Wasteland Wasteland 2 Thread - Director's Cut

[OSK]

Another thing that's really annoying is the fetish with robots. How many robots were there in Fallout 1/2?

You should be asking how many robots were in Wasteland 1.

 

[9ted6]

The only thing I remember about 2 was I got to a base full of mutant plants and got really bored and quit.

Didn't 3 go woke?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Lol, Rodia is a great example of shit quest design.

I came there, at the gate, the leather jerk bitch shoots some old guy's head off. So of course I tell her to go fuck herself when she demands tribute to pass. How else would Rangers act in such a situation? This starts a gunfight, and turns all of them hostile against me. It also disables all the cool quests inside the town, since everyone is trying to shoot my guys on sight.

Shittiest part: when you try to save the mayor, the enemy boss appears with 3 bodyguards who are balanced like shit (apparently you are supposed to weaken them by doing quests above, but I couldn't since I attacked the crazy bitch at the gates). So your group is squeezed into a tiny space when saving the mayor (can't select/use positioning), and the bad guys, despite wearing crazy armor and having mass hitpoints, get to move first except for one guy on my team who has ridiculously high initiative. Holy shit, one asshole attacks 6 times per round with an axe, dealing 100-200 damage (on Ranger difficulty) per hit.

Finally got through that fight by having to burn 2 LAWs, but wtf, why would you design an area like this?

 

[OSK]

How dare there be consequences for your actions!

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Good C&C (e.g. Fallout 1/2/NV, Dragonfall, Witcha games) creates interesting consequences, whether good or bad. Bad C&C like in W2 creates stupid consequences (ie do it the way the developers intended and profit or do it in some other way and be punished).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

The more I play this game, the more it seems like complete trash. As in, budget shovelware trash. In Angel Oracle, you have to give up your party leader as a hostage for some dumb quest. When they are eventually returned to you, they are added to the end of the party list, and there is no way in the game to rearrange party order. So now the party leader is the last person in the party.

There is a way to manually rearrange the order by changing the game XML files, but I don't want to do that in case it fucks something up with Steam achievements or what not. But this is shovelware level crap I wouldn't expect from a normal RPG company.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

The writing in this is ... goofy.

Graphics are obviously shit. Exploration is marred by the camera bs.

The combat was the sole saving grace, but now that I am well into LA area, the combat is turning into absolute trash also. Taking cover was like the one legit tactical thing in it, and now that I am fighting God's Children or Children of the Citadel or the endgame robots, cover doesn't matter at all. I take cover with that perk that gives you extra evasion in cover, and they hit me every single time for massive damage. Armor also doesn't seem to matter because the enemies in the later parts do so much damage (I am playing on Ranger difficulty, so they get a boost), my rangers wearing Power Armor are getting shredded and one-two shot. Meanwhile enemies are tanky as fuck and take forever to kill. The only tactics working against end-game enemies are pure cheese (converting robots with high Computer Science skill, or using area of effect rocket launcher/grenade weapons since enemies tend to cluster).

The combat in Shadowrun games (SRR, Dragonfall, Hong Kong) and Underrail (up until the Dark Caverns bullshit) was way better, hell even in F1/2 it was way more fun.

 

[Technomancer]

The combat in Shadowrun games (SRR, Dragonfall, Hong Kong)

Shadowrun combat was fucking terrible. Piss easy on highest difficulty and with all enemies perma-nerfed with only one AP per turn. Where player party always had two by default that you could boost further.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

The combat in Shadowrun games (SRR, Dragonfall, Hong Kong)

Shadowrun combat was fucking terrible. Piss easy on highest difficulty and with all enemies perma-nerfed with only one AP per turn where player party always had to by default that you could boost further.

It wasn't piss easy, it was alright. F1/2 combat wasn't super challenging either, but both SR and those were FUN, which is far more important. There is nothing worse than STUPID difficulty, like boosting enemy damage and nerfing yours at higher difficulties (which is what dumb games like W2 do).

 

[Technomancer]

It wasn't piss easy, it was alright. F1/2 combat wasn't super challenging either, but both SR and those were FUN, which is far more important. There is nothing worse than STUPID difficulty, like boosting enemy damage and nerfing yours at higher difficulties (which is what dumb games like W2 do).

Well my turn based ideal difficulty is AoD. So shadowrun felt easy as fuck. Even giving enemies more AP didn't do it for me. Recently heard similar experience from fellow AoD player. I just prefer combat that is designed to be lethal by default with no difficulty selection, and ruleset going both ways, that's how you can fine tune it and design fun challenge for every encounter. Something that feels like both hard and fair enough.

like boosting enemy damage and nerfing yours at higher difficulties

Modern cRPGs with difficulty nearly always have it like that, coz devs are lazy hacks and designing is hard. So they use cost efficient solutions by using blanket overbuffs. Pillars, Pathfinder, Wasteland 2, Underrail etc. Pick highest difficulty in any of those and everything will be made "hard" through artificial means. At least its option for challenge. Shadowrun had neither. It was easy from the get go, and hardest difficulty with unnerfed AP was still easy.

For some reason I still have W2 installed. Checked and I played on Ranger as well. From what I recall I enjoyed it way more than Shadowrun. But yeah, end game energy weapon felt a bit like bullshit. As I recall damage from energy melts armored dudes. I had like 14 DR tank char that would get obliterated in every fight. How can high tech power armor suck so much against energy weapons? Makes no sense. Still I had optimized party so it didn't feel too bad.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

It's always a bad idea for RPG designers to aim for difficulty as a design goal. They mess this up in almost every instance. Difficulty should spring organically from interesting and complex systems, Battle Brothers is a great example (blocking, dodging, armor, morale, terrain, complex movement, deep skill trees, etc).

But in most instances, RPG difficulty is complete bullshit, resulting in such exciting shit as constant buffing, "solving the puzzle of the specific combat", hitpoint bloat, nerfing/buffing damage, stupid fight set ups designed to screw you over and so on.

 

[Technomancer]

stupid fight set ups designed to screw you over and so on.

I actually like that, was a big part of AoD Depending on the context in can also be called smart encounter design where enemies try to ambush you and have a massive positional advantage.

But sure, sometimes it can be too much or make little sense.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I completed AoD a few years back, don't recall it having good combat. You specced into some weapon class, and after that it was basically click, click, repeat.

Most of the challenge came not from the combat per se, but from how C&C could fuck you over in it. Made a few wrong choices? Oh, here is the entire 20,000 stronk "Mongolian" army, have fun.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Aside from cover and armor becoming useless on higher difficulties later on in W2, another stupid thing is how enemies get so much movement points, that range is completely irrelevant. For example, I open up with my sniper from his max range, the enemy gunslinger runs up to the sniper and shoots him in the same turn, lol.

This game has no tactics per se past a certain point.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Lol, just had to post this:

Ahahahahah....


Fargo: draw me a portrait of a stunningly beautiful woman.
InXile intern: draws Asian man with tits and a pirate patch.
Fargo: I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.