback scrolling past in the top-right window and participants firing/striking in order of Speed. If you're using guns, you have the additional options of single fire, burst fire, and full auto, which empties the clip. Single and burst fire both seem to only strike one or two enemies, whereas auto can hit all enemies in a group, and - as far as I can tell - any groups adjacent to them, if you're lucky. It can rack up some truly impressive damage, and will completely shred any unfortunate soul you unleash it upon early in the game. This would be another area in which Fallout was its true spiritual successor, but Wasteland sadly lacks that fucking bone-nosed tribal taking careful aim and tearing your character apart at the culmination of a perfectly set-up and lucky turn. Saddening, right?
Skill use in combat is an option, but is fairly minimal. I never encountered any opportunity to use anything but medic and doctor, but you'll be using those more than enough. When a bro dips below 0HP, they'll be unconscious; if they were hit hard enough, they'll be serious, mortal, comatose or dead. Too many rounds before healing - and this goes also for steps on the overworld - and their state will deteriorate, making them both harder to heal and closer to death. This can lead to some escalatingly frantic situations, where more and more hands are kept busy healing the wounded, leaving only one or two bros desperately fending off the hordes that already had the advantage.
At any rate, the combat is of schizophrenic difficulty. The early game is manageable, then you stumble into the abandoned mine and pick off a few enemies at a time in between fleeing to the desert to heal. Quartz isn't too bad, but take care, because here you'll start encountering both enemies with guns and enemies capable of knocking a character down to serious injury or worse. Hope you brought a medic. Needles is where things start to get downright dangerous, but is also where you'll acquire some assault rifles; a bit of training with those and you'll make it out alright. And then you hit Las Vegas. Vegas is something of a vertical difficulty slope; you will be drawn in, beaten, humiliated and left out to rot. Then you'll dust yourself off, do your job there, head to the Guardian Citadel, and after a tense struggle there, you'll find power armour. From then on, the difficulty will plummet until you hit Base Cochise at the endgame.
This was simply my approach, of course. The enterprising player is welcome to ignore the Guardian Citadel's warnings and brave its walls with uzis and assault rifles, if they so wish it. Still, I believe I followed - roughly - the order in which you're expected to do things, and overall, the game presented a fun and fair challenge. It's worth bearing in mind that any mistakes are permanent, as the game saves every time one goes through a map transition; if you lose a bro, better quit and restart the game immediately, because if you go through that door to safety before trying to heal him and discovering it's too late... well, too bad. No idea what happens if your whole party dies, or all but one (leaving you in an unwinnable and unsurvivable situation), come to it. I'd suggest avoiding it, personally.
Final Points
One point that I feel I'd be amiss not to mention is one that I also don't feel particularly qualified to write about. Wasteland came at a time of huge upheavals for the RPG industry; Ultima IV showed us that RPGs could be about more than killing foozles and stealing their loot, The Gold Box games were giving us tactical combat on an unprecedented level, and Interplay themselves brought us The Bard's Tale. Other than Ultima IV, these are all games I've yet to experience, but to me, Wasteland seems like a mix of the core concepts of all of these; it took and refined the combat and interface of The Bard's Tale, combined it with Ultima's top-down exploration view, and took RPGs even further back to their roots by presenting itself as if it were a real DMed pen and paper game. Texts from the paragraph book elaborate on the story and particularly important areas, slain enemies explode like blood sausages and have holes blown in them, and - most of all - you can be certain that, wherever you go and whatever you examine, the dry and omnipresent narrator will describe it all in wonderfully atmospheric and concise snippets. It's a trite thing to say, but skim through any update from this thread for examples if you don't believe me... modern graphics do not compare. And half of those described objects can be looked at further, interacted with, blown up; if something comes to mind that you could or would want to do to it, give it a try. Even if it doesn't advance the game in any meaningful way, they might have put it in just for fun. See the crystal ball in an old occult shop that, when examined, reveals a grumpy wizard shouting at you that this isn't The Bard's Tale. If the pen-and-paper and CRPG styles ever hit a sweet spot together - to the best of my limited knowledge - it was Wasteland.
If the above didn't convince you to play Wasteland, my final words probably won't either. But if you really want to keep your Kodex Kool Kredits... are you really going to turn down a game as "too old and primitive" that even someone who liked New Vegas managed to play and love?
Elwro
Arcane
Congratulations on your LP and thanks for the detailed impressions!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts Admiral.
Carlos' Bitch1
Arcane
You may think you are unqualified to give some of these impressions, but in fact you are actually uniquely placed to do so; this is your first playthrough of the game. When I carry on about Wasteland, it is easily dismissed as some older type feeding the birds and having a grumble about the 'good old days'. When others see someone around their own generation giving impressions, it is (well, it should be) taken more seriously.
In any case, again I am happy that you have taken the plunge, enjoyed the game, described the strengths probably better than I could have and supplied a humorous, well crafted and witty LP to go along with it.
Will it change the nature of the average consoletard? Only time will tell.
Thanks Admiral.
In any case, again I am happy that you have taken the plunge, enjoyed the game, described the strengths probably better than I could have and supplied a humorous, well crafted and witty LP to go along with it.
Will it change the nature of the average consoletard? Only time will tell.
Thanks Admiral.
This.Elwro said:
Very nice
Cassidy
Arcane
Admiral jimbob said:
Once my boner with Grand Strategy and 4x games is over, I guess I will.
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.