Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

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Are you going to somehow glue all the maps together when talking about Wizardry level design as well, bro?

 

Oh, someone finally started playing the game and paying attention, eh?

 

Funny because a lot of people are saying the exact opposite - not enough points are given. Seems like different people have different beliefs on what works.

In the final build I believe it's intended for attributes to cap skills in some way. Also, boosting an attribute all the way up to 10 effectively reduces the character's abilities to below-average in all other respects, so it's not necessarily the best idea from a character-building standpoint.

 

Huh. I haven't been on the official board much lately, but most of what I've seen has been in favor of keeping stat points scarce. The only problem came up when they assigned those stupid adjectives saying that 5 is 'average' and so on. A value of 10 should not be the baseline for 'decent'.

 

It was known, but I wonder, doesn't this increase the pace of "capping out" a character quite drastically seeing how low the attributes start at and given the pace of leveling up and the 1-10 range of the skills (plus the consideration of additional learn by doing system)? Or am I overthinking it here?

 

Funny! Hillarious! muahahahaha... The "People!" - give me MOAR! CONSUME! consume!...


... romances?
fuck... ok... no way out...

Attributes caps on maximum skill levels are the only thing, the only mechanic in the game that prevents one character to have several maxed out skills.
BUT - this is not per singular skill, but by skill groups. Two of them. Combat skills vs Diplomacy vs... what... some flavor skills like animal whisperer?
I only need one character with high Int and one with high Charisma... if that even makes any sense in the game at all...
And... the player has SEVEN team members. In a game that is combat focused.

AND - its not like you really have to have any attribute at max 10 anyway. Whatcha gona miss with attributes at 8 or 9? A few items and few dialogue options at best? (imagine how much crying there would be from your target audience if that was more, eh?)

 

My point of reference is this game. Nothing else.
I dont need to compare it to any other game in some sort of desperate last ditch to make it seem better because some other game is maybe worse.

I look at this. And i see it as it is.
What other games are doing is their own business. Judged based on its/their own merits. (all this is one of the bigger reasons i dont like party based RPG but prefer solo RPGs, that have independent Ai controlled companions at the most)


The skills of Wasteland 2 alone will not bring any reactivity - as advertized. Fact.
The design of skills, the retarded splits didnt achieve anything positive, but several negative things - still ongoing - and most of it had to be melded back - as i was saying from the start - which means if anyone listened to me huge amounts of time and resources would have been saved, but instead i had imbeciles like Zombra and other stupid cretins screaming at me like retarded emotionally engaged stupid monkeys they ARE - so now you (we) all get to slurp the consequences of that - fact.
The only thing that could actually create any reactivity and C&C (of any form) is mutually exclusive content. Fact.

Which means that the game will live or die based on how much of it you (the team) manages to create in next few months.

Im hoping you guys will manage something but realistically... i dont know... ill have to play this new beta before i can claim something about it with more certainty.

In case you all fail, im hoping me and few other bros will pick up the flag and mode the hell out of it and actually create something great - which would not be possible without the InXile effort at all.
But thats far in the future still.

felipepepe
talk to me bro... has anything been done to AG center to make it better?


Im still waiting on the High seas but there is no land in sight.... and isnt that just depressing...

 

Lower the amount of skill points given..

Or increase the skill level needed to perform skill checks on stuff...

Make it fucking hard to do stuff with your skills unless you really specialize in that... so it makes your party unique... instead of just trying to be perfect at everything, jack-of-all-trades shit

 

Just wondering. How does it contribute to difficulty in any way? I mean insta-failing optional stuff doesnt make it harder in my experience. you should talk more about rewarding especialization. Dont make whats there impossible to access, put in new, more valuable stuff behind higher walls.
Just saying.

 

The solution is quite simple, there should be perks or large bonuses for high skills. IIRC, there is already something like "At 5 skills points you reload for 1 AP less", but that's still too little, not to mention hidden from the player. I should be something clear, that you would take into consideration while creating your character, and that would make every skill point you spent relevant, instead of just going from 75 to 80% hit chance. Pure % upgrades are as boring as can get.

Personally, I would make the skills points only range from 1 to 5, with 2/3/4/5 points cost for upgrading, respectivly. And each upgrade you give you meaningful things besides the THC increase, like for Sniper Rifles: +10% THC when crouching/-1 AP for reloading/+5 damage on aimed shots/-1 AP for shooting or stuff like that.

Didn't do it yet, I'm trying the new option to let both Ag. Center and Highpool fail this time.

 

Save that stuff for the eventual mod man... they should know stuff like that themselves.

Except ... yeah... has anyone in Inxile team been involved in actual RPG design before this?


- edit-

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Before anyone steps on my so inconspicuous infantry mine im leaving behind so indiscreetly... i gave 40 bucks through codex and 30 through kickstarter, taking only the 30 dollah reward. So i cant officially get to beta.
Damn... i cant even see some pirate ship on horizon with which i could not trade our inventories.
And its been two days already...

 

I'm at Nomad Railways... some nice new C&C there.. abit more polished and larger area now.. I like it.. Haven't even begun to go to the prison yet.

 

Since this is a party based game and all of the ones I played and loved made it possible to cover all the important skills with the different specialists in your party if you planned well enough I'm very much against making skill points too scarce. I'm with Lhynn on that, I don't see any benefit to locking content that way. Lock it with story C&C, not by forcing me to dump skills. I wanna try out all the toys the game has to offer in my first playthrough.

 

by the way... sea little DA:O mod has more reactivity and C&C then whole W2 so far. If only... but thats not going to happen.

 

Linear advancement like that is p. banal. I prefer when that kind of special bonus is handled through perks/talents/feats/whatever

 

Doesnt have to be linear at all. Good idea. of course.

 

Inventory getting on my nerves, for a myriad of reasons.
Lots of items don't stack, some you can stack yourself but I really can't be arsed to bother with something like that. Ammo for example, I loot three guys with 12, 3, 6 ammo, and I'll have 3 different stacks, same with all healing items.
No auto arrange, inventory seriously needs auto arrange, I don't enjoy manually moving my icons back up because my screen is stretched way too low.
Equipping items from inventory is a little bit more annoying than it was pre-patch, now you have to click equip instead of drag/drop, I'd prefer both to be options, not a huge deal but an annoyance.
equipped items take up space in your inventory, even worse, so do your costumization options. In my shared inventory screen I have about 40 items just from all of the equipped shit my rangers have, including their heads, hair, outfits, etc etc.

These are annoying pls fix

 

I'm worried about the skill design / rollout and how it's going to affects C&C too. One of the clearest examples of what you're talking about is that they have not one or two but three speech-related skills you can invest in ('X' ass). To me this doesn't make sense, why dilute the skill pool so much? What is gained by having them be 3 skills rather than one, or *gasp* tying the success of these attitude response to your characters attributes (STR, INT, CHA) and chopping down the skill-bloat?

They've got MCA, Danforth and Stackpole listed as 'designers', but I think Stackpole is the only one doing real systems-level shit [link]. MCA was a consultant and designed the Ag Center, right? He's not going to be getting his elbows dirty in stat and skill balance and it's integration with the game. Liz Danforth came from the original WL1 team where she did map design (maybe more, can't tell).

Honestly, I don't think they have a lot of experience.

 

A novice... from 2004, heh.

Well, look... its clear they tried to create as much "skills" as they could so thats why the bloat. The problem is those are not different skills at all, but single ones split into nonsensical parts. That, for many reasons end up in most of them producing negative consequences, which most of us knew since Fallouts. That is always one of the biggest critiques of the old games.
Its not like its some new unexplored territory.
But since you have a whole party, seven characters no less... its pretty superfluous to try and force some kind of diversity in gameplay through such fake skills themselves.
Unless you can make 20 different skills - but then you have to create content for all of them (again, old Fallout ailment) - which is completely out of the scope and the budget of this game.

And since the situation is like it is, it would have been much better if they didnt even try and instead spent time creating more mutually exclusive content to create diversity in any single playthrough.
As for those different speech skills... i think that actually makes more sense, since its not just speech and dialogue but, rather a whole different personality approach to any situation.

The big additional problem i saw a lot in the previous beta wit that was that most of the time, if you dont have the needed speech skill the game handily gives you other easy ways to achieve the same thing with other means. Which pretty much defeats any sort of reactivity those different personality skills could have created.

And then on top of that, these first locations you can visit are all very linear and without any smaller differences and diversity inside their small stories, or gameplay.
Which, actually might have been incidental... created just by making them really, really big. AG center insides are huge. So a player naturally expects there will be more to it all then simply going in straight line to the villain and the ending faux binary choices - that didnt make any sense.

So its ind of a... a cascade of various smaller and bigger bad features that play off each other in bad ways and create ever more negative ripples.
(at least according to few people here, im pretty sure that the "fans" are creaming all over themselves... just dont ask me what for, exactly)




MCA was just a guest for some over arching things in AG center. I think he just came up with those characters and general plot, or something... or just came up with the design of the area - and then the rest of the team took over.
Frankly im not sure what exactly did he do there.

Stackpole ... didnt he only do the overall story? The main plot? And that long before the kickstarter. I dont think he was ever employed by InXile in this.
I dont think he was actually involved in actual design of anything.
and miss Danfort... i have no idea at all. Cant remember any specifics myself at the moment.

but it doesnt look like any of them were actually involved in design of the mechanics, systems or gameplay.
And then again... a single game designer cant really just decide for himself and do whatever he wants.

As usual, the captain gets all the praise and all the blame.



Anyway, if they have all the systems and assets up and running (bar some adjustments of Ui and inventory etc) they should be able to fill the game with enough content in three months, and a few more that will surely follow. (who the hell am i kidding... -ninja edit)
And even in the worst case...we can mod the stuff in later.
(help me god im turning into an optimist)

One other positive consequence of this all is being a good school for Torment.
(yeah right)

 

I didnt really meant that, i have nothing against content not being available in every playtrough, just that reward should go hand in hand with skill investment, the pay off from high specialization should be good, maybe in the way of items, character interaction, eastern eggs, etc.
Even luck should play a factor into this, as it will add to re-playability and keep each game somewhat fresh and new.

It shouldnt even be tied to the game progress, some/all the cool stuff should be theoretically accessible from the beginning, if you have foreknowledge or the necessary skills.

 

-1

No thank you!

 

-2


The higher number of more unique playthroughs you can have, the fucking better.

A good cRPG should NEVER make the player experience everything in 1 playthrough.. choices should limit and prevent other stuff from happening through C&C and reactivity.

Skill points should be limited, so that you have to choose wisely, instead of trying to get EVERYTHING at once

 

And I didn't mean what you think either:

You see, my favorite games (look at my avatar) didn't have many real C&C so maybe I don't care that much for your favorite buzzword anyway but again, this is a party based game, so all your character specializations together should be enough to handle all the different situations you can get into. If you don't want to, sure, feel free to take your 4 diplomats on a suicide trip, it'll be fun! But let me cover all bases and give me enough skill points to do so because that shit isn't fun C&C in a fucking party based game for me.

You guys cannot into reading.
:picard facepalm:

Single character game: yes, definitely.
Party based game: nooooooo!

 

It makes sense, because strength (Big guy) induced intimidation through being a HARD ASS would invoke some reponses in some people, others not. Not everybody can be bullied.

Same thing with Kissing ass or talking smart... it works on SOME people, but not all.. And charisma and intelligence has to do with this... kissing ass. and sounding smart...

General Vargas explains this also, when he gives his introductionary speech to the recruits.

So it makes perfect sense to have 3 branches of speech skillchecks in the game, if the game can cater around that and implement interesting C&C and reactivity based on the speech skills... (which im sure it will)

Perhaps one could imagine having an intimidation/brute speechcheck that requires both strength 5 AND hard ass level 3 or 4.. for a highlevel check on a baddie..

Or a high charisma and kiss ass check to sleep with the queen of neverland.. or who the fuck knows.

 

+1 Agree with dis. Needs to be severely looked at. Manageing items is abit of a hassle at the moment.