stusser
1703
The very frequent alarm/trap/computer/repair/lockpicking checks were my primary complaint with the game-- they strongly incentivized savescumming and just plain took forever. When I replayed the revamped version, I simply cheated all those skills up to the max so I wouldn’t have to worry about that stuff.
It definitely isn’t a AAA game, but I disagree regarding polish-- the director’s cut eliminated the bugs, cleaned up the graphics a bit, and smoothed over some weird plotpoints.
Torment actually uses an entirely different engine, the Pillars of Eternity engine. I did find it to be more polished than Wasteland’s, and their design decisions were certainly more thoughtful.
How in the fuck is this game balanced. I can’t do the fight in Whittier Narrows.
-It’s a scripted ambush, in an open area, against an enemy with superior numbers, so I always eat several shots in their first turn where I can’t do anything. They are packing serious firepower, so they incapacite one guy and leave another at 10% hp.
-I already did almost all the secondary content not leaving stone unturned so I’m pretty sure I have the appropriate level/armor/weapons. But even with power armors they can kill me sometimes in one hit.
-I lowered the difficulty to seasoned, but it’s mostly the same, I just can hold up one more turn.
-It’s part of the central quest line (it doesn’t seem so but actually the main quest won’t advance until I play this) so I can’t avoid it and do other part.
Huge difficulty spike. :/
Kick the difficulty down again. Some of the balancing in this game is absolutely screwed if you just don’t happen to have the perfect team with the perfect weapons.
What would be cool is if in a difficulty spike like that, they had a whole brief separate ending. I already do that on my own, “… and then my team was ambushed in an unwinnable battle and they all perished.” But I always think it would be neat if developers are going to put a difficulty spike like that, then also include a unique flavor ending for that situation.
I could do it lowering even more the difficulty, as you hinted. It was worth it, because imo the Hollywood part is pretty cool. I’m liking Los Angeles more than Arizona, with the mannerites, the god’s militia, Rodia, etc.
But in general terms, this seems to be a 62-64 hours game, and imo it would have been better to make something shorter (say, 45 hours) but more polished and designed.
It’s funny how despite the game being so “old school”, the designers doesn’t seem to have heard of the term “natural 20”. Why I have to lockpick 4 times a lock…
So it seems I went rogue and didn’t know it. I was cleared to go to LA, but wanted to wrap up the NW half of the map, the Rail Nomads. For whatever reason, I couldn’t resolve it peacefully. Kekkahbah wouldn’t give up the Golden Spike, and would just shoot Casey James and his crew when they met. Clearly, he was the problem so I removed him.
Afterward, I went to talk to Casey and everything was cool. I walked around the Rail Nomads and everything seemed cool, then they started to attack me. The radio started going off about something, but I could never hear more than a word or two before combat would start up and cancel it. /shrug
I go to Darwin, get the cure for cancer, spend some time exploring. Then I get attacked by Death Squad sent by Vargas. What?! Oh nice.
I’m not pissed that I went rogue, I’m pissed that the game didn’t explicitly tell me that I was now fucked and had to reload or I had just wasted 40 hours. Supposedly you’re allowed to wipe out one camp and Vargas will forgive you, but I never got that option.
Fuck you, Bryan Fargo.
Just in case anyone out there besides me is interested:
You made it through the Bard’s Tale games in remastered form, that gives me hope that a remastered Wasteland might be worth playing. Plus the setting makes me actually interested (as opposed to Bard’s Tale).
stusser
1711
This is a pretty substantial graphical upgrade!
I really enjoyed the Bard’s Tale remaster - much more than I expected. I mean I knew they were really good games, but I figured they wouldn’t have aged all that well. But they did a solid job retaining all the classic game stuff while also introducing a bunch of quality of life items that really helped - stuff like being able to save anywhere, taking character upgrades to the rogue from the third game back to the first two, all kinds of things. I hope they do something similar to Wasteland, keeping what was great but making it more easy to play by present day players.
Oh wow, that is a huge difference.
Benhur
1714
Thank you for the update! I was thinking about this just the other day and now I have a date to look forward to.
Based on the screenshot, it looks like we’re going to have read paragraph books again? I hope that was just there for nostalgia and we’re not going to have to open a separate HTML file to read copy-protection text.
Bear in mind, that screenshot is actually from a tweet Fargo sent out last summer. It’s possible that may have changed but yeah, I guess it may also be that we’re going to be reading paragraphs from a separate document again.
I thought the paragraph books were integrated into the version they are selling now?
I tried Wasteland years ago but got roflstomped by the giant robots in the city and never went back. I didn’t know about the paragraph books so was missing a lot of content too! (Despite previously inheriting one of the Interplay anthologies with physical books from my brother-in-law.)
;)
We have a trailer! Hardly any gameplay footage though.
Also, this may have been known, but looks like the remastering effort is being done by Krome, the Australian studio that handled the Bard’s Tale remaster. I thought they did a really great job on those games, so this is a really good sign. Something else I turned up, the game’s official page on Xbox.com:
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/wasteland-remastered
You’ll note that the physical storybook is now voiced and fully available in-game. No more looking up paragraphs.
So this released yesterday and I took a little time to dink about with it last night - it’s fun, but very much a throwback in terms of interface. Not much has changed or updated - you still need to use the old keystrokes to do stuff. For instance, if you’re told that a cave is hidden over between some trees, you need to go over to the trees, hit the Use button, then choose Skill, and then Perception to locate the cave. Then you open your inventory and Use a rope to tie to a nearby stump, then climb down. Inside that cave you may run into a person you can interact with. But standing in front of that person, you need to initiate the combat interface and choose Hire, then select the person. It’s the same as the original interface, but will probably seem pretty clunky to people who haven’t played before. Looks pretty nice though.
Bluddy
1719
Almost sounds like the LucasArts remasters, where the old interpreter is running in the background but the graphics and sounds are new.
Played a bit more this weekend, I’m really getting into its groove. I don’t know for sure but I think they’ve rejiggered the difficulty with the remaster - I made it to Vegas and I remember that being a pretty big jump in difficulty, with the addition of robots wandering the streets waiting to terminate me. But I didn’t find it to be all that bad, so either I’m misremembering or I’m way better prepared this time or they did in fact balance the difficulty a bit. For instance, I remember the Scorpitron being a huge blowup of a battle, but I took it down with a single LAW this time. Couldn’t be that easy.
And while it does have some modern conveniences, like adding a ‘Camp’ option to fast forward time (and healing), you still have to play a careful back-and-forth game of balancing your characters’ inventory. Swap out a weapon that uses 9mm to 7.62 mm and you’ve got to trade out the ammo one by one, and hope that the characters doing the swap have inventory space to do so. Still though, a fun blast from the past so far.
And I beat it! According to trueachievements.com, I am the 9th person (registered on the site) in the world to do so!
It’s kind of funny how the memories came back to me, I spent most of the endgame grinding for experience. Partly to get achievements, partly to buff up my group for the combat. But mostly for the achievements. Anyway, it’s all pretty much a nicer looking version of the original game and it was a ton of fun to revisit it. Makes me want to hop into Wasteland 2, which I never beat previously. And it’s on Game Pass as well, so … why not I guess?
