Wasteland Wasteland 1 Remastered by Krome Studios

[aweigh]

windows 10 is fine, just make sure to use an unbloat script that removes the MS app packages, the "extra" stuff like Cortana and that kinda shit, and it will run the same as windows 7 and have better compatability.

Hell, in my use case windows 10 actually saved me some RAM usage, at load (chrome with bunch of tabs + game running in the background) windows 10 uses about 15% less RAM for me than win 7 did.

oh, and obviously never use windows update.

EDIT: Also you can use windows 10's COMPACT command to compress game folders without affecting game performance (no, it is not NTFS compression, it is a new algorithm and a great one). Look up:

"Windows 10 COMPACT command tutorial" or "Windows 10 COMPACT GUI" app if you don't wnat to fiddle with command lines. Very very useful for SSDs!

 

[JDR13]

It will be interesting to see what in the gameplay they do change.

They said it will be "Still very true to the original as far as design/gameplay", so I don't expect anything to change in this aspects of the game. This looks like they're doing a remaster, not a remake.

Well, they've called it a remaster from the beginning so...

I hope they made all the skills useful at least. As I recall, there were a few in the original that basically did nothing.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I haven't read the useless list in a while.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/wasteland_remastered?as=1649904300

 

[vonAchdorf]

Krome has definitely built some trust, but why 3D? For budget reasons?

 

[mondblut]

Krome has definitely built some trust, but why 3D? For budget reasons?

Controlling a toy soldier on a plastic base? Suddenly the original doesn't look all that unappealing no longer.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Even random deviantart wannabe "artists" would've come up with something more pleasant to look at.

 

[ItsChon]

The portraits and 2D art stuff looked good, but once I saw some screenshots of the actual game world? Does anyone fucking like it when games add figurines? I'm not five years old, I don't want to see that shit. And instead of updating the pixel art into some nice, 2D goodness, they made it into some bland and blurry 3D type shit. Whatever, INXile really is a trash company.

 

[agris]

 

[Sykar]

View attachment 12307

Almost the same as the original. Hardly any difference, I swear!

 

[Comte]

Man why didnt they just make an updated 2D tile set? This looks like crap and zoomers arent going to buy this anyway only the old fans.

 

[Infinitron]

The Bard's Tale Trilogy remake was 3D too. Did people care less because it was first person?

 

[Modron]

The Bard's Tale Trilogy remake was 3D too. Did people care less because it was first person?

It bothered people less because the updated graphics were more consistent design wise with the original games.

 

[AdolfSatan]

There's nothing to be gained from turning a 2d game to 3d.
BT's remaster looks like a shitty flash game.

 

[Comte]

The Bard's Tale Trilogy remake was 3D too. Did people care less because it was first person?

Listen this looks like dogshit and you know it.

 

[Tom Baker's Arse]

Looks like they really use some blurry post-processing intentionally, probably to make it look painterly or something.

What in the fuck does "painterly" mean ? Lets get our Queen's English straight.

 

[MRY]

Having the ranger cast a shadow is a bad call. It emphasizes that the scale is all wrong. Especially because there's already that circular "token shadow" beneath it, which makes the actual light-sourced shadow confusing as well.

[EDIT]

Also, I think even the enemy portraits run smack into Brian Moriarty's point re: the loom VGA upgrade.

The paint-over is "faithful" in the sense that it is the same picture, only done at a higher resolution and with more colors. But everything about how the original is done is driven by the limited number of pixels and palette. (As with Loom EGA->VGA.) The illustration is a technically excellent piece of art under its original specs. The paint-over is not a technically excellent piece of art at its current specs -- it looks fairly amateurish, akin to the art in Hero-U. There's very little thought to light sourcing, for instance. But it's not just that the rendering is amateurish. As more details emerge, aspects of the original design stop working as well (including the composition, the orientation, etc.). Just as a cave painting might be particularly vivid in the flickering light of a torch, but rather unimpressive under neon floodlights, the original Wasteland works better under its original limitations. Another example of this is that the added textural detail on the ground and the plant make it very clear that this is basically an ordinary-scale rat. But these are actually "three foot tall black rats." The original pixel art is ambiguous -- the plant could be anything from a large weed to a stunted tree, and what you're seeing on the ground could be cracked earth or large rocks. But the rendered illustration seem to depict the plant as some kind vine (a grapevine?) and the ground as cracked earth. As a result, it's hard to read the rat as being three feet tall. (NB: The original wasteland also used this art for bunnies and opossums, which obviously is stretching the pixel ambiguity too far.)

I'll note also that the illustration actually is not that faithful. For instance, the original rat has missing patches of fur that are well-rendered in the original art (despite the trickiness of doing so with limited colors and pixels), but the redone rat is thickly furred. Further, the artist seems to have misread the rat's hands as chicken feet, or perhaps not referred back to actual rat hands, and the result is extremely odd -- the whole thing looks like a Hero-U meep:

 

[Infinitron]

I guess I basically see this as a complimentary game (even though it's not free for Kickstarter backers like the BT remake was). It's like being disappointed by the graphics in CHEX QUEST. They hired some dudes to make this bonus game and it's a nice thing to have, because unlike say Baldur's Gate, those 1980s originals really are too primitive for modern audiences. Take it or leave it.

 

[Saduj]

Has there been any info released on interface, controls, etc? If all they did was change the look then there is no reason to upgrade from the recent remaster. But if they made quality of life changes, I’m interested.

Also, why is the ranger miniature in that picture armed with a golf club?

 

[MRY]

I guess I basically see this as a complimentary game (even though it's not free for Kickstarter backers like the BT remake was). It's like being disappointed by the graphics in CHEX QUEST. They hired some dudes to make this bonus game and it's a nice thing to have, because unlike say Baldur's Gate, those 1980s originals really are too primitive for modern audiences. Take it or leave it.

(1) Isn't "take it or leave it" true of every product that isn't being offered to you at the point of a gun?
(2) It's like being disappointed in the graphics in CHEX QUEST if CHEX QUEST were being marketed as a visual update to DOOM.
(3) In any event, it's less a matter of disappointment and more a matter of arguing for the sake of either (a) argument itself (this is the Codex after all) or (b) sharpening one's own understanding of classic game aesthetics. Understanding why Wasteland's original* art is better than the remaster helps appreciate the original.

(* Need to be careful here, the DOS VGA art is not the original art, of course, When I played Wasteland it look like this, and I think an argument can be made that the remaster, ugly though it is, is easier on the eyes.)

 

[MRY]

Also, it's not like the rat is the worst of the bunch, it was just the easiest for me to find the VGA art so that I could do a 1:1 comparison.

Here's another:

For some reason I can't embed this image, but here's the original: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q204/snikers000/wl_074.png

So, a few things.

This one actually is *not* an overpaint. As you can see, the artist has changed the position of the gun, which in turn has changed the position of the ranger's arms. The direction the ranger is looking is also changed. I believe this is because the new illustration is not a perfect square, and the artist thought that have the gun pointed that way would be more realistic or dramatic, but the effect is generally for the worse. For instance, the ranger patch, which is a focal point of the original, is now replaced by the watch as the focal point. (FWIW, I actually read the "watch" as an identity bracelet in the original, but I guess it's probably a watch.) The canteen is also downgraded in prominence (possibly turned into a pouch of some kind). The original soldier looks quite heavily laden with gear, but the new one is missing the backpack altogether. The original's glasses actually read to me as regular glasses (not sunglasses); I took him to be a little dorky but still awesome, like so:

The new one also renders the brown material behind the ranger as a forest with fall foliage (I think?), which makes no sense whatsoever for the setting.

By changing the soldier's orientation, this also ceases to be a portrait of one of your guys at ease and looking at you (the player), and becomes a guy at the ready, looking at something off camera to the left, ready to fight.

On a technical level, the new soldier has no apparent light source (though the light source in the original is not great either). On his helmet the light is shining from above and to the left, but on his left (our right) shoulder, it's shining from above and to the right.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

you guys are autistic, it looks fine
you weren't going to play it anyways so why complain

 

[MRY]

Complaining about slapping amateurish graphics on a classic RPG is at least as satisfying and rewarding as meta-complaining about those complaints.

 

[agris]

MRY is probably billing the hearings today to professional development and needs something to pass the time

 

[ItsChon]

MRY is spot on. Honestly, the thing that bothers me the most from the old screenshots is the text/numbers, and how they all seem to be varying distances from each other and just plane unpleasant to read. I would be interested in a remake to one of these older games that focuses on making everything sharper and more detailed. I will cite an old screenshot that was posted by Great Deceiver.

Spoiler

Absolutely gorgeous, don't change a thing about this picture. Even the text looks decent, though I think it could do with just a little more touching up, as it hurts or makes my eyes feel weird for some reason. Why can't games just focus on doing UI fixes and making the corners a little cleaner while keeping the beauty and ambience of the original art?

EDIT: Does anyone know what game this is from btw? Loom? Fuck it looks good. Reminds me that I need to get around to playing Loom one of these days.