Alas, ineptile finally descends into becoming a shovelware developer. Now the question is, will they drop dead before or right after Wasteland 3?
Combat is.... crap... There, I said it. The thing is, it is turn based, but of the kind where one side do all its actions first with immediate resolvement and then the next side does its actions. Whoever initiates combat goes first. Now, instead of giving orders to each character and having everything do something, inXile looked at games like hearthstone and felt inspired by that (they specifically mentioned hearthstone as an inspiration). What this means is that each character have a limited set of masteries (active skills) they can use. Want the option to attack? that's a mastery. Want the option to move? that's a mastery slot. and so on. Some are fixed for all characters (move and trinket use is hardlocked for all characters as 2 of their masteries) and the rest 3 or 4 choices are choosable by the hero while you are NOT engaged in combat. once you are in combat you are locked into using whatever abilities you had set in the mastery slots before combat. I am guessing inXile thought this would be akin to deckbuilding or something like that. Add to this that you have a shared pool of 'action points' to use on your turn. Most mastery skills cost a single action point to use, but some cost more than one. And usually you have less actino points than you have characters in your party, so remember that guy I mentioned you put in the corner doing nothing during combat? The whole combat system feels extremely restricting and claustrophobic. Add that there are no hit chances (everything hits) and no damage variables (you make an attack, you hit for... how much strength did you say you had?) and combat stops feeling like combat, but more like a low level puzzle in a meeple placement boardgame.
Oh wow.
How something as simple as turn-based, blobber, pop-up-encounter combat already mastered in the Apple ][ days could be fucked up
so much?
luka ought to be pleased
After Brian Fargo helped kill the old style rpgs this forum claims to like by a) riding the early wave of ~cinematic~ and ~art games~ and b) driving Interplay into the ground, what did his next company Inxile develop before Kickstarter? Literally cell phone shovelware and figurative shovelware in a truly terrible 2004 Bard's Tale game. If you bought this game, you gave money to the guy who destroyed a company through terrible decisions, who then went on to make shovelware, who then went on to scam kickstarter twice with truly terrible games that couldn't possibly have required the millions raised to alllegly fund them.
Basically you haven't to be the most stupid person in any room you walk into to, with Brian Fargo's history, spend time and/or money on this game. Or you just have to be a very stable genius member of this forum which had multiple crowdfunding campaigns to enable this crap.