Jagged Alliance 3 from Haemimont Games

[ArchAngel]

Storyfag complains about story and characters but says combat is OK. LOL wtf!
Storyfags everywhere!

 

[Zombra]

The more I play this, the more I realize that not only is it a solid strategy/tactics game, it's secretly the full fledged RPG I never knew I wanted. Character advancement is much less stingy than earlier titles, with enough level-ups and new perks to keep your squad evolving even if you never hire more than a team of 6. But you CAN hire more, and in essence have multiple "parties" operating at once, calling back to the team splitting mechanic in Wasteland, which I always expected more from. Turns out this here is the realization of that ideal. When I look at the map, my primary concern isn't conquering territory (although that's important too); I'm mainly checking the Notes tab for unfinished plotlines. It's a quest log. There's so much more to pursue here than "paint the map and kill the enemies", and building up not just your roster but each individual merc scratches the RPG itch so satisfyingly. My mind is kinda blown.

 

[ArchAngel]

The more I play this, the more I realize that not only is it a solid strategy/tactics game, it's secretly the full fledged RPG I never knew I wanted. Character advancement is much less stingy than earlier titles, with enough level-ups and new perks to keep your squad evolving even if you never hire more than a team of 6. But you CAN hire more, and in essence have multiple "parties" operating at once, calling back to the team splitting mechanic in Wasteland, which I always expected more from. Turns out this here is the realization of that ideal. When I look at the map, my primary concern isn't conquering territory (although that's important too); I'm mainly checking the Notes tab for unfinished plotlines. It's a quest log. There's so much more to pursue here than "paint the map and kill the enemies", and building up not just your roster but each individual merc scratches the RPG itch so satisfyingly. My mind is kinda blown.

I get all that with JA2 1.13 that I am currently playing and also I get good combat and big battles and whole thing feels like a war.

 

[Agame]

The more I play this, the more I realize that not only is it a solid strategy/tactics game, it's secretly the full fledged RPG I never knew I wanted. Character advancement is much less stingy than earlier titles, with enough level-ups and new perks to keep your squad evolving even if you never hire more than a team of 6. But you CAN hire more, and in essence have multiple "parties" operating at once, calling back to the team splitting mechanic in Wasteland, which I always expected more from. Turns out this here is the realization of that ideal. When I look at the map, my primary concern isn't conquering territory (although that's important too); I'm mainly checking the Notes tab for unfinished plotlines. It's a quest log. There's so much more to pursue here than "paint the map and kill the enemies", and building up not just your roster but each individual merc scratches the RPG itch so satisfyingly. My mind is kinda blown.

Getting similar feeling, and I am more compelled to keep playing this than Baldurs Gape 3 (Codex game of the year/Best game of all time etc).

Dialogues are great, snappy and to the point. Like the junkyard scenario is shown to you in quick cut scene and then you just immediately pick a side and slay some fools. Nice! AAA RPG would have walls of text explaining each sides motivations. Sometimes all you need is a few sentences and some visuals, and I as a player can fill in the rest. Not to say more in depth dialogue can be good for key characters when used appropriately.

Of course Fallout already nailed this 100 years ago...

 

[Yosharian]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1084160/view/3645154111876890482

Patch hasn't dropped yet but here are the notes. Some key points:

1. Modding tools
2. Source code is going to be released
3. In addition to diamond shipments travelling over the map, now there's weapon shipments too
4. Active pause option available, issuing attacks unpauses it
5. Leadership effect on travel time nerfed
6. Overwatch firing into cover tweaked (not sure about this yet)
7. Lots of bugs fixed but still some bugs present, Audaki's mods still required to fix these
8. Almost no balance changes

 

[Grampy_Bone]

I had way more fun with this than BG3. That game I had to force myself to play, this game I couldn't put down. Sad.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Good shit.
Hope they stick to support this.

 

[Sacibengala]

This game is great and didn't even get years of early access. It should get much more praise than it has been given.

 

[ArchAngel]

Good shit.
Hope they stick to support this.

Yes. It has a chance to become a good game if they do stick with it and someone fixes the game for them.

 

[Pegultagol]

Wonder what their own patch v1.13 would be...a new difficulty mode and 'new' Bobby Ray's, anything less and I'ill be kinda disappointed.

 

[goregasm]

Still haven't picked this up, something about how the tone of it appears, is keeping me away.

It seems very..cartoonish? Or overly campy?

Is there anything remotely serious about the tone of the game?

Or is it essentially like what Bethesda did with fallout 3 in turning the campiness to 11?

JA2 had it's silly moments for sure, but I don't feel like it was the entire theme of it. JA3 seems like those moments are it's entire fucking identity...or am I off base?

 

[raeven]

Still haven't picked this up, something about how the tone of it appears, is keeping me away.

It seems very..cartoonish? Or overly campy?

Is there anything remotely serious about the tone of the game?

Or is it essentially like what Bethesda did with fallout 3 in turning the campiness to 11?

JA2 had it's silly moments for sure, but I don't feel like it was the entire theme of it. JA3 seems like those moments are it's entire fucking identity...or am I off base?

It does attempt some moments of seriousness, which clash somewhat with the otherwise campy tone.

The game is a blast though. Much more emphasis on the CRPG stuff, but also a lot more tactical mechanics to play with than previous games. The patch released yesterday plus the hotfix patch dropped today have really smoothed out the whole experience.

If you're hoping for gritty realism though you might understandably be disappointed.

 

[ropetight]

Still haven't picked this up, something about how the tone of it appears, is keeping me away.

It seems very..cartoonish? Or overly campy?

Is there anything remotely serious about the tone of the game?

Or is it essentially like what Bethesda did with fallout 3 in turning the campiness to 11?

JA2 had it's silly moments for sure, but I don't feel like it was the entire theme of it. JA3 seems like those moments are it's entire fucking identity...or am I off base?

It is goofy, but humor has different tone than self-aware fourth-wall breaking Marvel bullshit that infected everything.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Still haven't picked this up, something about how the tone of it appears, is keeping me away.

It seems very..cartoonish? Or overly campy?

Is there anything remotely serious about the tone of the game?

Or is it essentially like what Bethesda did with fallout 3 in turning the campiness to 11?

JA2 had it's silly moments for sure, but I don't feel like it was the entire theme of it. JA3 seems like those moments are it's entire fucking identity...or am I off base?

The main conflict is mostly played straight but outside of that there's a lot of screwball nonsense and on the nose pop culture references. In that regard this game to me felt like what people purport Fallout 2 to be like. One of the first things I came across past the tutorial island was a cooky archeologist dressed up like Indie (he has a whip even) who had a "magical" chicken companion, so at least I knew what I was in for and wasn't too surprised when I later ran into Karen (who wants to speak to the manager, hilarious!) or a straight-up sidequest involving Courage the Cowardly Dog.

Besides that a lot of the mercs are just way more goofy and even more one-note despite having far more lines than JA2. Igor never shuts up about vodka or UNCLE IVAN, Ice now talks like a gangbanger (dats raycest), Thor exclusively speaks in new age babble, Steroid has BIG MUSCLES, Blood is now into cooking so I hope you enjoy hearing him talk about truffles whenever he goes prone, and so on. That being said I did find some of them funny at times, but the writing isn't anywhere near as sharp as JA2.

 

[Strange Fellow]

It's very hit and miss. Some of the mercs are cool (I would say most, but not by much), others are somehow way more of a caricature than in JA2 despite having ten times more lines, like destinae vomitus says. The game had two writers, and my extreme conjecture is that one of them knew what he was doing and the other didn't. One of them is Ian Currie, incidentally.

 

[Zombra]

Yeah, a lot of the character writing either misses the tone of the originals or simply makes up completely new hooks, which don't fit well. I always loved Grunty for being an understated professional with a thick German accent and that was it - now his entire personality centers around an Oedipus complex? Why make fundamental changes to the old characters if you didn't like them? Just create new ones. Still, some of the characters are as true to the originals as you could ask for with a new voice cast. Since Tex is my favorite of all time and his personality wasn't changed at all, I can take the weak portrayals with the good. (I just wish they'd at least paid for an ESL actor, his Japanese accent is terrible.)

 

[raeven]

As an American, I found the whole Karen side quest EXTREMELY offensive!! She was a scared white woman, far from her home country, stuck in a refugee camp with a bunch of savages and yet they had the GALL to mock her misfortune, making her out to be some kind of sheltered, entitled princess!!

I've half a mind to write Haemimont a letter letting them know PRECISELY how I feel about this slanderous mischaracterization of our nations women!!

 

[Fatberg Slim]

Yeah, a lot of the character writing either misses the tone of the originals or simply makes up completely new hooks, which don't fit well. I always loved Grunty for being an understated professional with a thick German accent and that was it - now his entire personality centers around an Oedipus complex? Why make fundamental changes to the old characters if you didn't like them? Just create new ones. Still, some of the characters are as true to the originals as you could ask for with a new voice cast. Since Tex is my favorite of all time and his personality wasn't changed at all, I can take the weak portrayals with the good. (I just wish they'd at least paid for an ESL actor, his Japanese accent is terrible.)

Ah, good to know. I'll probably buy it now that I know they didn’t make him more PC. Time to saddoru appu!

Does he still have really shitty WIS? That was probably the least stereotypical thing about him, although I suppose he earned it by choosing to LARP as a cowboy.

 

[Zombra]

Fatberg Slim Tex got a substantial stat boost - he's considered "Elite" with a 90 marksmanship now, which I love - but he's still not a thinker. Anything that doesn't have to do with cowboy movies and trick shots, he has nothing to say about. Which is exactly how he should be imo. And hey, 52 Wisdom is above average!

 

[ERYFKRAD]

As an American, I found the whole Karen side quest EXTREMELY offensive!! She was a scared white woman, far from her home country, stuck in a refugee camp with a bunch of savages and yet they had the GALL to mock her misfortune, making her out to be some kind of sheltered, entitled princess!!

I've half a mind to write Haemimont a letter letting them know PRECISELY how I feel about this slanderous mischaracterizarion of our nations women!!

Karen-grade response lmao

 

[Lyric Suite]

Storyfag complains about story and characters but says combat is OK. LOL wtf!
Storyfags everywhere!

Well, call me a storyfag but modern shit writing bugs the shit out of me, even in games that aren't meant to have any story.

 

[Strange Fellow]

Been trying an ironman run while testing some mods. After a few dead starts I got a good campaign going, captured a few mines and got a full party of dudes. Then it all went wrong when we tried to assault the Good Place. Those prison dudes are quite a bit tougher and more accurate than the regular mooks, and we had a horrible start as I forgot there are moving searchlights and let everyone get spotted before we'd even breached the outer wall. That made getting up to the main building very tricky, with dudes overwatching out of every window in the place. We made it over there with only minor injuries thanks to liberal use of smoke grenades, but then got pincered by dudes coming down off the roof. Some cleverly set machine gun overwatches from the prison guards and we were done for. No one made it out alive.

But, this being a Jagged Alliance game, the death of every single hired soldier doesn't mean the end of a campaign. I put together the best B-team I could with what little cash I had in reserve, and they managed to mop up the few enemies that remained using only shitty pistols and a couple of grenades. Not sure if I'll continue given that most of the cool mercs I had yet to try are now deceased, but we'll see. At least they were avenged.

Some notes on a few of the mods I tried:

• Pinned Down: Adds proper suppression, with a tiered system of AP-decreasing status effects that get more severe the more bullets whizz past you in a turn. Works on proximity, so shooting near a cluster of enemies applies suppression on all of them. It even forces pose changes on heavily suppressed units. Very cool, but it feels like the effect triggers per attack instead of per bullet. In any case, great mod, highly recommended.
• Bleeding Mod: Adds bleeding effects to all bullets in the game, simulating the old systems of open wounds. More incoming damage means more bleed stacks means more bleeding damage per turn, and every stack of bleed decreases AP as well. Good stuff. Makes heavily wounded units a lot less effective, more in line with the old games. Also makes bandaging very important which makes the action economy more interesting. It was almost never a good use of a turn in the base game, but with this mod it is.
• Revised Wound Effects: Adds AP loss on hits. A good companion to the bleeding mod. Combine those two and getting shot is a big deal, which is great.
• Revised Autofire: Makes automatic fire work like it should, i.e. with progressively worse chance to hit for each bullet. Also sets auto damage to 100% instead of 50% like in the base game. I honestly can't tell how well it works, but it seems to make auto fire less accurate in general, which keeps the full bullet damage from being OP. It also makes enemies more dangerous, as they love to shoot bursts. Overall an improvement over the base game.
• Revised Mags: Adds magazines for guns, for mercs to keep in their personal inventories. Doesn't remove ammo from the shared stash, but makes it so that reloading directly from the stash takes triple the AP of reloading from a magazine. It's a great idea, but the implementation isn't quite there. You can't remove a magazine from a gun without scrapping it, which makes magazines very hard to come by, and some guns don't have magazines at all. In the end I enjoyed it just for making reloading cost more AP, which makes things a bit more challenging. Hopefully there's some further development on this that makes mags easier to come by.

 

[ArchAngel]

Been trying an ironman run while testing some mods. After a few dead starts I got a good campaign going, captured a few mines and got a full party of dudes. Then it all went wrong when we tried to assault the Good Place. Those prison dudes are quite a bit tougher and more accurate than the regular mooks, and we had a horrible start as I forgot there are moving searchlights and let everyone get spotted before we'd even breached the outer wall. That made getting up to the main building very tricky, with dudes overwatching out of every window in the place. We made it over there with only minor injuries thanks to liberal use of smoke grenades, but then got pincered by dudes coming down off the roof. Some cleverly set machine gun overwatches from the prison guards and we were done for. No one made it out alive.

But, this being a Jagged Alliance game, the death of every single hired soldier doesn't mean the end of a campaign. I put together the best B-team I could with what little cash I had in reserve, and they managed to mop up the few enemies that remained using only shitty pistols and a couple of grenades. Not sure if I'll continue given that most of the cool mercs I had yet to try are now deceased, but we'll see. At least they were avenged.

Some notes on a few of the mods I tried:

• Pinned Down: Adds proper suppression, with a tiered system of AP-decreasing status effects that get more severe the more bullets whizz past you in a turn. Works on proximity, so shooting near a cluster of enemies applies suppression on all of them. It even forces pose changes on heavily suppressed units. Very cool, but it feels like the effect triggers per attack instead of per bullet. In any case, great mod, highly recommended.
• Bleeding Mod: Adds bleeding effects to all bullets in the game, simulating the old systems of open wounds. More incoming damage means more bleed stacks means more bleeding damage per turn, and every stack of bleed decreases AP as well. Good stuff. Makes heavily wounded units a lot less effective, more in line with the old games. Also makes bandaging very important which makes the action economy more interesting. It was almost never a good use of a turn in the base game, but with this mod it is.
• Revised Wound Effects: Adds AP loss on hits. A good companion to the bleeding mod. Combine those two and getting shot is a big deal, which is great.
• Revised Autofire: Makes automatic fire work like it should, i.e. with progressively worse chance to hit for each bullet. Also sets auto damage to 100% instead of 50% like in the base game. I honestly can't tell how well it works, but it seems to make auto fire less accurate in general, which keeps the full bullet damage from being OP. It also makes enemies more dangerous, as they love to shoot bursts. Overall an improvement over the base game.
• Revised Mags: Adds magazines for guns, for mercs to keep in their personal inventories. Doesn't remove ammo from the shared stash, but makes it so that reloading directly from the stash takes triple the AP of reloading from a magazine. It's a great idea, but the implementation isn't quite there. You can't remove a magazine from a gun without scrapping it, which makes magazines very hard to come by, and some guns don't have magazines at all. In the end I enjoyed it just for making reloading cost more AP, which makes things a bit more challenging. Hopefully there's some further development on this that makes mags easier to come by.

Sounds like mods are already moving in a good direction. Maybe in few months up to 1 year this game will be worth playing

 

[Star Citizen]

Trusting you peeps on this one.