Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Infinitron]

Source: http://www.gamespot.com/videos/why-wasteland-2-is-an-rpg-that-lets-you-kill-absol/2300-6420632/

 

[Bubbles]

For example, they would need to implement an over the shoulder camera, because you can't control a party through point and click on a console.

You could just use voice commands, like, you know, actual solders do.

 

[J_C]

For example, they would need to implement an over the shoulder camera, because you can't control a party through point and click on a console.

You could just use voice commands, like, you know, actual solders do.

Better yet, you could use the Kinect and issue arm orders. For total IMMERSUN!

 

[imweasel]

For example, they would need to implement an over the shoulder camera, because you can't control a party through point and click on a console.

You could just use voice commands, like, you know, actual solders do.

Better yet, you could use the Kinect and issue arm orders. For total IMMERSUN!

You would also need an occulus rift for total immersion, duh.

 

[Country_Gravy]

The Juvies are minors in their mid to late teens, so they aren't really children.

Portrait makes them look 10

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

We had that with called shots. I told everyone we could probably do called shots post-release -- even though we might be able to do a simplified version of them for launch. Because everyone wants called shots, because Fallout had called shots.

oooo

 

[Athelas]

Nice reasoning there. 'Let's do aimed shots because Fallout had them (in a terrible fashion)' rather than 'Let's do aimed shots because they're tactically interesting'.

 

[BGMD]

yet to watch whole thing, but it looks like more detailed presentation of scenes from recent articles + interview

 

[Infinitron]

More quotes from previews. PCWorld has some details of the game's C&C/reactivity:

"So imagine this is one of the first things you see in LA. You don't know who they are, you don't know who the people getting killed are, but your lack of decision was a decision at this point," says Fargo. "You could jump in at any time and save these people. You're not given the option whether you want to save people yes or no. You just do it or not. And if you don't they just walk off like you don't exist."

"You want the Pistol-Packing Priests for stuff later on, but if you took them on and saved the other guys there's a whole other story arc. And of course, it's not a major consequence in this case, but there are people who will say 'You should've saved these poor saps, but you just stood there and let it happen.'"

Fargo also takes this time to demonstrate the depths of the game's radio chatter for me. While not all of the dialogue in Wasteland 2 is voiced, InXile has gone to great lengths to set the mood through the radio—going so far as to hire the world's creepiest children's choir to sing about Sampson, deceased leader of the Pistol-Packing Priests a.k.a. the group we just saw execute all those people.

Fargo loads another save. This time we approach a base run by the Mad Monks, the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, a faction from the original Wasteland that believes radiation was beneficial for mankind and that worships the "Great Glow."

In this scenario Fargo is returning from a quest without finding the materials he was sent out for. "This scene right here, you could be through this in a couple of minutes or an hour and a half, all depending on how you do it," says Fargo.

"They've sent you out to get this radioactive goo. We can talk about it, try to negotiate, or say 'No, you're in trouble.'" He does the latter, and we're in combat. After taking down a few Monks, they threaten to detonate a nuclear bomb. As the countdown ticks lower and lower with each turn, another monk finally runs out and tries to stop the fighting. The nuke is disarmed, and he presents you a second choice—either submit to arrest or not.

"You want to keep fighting, you choose the Death option. That turns this into an hour and a half slugfest, hostile map to get through these mobs," says Fargo. Instead, we submit to arrest. "So now we're in a jail cell, and he has a job for us. You can say you're willing or not willing. So now you've got yet another branch, which is a whole new mission you wouldn't see otherwise. Or you say you're not willing and he says 'Fine, rot in jail' and you have to fight your way out."

You could even cut out the entire second half of the game. And the developers plan for some people to do so, and even have a built-in ending to accompany that direction. "You can go hostile against the rangers themselves and become an enemy of the state and the world just takes a different turn, and you don't even get to go to the LA part of the game," says Fargo. "But you can still win the game! You can beat the rangers, credits will roll, you get the epilogue, the whole deal. You get a different ending."

 

[Bubbles]

Sounds like they've hired a good PR team for the release push, should result in positive reviews.

 

[Zombra]

We had that with called shots. I told everyone we could probably do called shots post-release -- even though we might be able to do a simplified version of them for launch. Because everyone wants called shots, because Fallout had called shots.

Blech.

 

[Infinitron]

Some interesting information from the Destructoid preview:

"The budget for this game is much closer to five million, but that's because I poured in more of my own money and money from our sales from Bard's Tale and sales from Early Access, because I wanted to do something more ambitious. We could've kept it at the Kickstarter budget, but I wanted to knock this out of the ballpark and have people point and say 'that's what Kickstarter can do!' So I felt it was worth the risk."

Fargo was so anxious about the initial reveal of Wasteland 2's gameplay video back in February 2013 that the potential development of their next title was dependent on the reception to the video.

"If the first gameplay demo for Wasteland 2 didn't play well for the fans, then I wouldn't have done the Kickstarter for Torment," Fargo explained. "It's completely, 100% based on trust. For me, I've never had more pressure in my life. I can't imagine what would happen had I not been able to deliver. You'd be done right at that point."

Fortunately for them, the video was well received by backers and newcomers alike. Emboldened, they started a second Kickstarter campaign for the successor to Planescape: Torment a month later, which found even greater success. It brought in over $4 million from over 70,000 backers.

 

[Infinitron]

The Strategy Informer interview is surprisingly broad in scope:

Strategy Informer:In terms of NPCs, how in-depth are their back-stories and quests and so on?

Brian Fargo: Well let's see. First off they all have their own personality, every one of them has a big script. Which again is tricky because if you think of the entire game, each one of them has 'barks' throughout the entire product, and we don't know which one you have. And in some cases the whole script changes. One of our characters, Vulture Cry, is a woman that talks like a Native American, like Tonto, but she's completely bullshitting you. If you catch her out on that her script changes and she just talks like a normal person. She acts like a stereotypical 'Indian', you know, but she's just trying to bullshit you which is pretty funny. So they all have their own personality, maybe not a quest per se but they all want to join you for whatever reasons, but some of them leave throughout the game also. Some of them just say “I''ve come with you this far, but I'm off now”, so they come in and out rather than that typical thing of “I'll join you if you take me on a quest”. There's a little bit of that, but it's more about getting other interesting characters in your party making it an escort mission.

Strategy Informer:If you do leave the Rangers you miss out Los Angeles, how does the game react to that decision apart from that change?

Brian Fargo: Well now what happens is they're now sending death squads after you, so you're now fighting a whole different group of people. So when you get random encounters now, it's a heavily armed group of Rangers out to kill your ass. You have to fight them off, and then the mission becomes 'kill or be killed'. By default it becomes “how do I take out the Rangers Citadel?”. So your goal is to take over the Citadel, kill Vargas and become the Ranger leader. There's another example in LA, that I actually like much better than the regular final ending; it's super dark and twisted, you have to be a real asshole, and the payoff is perfect. So perfect. And when you do it, if you're a normal human you're going to feel like crap about this, but if you take it all the way to its conclusion, what happened? It's so perfect.

Strategy Informer:The various weird cults you run into sound like a lot of fun– do they come into the story directly?

Brian Fargo: Oh yeah, everybody you hear on the radio you meet. Every single one. You've got to have a payoff for all that stuff, right? Two parts about the cults; so you're a Ranger, right? You're running around town trying to help people but no-one really knows who you are. Your trying to build a reputation. These cult guys, every time you do something they'll spin it into a bad thing - “oh, the Rangers just murdered someone again”, meanwhile you were trying to save someone, right? They keep twisting it, and then they get more aggressive later, they start killing people and leaving Ranger stuff at the scene. You'll get to a murder scene and there will be a Ranger star there written in blood. Just setting you up; it's completely irritating and it beats the hell out of you, because you're just trying to do the right thing. Finally knocking them off will be very satisfying. Actually I think it's very important that the bad guys... one of the things that I think games do badly is you meet the bad guy at the start, then you barely see him again until the end of the game. You're like “well he's not too bad, I didn't really see him do that much bad stuff”. That's like if in Star Wars you saw Darth Vader at the very beginning, and then you never saw him until right at then end when Luke kills him. You'd be like, “what was the point?”, right? We make sure the bad guys are constantly toying with you the whole game, so there's some real satisfaction when you finally off 'em.

Strategy Informer:Is there a process you use to make sure all skills are used equally throughout the game? Sometimes that doesn't happen in an RPG, and you're stuck with a useless skill.

Brian Fargo: Oh no, you can't do that. No, no all the skills are all useful, we make a very concentrated pass for each one. It'll be like 'demolitions and lockpicking week' and everybody will go through their maps and add it, we'll go through alarm disarming, safe-cracking, toaster repair, you name it. Every scripter is assigned that they have to put those skills in their levels, period. Because otherwise you'd be angry, right? You've put a bunch of points into it and it's never used. I'll tell you something funny, though. In the original Wasteland we had a skill called 'combat shooting', right? And it didn't do anything... People would ask what it did, work out that it didn't do anything. I had to eventually cop to it and admit that it was useless. It's in this game now, and it's the most powerful skill. You can't even get it until the very end, and you have this massively valuable skill that was completely worthless in the last one. That cracked us up.

Strategy Informer:What about armour and weapons, how crazy do they get? Seems like, at least at the start, things don't get too ridiculous in terms of your equipment.

Brian Fargo: It gets more advanced. I mean you start with simple stuff, well you get laser weapons off the bat if you have the 'energy weapons' skill, so the way I look at the world is like... there's two parts of the world, right? One part is like the 1920s, where everything is thrown back in time and that's why they use the radios for communication. Pop culture is locked in the '80s no matter what, there's no entertainment media past that, so we've got a culture locked in the '80s with the technology of the '20s and '30s. Then, because of the singularity effect, remember this is a hundred years in the future, one group has a thousand years of technological advance and the other group have just stagnated. That's why you get these diverse things going on.

Strategy Informer:How do the basics of the game change once you travel out of the desert wastes to Los Angeles?

Brian Fargo: Well visually it feels complete different, you still have the world map but water is no longer an issue. That goes away. You still have the travel system but the play pattern is a little different - it's a little more like Fallout, you have a busier hub, more people, lots of quests and that sort of thing. With the cults there's a lot more radio chatter going on, it's weird. It's really weird. It's like LA really is, actually (laughs), super twisted and dark. Everybody's got their world-view they're trying to impress on people, so yeah, the tech and robots get more advanced – you get those huge scorpion robots there. It feels like the sequel, is what it feels like.

 

[Perkel]

lets hope game will reflect that.


It would be interesting if InXile would deliver better RPG than Obsidian in the end

 

[Rake]

lets hope game will reflect that.


It would be interesting if InXile would deliver better RPG than Obsidian in the end

Yeah, right. That last one must have been a hell of a patch then.

 

[tuluse]

yet to watch whole thing, but it looks like more detailed presentation of scenes from recent articles + interview

Around 3 minutes he says a "famous" developer visited their offices and thought it was crazy they were making so much content a player would probably not see. I wonder who it was.

 

[sea]

Around 1:30 you can see Thomas as well. He so dreamy.

 

[Jaesun]

I think Ziets is dreamy....

 

[VioletShadow]

I think Ziets is dreamy....

Cute. Is he single?

 

[Jaesun]

I have no idea. I don't really keep track of developers personal lives. Unlike you know who here on the codex....

 

[Sensuki]

You could always ask Beamdog/Pillars' Liam Elser as he goes your way, so to speak.

 

[StaticSpine]

I think Ziets is dreamy....

 

[garren]

Couple nitpicks:

Can you add a 'skip intro videos' option to the options menu (when you start the game)? You can usually remove them by tweaking .ini files or something but it's nice when there's an extra option for it in the menus.

Also, don't play the scorpitron animation when I just want to load a game from the main menu, it just wastes time and is annoying when you've seen it a million times. Keep it when creating a new game.

 

[sea]

Couple nitpicks:

Can you add a 'skip intro videos' option to the options menu (when you start the game)? You can usually remove them by tweaking .ini files or something but it's nice when there's an extra option for it in the menus.

Also, don't play the scorpitron animation when I just want to load a game from the main menu, it just wastes time and is annoying when you've seen it a million times. Keep it when creating a new game.

Already sitting in JIRA!

 

[Cazzeris]

I thought that the main menu would be completely changed.

It still looks half-baked to me.