Game News Wasteland 2 Kickstarter Update #34: Gamescom Demo Video, First Dev Diary Released

They make things?

 

Yeah I am hoping that they are kinda doing what Obsidian said they are doing regarding those things "taking creatures to a blockout stage before moving to the next".

The sliding over the ground walking animation is a bit off-putting. It's not a 'big deal' but surely they could do better.

The runtime performance based on the video doesn't seem that great either, but that may just be the video and not the game.

 

I could deal with it in Geneforge 5, I can deal with it in W2. Depends on the rest of the game.

 

Why not inEPTitude? Why don't you be hilarious like Roguey?

Game's looking good, needs faster combat animations though as watching the dogs was definitely a pain. I wonder about that medicine bit, if you hadn't killed her would the guy still come running and just give her the medicine, solving the quest then and there? Or was that just to give that choice some kind of 'I fucked up' feeling?

 

I want to like the game but its not hitting the sweet spot. Graphics still look dodgy. Animations are a bit stilted. The encounters shown have been a bit too piece meal (i too wonder if that dude will show up if i dont shoot the lady).
Maybe its just the demo and lack of final polish.

I guess im holding it to a higher standard because its 2012-2013 and this has to live up to the best crpg possible. But have to counter that with their small budget and timeframe.
Will have to get into the meat of the game before I make up my mind.

 

Combat looks just like SRR (a bit deeper, by not by much). Guess it's easier to do it this way in unity and/or making good AI / tiling for hexes is hard? Anyway, I don't mind.

The situation with Anna and her husband was pretty contrived and JRPG-y. Why does he run up right after the player kills her? It'd be a decent C&C-ish event if the party met him later in the game, and (if they killed her) he was either depressed and drinking his life away in some bar... or maybe even trying to track down the scum who killed his wife, and showing up as a 'random encounter' with some hired help.

 

This game really is a throwback to the 80s. Games from that decade also used square grids due to technical limitations. Apparently there is some world-wide conspiracy set on removing RPGs with movement based on hexes. See what happened to Chaos Chronicles. inXile was smart enough to remove their hexes before they too became a target.

But if we're going with a square grid, please allow diagonal movement. It should be really easy. You can double the AP scaling and make movement cost 2 AP (straight) or 3 AP (diagonal), instead of 1 AP per square, while giving everyone double the number of AP they have now (and doubling the cost of shooting and other activites, of course). Pretty please? Brother None?

The dotted AP counter does not look so bad during gameplay. I'd still prefer something else but if it were to stay, I wouldn't mind.

Overall, looks good.

 

Kept waiting for a Duriel fight

 

Maybe he played that Bard's Tale remake.

 

I was kidding dude, couldn't you tell by the :chew If only you guys had better emoticons then that wouldn't have thrown you off.

 

The comment was about the combat system itself, not the difficulty of the encounters. Yeah, SRR's OC is super-easy, news at 11.

I can go into the SRR editor, create enemies with stats/equipment/AP that are actually on par with players, set them up with the 'gets more than 1 attack a round' AI setting (which only 'bosses' have in the OC), and party members will actually manage to get themselves killed.

e: also, I did say 'a bit deeper'. Just the fact that they have ammo and initiative is a pretty big improvement. But let's not pretend we have JA3 here. Not even close.

 

I'm going to down a kettle of Psilosybin infuced tea before I begin my first play through of this game. Juicyyyyyyy.

 

The long animations for interacting with the environment remind me a lot of drakensang 1. They really pissed me off in that game.

 

As long as the Codex keeps compairing every game against his "ideal RPG" (PS:T narrative, JA2 combat, Fallout C&C and game structure, BG2 scope and encounter design), all games will come short. News at 11.
Kickstarter won't change that. Even if the games are succeses, W4 and PE3 will still come short, even with bigger budget.
There'll never be a JA3. And if it comes, it will be a strategy/tactics game with nothing RPG about it.

 

Okay, not the '80s, but 1990's Centauri Alliance was a rare exception. Heck, even the box was hex-shaped!

 

I was being sarcastic.

 

All the reactivity presented in the video is good, reminds of the old games. But.

it`s so claustrophobic. I understand that it`s set to show as much features as possible in small timeframe, but this looks like an amusement park, not a Wasteland, or more like a zoo, with tiny little cages put side by side one next to another, every just a little bit different than the other. You`re walking from one cage to another watching what`s going on, there`s no feeling of the Wasteland being actually the good old dirty, destroyed by atomic fire, burned down to the ground Wasteland, a big empty space with remnants of civillisation struggling to survive (except for the Mark Morgan music that is, I know it`s not Fallout, but isn`t the world just recovering from a nuclear holocaust?)

UI on whole is just a big mess. while I can deal with the new version of the main gameplay screen, you get this ubelievably ugly buble dialogs, jumping and floating around the screen breaking all the immersion. It`s unreadable and unelegant, completely out of place. Futuristic Deus Ex: HR type trade window has a freaking Bioshock thing glaring on top of it. Just a cheap, uninspired way to forcefully push the retro vibe into the User Interface. It`s a clusterfuck with no character of it`s own, no coherency.

 

Yeah, I'm really bothered by the "Theme Park" feeling that map has... instead of a large area full of stuff and people - some important, some not - you got paths leading to events; "here is the woman dying, there the goats with mines, and over there the combat area, etc" It seems all very obvious, almost impossible to miss. Not only there is the radio leading you to the dying woman, but she is also quite easy to find, just follow the path... older RPGs will just leave her in a tiny house on the border of the map with a locked door or something.

I hope is just due the whole "we're in a valley" thing and other areas are more interesting... a map with many corridors is an improvement over linear maps, but it's still a heavy decline from open maps.

 

Maps in Project Eternity will probably be like this as well. I don't know why designers think that the BG1 / other open exploration style of maps is bad design or a waste of space, because it isn't.

 

Atleast they did away with the retarded DoF effect from the screenshots.

 

Reread my original post. I never said it had to be JA3, only that the combat system really isn't that much better / more complex than the combat system of 'kiddie nuXCOM' SRR.