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

With a party of 7, each character knowing 4 skills, you have 28 skills covered. Considering that 10 of those 34 skills are for weapons & combat only (not counting Field Strippin and Weaponsmithing), a full party is clearly capable of handling almost anything that the game throws a them in terms of skills.

 

Doesn't seem to me that the old IE games were any different in that regard.

 

Party in WL 2 should be of 3 rangers and one follower only that you have no control whatsoever, just giving broad orders like in Fallout 2 (more options as the leadership is increased)
I want a new Ian shooting me in the back!

 

IE games didn't even have skills beside the thief stuff bro... this parallel makes no sense. And even so, BG II and PS:T had content locked out due your class/attributes, like becoming the master of the Planar Sphere or of the Druid Den.

 

Right, but the point is that generally you'll have a party member with the skills you need.

 

yeah, as felipepe said, we are talking about party of 7 really, and those NPCs did have very nice stats and skills themselves.

Yes. Really.

Not at all.

Out of those, 10 are weapons.

Toaster repair is a gimmick, and the same is probably that southern folklore and animal whisperer. (which also means they work fully just with minimal investment)
Leadership apparently minimizes how often NPCs act on their own - which i found is actually useful and not a problem at all. Field medic doesnt need more then 2 points, weapon stripping too, salvaging is just giving you some crap from garbage, brawling ... didnt seem much needed really,
Perception just highlights interactive pixels and you dont need more then 2 points either...

Smart, Hard, Kiss Ass just add flavor, they arent needed to solve anything. You can use them but you dont have to.

So, there are several skills that dont need more than 2 or 3 points spent on them, in addition to everything else.

As ive said, you cant really just lower XP gains indefinitely, or not even that much overall. there simply isnt enough skills to go around plus some are almost worthless + the gameplay doesnt let you do anything actually meaningful with them, except combat of course.

You dont need a weapon to be at 7 at all. 4 is enough. The rest, for a pure fighter, better go into evasion, or one more weapon.
etc.

And you will get randoum encounters without any special grinding too.
You cant just remove those from equation.

No, not at all. this has nothing to do with Fallout and its content.
In Fallout you actually used skills to get through the game, through the quests. There is no such thing for W2, except combat and its skills. The rest is fluff and flavor material that doesnt affect quests at all. If its something important - there is a secondary option always available which does the same. Usually through dialogue, since if its anything important then its about main quests of the location and you deal with those by choosing a dialogue option.

This has nothing to do with that.

what skill checks? This aint no AoD.

For what? Did you have a single skill check in the beta for anything important? Everything there was to do specifically with some skill is doable with 2 points because W2 uses soft skill checks. You just repeat and eventually you succeed.
Its always completely plot and quest non critical stuff. Lockpicking something, some safe with a blood pack inside - big deal?

 

Explain.

 

In my opinion, you can plan your party around the skills NPC followers have, but you're not realistically going to do that on a first play-through. I also see nothing wrong with maxing say, half the skills the game has to offer by the end of it. There are still choices that affect the story independent of skill use so it's not like maxing your skills is a problem.

Already you are doing exactly what I said: dismissing skills based on what you saw in the beta (which is only at most 1/3 of the game) and also without acknowledging that balance and skill use opportunities can and will change. That doesn't mean your complaints aren't fair, of course.

I can't comment on this with any sort of genuine knowledge, but I would not be surprised if higher-level equipment have skill requirements. Seems like a reasonable way to balance things. It's already been said that skill caps around attribute are also planned but not in yet, as well as perks. All those could have a profound impact on how you build your character and what kinds of choices you make.

How is that any different from Fallout?

In Fallout you can blow through the critical path using nothing but firepower. The other skill use gives you options but there is basically nothing in the game that requires you to use skills on that critical path. If you have the weapons, armour and skill to get through, just shoot stuff. No big deal. The only difference is that Fallout is more punishing because as a single-character game you can't always make up for your character's downsides with another party member. You have to be good at the combat to succeed, but so what? You have to be good at Wasteland 2's combat too, or you lose (independent of difficulty, the hard failure state is the same).

That said, I don't want to draw too many comparisons between Wasteland 2 and Fallout. Fallout is obviously an inspiration for Wasteland 2 (and vice-versa), but "Fallout did it this way so Wasteland 2 should as well" is a poor argument; I don't want to sound like I'm claiming that or that I'm accusing you of saying the same.

 

Wasn't that Failout Tactics ?

 

No more than 30%-35% or go home.

Skills are used for meaningful world interactions. Quest branching as a sole instrument of c&c and replayability renders skills as just a flavor. It destroys the purpose of creating character and leveling. Skill checks are a good and simple way of adding consequences to the game, why waste it? It can only even strengthen good quest reactivity.

 

" a full party is clearly capable of handling almost anything that the game throws a them in terms of skills."

All I'm saying is that this doesn't seem to be an issue most of the time in most party based games. If we reduce "redundant" or nonsensical skills as Hiver seems to want to do it becomes even less of an issue.

 

I think the game needs a happy medium of being able to choose what to do in broad strokes, but skills influencing the finer details.

Going back to the Rail Nomads Camp scenario, there are many individual situations that are influenced by skill use; however, you are not locked in to what you can do entirely by your skills. For instance, whether the girl lives or dies at the start is influenced by a number of prior actions as well as the use of skills, which in turn influences the wider quest plot, whether you get certain dialogue options to resolve the quest in certain ways (which have skill checks themselves), and of course ties in to whether or not you get Ralphy as a follower.

Now, if you just want to have lots of situations where you must have skill X to finish a quest or objective, then that's fair. But I'm not sure that's what the devs want to do with the game and I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. You can dismiss that approach as "destroying" character building and levelling, or say it reduces skill use to flavour, but respectfully, I simply have to disagree, because I think it's a slippery slope reductionist argument which basically says that all that matters is the outcome, not the finer details or how you get there.

 

I don't even know why max party sizes are so large. I played with the 4 rangers most of the time and I had no trouble, and I feel like more than that will just be cumbersome. It's not like 7 party members deliver a different combat experience. 3+1 I would be fine with, as well as various skills balancing.

 

You get Angela right at the start, she has high outdoorsman so none of your team need it.
Why wouldnt you count on that?

The rest of them are just a bonus material too.

You make two fighters. One melee guy, one assault weapons. Melee guy gets to be Hard Ass.
One demolition expert with shotgun (cherry bomb). One "doctor" with Surgeon and field medic skills and hand guns. (pills)
Angela is additional fighter, takes care of outdoorsman , which isnt really needed (if you use it you get less xp and gameplay overall) on the world map. Kiss Ass.

The assault wepaon fighter gets Computer tech and a point in Synth.

You go get Scotchmo and he is another melee fighter and takes care of all lockpicking and safe cracking, plus has a point in Alarm Disarming. Smart Ass.

The "doctor" char (high Int) gets Surgeon to 8 quickly, since the hardest critical wounds demand that much (the only case of such a high skill check - which stops being a big problem as soon as you can enter RC or can talk to other doctors), then pumps the rest of points into sniping or any other "gimmick" skill. Feck, i gave mine even toaster repair...

Demolition expert gets it to 4 or 5 (which deals with everything in the demo), adds a point or two to anti -tank weapons, then adds another weapon or some flavor - gimmick skill if you want.

You can also add a point or two into smg weapons for that first melee guy.

and...

... thats it.

You wont be calling any sheep or goats into mines - horrible, i know. (i think animal whisperer might be charisma dependant eventually. it would fit and charisma doesnt have anything else anyway.)

excuse me, but on what else am i suppose to base it on?
Are you saying it is wrong im basing what i said on the beta?

There is nothing else but to dismiss those, since they play exactly in that way. And its not just a problem of those skills - but of the general global rule of soft skill checks - which means many skills do not need more then a point or two in them for a long, long sections of the game.
And when you eventually find some higher skill checks (such as those safes and locked containers in RN) - by that time you already have many points extra already waiting - and there is nothing special in those containers anyway.

That they will change is more or less certain - yet how or in what ways is completely unknown, until they release some update, it is all theoretical, therefore one cannot claim they will be good or bad - ie, its irrelevant as any form of argument in any case, for any side.
Thats the only thing that can be acknowledged there.

- its a Schrodinger cat in the box.

Whomever said that should be locked in a barrel into which hundreds of nails are nailed in and then pushed down a hill.

Life isnt failr. deal with it.

Ultimately your team easily has all weapon types at their disposal. Fast. During first two or three locations. (when you find better weapons, as you progress, they additionally increase your precision and damage etc)

Hope is a nice thing. Thinking that something nice might happen in the future is also nice.

unfortunately completely worthless when talking about this game, at the moment. In the present.
All ive seen are those Slicers at Robots location, with 200 hp.

i would be very surprised since that doesnt exist in the game currently and nobody ever even mentioned it.

Reasonable went for a smoke and hasnt returned when someone came up with skills as they are now. Then common sense went looking for her and hasnt came back either.
we have notified the police but... no luck so far.

Surgeon is capped by Int attribute right now. Im not really sure how good it will feel for people to play about 30% or 50% or 60% of the game and then discover that they cannot raise the skill anymore because they didnt know that at the beginning.
(plus there are items that change attributes, - rabbit paws and ranger stars? - which means it could be more)

profound... cough.. yes, thats how you could call it. i agree.

If you were playing jeopardy about W2.

in W2 the use of skills doesnt affect quest or missions in any way. Currently.
- there is that kind of reactivity in RN with that bloody ralphy, use brute force and demolitions later (or DONT! TA-DAAA!) - but its done in such a heavy handed, crude manner its just... bleh.
plus, you can solve RN with or without it anyway.

Solve Gecko and Vault city in a best way without skills, just by firepower. Solve New Reno like that and NCR quests. Solve them without speech skill and science skill and even repair... and few others. Just go shootan.
Sure, critical path, in both first and second game, you can do some speed run but you are then missing 80% or more of the game.

Of course, Fallouts had their own very well known various underused, practically secondary skills, if that.
Which is actually a good description of W2 current skills in terms of their usage. They are all about as influential on gameplay as those few well known skills in Fallout were. (gambling, barter, outdorsman, first aid, throwing, - sneaking, etc)

Combat is the only thing in W2, unlike Fallout (full game vs beta and all dammit).

agreed. move to strike.

 

Most fun I had was playing with 2 rangers, one melee + looting skills (lockpick/safecraking), the other ranged + hardass/first-aid. Seven party members is really overkill.

 

Actually there is a good incentive to pay attention to potential NPC companions, since if you invest into same skills you run into a bad surprise later on, seeing some npc ally has those same ones, superfluously.
of course, there will be many NPCs to take along, four or five just in this short beta. And you will be able to tell them to wait in RC and switch between them as you please.
For maximum accessibility. (wouldnt be surprised if they would automatically level up to party level, either)

I wonder would it be possible to start the game just with one Ranger and then just collect NPCs for a full party.

 

I don't even...

 

In ToEE you could have a party of 8 even though you could complete the game just fine with the initial 5. inXile following in Troika's hack footsteps.

 

The best thing about reading this thread is that it killed my hype so brutally that I might end up enjoying the final game.

 

Its still wait and see for me, but so far Im not impressed. I guess short development cycle got to do with it for the most part. Not alot of time to do everything right and the whole thing looks rushed. Dunno how much money Fargo has left from ho's and booz but by looking at the videos, playthroughs and reading mostly this thread it looks like it needs another year before release.

 

well, it depends...

to play the devils advocate here
:strums a harp violin:

its all a material that could be worked into something, just depends on what and how much they want to do.
With some relatively smaller re cutting and repositioning of the starting narrative, more skill based various big and smaller gameplay uses - that actually affect quests and sub quests (lets say somewhere in the ballpark of Fallout two games, generally), - that would appropriately close other relevant options, instead of all options being available (stronger role of hard, kiss, smart ass skills) bit better and tougher combat, and several other adjustments and improvements...

I mean, if it was me, i wouldnt let Angela join until you earn it.
that alone would make things bit more difficult at the start.

and whats with that "no entering of our cool citadel" really? whats the point really?
plus those hand waving, graphene thin excuses about all those other rangers being too busy (actually doing nothing in citadel) - so you rookies will go and do this mission of critical importance and go handle two biggest directly connected locations - "we will all just pretend its plausible and just go on playing" level of quality as a setup. while it could be done much more engagingly.

 

What about fixing it with putting Vargas message stating that because player team is closer he can chose which location he want to take care of and Vargas is launching a team to the second? Team is ambushed during their travel and slaughtered/ forced to retreat. So the second locations is doomed. This solution will greatly improve believability of the world and will need only 1 or 2 extra voiceovers from Vargas and 2 to 3 from ambushed rangers team. Also it can lead to a quest with searching traitor in the ranks of rangers.

If additional voice overs are not an option, player can find out that his communication with ranger citadel is jammed and only he as a sole rangers team in this region heard the pleadings of help and can do something about it.

You can send my suggestion to codecenter if You like it.

 

nah, it sucks, plus you left out my violin concerto, which makes it suck double automatically.

 

A simple narrative solution to the choice between Highpool and Ag Center - aside from opening the locations in a limited manner to provide some background info before the distress call ins - would be Vargas saying that he sends another team to where the player is not going ("Ok, you take care of Y, I'm sending Ranger Fukupp and and his team to X."); and that team just happens to fail.

Could be neat if there was a possibility of the other team succeeding, but doing a lousy job that leads to the place being a wreck and causing some major disdain towards the Rangers; once you enter, you are not greeted with open arms nor are you provided with quests and very limited trading at most due to the circumstances, many NPC's are dead, but you'd get good narrative about what has happened and why you should probably leave before there's consequences.