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Weird West: Definitive Edition - top-down immersive sim action-RPG from Arkane founder Raf Colantonio

Joined
Jan 26, 2007
Messages
522
Location
Germoney
It seems they have (finally) nerfed the silent sentry ability, which is basically the sniper thing you previously could spam over and over, taking down entire enemy camps with but a few of patience. Using silent sentry doesn't cost but 5 AP anymore, but 10. Meaning that auto-regenration to 5 AP won't be enough to reuse it endlessly. You have to actually invest in ressources. Given the power of the ability, that's how it should be.

I finished the game on the last weekend. Then started immediately another playthrough of the bounty hunter's storyline to do a few things differently. During that playthrough, I laughed my ass off that the game had even "acknowledged"
that I had shotgunned my own husband, as "illogical" a decision that was. Both via the ending cutscene, as well as the final review screen.

Total game ending spoiler:

That said, the actual ENDING you get seems to purely depend not on your actions (for which you seem randomly asked about at the end -- what you did here, how many people you rescued there, how much stuff you stole from people, etc.) The ending depends on how you answer the questions asked on your actions. Which means that the ending isn't determined by much of anything you do in your playthrough, but how you respond to / what you think of it at the very end. That is, outside of how you handled some factions/characters, as they get Fallout-y conclusions too.

It's an interesting concept, and upon reloading it seems partially randomized on which of your actions you are trialed about. In paritcularly considering that the 21's experiment was never a trial of morality, aka harvesting/not harvesting the Little Sister in Bioshock. But one of emotions. But I can see why some would be disappointed by it as it basically boils down to what you do in the final moments of the game.

Hoping for a few decent story DLC, Garrett DLC included: A yet not playable character with but 20 HP, a mechanical eye allowing for a more customizable camera and abilities that are universally about staying undetected (I found that the majority of character abiltities are directly related to combat, with a few exceptions). His storyline? To rob the filthy rich of the Weird West in their expertedly crafted multi-storey estates blind, of course!
 
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Child of Malkav

Erudite
Joined
Feb 11, 2018
Messages
2,454
Location
Romania
I will replay this once all the DLCs and updates are out. They seem to want to support this so I'm excited for it, for more content. I'm curious about the nimpossible difficulty they will add, about the specifics.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Welcome to our Weird West Developers React Stream with host Community Manager Alex, Creative Director Raf Colantonio and and Lead Systems Designer Gael Giraudeau aka
GaGzZz https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjjKpNYRc2omsrA0EY2_Cpg
Find out more about the Weird Wolves https://www.weirdwolves.com/

Watch us react to how you play Weird West!
We then talk more about the features of the Snake-in-my-boot Patch 1.02 available now on Steam, GOG, Xbox, PC Game pass and Playstation. Plus we hint at what's coming next....

Thanks to everyone that submitted clips and everyone that's played Weird West.
Please note there is a slight echo on some of the clips which stops at 14:02:
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,660
"I don't expect he'll find many fighters willing to face him."

That's where you're wrong.
 

SumDrunkGuy

Guest
This game is a lot of fun. Probably my third favorite game I played this year, behind Elden Ring and White Day, and just ahead of Tormented Souls.
 

SumDrunkGuy

Guest
Is there any way to de-aggro NPCs other than killing them? There's this progressive lesbian couple holed up in their house and they seem to know exactly what I'm doing at all times no matter where I'm located and it's keeping me from pulling off crimes quietly. I jumped through their window and hacked them up with a machete (no body else was around to see me go in the house) but the whole town seemed to clairvoyantly witness it and matters only got worse. It's very annoying. I just want to rob the bank in peace.

Seems after a bunch of days they no longer have "the eye in the sky" detection on me. They're still aggroed though so I have to try and avoid them. Maybe now I can git away with smokin the foolz.
 
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SumDrunkGuy

Guest
With the current balance (bugs?)
Playing a Character who has no reservations about crime completely breaks the game.

Playing pigman, went back to the first village. firearms store had a legendary and bunch of 4 star guns of each type.

You treat me like a pig, I have no money, and I really want the gun, so I`m just going to take the guns.

Waited for everyone to leave and then knocked the clerk out.

As I‘m standing there looting the shelves of the glorious legendary guns, Townsfolks and even the bloody sheriff are walking in and out with text boxes above their heads "Someone is knocking people out!"

You think there is any possibility that it is the pig man currently having a wonderous time looting the shelves of the stores, who looks awfully familiar to the talking pigman with a -80 reputation $100 bounty just posted yesterday?
"Nah, Can`t Be, just let the nice pigman completely loot the store"

Repeat the process with the rest of the stores in the town....

Entirely eliminated challenge for the rest of the chapter.

Kek, I did all that and maintained +100 reputation. Try being sneaky next time you fucking neanderthal.
 

SumDrunkGuy

Guest
Alright, so after FINALLY switching characters and messing around a bit I can now see why this game could be problematic.

 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
GameBanshee review: https://www.gamebanshee.com/reviews/126459-weird-west-review/all-pages.html
Introduction

You may know Raphaël Colantonio as the founder of Arkane Studios, the team behind such titles as Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Dishonored, and Prey. However, over the past few years, he's been busy getting Wolfeye Studios off the ground. The goal there was to have a smaller indie team that traded Arkane's publisher-supported budgets for some extra creative freedom.

This endeavor has resulted in Weird West - a gunslinging isometric immersive sim. And having played through Wolfeye Studios' debut project, we now bring you our thoughts on it.

Multiple Personality Dishonor

First things first, we have to figure out what an immersive sim even is. It's a terrible name, for starters. Games classified as such are not true simulators, and neither are they a part of The Sims franchise. And immersion is just a nebulous buzzword that doesn't really mean anything.

But if you don't get too stuck on the literal meaning of the words, you'll understand that when someone calls a game an immersive sim, they actually mean a stealth game with a progression system where you have multiple ways to tackle just about any challenge and an option to eschew subtlety in favor of a brute-force approach. A game that is somewhat similar to Deus Ex would be another way to describe immersive sims.

Weird West then is one of those. At the same time, Weird West is also a literary subgenre that combines a Western setting with some supernatural or occult elements prevalent in the so-called Weird fiction. In other words, if H. P. Lovecraft were to write a script for a Clint Eastwood movie, that would be an example of Weird West the genre.

Weird West the game, as you may have already guessed, uses that particular subgenre for its setting. You get a world where an expansive frontier of plains, bogs, steppes, and deserts is dotted with tiny settlements, mines, ghost towns, and haciendas. And in that world, you have farmers growing crops, prospectors lusting for gold, outlaws causing trouble and bounty hunters chasing said outlaws.

But underneath the surface, you also have ghosts haunting their graves, werewolves howling in the night, shapeshifting monsters running slaver gangs, and strange cultists prophesizing doom and despair.

As you play Weird West, you'll get an opportunity to explore this world as five different characters. You will start your journey as a bounty hunter on a quest for revenge. Then, you'll play as a cursed pigman, a demon-hunting native, a god-fearing werewolf, and a witch who can see the future.

These characters all come with their personal stories and an overarching thread that connects them in some way. While playing as any one of these characters, you'll be able to tackle all the optional content you wish. You'll get to take on side quests, bring outlaws to justice, rob banks, hunt bears, explore ghost towns, and so on. But once you're done with a character's main story, you will have to switch.

And while these characters and their stories are pretty good overall, I see this general structure as one of the game's biggest failings. In a game like Weird West, chances are you want to play as either The Good, The Bad, or The Ugly. You know, the classic Western archetypes. And seeing how it's a game with a great degree of freedom, let's face it, it's probably The Ugly, an unabashed agent of chaos. Not being able to create your own character here is a great shame.

This character-hopping thing also ties into the game's progression system. Your characters in Weird West have Perks and Abilities. You unlock them by finding special items while exploring the world. The caveat here is that Perks unlock new stuff for all your characters, while Abilities only upgrade your current one.


Perks range in usefulness between some handy unlocks, like being able to jump higher, sneak faster or deal more damage to unaware targets, and the significantly less impressive percentile increases to your HP or shop prices. Abilities are split between weapon abilities which all characters get, and a special tree unique to each character. These too vary greatly in their usefulness.

To take things one step further, all the upgrade items you pick up but don't immediately use will be transferred over to the next character once you recruit your old character as a companion. This creates a situation where you don't actually want to upgrade your current character, and instead want to hoard all the upgrade items. To make matters worse, your third character unlocks the ability to converse with ghosts, while the final one lets you decipher ancient texts, further incentivizing you to treat your earlier heroes as disposable.

And to complicate things even more, all your characters share their saddlebags and safety deposit boxes, but you can't transfer your actual savings between characters. This results in a rather tedious song and dance where before wrapping things up with a character you have to turn your dollars into gold bars, stash them away, and decide which consumables and items you need to finish your journey, and which you'd rather leave to your next hero.

Once you actually start that new journey, you have to first find a town with a bank, then find a town with a stable, then find one of your old characters and hire them to get all the upgrade items back. And you have to do this four times.

But at the very least, this approach allowed the developers to introduce a great deal of reactivity. During your journeys, you'll be making plenty of decisions that will affect the world around you on both a major and minor scale. You'll get plenty of opportunities to dismantle or prop up entire factions, save or destroy various settlements, and in the end, decide whether to save or destroy the world.

And on a more personal level, you'll be making friends and enemies. The former will aid you in combat, while the latter will be sending their goons after you. There's even a pared-down take on the Nemesis System from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.

For example, during my pigman journey, I ended up turning the witch that cursed him into a pig herself. Then, on a later journey, I apprehended her for a bounty, as the pig version of her was now an outlaw. And finally, when visiting the pigman at some point, I had to put her down, as she had apparently escaped and together with her gang, was now attempting to take her frustrations out on the town the pigman was living in.

So in the end, despite some reservations about the game's approach to storytelling, the abovementioned busywork didn't stop me from enjoying Weird West overall.

Twin-stick Six-shooter

Now, usually, immersive sims tend to favor the first-person perspective. Weird West, however, adopts an isometric approach. Here, you'll be looking at your character from up high while using your mouse to control the camera and aim, and WASD to move. Alternatively, you can use a gamepad.

The fact that most immersive sims aren't isometric should've been the first warning sign here. No matter how you look at them, the game's controls are extremely clunky. All the menus seem to have been designed with a controller in mind, making them needlessly annoying to navigate.

Everyone's favorite "press button to do one thing, hold it to do another" feature is a big offender there. Having the cursor completely disappear on you whenever you're not holding the right mouse button (it's what you have to do to pull out your gun and start aiming), is a close second though. Inventory management could also use some drag and drop functionality.


In combat, this clunkiness translates into you having to constantly hold and release the right mouse button to either aim your gun or adjust your camera. You can't do both at once. And should you decide to use a controller, you'll come face to face with the fact that while all the menus were designed for it, due to the game's overall pace and the general scale of the objects you'll be aiming at, trying to use a controller during a fight makes the game borderline unplayable.

But even when you're using a mouse, the game simply moves too fast. The developers actually went all out here and included a lot of systems that can interact with one another. You can set fire to oil puddles and you can then douse said fire with water. Wind can blow flames onto nearby wooden structures. You can get hit by lightning thanks to a dynamic weather system. You can break enemy morale by killing their leaders. You can kick people off ledges, attract their attention by making noise, and set up elaborate traps.

Unfortunately, since things go down way too fast once bullets start flying, you won't get a lot of opportunities to utilize any of this to your advantage. Without fail, every time it's easier and more effective to sneak behind enemies and knock them out, or just shoot them dead if you get caught.

And if you do decide to get all fancy with it, chances are you'll end up being disappointed. Let's say you spend five minutes sneaking around and setting up an oil puddle for your enemies to walk into. Then you set the thing ablaze. Your enemies take around 5 damage each, roll out of the fire and start shooting, alerting the entire dungeon to your presence.

This is especially noticeable early on when you have bad guns and under-leveled abilities, which results in hilarious moments like your silent takedown skill not being able to actually kill your target in one shot, or when you have to shoot an explosive barrel several times before it explodes.

Now, while the game's combat is highly clunky, that doesn’t make it difficult. I was playing on the third out of the game's four difficulties and never felt like things were particularly challenging, aside from the times I had to deal with the crazed miners who like to throw dynamite at you. The idea there is to shoot the dynamite before it reaches you, but those sticks are like 2 pixels wide, while the miners have way too much health and chuck the things like there's no tomorrow. Those encounters were pretty tough.

Thankfully, this being an immersive sim, you don't have to engage in combat all that often. Usually, you can just sneak around your enemies or knock them out. This approach makes things significantly more enjoyable.

Either way, the gear you'll have at our disposal includes several weapon types - melee weapons, pistols, shotguns, rifles, and bows. You will also have access to a number of consumable potions and throwable explosives, as well as an armored jacket and two talismans that usually make your character better under certain conditions, like doing more damage if your reputation is high enough.

Your gear comes in several tiers and variations. For example, you have a choice between a slower and stronger rifle or one that's a bit weaker but shoots faster, and these can range from the common greys to the legendary oranges.

If you're looking to upgrade a particular gun (or a suit of armor), you can utilize the game's crafting system and exchange several ore nuggets or animal pelts for an extra tier of quality. But unless I was doing something very wrong, usually, you'll be able to find plenty of high-tier gear way before you'll get a chance to collect the necessary upgrade materials, making the whole thing redundant.


I guess it's just another extension of the game having way too many systems for its own good. In fact, the game even has a system where NPCs can remarry should their spouse perish at some point. But seeing how Weird West doesn't really have any memorable characters outside the main quest, its side-quests tend to be of the fetch variety, and its dialogue system is extremely basic, chances are you won't remember any of the NPCs you meet, at least not well enough to notice their last name changing.

In general, the game presents you with an abundance of points of interest, but they're just not all that interesting. Once you've managed to build a nest egg with your very first character, you don't need much else. The loot you find is mostly junk, and you can get all the leveling items you need during story-related missions.

And if you do decide to go out and explore, after a while you'll realize that all the mines and settlements and farms here look pretty much the same, like the settlers brought along some prefabs on their journey West.

At times it feels like Weird West doesn't know what it wants to be - a hand-crafted story-driven game, or a procedurally-generated one. And for an immersive sim, a genre with its roots in the likes of System Shock and Deus Ex, the choice should be an obvious one.

In an immersive sim, you want to see elaborate sprawling levels that give the game's systems enough room to breathe. You want these levels to be populated with memorable characters and encounters, easy to miss nooks and side passages. You want Liberty Island, not a handful of shacks in a desert.

Technical Information

For a game with so many systems, Weird West is surprisingly stable. It runs well, doesn't chug too hard, and I haven't encountered any major bugs or issues. On rare occasions, I wasn't able to knock out certain NPCs (that otherwise should've been susceptible to it), and a few times I was detected seemingly through a wall. But a reload sorted those out.

Speaking of reloads. The game has several rotating autosave slots, quick saves, and manual saves. The caveat there is that reloading the game world can lead to some unexpected consequences like enemies suddenly being reshuffled on the map. But while annoying, I just treated that as an incentive to not get caught.

The game's visuals are neat for an isometric title, but once again it suffers from its choice of perspective. There's plenty of stuff in the world you can pick up or interact with, but looking at it from a distance, it's all too small. And as far as I'm aware, there isn't a button that highlights interactable objects.

The sound design is also quite good, even if the game's soundtrack isn't overly varied. And while we get plenty of voice-acted narration during the story sections, the rest of the game isn't voice-acted, allowing you to read things at your own pace.

One last thing to mention here is that when you launch the game for the first time, it just starts. You don't get a chance to tinker with the options menu and instead get the opening cutscene straight away. I really don't like it when games do this.

Conclusion

While Weird West can't hold a candle to the likes of Deus Ex, and it sure does have plenty of questionable design decisions, at the end of the day, the immersive sim market is not exactly oversaturated. And with that in mind, I did enjoy my time with the game. It may not be great, but it's still a perfectly decent way to spend 20-40 hours of your time.
 

SumDrunkGuy

Guest
I was bored with this game by the time I got to the third chapter/character. Only a select few abilities and perks are actually useful and every character plays almost exactly the same with a few minor exceptions. You can pretty much see everything the game has to offer in the very first chapter, and then there's 4 more chapters of the same exact shit.

I guess it's my own fault for sticking with the first character for way too long. Weird West would probably be best enjoyed if you just stick to the main quests of each character and do a little bit of exploration here and there. I imagine that would keep the game from getting stale.
 

gurugeorge

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Aug 3, 2019
Messages
7,437
Location
London, UK
Strap Yourselves In
From that review:- "This endeavor has resulted in Weird West - a gunslinging isometric immersive sim"

I swear to God, on glancing over the article I read that as, "a gaslighting isometric immersive sim"

I need glasses. I need to get out more :)
 

Comte_II

Guest
Who cares about Weird West what about Devolver going down the tubes on the stockmarket?
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,153
Performance of this game is absolute dogshit. I get ~50 FPS on my 480. Old GPU? Sure, but the game's visuals are about equivalent to a 2010 game, it should run fine, and I can run good looking modern games at low settings and get way better performance than this. Worse yet, there seems to be some extra frames of lag to input, so if you don't have 144 FPS+ you're basically playing a drunk retard simulator. The game does become playable if I reduce my resolution in half but fuck that.
 

1451

Seeker
In My Safe Space
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Jan 1, 2011
Messages
1,368
The performance is horrible within towns but otherwise I found it pretty smooth.
The graphics are definitely better than 2010 era games and expecting to maximize all settings on a 480 is entitlement.
 
Joined
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Messages
14,153
The performance is horrible within towns but otherwise I found it pretty smooth.
The graphics are definitely better than 2010 era games and expecting to maximize all settings on a 480 is entitlement.
Crysis is 2007 and looks infinitely better while running better (90 FPS all settings maxed, just tested). 2010 was being generous, game looks more like it's from 2005 at best.

Also I'm not maximizing settings, I'm running at the absolute minimum for everything and performance is still awful.

To draw another comparison, I can run TW Warhammer 3 just fine with literal battle of helms deep level armies running around at mid settings. In Weird West I'm in the tutorial staring at an empty canyon and it gets worse FPS. How that is possible boggles the mind.
 

1451

Seeker
In My Safe Space
Joined
Jan 1, 2011
Messages
1,368
I agree about the unoptimized part, I even mentioned how horrible it performs in towns.
But a direct comparison of graphics is not fair most times because one must also include the art style or the artistic direction of the game.
Sure in terms of polygon count and high resolution textures the game is not that spectacular.
But since the goal was to transfer the player into the setting of weird west, for me it accomplished its purpose.
And my rig is ancient, phenom x3 with a gtx 1650. Maybe it's a problem with older amd gpus because they could not be arsed to test the game on them.
Not defending any anti consumer practices of developers here, just having completed the game I didn't have any major, game stopping issues with the graphics and the performance.
Unlike Elex 2 for example which is unplayable at later stages on weaker computers.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,660
This is a PS4/XBone port, not a PS3/360 game which is what your era your video card is from. :lol:
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,153
This is a PS4/XBone port, not a PS3/360 game which is what your era your video card is from. :lol:
PS4 is 2013, my video card is 2016 (and as I mention can still run very good looking games in 2022 on medium/lowish settings).

Furthermore, I frankly don't care what the date is for any system or hardware or game. Performance being bad because a game is actually doing a lot of impressive graphics is fine. Performance being bad because the programmers are retarded and can't program their way out of a paper box is bad. The idea that performance should just automatically get worse as time goes own even if rendering the same or worse graphics is a joke. And the awful input lag amplifying this game's framerate problems only makes it more obvious that the devs are massively incompetent. 60 FPS is frankly unplayable here because of this and that's a disaster.
 
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