Hard West 2 - sequel from Ice Code Games

[toro]

 

[Roguey]

Edit: 30 seconds in and I'm already triggered by the narrator referring to his gang of train-robbers as a "posse"

They have the ESL excuse, unless an EFL localizer is to blame for it.

 

[lukaszek]

Went through few fights.

luck is less important now, it only covers percentage chance to hit? Not a resource to be spent on cool abilities. Everyone with a revolver can ricochet for free. There are also shiny ricochet surfaces scattered everywhere.
Every character got awesome button. For free, with a cooldown. One zombie gunner is throwing dynamites, another shoots shadow bullets through obstacles, while another teleport swap with enemies.
I much preferred proper gunplay of original. Not just because its more rng, it did lose part of its charm.
Cards are there, not sure if they offer anything beside passive abilities at this point

Havent seen non combat start from hard west 1. Enemies dont seem to be able to use watch ability. Cant say if elevation gives bonuses.
CYOA choices displays both known and unknown costs of actions as well as known and unknown rewards. Its bizzare. You will know that corpse you are about to rob will attack you if you pick that action.

 

[ArchAngel]

Uff I have to try this when I get home. From the trailer it looks sweet.

 

[ArchAngel]

Ok I finished the Open Beta, the worst thing about it is that it is too short :D
Overall pretty fun but easy. I didn't see any difficulty options in the game. Missions even have sub goals like "kill all enemies in one turn" LOL.. you can imagine how hard the game is when it needs to let you do stuff like that...

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

I also finished the Open Beta. It was pretty easy, but I did have fun and I liked the art direction.
And yeah it was pretty short, they choose a good cliff hanger to end the beta on.

 

[lukaszek]

did you notice any remnants of old injury/bruise system?

 

[ArchAngel]

did you notice any remnants of old injury/bruise system?

It was too easy to not get anyone downed during combat so no.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Admittedly I'm just getting into the first game -- but I've noted that they've switched developers in between this and the first game.

What's the reason behind this?

How does it all compare to the first game? My first impression of that is pretty positive (they should have really made the font size customizable though).

 

[lukaszek]

What's the reason behind this?

after phantom doctrine studio imploded

 

[Modron]

Admittedly I'm just getting into the first game -- but I've noted that they've switched developers in between this and the first game.

What's the reason behind this?

Studio was bought out by a publisher who was mainly interested in just squeezing money out of their catalog and then they ran the studio into the ground and almost every developer left. They then turned the resulting crater into a gamemill slapping the developer name on random titles and throwing it up on steam.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Admittedly I'm just getting into the first game -- but I've noted that they've switched developers in between this and the first game.

What's the reason behind this?

Studio was bought out by a publisher who was mainly interested in just squeezing money out of their catalog and then they ran the studio into the ground and almost every developer left. They then turned the resulting crater into a gamemill slapping the developer name on random titless and throwing it up on steam.

iirc the rights to make the sequel were auctioned off or something though, so I don't think they have any say in this?
idk it's confusing

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Does this thing have melee combat?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Does this thing have melee combat?

Yes, actually.
One of the characters you get specializes in smacking people in the face with a club.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

One of the characters you get

Wait so you don't create any of your own?

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

One of the characters you get

Wait so you don't create any of your own?

Nope, much like Hard West its a narrative heavy game with premade characters.
Unlike Hard West though, Hard West 2 is more like your typical RPG, with a continuous scenario rather than a series of different scenarios that piece together to form a story.

 

[Kacper Szymczak]

Admittedly I'm just getting into the first game -- but I've noted that they've switched developers in between this and the first game.

What's the reason behind this?

Studio was bought out by a publisher who was mainly interested in just squeezing money out of their catalog and then they ran the studio into the ground and almost every developer left. They then turned the resulting crater into a gamemill slapping the developer name on random titles and throwing it up on steam.

That's... actually very correct!
Except:

almost every developer left

- literally every single developer left

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Tried the beta - its pretty solid tbh fam. I personaly prefer the single focussed campaign rather than the series of small ones that were presented in the original Hard West, the gameplay is as good as the last time around and the characters are fine. Wishlisted.

 

[onemananadhisdroid]

Tried the beta - its pretty solid tbh fam. I personaly prefer the single focussed campaign rather than the series of small ones that were presented in the original Hard West, the gameplay is as good as the last time around and the characters are fine. Wishlisted.

Maybe I'm missing a thing (still comparably early), but I don't see yet how the same (save) system and campaign mode would work in Hard West 2 if it's a single campaign rather than scenarios. And that's a part of what makes the HW1 unique to me -- no manual saves, but an auto-save/checkpoint system. Meaning that, once a decision is made, you can't unmake it, except starting a scenario over completely (choice&consequence).

On my current scenario, I decided to do a dangerous sounding optional mission. This wasn't blatantly telegraphed to me luckily, but the description sounded dangerous enough. Lo and behold 2/3 of my posse were killed. I now have to tackle the final mission with just one man left standing... this isn't a dead end as such, but it can make life harder obviously. If I found it all too hard from that point, I could still restart the scenario and reach that point in a pretty short amount of time.

If it all were but a single campaign I had to do over... unless it was still divided in chapters, that is.

I can also see now how some compared the Hard to the more recently released Weird West, in particular in that regard...

 

[LESS T_T]

Demo is live now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1661050/

 

[Falksi]

This is the one game I'm really looking forward to. Fucking love the original. The best not fuck this up the cunts.

 

[ArchAngel]

Demo is live now: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1661050/

Do we know how different is that compared to that Open Beta or whatever it was before?

 

[Abu Antar]

This one launches on August 4.

 

[Tacgnol]

So it sounds like this might actually turn out to be good?

I wasn't expecting that after all the original devs left.

 

[Abu Antar]

I never played the first one. Don't know it worked the same way.

Spoiler