I have not seen the slightest hint anywhere that any of the writing has been revamped. There is no reason to expect it or ask about it. I would be astonished if they threw out the Highpool/Ag Center choice for several reasons, including the fact that it is the primary example of C&C cited in two years of promotional material (including over a year before your Codex join date, I might add). I'd say it's time you let it go.
That would "solve the issue", huh? So no one would ever again complain that the game is unrealistic?
"So easy"? So easy to pull some of the writing team off of the Torment schedule to come back and work on this? So easy to fly the Vargas voice actor in to fix this one thing? So easy to schedule and pay for the studio time for this one thing? So easy to bring back the level designers to redo sections of both ruined Ag Center and ruined Highpool to show the impact of the failed Ranger team? So easy to add in extra busywork content for you to do since Vargas isn't sending you to track the transmission until you become hardened veterans? You're talking about a major overhaul to the first chapter of the game. Or would it be better to completely half-ass such a retcon with a quick post-it saying "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet"? Perfect solution?
I wouldn't hold my breath, but it's your dime. I'll just reiterate that nothing was mentioned about a writing revamp in any of the GOTY announcements that I saw.
This isn't a retcon, retcon is when you change the major things that happen, you would still choose Ag Center or Highpool, the Wrecking Crew would still attack Highpool, the Ag center would still be sabotaged, you woudldn't even need to touch the maps (and as they are revamping the maps to look pretty it wouldn't be that far fetched to add very minor side stuff involving rangers). I don't think that adding a few flavor dialog lines from Vargas would be that hard as they are adding voice acting anyway, placing scripts for generic rangers to appear with one line of two of dialog when you are leaving highpool or Ag Center wouldn't be that hard to to do. Just add a few rangers maybe dead or still fighting on the contaminated farm and village just for flavor, or some random encounters with rangers being attacked by animals. Aren't they rebalancing the combat and messing with the encounters? Why don't add a few generic rangers here and there so you don't feel you are the only squad the rangers have?
Horseshit. Any time you change the established facts, small or large, it is a retcon. Look it up.
What you are describing is a nontrivial amount of work. And personally, if I go to the wrecked city that Ranger Team Zulu tried to save but they didn't even leave behind bloodstains, I am going to say, "half-assed".
So you want a major rewrite of that section? But somehow it would require next to no effort.
Well, about that and the thing with the dogs - and this applies to the entire game - it's OK in 80s type post-apocalypse stories for "realism" to take a back burner. Go watch Road Warrior and ask yourself every few minutes "But does this make sense?" Then ask yourself if changing everything to make it dull and realistic would be an improvement. The PCs have to be rookies or they don't get to start at level 1 and work their way up like in an RPG. Yet they have to be given an interesting mission or else the player is being given boring missions. If real life military commanders are shitting their pants because that's not how the Army would do it, too bad - it makes a better game. If you had played the first Wasteland you wouldn't be expecting a sensible game world in the first place.
Fair enough. I guess I got annoyed because you seemed to be indicting "problems with the writing" for the game as a whole. If all you care about is this one specific thing getting changed, and if it's true that the player community has been highly vocal on that particular point to the exclusion of others, then hey, maybe it'll get changed. I don't really see it as like the one outstanding problem with the writing in a game that otherwise makes perfect sense, but I can be wrong.
I don't get it. Do you expect them to only fix that one example, or are you looking for an overhaul of the writing for the whole game?
The Gang’s All Here
The first thing we wanted to do with the GOTY Edition is make it easier to jump right into the game and get up to speed with a squad that can tackle the dangers of the wasteland. To do so, we've added the Squad Overview interface.
Now, you'll have a better picture of your entire squad at a glance, so you can identify changes to make before starting on your mission. Your attributes, skills and traits are displayed here to help you identify your Ranger squad’s strengths and weaknesses.
When you dive into each squad member's details, there's more new stuff to see. We've rearranged the layout of the Character Creation process significantly. Now, you customize your character's appearance, portrait, and bio as the first step. This provides a more natural progression, letting you establish your character's style before you think about what stats to give them. We've also added some quality of life improvements, such as an improved portrait gallery.
From there, we move on to the Customize Ranger screen, where you edit all your stats and skills. It works just the same as before, but it's been visually upgraded to match the rest of our art changes and reorganized to be a bit easier to digest.
We all have a few Quirks, right?
The idea of a unique defining quality for your character has been a common and well-loved one in CRPGs for many years now. Quirks have great role-playing value by letting your characters have distinct personality elements from each other, which give them a special bonus that only they have. In a party-based game, we think it's important that all your characters feel unique, and that's what quirks will let you do.
When we approached quirk design for Wasteland 2, we wanted to achieve a few different goals. It was important for us to avoid quirks that you "have to pick" in order to play your character the right way, or create quirks that are so good you'll always want to pick them on all your characters. By giving each quirk both an upside and a downside, we can make sure that they are interesting to play without becoming overpowered. This also means that quirks are optional – you can choose to go quirk-free if you want to, and you won't feel disadvantaged in doing so.
We also wanted to have quirks that go beyond your typical stat tweaks, and act as fun or unpredictable gameplay modifiers. While some of our quirks take a simpler approach, some will give you a more radical change to gameplay that might require you make careful trade-offs and considerations. Of course, giving them a unique or compelling personality-based theme also means you'll definitely want to try them out.
One such example is Repressed Rage. Some people are more mild-mannered than others, but sometimes it's the quiet ones you need to be careful about. With this quirk, you'll keep your anger bottled up inside, but you can only keep it that way for so long. When you take a critical hit in combat, you become enraged and gain a heavy damage bonus, in addition to a higher chance of scoring a critical hit. But on the flip side, your mild-mannered self won't be able to inflict "normal" critical hits. Obviously, this will have some implications for how you choose to build your character throughout the game.
Another quirk we've had a lot of fun making is Two-Pump Chump. With this one, you live life fast – but perhaps a little too fast at times. You'll start combat racing for the finish line, and on those crucial early turns will have some bonus Action Points and a higher damage output to help you eliminate the enemy quickly. But what happens if your tank runs dry and you sputter out? After a few turns, your character will start to lose stamina and will suffer decreasing effectiveness over time. You'll want to make sure your initial zeal is powerful enough to take care of business before you become much less useful.
And that's just a very small sampling. We have 20 quirks in total, and we hope you'll have as much fun building out your squad with these new modifiers as we had coming up with all of them.
That would be interesting, but fail by InXile marketing if this is the case. Always choose the biggest number possible guys!
I would like to see more, but yeah, with only one Quirk per character and only four PCs to choose them for, there's at least some selection.
