Wasteland Early Personal Reviews/Impressions

[Onholyservicebound]

No it isn't, there are plenty of ways to complete quests. The fact that you don't use skills doesn't make it less of an RPG, there are plenty of uses for all of them, as for speech, having a high ceiling for checks actually doesn't help your point, if you had built a character whose role was more focused on speech you would be rewarded by the game, you know, like what happens in RPGs. Melee works well for me, my melee characters outdo some of my ranged characters(Sniper) and they're certainly more durable, a dedicated ranged character tends to be too squishy to stand toe to toe with enemies, and since a lot of the later ones have enough ap for quick rushes you end up wasting ap to move away from under pressure. Melee is good for that. My current melee character does 130+ damage per hit and is able to take a hit from the mech cannon and survive.
I agree on armour, never felt that it was a detriment however, still use it, but it could be better.

As for ag center, I wouldn't know, because I never do it, but if I did and had a dedicated scientist/surgeon then I simply wouldn't recruit rose, because I have the choice not to, there are plenty of character in the game and by the time you get to the second half you decide who fits your party composition.
Say what you will about this game, but it isn't light on RPG elements, especially compared to the recent kickstarters, and even when compared to older RPGs. (It's got a hell of a lot more c&c than Fallout.)

 

[Mortmal]

I did a character focused on speech and leadership, i find theres not enough options, game is 90% combat. The high ceiling is problematic, not only theres not many options but if you are missing one point it can completely screw a mission arc, just for one point . Theres not even a % success rate its all win or loss.
I never noticed such high melee crit, maybe they only shine endgame .Melee was not worth it a shotgun guy do as much , point blank on multiple targets than a melee guy do on one. Melee character has more hp , but thats not really usefull when you could simply deal way more dps with range, ambush at 360° and sometimes dont even let enemies come any closer.Kiting is even possible with high movement, so armor hinder movement .All i did during the game is place my character in line, shoot with sniper, ambush , kill the bagder/raider/robot(do i miss one enemy type?i killed those a lot), rince repeat.The melee guy is sitting next to the others.

As for recruiting rose, by then you dont have much choice.

 

[Volourn]

."You need to read a walkthrough before creating your char, knowing companions stats before hand."

No, you don't. Only if you are trying to 'cheese' the game and get the perfect combo. At the very least, your first playthrough, shouldn't be about 'perfetion'. FFS


"Theres many skills i never use , even speech one , and when i finally get an option to use them"

Most skills are used a lot and even the weaker skills (not counting barter) have their uses. Dialogue skills open up some good stuff.


"The rpg part is light too,few way to complete a quest."

Not counting fetch quests, plenty of quests have multiple ways to complete them.


"melee is usless, now i notice armor is useless too"

Melee is useful. It can do lots of damage and crits frequently. Armour is okay but can definitely be improved.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Mortmal
So what? Then the outcome changes, and this game is actually reactive to those failures, which is cool. When I left AZ there was a lot of parts of the game that I genuinely failed, I felt the weight of my choices, in followers, and even my skill builds. Anyway I don't think skill checks are as high as you're making it out to be, I only missed about 3-4 of them, and I was okay with that, in some instances I encountered checks where there were lower ones for different rewards, so that statement is false, of course I can only think of two off of the top of my head, but they aren't necessary.
When I miss a check I don't get butthurt about it, it just gives me more reason to want to replay the game.

Well, despite your opinion almost everyone bitches about how useless shotguns are, I don't have a shotgun character, but my late game melee characters outshine my guns characters in sheer damage and survivability. Since release I've seen every weapon(Save assault rifles) complained about, so I'm sceptical.

Nope, animals, humans, and robots are the only types of enemies, idk what other type of enemy you're looking for, lol.

Go a different route, trade her in later at the citadel, remove redundancies based off on your party member's specialities. I didn't use her, or anyone who had the exact same build as one of my rangers.
I think this is a great game, it has shit all to do with sea or BN, I think it's hella reactive, has nice c&c, is replayable, character building/creation is fun, it's a solid RPG and reminds me of the classics I like. Not that it isn't without flaws, despite all that dev time it does lack polish, hopefully the devs are reading the critique and continue to improve it after the release like D:OS did.(Within reason, don't go and nerf everything like morons.)
My biggest issues are bugs and immersion related, but yes the armor scaling is bad as well, especially in a Fallout type game. The attempt at balance with the movement speed trade-off was stupid, it would be nice if they removed that.

 

[RK47]

I don't really like how the 'team switching' aspect works.
Annoyed to keep repeating the same ritual of:
1. Walk Perception Guy over to Box: Confirm There is no Trap. If there is a demo trap, go to 2. If there is an Alarm go to 3. If it's locked, go to 4. If not, go to 5.
2. Disarm Trap with Demo Guy.
3. Disarm Alarm with Alarm Guy.
4. Lockpick / Brute force with Lockpick / Brute Force guy.
5. Open the damn box.

Why not just add in a right click context menu where you can 'Use highest Demo Guy' / 'Use Highest Lockpicking Guy'.
I do recall having to do the same in JA2, but the whole 'locked container' occurs much less in that game. In WL2 it seems like there are more than a dozen in every map.
And the 'use shovel' to dig is hilarious. Why can't there just be a simple inventory check for a shovel? Why so anal about it?

 

[Rhalle]

That stuff is essentially a relic of WL1.

One of the things WL2 doesn't do just because WL1 did it is allow access to all weapons from the very beginning.

In WL1 everyone started with pistols and you didn't see the stronger weapons like assault rifles and heavy weapons until later in the game.

This ultimately may be responsible for the weapon imbalance issue that people way deeper into the game have discussed.

Already re-rolled party and might do it again.



If anyone else is experiencing the horrific screen tearing, the answer for me on an ATI GPU was to:

* Turn off AA and SSAO in the in-game options; turn on vsync and force on AF

In Catalyst Control Center:

*Override Force on AA 4x or 8x with multisampling; Override Force on AF @ 16x; Force on Vsync; Turn on Triple Buffering

That provides the best visuals and least tearing for me.

Turning on AA or SSAO with the in-game options leads to the ridiculous amount of tearing regardless of other settings.

 

[Rhalle]

I don't really like how the 'team switching' aspect works.
Annoyed to keep repeating the same ritual of:
1. Walk Perception Guy over to Box: Confirm There is no Trap. If there is a demo trap, go to 2. If there is an Alarm go to 3. If it's locked, go to 4. If not, go to 5.
2. Disarm Trap with Demo Guy.
3. Disarm Alarm with Alarm Guy.
4. Lockpick / Brute force with Lockpick / Brute Force guy.
5. Open the damn box.

Why not just add in a right click context menu where you can 'Use highest Demo Guy' / 'Use Highest Lockpicking Guy'.
I do recall having to do the same in JA2, but the whole 'locked container' occurs much less in that game. In WL2 it seems like there are more than a dozen in every map.
And the 'use shovel' to dig is hilarious. Why can't there just be a simple inventory check for a shovel? Why so anal about it?

I actually made an idiot savant character in the hopes of just making him do all the perception and applied skills. He's almost good enough; I really need to reroll him minus a skill or two for him to be more effective.

 

[RK47]

I actually made an idiot savant character in the hopes of just making him do all the perception and applied skills. He's almost good enough; I really need to reroll him minus a skill or two for him to be more effective.

I know some people just meta with the companions, but I dunno - I'm never more annoyed with a locked container in RPG than this game.
The delayed response.
The step-by-step.
Just to loot a bunch of scraps from generic containers.
Are they seriously expecting a dopamine rush from the 'chorus of FX' upon compeltion and SUCCESS +8XP word pop?

I contrast this with a short of session in New Vegas last night where I ran from Goodsprings to Vegas in 3 hours, just looting what I can and killing what I could, running from shit that's too strong. It felt like the fun to bullshit time spent is on a better ratio than WL2.
The camera angle too is pretty irritating in Ag Centre. Edges that cover boxes. Walls that had to be 'navigated by camera', I was pretty happy when the indoor portions were done with.
A button for preset camera angles would've been a good solution to this.

 

[Space Satan]

Space Satan 's retartet complaints
-As annoying as that part of the game was I can understand the aim, slow moving overwhelming zombie horde a la the old films. They didn't quite get it though, since even with time they don't become a threat. Funny enough more numbers would probably fix that, yet make the experience even slower.
-Yeah that's an actual bug that's been reported, it's hilarious, but not a concious design choice.
-I didn't even know that was a thing, maybe that's why I've been getting so few quests resolved.. With the promotion rate being higher I don't see why it was still necessary to have party CHA matter, everyone can benefit from more exp.
-Mech repair isn't useless unless you're a save-scummer, I've found plenty of uses for it throughout the game. Alarm disarming however, is, it seems like something that would have fit nicely with stealth, but since that isn't an option and you almost always kill the enemies first and loot later, it's never useful, hasn't been yet for me at least.
-Your heavy weapons complaint is stupid, that's exactly how HW are supposed to function.

Slow moving-high damage enemies are ok, but slow waiting 5 minutes for n+1 zombies to finish their crawl is a shitty design. Nothing prevents devs from changing thei crawl speed so they can move their three or four tiles in several seconds like other enemies.
- That's the point Charisma doesnot retaded to quest solving - it just locks out some NPCs from being recruited, like Pizepi mutant woman.
- There's too few things to repair to make this skill useful even with maxing it out. Same with alarms - one area could feature lots of alarms(Prison) while entire game is almost devoid of it.
- Heavy weapons lack the balance aspect - usually HW is high-effective - high-cost niche, meaning consuming ammo yet dealing lots of damage thus making them cost-effective. In W2 ammo is MUCH more valuable and HW is not cost effective when used by high HW skill char.
Speed, HW ammo cost-effectiveness and zombie movement sped could be fixed in patches, skill usage could not, unless game features severe overhaul.

 

[Volourn]

"Since release I've seen every weapon(Save assault rifles) complained about, so I'm sceptical."

THIS

 

[Cyberarmy]

I don't really like how the 'team switching' aspect works.
Annoyed to keep repeating the same ritual of:
1. Walk Perception Guy over to Box: Confirm There is no Trap. If there is a demo trap, go to 2. If there is an Alarm go to 3. If it's locked, go to 4. If not, go to 5.
2. Disarm Trap with Demo Guy.
3. Disarm Alarm with Alarm Guy.
4. Lockpick / Brute force with Lockpick / Brute Force guy.
5. Open the damn box.

Why not just add in a right click context menu where you can 'Use highest Demo Guy' / 'Use Highest Lockpicking Guy'.
I do recall having to do the same in JA2, but the whole 'locked container' occurs much less in that game. In WL2 it seems like there are more than a dozen in every map.
And the 'use shovel' to dig is hilarious. Why can't there just be a simple inventory check for a shovel? Why so anal about it?

This problem can be easly solved with having less containers, games really slows down when you enter a locked room full with five trapped and locked chest/safe.

 

[Pope Amole II]

I know some people just meta with the companions, but I dunno - I'm never more annoyed with a locked container in RPG than this game.
The delayed response.
The step-by-step.
Just to loot a bunch of scraps from generic containers.

Try this:
https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8727

Doesn't fix all the problem, but at least cuts out some of the filler.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Only the no cheat version of that is worth getting, too bad it doesn't include the movement speed, as long as it's an out of combat thing I don't see how it's much of a cheat.

Inxile clearly took a quantity over quality approach with the loot system, and while I can't relate to some people's complaints due to not wasting time save-scumming, and finding the skill bars oddly satisfying, it's nice to have a mod that speeds up the process.(Especially since I've put so many hours into this game already.)

 

[Ebola1717]

So I'm like 3 hours in, and does this game get better? It's been a linear crawl so far, minus the overworld map. All combat, with the occassional speech check to avoid a combat. Will there be hub zones and interesting quests after I slog through this, or is this it?

 

[Volourn]

Linear? If this game is linear, what games do you consider non linear?


\Also, if you don't like it, drop it and move on.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

Linear doesn't mean what you think it means anymore, it isn't about where you can go and what order you can do things, it's about not having the dreaded corridor maps. It's actually rather sickening to hear this same critique brought up on various games. The game isn't linear, even in the first 3 hours, the maps themselves aren't even linear, not that that shit matters, non-linearity should be valued where it matters, and yeah, you can do things in almost any order you please, and there are many different solutions to quests and even different outcomes for the game.

The game is around 50 hours long, arguable longer than Fallout 2, there's a lot more to the game, but there's also a lot more combat, some good, some bad, hub towns? I don't know the strict definition as it seems to change depending on whose using it to bitch about what game, but I'd say there are a few.

 

[Zetor]

The radio conversation in the spoiler block below gave me a whole lotta WL1 vibes... I assume there were others who read the "red herring" entries in the paragraph book?

Spoiler

Spoiler

Also, this means that my embarrassing Wasteland1 fanfic I wrote about the Serpioids when I was 14 is now validated! WOO!

e: also,

Spoiler

 

[Disgruntled]

I havent gotten very far, but my first impressions are reasonably good. All the various stats and character specializations have got me invested into the game so its glossing over the rough edges.
Combat is fun but I feel like my party is rooted to the ground somewhat, getting rushed in every encounter so far without the option of going into ambush beforehand.

The annoying part is feeling like I have to save scum every 5 minutes or face going through busywork before a vital error occurs. Maybe thats just the AG centre compounding the issue with those damn explosive plants, obscured vision and sprinting rabbits.

 

[Norfleet]

Combat is fun but I feel like my party is rooted to the ground somewhat, getting rushed in every encounter so far without the option of going into ambush beforehand.

Oh, yeah, the moment you fire your first shot, the Zerg Rush begins. It helps to make sure everyone is in position before the shot is fired and that you make sure everything is properly aligned, which is annoying because the Show Grid option is broken and doesn't work, and pushing the button does nothing.

I still don't get why enemies are so insanely fast, though. How many freaking APs do they HAVE? I fought an enemy that was apparently able to run ALL the way from outside the visible radius, then attack...then run to another team member, attack THAT one, too, and then run to a THIRD person and ATTACK HIM ALSO. How many APs would that cost? And WHY WOULD IT DO THAT?

 

[Disgruntled]

Id like to think it would be simple to fix the AP and initiative balance with a few value tweaks, but I havent been following the game through its various beta builds.
Was the game too easy without that boost to enemies?

 

[RK47]

if u find the game too easy its recommended to drop angela. shes level 14 while you're lvl 1 and kills everything even with the wrench.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Here is my early personal impression:

This game would be a lot better if they simply copied the various game mechancis from underrail. A lot better.

 

[RK47]

Confirmed Barter is essentially worthless. Oh well.

 

[Owlish]

Finished the game. Bravo. Long live Hitler.

Spoiler

Matthias self-owned.

 

[Owlish]

The ending was the shit except for the faggoty Bioware last battle crap.