Since I'm a poor (and also dumb) monkey who asked our research budget to be spent on a Wasteland 2, making me stuck with this hype trainwreck (while everyone seems to enjoy D:OS immensely), I feel rather entitled to bitch about this game some more. Well, in reality, I have two curious observations about it.
First - one of the biggest powers of this "crowdfunding" schtick is that it creates a rather tight community from the get-go. Of course, you can't create it from the scratch, you need some sort of initial boost (in this case - Fargo's old glory) to start the thing rolling, but once it charges in moves to the end. I mean, hell, even if they sell zero copies of wasteland 2 after this point, who cares? They already have enough customers to kickstart their next game (after the Torment, that is - but the fact Torment was started is another proof of this).
I get the really strong "football fans" sense from W2's core fans, with the standard "if we won, we're the best because we've won", "if we lost - we're the best because it's just bad arbiter/field/weather/luck/cheering/whatever and, if you discount all these irrelevant factors, it's obvoius we're the best". I don't want to talk badly about anyone, but people becoming fans of the game before it's even released doesn't sound right to me. And it creates rather harmful feedback, in my opinion - for example, the decline of Vogel (who is, of course, not crowdfunded, so it has happened historically that his fanbase is quite similar) have been caused, in addition to other reasons, by his community being ready to excuse and laud anything he does, no matter how lazy or uninspired it is. Getting praised for nothing has never been helpful creativity.
Another important point here is the "this is not the game people will like, but it's the game WE WANT" style of thinking. Nothing shameful in it, but let's recall our old "never ask that" question - what do you want? At this point, oldschool lost it meaning and became mostly a buzzword. When you say that this game isn't a very good fallout-like game, you'll get rebuffed with "but it's not fallout 3 - it's wasteland 2". Cool, but when you point that it's not very good as a Wasteland, you'll hear "yeah, but what do you expect them to do, a text adventure? no, it's greatly improved because it's fallout-like!" A closed circle. Oldschool sounds more like "AWESOME" at this point with, only with even more amorphous definition. There are people who want W2 to be oldschool and thus be like Fallout, Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale and Borderlands. And that is oldschool, sure (almost), but what about those pesky pre-1997 years? What about the golden era? If fallout is oldschool, then what's that? But then, in the RPG-codex pre-97 games begin only from the fifteenth position, so...
But that's not the point. The thing is (and what I dislike the most about KS) is that it centers a mass of people around some vague kind of promise. And while the promise itself is usually very bright, oldschool and awesome, that doesn't make it clearer (and, therefore, it's really difficult to tell whether or not it was fulfilled). And while you can engage people into discussions about features & stuff, design can't really be done communally.
As for the part 2 of my entitled bitchings, I've had a funny thought yesterday - I've compared Wasteland 2 and Temple of the Elemental Evil. Because, just like the W2's premise, the idea of TOEE was to deliver a decent game in a really short time and on a (relatively small) budget. Almost shovelware, but with a noble purpose. And when we compare all the factors...
1. Budget - even accounting for the inflation, TOEE was cheaper than W2.
2. Engine - W2 has a huge advantage here with its Unity (in terms of ease of development). Compared to Troika's need to rekit arcanum's engine for dnd system, Unity with its tons of detailed tutorials, ready solutions in form of good code&effect packages at untiy store & relatively cheap outsoгrce labor available absolutely kicks ass here. Sure, it gets a lot of flak around the web, but I think that's cause it's too easy to use so lots of bad coders make their games on it, thus creating the illusion that the engine is crappy. It's not.
3. RPG system - CLASSIC is neat and nice in theory, but it's rather simplistic and not nearly as good & entertaining to use as the dnd 3.5. Of course, I won't call dnd immaculate with its crappy balance and so on, but, at this point, CLASSIC is also anything but balanced and, at least, 3.5 provides more party-building options.
4.Combat - combat is incredibly much more fun in TOEE. Sure, bugbears wear you out at some point, but still. In W2, however, combat is just filler and interesting encounters are extremely scarce. Well, what do you expect when your tactical options are mostly about clicking stuff to the death? Whereas in TOEE even boring warriors have trip attacks, whirlwind attacks, attack of opportunity maneuvers, power attack, combat expertise. And any caster gets his spell arsenal which is absolutely ridiculous in terms of flexibility. Even if you prevent yourself from using all the "dumb" aoe spells and broken brokens, you still have enough tricks in your bag to challenge pretty much everything.
5. Quest design - roughly equal. W2 boasts with lot of reactivity, but at this point it's mostly cosmetic and not that mind-awing. It's more for the boast than for the effect. And in terms of general design... Yeah, Hommlet was mostly horrible, but it's not like W2 is devoid of pointless running. It's not, unfortunately. And, just as in W2, there were some nice multi-choice solutions to some of the TOEE stuff, some more or less hidden companions and so on.
6. Writing - ok, W2 wins here. But, considering how dull TOEE's writing is, its not a great feat.
7. Music - I can barely remember TOEE's ost and W2 has Mark Morgan, though not at his finest, but still. Well, ok, that one is easy.
8. Bugs - at this point, rougly equal.
So the point of it all is... Damn, I'm an old and retarded man and I've already forgot what the point was here. But it's ok, it's all ok as long as it's oldschool.
