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

ferratilis

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It's out on GayPass as well, for those who are already cucked to it. I mean subscribed.
 

Skdursh

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Maybe they thought postponing the GOG release would reduce the incidence of piracy? Though if that's the case they may be disappointed to discover the Steam version is already available on many pirate sites regardless. It also definitely is going to piss off the people who pre-ordered GOG copies.
 

hackncrazy

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Maybe they thought postponing the GOG release would reduce the incidence of piracy? Though if that's the case they may be disappointed to discover the Steam version is already available on many pirate sites regardless. It also definitely is going to piss off the people who pre-ordered GOG copies.

I find it really hard to believe that devs are this naive when it comes to piracy.
 

Skdursh

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Maybe they thought postponing the GOG release would reduce the incidence of piracy? Though if that's the case they may be disappointed to discover the Steam version is already available on many pirate sites regardless. It also definitely is going to piss off the people who pre-ordered GOG copies.

I find it really hard to believe that devs are this naive when it comes to piracy.
They wouldn't be the first to do some majorly retarded shit in relation to piracy. Also, typically it's not the devs who have the say on when or where a game releases, that's usually left to the publishers.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth




https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1097350/view/3201503890295542359

Weird West is Out Now!
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Hello, everyone! Raf here.

We are excited and anxious to have you play Weird West and hope you will like the many things the game has to offer. We've been working very hard on this baby, for many years, with a small team of passionate experts in the immersive sim genre.

For Julien and I, our passion started with being fans of Ultima 7 and Ultima Underworld when we were kids; the immersive and simulation values we experienced back then as fascinated kids stayed with us to this day and forged our drive ever since. I created Arkane Studios in ‘99. Julien joined me shortly after and was a key member behind Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, all the way to Dishonored.

Weird West is our first attempt at a top-down immersive sim. It's a genre that hasn't really been attempted too often since immersive sims are traditionally in first person, but we believe the values translate well to the top-down angle, and it brings that comfortable nostalgic Ultima vibe that takes us back to our childhood. Because, ultimately, that's why we do the games we do; we want to give to the new generations what we received as kids: the gift of immersion. A world where players allow themselves to be whoever they want and invest themselves emotionally in the characters they meet and the places they explore.

We will keep on fixing, improving, tweaking, and balancing the game post-release utilizing community feedback via the Weird West Official Discord server and through our Suggestion Board.

Welcome to the Weird West—we hope you enjoy your stay.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...review-almost-but-not-quite-a-dishonored-crpg

Weird West review - almost, but not quite, a Dishonored CRPG
Dances with werewolves.

A bold, atmospheric yet dissatisfying ensemble RPG shooter, full of untapped promise.

The Old West has always been weird, hasn't it? A bloody daydream of plunder and desolation, heroism and nihilism, reincarnated in a thousand motley forms across generations of books, films, folk songs and campfire stories. Videogames have certainly taken it in some peculiar directions. Think of Media.Vision's Wild Arms series for PS1, where six-shooters are ancient relics wielded by chosen adventurers, or the pre-patch version of Red Dead Redemption, with its cursed physics and flying centaurs, or the dreamy vestiges of frontier life you encounter while trudging the plains of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine.

Magic is an everyday concern: town deputies sling lightning and fireballs alongside bullets. Stores are happy to trade in ectoplasm and cursed goblets alongside deerskin and copper. Quests alternate gritty pulp novel conceits with otherworldly enigmas: one moment you're squeezing a barkeep for information on a posse of kidnappers, against a backdrop of tinkling piano; the next, you're trying to make sense of a captive meteor. The realm is divided not just between settler communities and indigenous Americans, but factions of cannibals, werewolves and witches, all of them being manipulated by an off-screen illuminati of cowled figures who might as well call themselves game designers.

There's a lot going on here, but in practice, Weird West's weirdness is... hit-and-miss, much as its efforts to miniaturise the knock-on immersive chaos of the WolfEye founders' previous Dishonored games are more admirable than satisfying. It's a valiant attempt at recreating the protean intricacies of the best immersive sims with a smaller team and budget, packed with great ideas that don't quite mesh.

The best of these is body-switching. You play a member of the aforesaid cowled illuminati, who in turn plays many other characters - possessing a different person chapter by chapter care of a magical brand, in a grand, sorcerous experiment of unknown purpose. Beginning in different corners of the world map, a grimdark themepark of archetypal North American geography, each character offers not just a different playstyle but, in theory, a different perspective and set of dramatic constraints.

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You start off as Jane Bell, an ageing bounty hunter forced to saddle up for One Last Job after her partner is abducted by cannibals. Her story teaches you the basics of stealth - think viewcones and hiding in bushes - and gunplay - think crouch behind cover, plus a huge emphasis on AOE abilities and terrain traps - together with the bone relics and glittering golden cards you'll use to unlock abilities and boost your stats. She also shows you the ropes of various map mechanics, like pop-up random encounters and the game's morality system, with crimes only affecting your reputation if witnesses live to tell the tale.

It all seems comprehensible enough - an Old Western Fallout-style CRPG with a touch of the Arkane. But then you're plunged into the body of Cl'erns Qui'g, a recently transformed pigman. Qui'g has no idea who he is or rather, used to be. He's also, to say the least, unwelcome in human towns, so selling your surplus inventory can be tricky. On the upside, he can devour corpses to replenish his health.

After Qui'g comes Across Rivers, a member of the Lost Fire Nation, which are based on real-life Anishinaabe indigenous groups and written by Elizabeth LaPensée, who is of Anishinaabe descent. Across Rivers and his folk appear as protectors of the West, here to track down and purge the literal spirit of greed behind settler expansionism. Supernatural threats (and allies) aside, he has to worry about rifts with neighbouring non-indigenous trapper communities, which you might choose to heal. Fourth in line is Desidério Ríos, sharp-shooting werewolf and messiah of a quasi-evangelical religion who are searching for something called the Blood Moon. In theory, he's the mortal adversary of the final playable character, a witch initiate called upon to suture together the pieces of the grand conspiracy fleshed out by previous episodes.
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The idea of seeing the same world through different eyes describes many class-based RPGs, of course. The chaser in Weird West is that characters shape the odds for their successors, each required to deal with the consequences of the previous chapter. This is most conspicuous, of course, when it comes to major narrative choices - as Jane the bounty hunter, you can erase one particular gang of outlaws from the game, making life easier but perhaps, less exciting for the rest of the cast. But it also applies to smaller stuff, like towns rinsed of life eventually refilling with stranger threats, or side objectives carrying over between characters. Previous protagonists can also join your posse as NPCs, letting you access your previous inventory. Depending on your choices and reputation, others may become your foes.

It's a fantastic ensemble premise I'd love other games to learn from. The same sense of bubbling potential applies to the level maps, each a moody Petri dish about a minute across, curling up into parchment at the edges. These range from relatively vibrant trading hubs through isolated farms and churches to festering swamp and boneyard. Beneath the surface lie mineshafts, ice-locked treasure troves and forests of glowing cave fungus. Bigger settlements harbour shops, banks, doctors, general stores, blacksmiths and tanneries, plus a story-specific building or two. Coyote and deer roam the fringes, to be hunted for life-restoring food or pelts to craft into vests, the game's one armour item. While hardly as intricate as, say, a Hitman level, these maps reward a bit of contemplation. Their occupants follow daily cycles, locking up after dark and visiting the saloon: if you aim to rob the bank, it's advisable to do so at night.

Most maps are also primed to explode, with barrels of TNT, flammable oil or poison dumped all over, tempting your trigger finger as you crawl through the undergrowth. If Dishonored is the topline aesthetic influence on Weird West, colouring everything from the slashing inks of the character art to the singsong wispiness of the music, the game's love of self-propagating terrain hazards recalls Divinity: Original Sin 2. Rainwater conducts electricity and extinguishes dynamite fuses. Wildfire spreads in the direction of the wind; you can lay paths for it by shooting out oil barrels and lamps.

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The dead are terrain variables, too. Weird West has an unabashed interest in the many applications of corpses, going beyond garden-variety tactics like hiding them from view. Each area has an entourage of vultures, descending swiftly on the fallen and sometimes blocking your shots. Most settlements have an actual, functioning graveyard: return to the scene after a gunfight and you'll find your victims freshly interred, together with any items they were carrying. You can bury the dead yourself, which I often did while playing as the comparatively reverential Across Rivers, and the game tantalises with the thought that exposed bodies might return as zombies or something worse, though I'm not sure this ever happened during my playthrough.

Bags of potential! But while there are some nice setpieces, like the aforesaid ghost town, Weird West struggles to make the most of all these possibilities. The first warning sign, perhaps, is the top-down view, which, together with the dense graphic novel art direction, often squashes and obscures the cleverness of terrain setups, while making the collection of objects an absolute nuisance. The cast feel a bit squashed too, beyond their narrative framing - each distinguished in the hands by four abilities that are both unremarkable individually and a poor basis for a playstyle, with no modifiers to unlock and a sparse selection of combo opportunities.

The pigman and the witch are clearest cut: he's a brawler with rushdown moves and an AOE stomp; she's a kind of hacker duellist, able to teleport, absorb bullets as health, and conjure spectral clones as distractions. The others resemble everybody's awkward first stab at a Skyrim build. Jane Bell is good at forcing people to like her for 10 seconds, or kicking them into her makeshift traps. Across Rivers can't work out whether he's a sniper speed-walking through the bushes or a D&D shaman conjuring up spirit bears and (enjoyably unpredictable) tornadoes. Most disappointing of all is Desidério the werewolf, who is in practice a befuddled cleric equipped with heals, buffs and team-wide invisibility spells - the actual werewolfing is a glorified melee power-up.

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You'll spend more time thinking about the weapon abilities, like silenced rifleshots or electrical pistol rounds, and to a lesser extent, passive perks such as increased jump height or faster reloading. These latter options are shared across the cast, which means that characters ultimately blur into one, though you do need to unlock weapon abilities afresh in each chapter, which is an incentive to try out different tactics.

I could live with some underwhelming special moves. More seriously, Weird West is unable to make the most of the different and differently constrained vantage points each character gives on the game's landscape and society. The pigman gets a quest early on that makes you acceptable to human townsfolk, nipping the most intriguing element of his story in the bud. You can play out the whole werewolf arc without ever turning into a wolf; there's no lunar cycle, and thus no need to worry about things getting hairy when you're trying to (e.g.) sweet-talk the sheriff. Across Rivers eventually gains the ability to talk to roaming ghosts, but in my 30 hours with the game this was mostly the basis for additional fetchquests of the "find my favourite hat so that my soul may know peace" variety.

The maps, meanwhile, are lovely dioramas, but their dinkiness means that you seldom need to seriously search for different methods of completing objectives. There's the usual imsim spread of high or low-profile tactics - sneak through the long grass! Climb through a window or drainage vent! Set up an elaborate multikill by kicking over oil barrels! But everything feels too available, with too many options per inch of screen estate, and none of them very complex or imaginative. The game seems positively paranoid about people losing their way, at times: if there's a locked door, it's likely that most guards will have a key. You'll occasionally have the option of talking your way through a situation, but this is seldom more adventurous than a single dialogue choice, which is a shame given the period swagger and compactness of Weird West's writing.

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Gunplay is usually the most satisfying approach, but this is damning with faint praise, because the gunplay is 50 percent circle-strafing while spamming the game's incongruous but dependable bullet-time dodge, and 50 percent aimless blasting in hopes that exploding oil barrels will take care of the rest. Weird West is generally a more entertaining spectacle when you hurl things at it indiscriminately, not least because the background systems have the usual immersive sim propensity for going slightly haywire.

There's something poignant and invigorating about how the pieces of this game come back to haunt you... Other elements, however, feel like they're still searching for their place in the puzzle.

Here's an obligatory "grenade rolled down the hill" anecdote: enemies who escape your rampage may form vendettas, in faint echo of Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system. At one point I was ambushed by bandits and killed the leader. One man ran away, promising a terrible vengeance... which he showed up to carry out about 30 seconds later. I killed him and somebody else ran off, promising a terrible vengeance, which they showed up to carry out - etcetera, etcetera. I realise vengeance doesn't have a minimum cooking time but I do like a bit of suspense with my vendettas. This conga line of grudge matches ended when I ran into somebody robbing somebody else. I blind-sided the bandits, managing to murder the lot this time and stave off further reprisals. The victim engaged dialogue and thanked me profusely - all the while firing arrows into my head. Life is complicated on the frontier.

The AI in general is that familiar balance of vigilant to the point of smelling you through ceilings, and charmingly unaware, reacting to things like knocked-over buckets as though the circus is in town, then forgetting all about it. Later on, I fled a basement after killing a whole brace of characters by essentially dumping my entire supply of dynamite on the floor. I crept back down later to collect the spoils, and found that the sole survivor had made herself at home in an adjoining bedroom, living out a blissful endstate punctured by moments of acute trauma whenever she sauntered through and re-discovered a heap of incinerated corpses. I didn't have the heart to interfere.

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Weird West is a game of loose ends. As regards its unscripted narrative and world elements, that's to its advantage. Take that woman in the basement - on sneaking closer I realised that she was, in fact, a named character with a backstory. A few hours before, I'd helped reunite her with a lost friend, after stumbling on the latter's kidnapper in another town, way across the map. There's something poignant and invigorating about how the pieces of this game come back to haunt you - given a decent interval, anyway. Other elements, however, feel like they're still searching for their place in the puzzle, their potential fizzling out like dynamite in the rain. I suspect that, above all, what this eldritch vision of North America's settlement could have done with is a bit more time.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/weird-west-review

Weird West review: a breathtakingly reactive spin on classic Fallout



“Graveyard’s full,” says Timothy Hall, the man prodding the bones of the piano at the saloon in Grackle. It’s a concise expression of everything the town’s been through: the rampaging bandits, the cannibal kidnappings, the swirling tornados. Filling the graveyard has been a solemn bid for order in the wake of so much chaos.

It’s not that way in Bripton, the next town over. The graveyard there is uncannily empty, save for a similarly bare tree. But you can change that, should you so choose: shoot up the bank or fight a duel and, the next time you return to that settlement, new plots will have appeared for every life snuffed out. Weird West even suggests you head to the local cemetery to loot any bodies you’ve missed - though its reputational system implies you should ensure nobody’s watching first.

You could call this the dark fulfillment of Peter Molyneux’s promise of an acorn that, left alone, would grow into a tree in Fable. Or the perfect emblem for Weird West, a game which excels at finding concise expressions of unconstrained player choice. Or you could call it exactly what you’d hope for from a team of key Arkane veterans behind Dishonored and Prey.

It has to be said, though, that Dishonored isn’t the first game that springs to mind when stepping out onto Wolfeye Studios’ warped frontier. Instead, it’s 1997’s Fallout. It’s there in the isometric perspective; in the simple, disposable companions who function primarily as a way to draw fire and expand your inventory space. And it’s there in the cows. Something about bovine NPCs screams Fallout, regardless of their total number of heads.

But most pertinently, the influence is there in the modest maps - the homesteads and cave networks you can see almost from end to end on a single screen - and the abstracted overworld that connects them. During travel across the Weird West, time quickens to a blur, and it’s as the calendar pages flick by that the most far-reaching reactivity occurs. New sheriffs are installed to replace the dead ones. Ghost towns are slowly refilled, either by human beings or something even worse. Nature is healing, or else being paved over.


Meanwhile, your past deeds catch up with you. Bandits who once fled your bullets return to stage ambushes, looking to avenge their fallen bosses. Bodies hidden in town are discovered, and locals connect the dots back to you, the stranger passing through. As a result, the same NPCs who happily traded their wares one week might greet you with guns drawn the next. The repercussions of your gunshots echo back and forth across the desert with a convincing crack.

Rootin' Tootin' and the ol' Time Loopin'

Every so often in Weird West’s story, you’ll shift body to a new character with a different goal and backstory. Starting again - albeit with some permanent perks - is practically akin to waking up on the beach in a survival game. You’ll become accustomed to picking out the basic tools you’ll need, leaning on experience gained in a past life. It’s a system that helps keep the economic game interesting, by emptying your wallet and keeping you desperate. If you hate the idea of that, you can always go and recruit your former self as a companion. Though that idea carries with it the risk of getting them killed, which is emotionally complex to say the least.
While there are similar ideas at work in games like Watch Dogs: Legion, it’s hard to imagine Weird West’s high level consequences landing so well in a continuous open world. Rather it’s the discrete separation of settlements like Grackle and Bripton, with their clearly delineated comings and goings, that enables such meaningful punctuation. Figuring out this societal ecosystem, and how to fool it, is the metagame that’s still got me hooked on Weird West some 20 hours in. Less so the main plot which, while layered with witchy intrigue and unusual twists, typically hinges on a distant objective - forefronting your own self-set adventures.

Thankfully, the low level business of shootin’ (and rootin’, and tootin’) convinces too. Here, the primary touchpoint is Larian’s Divinity RPGs. The West is littered with flimsy receptacles, each spilling over with one volatile liquid or another - oil, rainwater, poison - just waiting to be incorporated into your plans for combat and exploration. Sure, shooting an enemy directly will kick off proceedings, but that’s boring. Better to take aim at a dangling oil lamp, coating the outlaws playing cards below and igniting the candle between them. The more ludicrous the contrivance, the better you tend to be rewarded in terms of damage and job satisfaction as a bounty hunter.


Likewise, breaking into a barricaded shop might earn the ire of the locals. But surreptitiously starting a fire which burns away any locked doors, then returning to poke around once the ash has settled? That works. It’s practically stealth. And all of this intricate interaction is marvellously intuitive. If there’s a criticism to be made, it’s that throwing lamps, barrels and other found objects takes some getting used to without an idea of their expected trajectory; any inherent human understanding of how momentum and gravity interact vanishes with the isometric perspective. Setting fire to your own feet is part of the learning process.


Where Weird West breaks away from its RPG forebears is in its rejection of turn-based fighting. Instead, it controls like a twin-stick shooter, asking you to aim and react under pressure. That might be a dealbreaker for some genre fans, but the messiness of open combat is balanced by three things: the ability to gather an AI posse about yourself, a hefty kick for knockbacks, and a Max Payne-ish dive that stretches out the seconds, giving you extra time to swing your shotgun in the right direction.

Besides, there’s plenty of pondering time to be gained by observing your quarry from the periphery. What initially appears to be a simple stealth system balloons in depth as you discover that enemies have long and meandering patrol paths - and that bringing a bounty target back alive requires a Hitman-esque separation of the prey from their bodyguards. I advise finding an opportunity to trail a lasso down a chimney and silently slide down the rope, like Killer Claus. Unlike Arkane’s Deathloop, which exemplifies the “roll with it” version of the immersive sim fantasy, Weird West encourages you to quicksave and reload often to make your middlingly-laid plans happen.


To date, my proudest achievement is the premeditated murder of one Mayor Weeks, a man with personal and professional secrets so vile that I sought him out long after our main quest business was concluded - returning to his plantation to scale the back wall and line up the perfect sniper shot on the veranda where, I knew, he liked to emerge to take the evening air.

The deed done, I was away into the night before his guards located the source of the single silenced bullet. Only once the Mayor was buried, and I miles away, did I take the reputational hit for felling a public figure. Worth it. Graveyard’s full, and nature is healing.

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/weird-west-review/

WEIRD WEST REVIEW
Knee-deep in supernatural horror.

I’ve lived many lives as I’ve travelled around the Weird West. Bounty hunter, werewolf, pigman—that was a memorable one. And in every body I made the West a little better, or a little worse. As much as it’s a game about constant micro decision-making—stealth or direct assault; Molotov cocktail and oil barrel or revolver and John Woo slow-mo dive—Weird West is just as concerned with the bigger picture as other immersive sims, including Dishonored and Prey.

That bigger picture begins in a familiar place: with a bounty hunter coming out of retirement to locate her kidnapped husband. For the first few hours, I was tangling with outlaws in typical Wild West fashion and wondering where all the weirdness was. You buy supplies in towns, and pick up bounties before heading out, traversing an open world map stuffed with abandoned mines, ghost towns, and isolated homesteads. More often than not, these locations are filled with enemies you can either sneak past or fill with lead, via fast-paced, top-down combat.

It may be that I was cursed with the knowledge that Weird West’s creative director Raphaël Colantonio was co-director of the original Dishonored, and director of Prey, but I couldn’t help comparing Weird West to Arkane’s immersive sims—at least at first. The similarities are there, particularly when you enter a hostile environment offering various methods of approach, but the action isn’t as slick or creative as in Arkane’s games. Unlockable abilities primarily increase your damage output, add elemental effects, or let you hit multiple targets—you can’t meaningfully synergise abilities, as you can with the Outsider powers in Dishonored 2.

Stealth, typically my preferred approach, is certainly possible in Weird West, but I used it more as an opening salvo, as a prelude to the inevitable massacre when it all went wrong. That’s partly because the fiction encourages it—you’re fighting eminently killable assholes, be they gang-members, monstrous sirens, or settlers driven feral by gold—and partly because of the murky visual style, which sacrifices readability for a grungy comic book aesthetic.

I was forever zooming in, to better make out the characters and environment, and zooming out for an overview of the level, and generally getting myself spotted in the process. When fighting does break out, it’s refreshingly and mercifully quick. However, between that dingy visual style, and an overly complex twin-stick control scheme, I never found it all that enjoyable.

My main takeaway from the top-down sneaking and shooting is that Desperados III developer Mimimi Games does it a whole lot better. Thankfully, there’s far more to Weird West than its combat.

I mentioned the pigman earlier, and now it’s time that Chekov’s gun went off. The second story in this anthology puts you in the trotters of an unholy man-pig mashup, who leaves his swamp to enact revenge upon the witch that did this to him. All that weirdness comes out in a flood, as you traipse across the world for clues to your identity. You’ll chat with a sentient, foul-mouthed sentient tree and battle witches in ancient, subterranean temples.

Structurally, all five stories are similar, playing out as miniature CRPGs complete with main and side quests, and companions who can tag along on the adventure. You can even recruit the protagonists of the previous stories, each of whom has been marked by a mystical brand. With each new chapter, you see even more of the West’s weirdness, until you’re ankle deep in an overarching narrative concerning ancient entities and the body-hopping Passenger. It’s a fascinating story with memorable characters including Pigman Joe, who has been cursed so he can only communicate in rhyme. I couldn’t wait to see how it all played out, and was left pretty satisfied by the conclusion.

While each new chapter is a fresh start of sorts, certain elements are carried across. Passive character perks persist through the whole game, while the former protagonists retain their inventories, reducing the need to gather supplies in later chapters. But the main thing that persists is the state of the West, which is shaped by your major and minor decisions.

To give an example—and it’s a spoiler for the second chapter—you can choose to leave your fellow pigmen as soulless husks, or return their missing souls to their bodies. Make the second choice and they’ll go out into society, turning up in subsequent chapters as NPCs. Not every decision is as notable—some are mere footnotes in the daily news—but you do feel like you’re having an impact on the world.

You can also turn settlements into ghost towns by wiping out their inhabitants. And that’s not a part of the storyline, just something you can do if you want to. Kill everyone in the town of Grackle, from the shopkeepers to the sheriff, and the place will become abandoned. Bandits might even have moved in, next time you visit. Similarly, if you clear out a bandit-occupied town, its former residents may eventually return to their homes.

In truth, one town is much like any other, so you’ll hardly miss one if it falls to ruin, but the possibility is exciting—the thought that almost anyone can be killed, and the game will roll with it. I tested this at one point, when a story ally laid an ambush for me, attacking in a scripted event on the road to an objective. I died several times trying to win the ensuing battle—until I reloaded an earlier save and killed the ally before she could turn on me. The ambush still happened, but my attackers were now a woman short.

I’m sure there will be better examples once Weird West is out in the wild, and I keenly await those more creative anecdotes. Weird West’s conclusion takes it all into account, so be mindful of the people you kill, of all the decisions you make. Far more than a lot of games with branching stories and morality systems, Weird West is watching everything you do.

THE VERDICT
79

WEIRD WEST
Look past the murky aesthetic and clunky combat: this is an exciting fusion of immersive sim and CRPG.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
Weird West encourages you to quicksave and reload often to make your middlingly-laid plans happen.
In this alternate universe, the West was won by trying a bunch of ideas so crazy they just might work… and if they don’t, hitting the quick-load button to revert to an earlier save and trying something even crazier until you pull it off.
The game has a quick save feature that players are told to use before trying something, whether that’s a headstrong charge into an outlaw camp, or finally killing that annoying NPC that’s important to the story. Just make sure you do hit that quicksave first because even the most important NPCs are not invincible in the Weird West.
The game will let you save at pretty much any point by hitting the F5 key, and you’ll want to quicksave often to protect yourself from accidental chaos.


:backawayslowly:
Might as well just make you invulnerable by default, can't expect modern gaymers to live with anything but a perfect playthrough after all.
 

toro

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I wanted to try the game but I just witnessed two streamers giving up on the game.

So, I think I will wait a couple of days.

Technical issues or didn't like it? It worked first time for me and even the menu thing fixed itself quickly.

They didn't like it. One of them was quite disappointed but honestly I never saw them before today therefore I don't know anything about their taste or skills.

Controls are consolized garbage.
Everyone's a strong woman or a nig or both.

Nothing out of the ordinary for a modern game so far. :smug:

except the price
 

Fedora Master

Arcane
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Jun 28, 2017
Messages
28,040
Weird West encourages you to quicksave and reload often to make your middlingly-laid plans happen.
In this alternate universe, the West was won by trying a bunch of ideas so crazy they just might work… and if they don’t, hitting the quick-load button to revert to an earlier save and trying something even crazier until you pull it off.
The game has a quick save feature that players are told to use before trying something, whether that’s a headstrong charge into an outlaw camp, or finally killing that annoying NPC that’s important to the story. Just make sure you do hit that quicksave first because even the most important NPCs are not invincible in the Weird West.
The game will let you save at pretty much any point by hitting the F5 key, and you’ll want to quicksave often to protect yourself from accidental chaos.


:backawayslowly:
Might as well just make you invulnerable by default, can't expect modern gaymers to live with anything but a perfect playthrough after all.

They clearly saw the Dishonored gameplay where you "create chaos" as something good.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
In a somewhat rare act of cultural responsibility in white media, the devs worked with Anishinaabe and Métis consultant, writer/narrative director Dr. Elizabeth LaPensée. The game’s fictional Lost Fire nation is based on the Anishinaabe nation, and is one of few games (if any) to feature the Anishinaabe language. It’s an engaging portrayal that feels like a step up from mainstream pop culture that often divorces or diminishes native folklore from their original settings. There’s also an effort to reimagine the lives of minorities who suffered in the historic west – East Asians are common as well as Black and Latinx characters. While I’m unqualified to speak about First Nations culture, I’m curious about why some narrative choices were even made in the first place. The white gaze is an inherent part of the western genre, and it’s very difficult to mitigate the genre’s racist hallmarks in fiction when the core storytellers are white.


Someone actually typed this out, it's not a paragraph generated by AI dungeon.
:avatard:
 

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