I see what you did there.
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Codex Review RPG Codex Review: Wasteland 3
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
I see what you did there.
Base game is good. I hear the DLCs are shit though. Maybe someone can confirm?
dacencora
Guest
I know you’re inclined towards single-character RPGs but ATOM is single-character isn’t it? The one thing that always pulled me to Wasteland vs ATOM is that Wasteland 2/3 have full party control.
There are companions in ATOM, but you don't have full control over them.
YMMV. This is my mini-review which is somewhat more negative than Roguey's:
Grunker said:Oki dokes, done.
The long tl;dr: I half-heartedly praised Wasteland 2 after I finished it. In retrospect, I shouldn't have. Looking back, the contemporary starvation of RPGs and hope in the Kickstarter generation made me praise a game that was sub-mediocre, just because it, in principle, had a lot of the bells and whistles I had been missing so much. Fortunately, I am no longer as RPG-deprived as most codexers are pussy-deprived, and thus, Wasteland 3 can be judged on its own merits. And here's the good news: Wasteland 3 is better than its predecessors. It players better, has much better presentation and has roughly the same sort of quest design - its predecessors only strength, which is probably why @Vault Dweller praised it (I know, what a sellout, right?). It has a good amount of C&C though less than it gives itself credit for. So that's a recommend right? Kiiiiiiindda? Sortta? Maybe? A little bit?
tl;dr of the tl;dr: I saw a review headline calling the game "a good but unremarkable RPG." That's pretty close to the truth. You won't hate it but you also won't remember it.
OK onto some more details.
Disclaimer: I played on Supreme Jerk difficulty and went through the entire game without the Explosives skill, meaning I couldn't open combat with a huge explosion that nuked several opponents. Thinking about it now, I think this vastly improved my enjoyment of the combat. I see a lot of posts talking about how easy the game is, and I can only imagine this being the case if you open each fight by one-shotting a group of enemies. The game was not exactly hard, but my Sniper-opener only took out at most one guy (typically actually just 3/4 of that dude's health bar), so enemies almost always got 1 or 2 rounds to try to fight back. You can do a lot to make this game piss easy if you set up fights probably, but go in by just firing a single shot to get the drop on some dudes and there's some decent difficulty there. I did reload a lot of fights early game and some mid game. After that, of course, the game becomes incredibly easy unless you fuck up which does happen. Before I started the game, @Haplo recommended I go with just 4 characters. I think that would be fine as well - I went with 6 and no Explosives-skill, and I think the results might be close in terms of difficulty.
The above to say: I may have enjoyed combat more because I had an actual challenge. I imagine Explosives can reduce that significantly.
Positives:
- Surprisingly, an enjoyable enough part of Wasteland 3 is the main plot and cast of characters (yeah I know, did not see that coming). Mainly, the characters have believable enough motivations and ye olde "choose the lesser evil"-strategy used by the game works juuuust fine. I've seen a lot of posts here being mad about their selection of choices during the end game ("Patriarch is an idiot," "Angela Deth's choices make no sense" etc.), but that sounds like a bunch of whining over not being able to choose a "good ending" to me. Yeah the Patriarch is a complete tyrant and even though the game portrays him as brilliant he is still retarded enough to think there's an heir hidden in Liberty, but have you checked history my dudes? If anything, the Patriarch is a bit too much copy-paste over every conqueror ever when it comes to that stuff. Every god damn brilliant warlord ever left his empire to some damn idiot kid. And yes, Angela Deth's "solution" is morally dubious at best and she is so idealistic she completely overlooks the institutions that bring stability to Colorado, plus her idealism gets innocents killed in what can only be described as downright nefarious ways (like her plans with Cordite). That's the whole point of her character - fixating so strongly on one evil it justifies any means in the pursuit of its destruction. But have you dealt with idealists before? The French Revolution gave us democracy and abolished slavery... after a few years of some of the most gaudy villainy in history. And the most evil people were also the most right about a bunch of political idealism - for example, most of the early revolutionaries were against freeing the slaves on Haiti. Among the few who advocated for its abolition, the one with the loudest voice was none other than Robespierre (small fry at the time), who ended up as the most insanely evil fucker of them all (well, apart from people like Saint-Just maybe). So yeah I think the game actually does a decent job of making its hard choices be sensible and not forcing you to do dumb shit for no reason (the DLC excluded - it's retarded). I mean its not poetry or great literature or anything but it's a good, simple story with characters that make sense and have qualities and flaws. It's a dark day when that is praiseworthy but it is not the norm for a video game story to be actually engaging and live up to the most basic criteria of OK writing. About the only thing I found completely mystifying was Connie Zeng being able to convert half the rangers to shoot her brethren in a couple of days and then a handful of refugees (who I had done nothing but help *except* imprisoning their leader) attacking a bunch of armed guys in power armor. But that's minor stuff - beyond that, the plot and characters were simple, but worked. It's your basic power vacuum tale of woe. Nothing crazy, nothing that comes near to even stuff like New Vegas in terms of weaving game mechanics into that tale or anything. But it was functional. I went into this game expecting not to give 0.1 percent of a fuck about the story, and ended up giving it a shrugging "yeah, it's alright." So 1 - 0 Wasteland 3, here.
- The best part of the game, however, was the presentation. I LOVED the Mad Max-inspired feel of everything - the armors, the clothes, the cars, the enemies, the buildings, some of the writing, the voice-acting, just about everything was all Max 2 and Fury Road, and boy it fucking worked. It's been a long time since I really enjoyed an audio-visual presentation in a game this much, an atmosphere, if you will, but I gotta say WL3 really fucking did it for me. I mean just take that opening cinematic with the mines on the lake, leading up to a Mad Max-inspired cultist screaming about the Deluge of Blood, while you kill his people to the tune of a hugely atmospheric and melancholic version of 'Blood of the Lamb.' Now I want every RPG ever to play dramatic remixes of country's best evergreens during key fights. Can we go to Tennesee in Bloodlines 3 and kill some anarchs while listening to a reimagining of Casey's Last Ride, please? It's also been a long time since I've had cause to praise voice acting, which is ironic considering how prevalent voice acting is these days, but many of these characters just sound great and evoke exactly the archetypes they're meant to. A few stand out as fantastic. All in all, WL3's presentation could have been close to Bloodlines' gold standard if it wasn't for the "humor" (see negatives). As is, it's at least as good as Shadowrun: Dragonfall - Dragonfall has WL3 beat on atmosphere and thematic cohesion but obviously loses in terms of graphical presentation. The presentation is also the chief reason that the next point is a positive:
- The gameplay. OK OK listen. It's not great, but it's not bad either to be honest. The combat is fairly simple, it's unbalanced, and the systems are barely functioning. For some reason playing it is just an OK time anyway. I suspect the spotless presentation is the primary reason again - almost every gun feels so satisfying to fire, the sound design is just amazing (the oomph of some of these weapons shames most modern shooters) and the visual feedback is great. But there's also some cool skinner box design. I always felt good leveling up because it almost always made some part of combat easier for that character, or allowed me to use a new item, or go back and complete a skill check, or whatever. Combat (at least without explosives) actually has some amount of tactical diversity, even as simple as it is. Don't get me wrong: great RPG combat this definetely ain't, but to lend a Codex cliché, it's "OK for what it is." And what it is, is enough of an improvement on the WL2 formula that you shrug and go "fair enough." WL2's main problem was the complete lack of anything beyond a basic "Fire" button in terms of tactical choice in combat. Between consumables, perks and weapon abilities, you got a bit more stuff here. Oh, and the enemy design ranges from good to generic. Some enemies are really cool - especially robots, while human opponents almost always boil down to each faction having a melee guy, a flamethrower-guy, a sniper guy, an assault rifle guy, a... you get the gist of it.
- Quest design. It's nothing incredible, but most quests have branching paths and a good number of outcomes. There are very few quests which was a good decision because it means the quests that are there have a sufficient amount of work put into them. They often have a decent build-up, some key highlight stages, some parts that can be approached in multiple ways, and then a few different results based on your choices. Cool. There are even multiple instances where NPCs will recall ALOT of your past decisions and potentially lock you out of future choices depending on your past choice-resume. So in contrast to, say, Pillars of Eternity's choice recall scene (courtroom scene), your past decisions actually do have one or two chances to shine beyond the ending slides. Even if it is just a character dividing them all into "what I like" and "what I don't like" and then summing up to decide your fate.
Whatever:
- The factions, reputation system and "fame." It's mostly window dressing and end slides. There are some compelling choices here and some good thematic storytelling, but there's no Vegas-esque flowchart of player choice to influence faction states. Factions like the One-Hundred Families are really well structured and function well within the story, but they lack engaging characters to flesh them out. Others like the Gippers are taken straight out of Fallout 4 and remind you why the game's worst aspect is its attempts at "humor."
Negatives:
- The braindead "humor", which threatens to completely destroy the strengths of the story and the presentation. Just like the previous games, we're in full Fallout 4-territory here, where the Wasteland is often more fun fair for children than it is the bleak and final stages of a waning humanity. I enjoy comedy (well, mostly dry and laconic sarcasm, but bear with me), but is a golden toaster companion "funny"? Did anyone ever laugh when they saw that? Is there an actual, breathing person out there who saw that golden toaster pop out and went "HEH! NOW THAT IS FUNNY!" while emoting human sounds of surprise at the scathing wit on display? Did Brian Fargo laugh? Did the developers? They must have, right? Someone wrote that and coded it and they all went "that is funny." But I think they did it without laughing. It's one of those things where you and your friend decide something is "funny" because it's "random", but you don't laugh at it, or the laugh is forced, generated by the high spirits of companionship rather than the substance of the joke. It's just the best your feeble unfunny minds could produce when you were put on the spot and had to make a joke. Your cammeradie and the joy of the moment is what made you think it was fun - but anyone who has ever tried telling such a story to others knows the awkward silence after a joke that only works if you were there. Or how about Dog Shit as a crafting component, did that prompt any actual players to laugh? Even just giggle? In WL1 and WL2 it didn't really make a difference that all this silly shit was there because the story and "characters" were ass anyway so who gives a fuck. But WL3 actually wants to tell a compelling story, it wants to discuss SERIOUS BUSINESS POLITICAL STUFF about power and regency and governance and it wants to take notes from Fallout: New Vegas and ask whether democracy is desirable or even possible in a stage of societal degeneracy and shit like that, it wants YOU to feel like you can't just go to your typical RPG-book of "how to do Neutral Good and make everyone win always" but instead THINK about the context of your situation and what choices that situation dictates, and it wants you to FEEL like all your options are shit because realpolitik means that the premise of your decisions force them to be suboptimal and as just one cog in the machine you can't do shit about that even if you are powerful, and aaaaaaaall that just doesn't work when the setting is as implicitly silly and frankly fucking juvenile as Wasteland is. And more importantly, when the silly shit isn't just presented as tongue-in-cheek in-jokes that aren't meant to be part of the actual "realness" of the game's fiction, but is actually taken at face value by the world and the characters who inhabit it - something that your characters can talk about and recognize as "how the world works." I recall distinctly a point where Lucia Wesson, one of the competently written characters with even more competent voice acting, commented on me cloning myself asking: "eh... are we really doing that?" She asked this while wearing a gimp mask featuring two pink dildos as horns, granting her +2 penetration (she's a pistol user, and pistols have shit penetration). This is not Fallout 2's referencial or tongue-in-cheek humor, where the fiction contract often strongly implies that the jokes aren't "real" in the sense that they're not actually part of the fiction that the characters accept as their world. No: WL3's fiction contract strictly tells you that this is a world where cultists worship good manners, clones yell Goose Goose Duck and there is an actual shrine to the art of Toaster Repair. It doesn't happen "outside of the fiction", as the writer winks at you knowingly, it happens within it, CONSTANTLY, sometimes *while* the serious shit is happening. The dissonance this often causes in the game is palpable, and it's a real shame they didn't just cut out 99% of it and wrote more of the good stuff instead. Of course the biggest sin of the humor isn't that it breaks the atmosphere in half: it is that it is patently, awfully, horribly, agonizingly unfunny.
- But didn't I just praise the over-the-top Mad Max-stuff? Well I think what I'm getting at here is that those aren't actually the same at all. The over-the-top stuff like the Dorsey's cries about the Deluge of Blood have a thematic reason to exist, harking back to the godfathers of the Post Apo genre themselves: the fact that post apocalyptic stories are literally about the fall of society and the clash of the remnants of the modern with the return of the ur-instinct, the base, the barbaric. And so post apo lends itself well to thematic environments of hyper-exaggeration (civilization = restraint, so collapse of society = extremism). Plus, in contrast to toasters and dog shit, that exaggerated stuff is just FUN. It's a good time. These are stories, right, so no, a guy with a flamethrower-guitar riding a truck with comically huge sound systems leading the charge of an insane warband in spike-adorned cars isn't realistic, of course it's not, but it's an entertaining take on the excesses of power in a world where raw hard power is all that's left of "society." It's great both because it's fun AND useful to highlight the dichotomy between those who strive to bring back civilization (typically, the protagonists) and the people who embrace the post-apocalyptic state of societal regress. So there's a clear divide between:
1) Thematic elements being way over the top first and foremost in order to be fun but also because its part of that post-apo vibe of exaggerated societal collapse and tribal nostalgia
2) "Random" or "wacky" humor that does the exact opposite: undercuts the thematic components of the setting rather than strengthening them
Or in other words: it's OK if it's metal. It's not OK if it's a 13-year-old's idea of a clever joke.
So that's how I can praise the game's Maxiness (lel) while lambasting its Fallout 4-ness.
- The ending. While I liked the setup to the ending, you kind of want to see all that setup come to a head. You want to see Angela and the Patriarch argue, you want to participate in that argument, you want to see the marshals debate with themselves who they believe in as the most succesful leader, maybe having the option to bribe the corrupt bastards or appeal to their waning sense of duty, you want to see the hundred families being opportunists, you want to see fringe factions at least comment on their desired outcome on the future of Colorado, you want a comment from the children and so on and so forth. You want the Patriarch to go over how well he thinks you did the jobs he asked you too (I killed the Gippers cutting off his oil supply - and even though the game did the whole "THE PATRIARCH WILL REMEMBER THIS"-spiel, there was nary a comment from ole Buchanon about that). Instead what you get is a couple of insanely boring trash fights and then you make two conversation checks (or you don't and fight it out instead) and that's that. No surprises, no wrap-up of the game's political themes. It just... ends (the presentation is still great, of course: the first ending slides are a decently written song about your main quest exploits).
- The character system. Yes, you feel good when you level up, but it's the most base form of satisfaction, like how you feel good after eating a cheap pizza. It simply satisfies the most basic tastes of your poor, human soul before your existance inevitably ends in doom and failure, being the disappointment to your mom that she always knew you would be. You feel good because your characters increased in power in a very tangible way, but it rarely poses an interesting choice or challenge. The system is simply so incredibly simplistic (very reminiscent of something like Divinity: Original Sin's character system) that it can't make your braincells spin for more than a few seconds before you've decided what to do. This is chiefly because of:
- The HORRIBLE perk system. Guys, make a pact with me. We shall hunt down whoever designed this piece of shit, tie him to a chair, keep his eyes open Alex DeLarge-style and force him to rewatch old episodes of Full House for the remainder of his life. Not only does the game have the old divide of "most perks are awful or worthless, a few are OK and then the remaining few are GODLIKE", perks are implicit to the skills. In practice this means you'll often find yourself saving perks or going into completely worthless skills JUST TO GET ONE PERK ON THAT TREE. I cannot express how insane this design is. You'll find yourself getting Small Arms 7 (yes - 7/10!) on almost everyone because the 'Draw!' perk is just that good and inexplicably not tied to using the actual weapons of the skill tree like most other perks are. Yes - you're nearly maxing a skill just to be able to buy one fucking perk. You're using the skill points themselves for literally nothing. In a game where skill points are very scarce, which speaks to how few perks are worth considering. Who thought that was a good idea? Not only that, but this also means you'll have a TON of levels where you either get an unexciting miniscule perk that does almost nothing OR you don't have any perks available that do anything. 0. You will often just run around with character portraits that shine like glowsticks at 90s rave-party because you have 1 or 2 perks pending and nothing to spend them on. This system is so incredibly shit it makes me angry IRL. I'm now going to go kill some cute animals for respite. BRB.
- Alright, I'm back. The crafting. Here's what it wants to be: a fairly involved system that can make almost any items in the game - from weapons to mods to consumables - balanced by a universal resource forcing you to choose carefully. Here's what it actually is: useless. Even in a party with no Barter-skill you have enough money to buy everything you ever want. Crafting is for the odd ammo-dump when you run out or maybe a healing consumable. If you have barter, you won't even use it for that. Why is there a crafting system here? Because modern RPGs have crafting systems. InXile are either incompetent system developers incapable of tieing systems together, or they just don't give a fuck, and the crafting system is the final piece of evidence. Lock 'em up. Fargo for prison. Etc.
- Stability. I rarely if ever give a fuck about bugs and have never understood why gamers are so fixated on that shit, but WL3 was actually annoying enough to make me notice. There are audio- and mixing bugs EVERYWHERE and it fucks with the presentation, which should be the game's only highlight. The game leaks memory like a motherfucker and visual glitches crop up constantly if you alt-tab. We're not talking game-ruining crashes here, but it's enough of a mess that it can get annoying. Also, the game only keeps a single autosave copy, which fucked me over once (the DLC).
- The DLC. Firstly, every single mechanic it introduces falls completely flat:
A) Stacking debuffs with milestones are a neat idea actually and could be a great alternative to the all-or-nothing systems in most RPGs, but in a game where combat lasts 3 rounds *maximum* (more often 1 or 2 rounds) it's a shitty system. No matter how shit you are at the combat you're never gonna stack these.
B) Non-lethal combat in my Mad Max outrageous over the top post-apo? What the actual fuck were they thinking?
I want to be at the meeting where they came up with, much less decided to implement, non-lethal combat in a game whose bread, butter, heart, soul and core is blowing shit up and looking like an 80s metal-fan who took the wrong turn and ended up in the apocalypse. It's so counter-intuitive the only equivalent I could think off is implementing a "DRIVE SLOW AND RESPONSIBLY"-mode in Burnout.
C) Gear that works against specific damage types, are you high? Who is going to equip even the elite versions of that stuff unless they benefit from the damage bonus? Pillars of Eternity: The White March already showed you how to do DLC-exclusive crafting. You allow the scarce DLC-resource to upgrade already existing gear - making each drop of it an exciting loot drop AND a difficult choice - not to craft shit you won't use or will replace quickly. That way, the player will actually hurt deciding between a crafting reward or a desired story outcome. Not shrug and don't give a fuck.
Secondly, the story is terrible. The premise is actually kind of a good mystery setup and makes you go "ooooooh, I'm solving some hidden enigma about what made everything go crazy inside this closed off section of the Wasteland", but it turns out what you're actually doing is mediating the world's most boring worker-dispute. It's one of those rare cases where rather than seeming simple on the surface but revealing a much larger mystery, the story turns out to actually be much more simple and boring than the presentation makes it out to be. After arbiting this banal ass conflict you're presented with a binary choice about whether synths are people too - a choice you've already made several times in the main game by this time, so there's no tension or moral conundrum for you to consider. You already know what your characters are going to choose, because you've made that choice many times now. There's also a subtheme about bureaucracy that never goes anywhere and is actually very poorly explained by the plot. There is a biiiit of cleverness here I suppose - I sided with the idealistic-but-on-the-surface-not-completely-unreasonable Union leader despite a few signs that she was an ideologue, and so when the game punished me for it I could only shrug and go "ah well, they warned me!" But that's one memorable moment from an entire DLC.
Final tl;dr: The main reason I had fun with Wasteland 3 is because it could have been a better game than it is. It is enjoyable when the reasons for that broken promise are on display, mainly in key moments of the presentation, but is rather 'meh' when they are not, which is probably more than half of the time.
In one sentence: I enjoyed my time with Wasteland 3, but not enough to ever replay it.
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Diggfinger
Arcane
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Grunker continuing his neutral-positive review tradition.
Jokes aside, pretty accurate review from Grunker. Definitely not the worst thing ever, but so many things that could have been easily improved with fairly minimal effort.
I remember trying to get through the game twice.
Each time, I was stopped by a completely game-breaking bug.
First time was close to release, alright, but second time was after several patches, and later in the game.
Maybe at some point I'll make yet another attempt...
Each time, I was stopped by a completely game-breaking bug.
First time was close to release, alright, but second time was after several patches, and later in the game.
Maybe at some point I'll make yet another attempt...
According to Steam I have 53 hours in this game, but the last time I touched it was September 30th, 2020. I'm sure it has been patched/updated multiple times since then? Anyway, I have no idea what interrupted it. I have to say it feels a bit forgettable; I remember almost nothing about it, which is odd considering I had 50+ fucking hours! I'll have to revisit it at some point but between Elden Ring, eventually trying Elite Odyssey, finishing up my Berserker run in PoE so I can try Deadfire for one last time, eventually maybe possibly I guess perhaps in some fashion finishing Cyberpunk, and forcing myself to play Elex 2 so I can review it for the Codex, I have no idea when I will get to it again.
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Tyrion8338
Novice
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I really wainted for wasteland 3 and started playing right as it launched, it wasnt a bad game but it didnt really immersed me like fallout games can or even atom rpg lately. Something about the writing and world building is missing imo and nearing the end game started to bug and I couldnt use some dialogue options so I didnt finish the game. I would rate this game 6/10.
Saduj
Arcane
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- Aug 26, 2012
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That is a cover of the theme song from Laverne & Shirley. You can hate it more now.
That fight does suck if the boss doesn't aggro in the direction you're expecting.
Cadmus
Arcane
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- Dec 28, 2013
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oh shit ok I just watched that intro I really do hate it even more
The boss doesn't aggro on anyone on the central platform (doesn't look like it can get up there anyway) so as long as you keep most of your rangers there you should be able to control where it walks well enough. And sniper, AR and heavy MG all can reach the cooling cylinders from the platform.
At least this fight had you do *something* different from rushing to the switches like in the other battles in the DLC or just getting first turn like in the rest of the game.
Xunwael
Educated
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- Nov 16, 2006
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WL3 is yet another in a long line of TTRPGs that fail to live up to solidly disappointing and mediocre titles of at this point a literal human generation ago. Why would you ever play WL3 over Fallout: Tactics? You wouldn't.
That people are willing to even squint at garbage like this without wretching with disgust and quickly leaving the room truly is a sign of not just the industry's massive decline but the decline of GAMERS also.
Fucking gamers. They should've risen up, but they didn't. Now look at them. All of them, like beaten dogs, down to the last he, she, and they. Pathetic.
That people are willing to even squint at garbage like this without wretching with disgust and quickly leaving the room truly is a sign of not just the industry's massive decline but the decline of GAMERS also.
Fucking gamers. They should've risen up, but they didn't. Now look at them. All of them, like beaten dogs, down to the last he, she, and they. Pathetic.
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rusty_shackleford
Arcane
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they aren't even comparable games
might as well ask "what's better, x-com or fallout"
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Significantly so.
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Wasteland 3 is right there in that blue quadrant. It's fine. If it had been released in 2005-2014 it'd be considered amazing.
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