Weird West: Definitive Edition - top-down immersive sim action-RPG from Arkane founder Raf Colantonio

[Child of Malkav]

I played it some more. Been doing side quests a lot. And hunting bounties, which are quite a lot I might say but they seem to be the best way to make money. Especially if you capture them and bring them back alive. There's also Sunrise Point which has a bugged silver chest that gives a nimp relic and if you leave the room or the general area or it's simply based on time IDK, it respawns the contents of the chest giving you a farmable relic.
Chests so far seem to come in ornamented ones, silver ones and gold ones i would assume though I haven't found any gold ones. Supernatural enemies are no pushovers. They deal serious physical damage and have various abilities. I only dealt with sirens, cave terrors, wraiths, some kind of werewolves (they're part of a tribe called the White ...something....).
The guns only go up to level 4 or 4 stars in upgrades and while they are good, they are not something that can get you out of any situation ever. There are a lot of barrels (chemical, explosive, oil, water etc.) that you can use to great effect in combat but not something you can rely on all the time. Using lamps, dynamites, or just kicking enemies off high ledges, using the charm ability of the bounty hunter (the first character you play), all of these and more can turn the tide decisively in your favor. Otherwise just stealth around and pick them off one by one or just climb a tall building, go to the roof and snipe them as they can't reach you. There is a rifle ability that silences any shot fired from a rifle within 10 seconds of activation. If you have enough golden aces of spades you can upgrade the sneak attack damage and you can one hit kill many enemies. I don't have it yet as I put them solely on higher jumping, it's so good, it pays for itself. You can sneak behind an enemy and chokehold them and they go unconscious and you can kill them quietly afterwards with a knife or something. If you don't kill them and they wake up and see you among the dead bodies they can generate a vendetta against you.
Pickaxes, shovels and skinning tools have durability and can break. You'll carry a few of those anyway as they are valuable. Nuggets are for upgrading weapons or turning into ingots for selling, leathers and superior leathers are for upgrading your vests or crafting new ones, shovels are for digging and burying corpses as well as can be used as a weapon, skinning tools for skinning animals especially bisons, snakes, bears and deer and ropes for predetermined climbing spots in wells or rooftops.
I'll focus on advancing the main quest for now because these bounties seem to be in very high number. the overworld gets populated with locations very fast. Random encounters out the ass. Vendettas consist of overworld ambushes and if you kill the one who initiated the vendetta the other enemies flee the combat. But sometimes one of them initiates a vendetta against you as they're running and you can kill them then and there to prevent future ambushes. Oh, when you capture a wanted person you have to get them with you all the way back to the sheriff in the town you got the contract from. It's not automatic stuff where you handcuff him and he teleports, no, you have to take him or her with you all the way back and they can die in ambushes in the overworld. You do get bonus money for bringing them alive though and that's good because you're gonna need ammo and other tools like a lot.
The perks like I mentioned before are just percentage increases but the golden aces required to purchase them are super rare so far so you have to think about what you want and prioritize that. They have 3 levels and the first level costs one, the second cost 3 and the third costs five.
Also when you are in an area, explore everything. Pixel hunt if you must but make sure you interact with everything. Every container can have a nimp relic, a golden ace, ammo, shovel , rope, pickaxe, explosives, molotov cocktails (they are not called that), bandages, food, nuggets, skins and pelts or whatever else. They're all useful. There are also different types of explosives that deal electric damage, there are flashbangs, antidotes, potions with various effects lie seeing live enemies around you or replenishing your action points (which is the main resource for abilities both character and weapon specific).
Surprisingly low number of bugs. The game controls like Seven Days Long Gone but better. 3 zoom levels, slow motion available all the time for combat situations but it doesn't make you move or act faster than other enemies. it's just to help you and slow things down. There is a character ability of slowing down time for 6 seconds and affects your enemies but not you.

Edit 1: you can get treasure maps marking spots on the overworld where you can find chests usually guarded by powerful entities. I also made friends for life with a demon after releasing it from a statue. Oh joy....

Edit 2: It's easy to get 100 reputation and that translates to 50% discount in shops.

Edit 3: You can find the body of Corvo near one of the story objectives. Also BTW I think I sequence broke some stuff because as I was exploring through various places I happened to complete a big story moment but there are characters mentioned in the dialogue I haven't heard of because of it. Cool.

Edit 4: OK so I finished the story with the bounty hunter (remember the sequence break from above?) and I started with the pigman. So what transfers so far is: all your perks (not abilities) and amount of map explored...ye. I'll play later. I want to get to the bounty hunter and see the interactions with her. Maybe I'll get access to the inventory I had with her if I recruit her or something. Hopefully.

 

[cyborgboy95]

More stuff I did on Weird West: Cooking/crafting system. You can cook raw food over a fire/stove, use forges and tanning racks to craft weapon upgrades, armour, smelt ingots from nuggets, etc. Arguably went a little overengineered for the game's requirements...

Most cooking is simple - Pickups have a CookedPickupClass, so eg a Raw Chicken is easily cookable into a Roast Chicken in this UI (but we also do this in-world - you can drop a raw chicken, set fire to it, and it'll become a roast chicken!) but the system also supports RECIPES

For a long time we had a janky placeholder system for cooking that was hooked into the dialogue system - if you wanted to cook a chicken you literally had to talk to the stove about it.

When it was time to make a proper UI, it wasn't clear how complex the system had to be yet (is it always just RawItem->CookedItem? Are there different types of crafting stations? Do the overlap? Can you roast a chicken on a forge? Can one recipe have multiple ingredients? etc)

I decided it'd be best to just support all that stuff in a data-driven way rather than doing the minimum viable thing and risk someone being sad they can't do a "get every ingredient to make an apple pie" quest

I'm pretty sure in the game, you pretty much just cook raw food into cooked food, but the system I built fully supports multiple ingredients (with a specific number of each) and multiple results. So this example recipe will let you craft 3 cans of beans and a shotgun

So if we wanted to do a chef DLC that'd be pretty straightforward

Crafting stations can support multiple Types, so while I don't think it's enabled in the game, you *can* allow a forge to also cook meat

Anyway, the cool thing about this system is the cool thing about everything data-driven: if someone wants to add a recipe, they can do it in a simple UI or a spreadsheet without adding any code or talking to a coder, and bam, the recipe is in the game.

It's nice when it works out that you can take a relatively vague prompt and put together a system that handles most of the possibilities and isn't gonna mess you up later

The beaut UI here is by Julien Mario, who I don't know if he's on twitter, but you'll probably recognise his work from Deathloop!

Source

 

[Child of Malkav]

Managed to recruit the bounty hunter and tag along. You can also dismiss her at will. When she is in your group you can't control her only tell her what weapon to use. She is invisible to enemies, most of the time, while sneaking.

You can get access to her inventory and transfer items but not money. All nimp relics and golden aces get transferred as well. You also have access to the bank safe (if you bought one). Money doesn't transfer or I missed something. Whatever you can do bounties to get money as each bounty pays for 100$ and up. If you bring the target alive you get a significant bonus (probably double, I think.) I'm pretty sure by now that bounties are randomly generated.

Also an interesting thing I noticed: there are higher level weaponry in shops. With the bounty hunter I saw weapons go up to 4 stars. Now up to 5. I assume it's incremented by one or more as you progress with the other characters.

The pigman can use all the tools and weapons just like the bounty hunter. A missed opportunity: when you start as the pigman and you go to the first town you get rejected and threatened by the sheriffs that they'll kill you if they see you again but after you do a quest for one of the oneirists there (she puts a good word for you), you can travel safely through the towns and take bounties as usual. I thought it was going to be like playing a Nosferatu in VTMB. Joke's on me I guess.

Outside of dialogue (and even there) there is little reactivity to you being a pigman, considering their reputation as kidnappers, killers, monsters etc. Oh well.

As for weapon diversity: a fast low damage melee weapon, a slow high damage melee weapon, an average medium damage melee weapon, and the same variation goes for the ranged weapons: shotgun sawed off or semi auto, rifle bolt action or semi auto, revolver six shot or 12 shot semi auto or whatever it's called. And they go in quality starting from 1 star to (up until this story moment) 5 stars. Like the Outer Worlds where you have mark 1, mark 2, mark 3 etc. of every weapon.

 

[Jinn]

So there is significant progression carryover between the different character scenarios. Great news!

 

[Child of Malkav]

Finished the pigman story. Was.....interesting, to say the least. Cool story so far. 30 hours of playtime up until now. 24 hrs on the bounty hunter but only because I explored so much and I haven't seen everything on the map. Discovered new locations with the pigman. I wonder if I should have explored those places before...hm, oh well. Next time. Now starting as an indian/native guy. A lot of supernatural stuff in the game. Lives up to its name really well.

 

[Ghulgothas]

Child of Malkav what are all of the Five Characters available currently? There a good degree of uniqueness between them all?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Child of Malkav what are all of the Five Characters available? There a good degree of uniqueness between them all?

There is the bounty hunter, Pigman, Indian guy, some werewolf dude and someone else. The only difference so far is the character abilities. Those are unique. The weapon abilities are the same and must be bought with the nimp relics with every character if you want, the perks are the same and are permanent for all characters. Of course, the story is unique to them as well but they are all tied into a bigger narrative. They're all connected by some symbol on their necks and when one of them completes their journey, another character gets "activated" and you play as them. I assume more will be revealed as you progress.

Edit 1: oh forgot to mention that Pigman cannot read treasure maps whereas the Bounty Hunter can.

 

[V_K]

the perks are the same and are permanent for all characters

You mean, if you increased, say, stealth speed for the bounty hunter, the pigman will automatically start with that?

 

[Child of Malkav]

the perks are the same and are permanent for all characters

You mean, if you increased, say, stealth speed for the bounty hunter, the pigman will automatically start with that?

Yeah, perks are permanent. Every character starts with those perks. And can find more golden aces and further buy more perks. You have to make contact and recruit the previous characters to get access to the nimp relics that they collected and didn't spend.

 

[Child of Malkav]

There are some unique encounters on the world map depending on which character you play as and also some unique bounties whether you spared some NPC in a previous character's journey. Also newspapers writing about certain events that you participated in as another character as well as information about the world. You can use rope to climb down a chimney so you can enter that way. Good idea to rob stores at night...and a good way in.
Bows are a pain in the ass. You have to hold to draw and the longer you do the more damage it does but it is a limit (I held it for like 20 seconds and it it little damage) and you have to find the sweetspot to do max damage but good luck finding it. But when you do get that max damage everything is right in the world.
Tutorials fucking suck in this game. They don't always appear when a new thing is introduced or if you do a new thing early but some appear when you play the appropriate character. I've been using the bow for some time now and only now, when I started with this indian chick do I get a tutorial for the bow usage. I mean I like Raph and all but sometimes it's just....it's the little things you know.

Edit 1: golden aces can be really well hidden especially under various objects like books, buckets etc. it's a good idea to thoroughly search a place before moving on. Regarding the bow sweetspot? Yeah, I found it. You just keep it for 1 second or less and then release. Should guarantee 150 - 170 damage together with the ambusher perk maxed out. IDK if it can go higher.

 

[kangaxx]

I'm quite looking forward to this.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Yeah. Don't take the charm ability with the bounty hunter. It turns foes into allies temporarily and as such any harmful action (like fucking shooting) against them is a reputation loss. There is a part at the end of the indian guy where you are ambushed and have to survive against 3 groups of enemies. The bounty hunter activates charm like there's no tomorrow and if you don't pay attention to which one is charmed and which one isn't (and you can't because there's dynamite and molotovs all over the screen going off) you're gonna get hit with massive rep losses to the point where I'm now hunted by bounty hunters...and my horse just died in the shootout. Which means I have to travel have the fucking map on foot. How the fuck you make a game with companions and don't give the player absolute control over them. How? They stand in fire, they run all over the fucking place, some enemy throws a dynamite at their feet and they just stand there, taking it like a champ. They don't ruin stealth, which is a plus. The game kinda ignores them if you haven't been detected.
So, as I was saying, don't take the charm ability. It's good, it's useful when you play as the bounty hunter but it's gonna come later and bite you in the dick and let me tell me you...once, there were better times.
Sure, you could opt not to recruit her in the first place but you kinda need all the firepower you can get for that fight because you need to end it fast before things get out of hand. There's molotovs flying over you you'd think you're in an airport with planes landing and taking off, which in turn ignite the vegetation and the fire spreads all over since you're in a field and these retards (read companions), once they're on fire they run AWAY from you and because of that you can't reach them and use a healing item on them. And they don't use items in their inventory only the weapons. And if you tell them which ones. You choose this in a dialogue window: dismiss, open inventory, choose which weapon for them to use, close window. These are the options.
Whatever.

 

[Roguey]

I hope they get genuine beta feedback about this.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Started as the next, fourth character, a werewolf, a priest of the Absolution (a religion). You hunt witches (the oneirists) as they have been killing clerics to stop a prophecy whereas the priests seek to fulfill it.
I can't recruit the pigman for some reason (I think it's bugged). The weapons seem to stop at 5 star quality called legendary. They can be bought or stolen. Anything can be stolen actually. Also, good idea to read the loading tips. A lot of useful information in them that doesn't appear in tutorials.
If you have a pickaxe or shovel and 20 gold nuggets you can go to a forge and turn them in to golden ones that have infinite durability and can be used as tools but also can be equipped as melee weapons and the funny thing is that they have some range (long), have high speed (fast) and the deal the highest amount of damage so far above any other melee weapon including legendaries. So yeah, good idea to stock on gold nuggets. Very good idea to buy the safe bank as you can store your stuff there for future characters. You can also store items on the other characters but you have to travel all over the map to recruit them whereas a bank is present in most towns.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

I hope they get genuine beta feedback about this.

A lot of the weirdness that Child of Malkav is reporting on seems like fairly standard bugginess/low-priority last minute QA-pass stuff that, at least in theory, should be fixed in the final release.

Obviously we'll see if that is the case, but judging the game on second-hand impressions of a leaked beta doesn't seem particularly fair.

 

[Infinitron]

Thank you for your service in this thread, Child of Malkav.

 

[Terenty]

How old is this build you are playing?

 

[Child of Malkav]

How old is this build you are playing?

Pfft, IDK. I got it in december I think? Let me check....yeah, december 23rd Build 7884477.
But I only started playing a few days a go, when I started posting here about it.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Finished the werewolf character. There's a very tough fight before the end that cannot be avoided but can be escaped from with one of the werewolf's powers. The story and lore get more interesting.
Now started as the fifth and final character, an oneirist. Still in the beginning and her powers are an 8 meter forward teleportation power, a shield one, an invisibility + decoy power and a summon 3 electric wisps. I'll try them later. Also, I think you can only recruit 2 companions and that's why I couldn't recruit the pigman when I was playing as the werewolf. Oh well. Still annoying as shit though, having no control over your companions. The indian guy that you play as has a tornado power and a lightning storm power (which enemies close to him) and he sure likes to spam those. Start a fight? Well all of a sudden you're electrocuted and can't move and then start to float in the air together with animals, bad guys, allies and all sorts of stuff and objects and lose reputation because the bounty hunter casted charm on enemies turning them into friends and any hostile action against them causes you to lose rep and bounty hunters to ambush and ask you about your health. It's shit like this you know....

 

[V_K]

Well, it tends to be a realistc simulation, and what's more realistic than retarded friends ruining your day?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Well, finished it. The final character's story is by far the shortest one. The story was meh, not anything ground breaking. The general lore was very good. Potential for sequels in the same universe. There's no sequel bait. The final sequence is very similar to Prey, where you're being "judged". I won't spoil anything about that but I thought it was done better. There are also some ending slides about various factions or events. Mine was pretty short but I also missed tons of sidequests and didn't really explore too much. I'll leave for it for 2nd playthrough.
Took me 49 hours and 39 minutes, however I rushed the story with the last 2 characters. There are a lot of places to explore and new ones appearing when you switch characters and they're marked with an ! so you know which ones are new but I didn't explore everything not by a long shot. There are sidequests that have various rewards including golden aces so they're worth doing. For money, bounties and later on stealing and selling high quality weapons. Each vendor buys and sells only one type of item. You can't go to weapons vendor and sell hides or vests or buy anything that you would find in a general store, healing supplies only from a medic, bows and leathers only from hunter shops etc.
There's no NG+ or anything like that. Levels of difficulty are Story, Normal, Hard and they affect reaction speed of enemies and attack rate.
I'll do a second run of it and make different choices and see what changes.
Doesn't reach the greatness of Prey or Dishonored when it comes to systems and interactions, not enough variety of tools at your disposal to achieve the same creative freedom. The game was done on a budget and it shows, on this front. Not many scripted parts, you can sequence break and can lead you to believe that you bugged the story but actually it holds up pretty well to shenanigans. There were some bugged sidequests (but a small number of them), floating corpses here occasionally, really not that many bugs overall, really impressed. They should have enough time to fix these things before release. Also there are unmarked quests as well. Forgot about those.
Whatever, I'll post here again if I find anything new. I'll go slow this time around.

 

[Terenty]

Didn't read all you wrote to avoid spoilers, but how difficult is it? Can we expect challenge or is it a breeze like almost all modern games?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Didn't read all you wrote to avoid spoilers, but how difficult is it? Can we expect challenge or is it a breeze like almost all modern games?

Difficult in the beginning but easy afterwards and when I say beginning I mean after you get some money to afford better guns or if you prefer sneaking there always seems to be a path for that as well. Not difficult, resources are scarce in the beginning but a few hours later you shouldn't have a problem anymore, assuming you do bounties, loot as much as you can, break everywhere, steal as much as possible, stuff like that. There are some story moments that are difficulty spikes especially one close to the end of the

Spoiler

4th character's journey. The 3rd character also a boos fight at the end, but that was easy compared to certain mobs.

Sirens are pretty tough, ridgebacks are tough as well, werewolves are the toughest for me.

 

[Terenty]

Did you play on the hardest difficulty?

 

[Child of Malkav]

Did you play on the hardest difficulty?

No, on normal.