Good - post your impression :)
Fargo sounds confident about the release which is rather encouraging. I can’t wait to dive in after I wrap up Red Dead 2.
Looks like word is going around the review embargo lifts on the 26th. Not sure what time zone though, but that’s what some reviewers have been saying according to a Reddit post I just saw.
Woo hoo, I got my key! And yes, I totally did forget that I kickstarted this.
Yep, just got my key!
I was amazed by Wasteland 2. Not that it was a great game, although I enjoyed it once the enhanced edition came out, but just how much it felt like an updated 80s CRPG.
Hopefully they fix the save scumming stuff, that was my biggest problem with the game, although it did fit with the recidivist CRPG feel.
Eurogamer’s Recommended review: a devilish satire of post-apocalyptic America.
Man, this review has me getting excited about this for the first time. Maybe this is exactly the kind of game I need to play right now despite my gaming A.D.D being worse than usual this year.
Honestly, for a launch RPG of the old school flavor by a studio known for releasing buggy messes this getting a meta of 83 (which is pretty high for a lot of games in this genre, most of them in fact) is pretty impressive. Will be checking into this as the day rolls on.
Frankly, the only thing that gives me pause after seeing the reviews is that it’s such a long game again. It’s obvious from reading that Eurogamer review, for instance that the reviewer isn’t finished yet, he’s only 55 hours and counting into the story, and there’s more to go. Other reviews mention that it’s closer to 80-100 hours long for completionists. That usually keeps me away from a game. If a game is that long, the odds that I’ll finish it are tiny.
The length excites me, if there’s actual content to go along with it. I don’t mind immersing myself in a world for many hours if there’s interesting things to do.
On the other hand there’s Final Fantasy 7 Remake.
I was clearly too focused on getting my digs in on FF7R.
Good stuff! Sounds like they kept a lot of the oldschool CRPG feel but stepped up the production values considerably.
Hope they got rid of the save scumming, though. Really didn’t like that in WL2.
What was the issue in WL2?
Unlocking containers, disarming traps, etc. If you failed you fail forever, but that chance was calculated the first time you try. So you save, fail, load, fail, etc. At least I did, because I can’t stand leaving a chest unopened.
That seems more like a “you” problem, why deny others the ability to save scum just because you have no willpower? :) Maybe it’s an option!
IMO it’s objectively poor game design to incentivize the player to take negative action outside the game.
They should determine the results of all static skill checks like pick lock when the player loads the map and recalculate immediately upon that skill level changing inside the map. That would allow for save scumming with hoarded skill points, perhaps, but would still be a huge improvement. I probably wouldn’t bother to munchkin my way quite that much.
Alternatively and much easier, use a fixed random seed and save the state of the query. That would be like an hour of coding (depending on the framework, but these games are built in Unity, so an hour is generous).
Yes, you could change the order of checks, but that’s more work and people would most likely not do that. And in a RPG like that outside of combat it’s harder to do (there are not checks upon checks so you can change order easily and fast enough).
I’ve seen stuff like that in TRPGs with rewind in which rewind also rewinded the random state, so rewinding and doing the same thing gave exactly the same results.
Then people would just leave the map and return upon skill check failure. I mean, they probably would, the dirty bastards. Cough.
As per my post above, if you make save scumming inconvenient enough, people tend to not do it. For stuff like chests and such I can see a simple solution working well enough. For combat I will save scum even if I need to repeat an hour of combat, if the results were bad enough.
I hated Civ 3 going off a fixed random seed though. One of the things I always enjoyed in Civilization games is saving the game before finding a goody hut, and then saving all possible outcomes under different saves. Save1: Found a settlement, save2: found a technology, save3: found a unit, save4: found gold. When Civ3 came out and the seed was pre-determined, I was really upset. I was ready to uninstall and return the game. Luckily they had the option to turn off fixed seeds in the menu.