I don’t know… it feels like it must be further and farther between than the previous Wasteland games. I mean, in the first game, the first or second mission (can’t recall if the summer camp or the ag center was first), was against “Harry the Bunny Master” and his swarms of mutant rabbits and rodents. Right out of the gate, you knew it was going to be weird and tongue-in-cheek.
So far, this one has been robots, terrible people and violence. Not a funny thing yet, except for a few of the junk descriptions.
I’m holding out hope for a Hobo Dog stand or a 3 legged hooker, but I doubt I’ll get one.
I loved the original game. Just played through the “remastered” version a few weeks ago.
I paid into the Kickstarter for Wasteland 2. It was good but very glitchy, especially the “Director’s Cut” version.
Wasteland 3 caught me totally unawares. While I suspected there would be another sequel I hadn’t heard anything about it. I have enough on my gaming plate to keep me busy until it inevitably goes on sale, so I’ll probably wait.
Heh, conversely I tend to roll my eyes and move along through the “wacky” stuff and wait to get back to exploring and fighting. Yeah, yeah, that gang all dresses like clowns and those dudes worship Reagan and this church plays a children’s choir version of the Welcome Back, Kotter theme song and there’s a cyborg chicken that can fight with me… very cute, now let’s lay some Small Arms: 9 down on some dudes. I get that it’s a “feature” with Wasteland (and Fallout to some extent) but it’s something I just accept rather than look forward to.
Anyway, my real complaint is the glacial loading speed of the game in 2020 off an SSD. In-game is fine but loading a save or changing zones makes me feel like I’m back on my Commodore.
Agreed. I’m running an SSD as well and have a computer that was pretty high-end when I built it two years ago. It still can run most games at full quality graphics. But this loads at the speed I’d expect from a console game running on a platter drive.
Of course, it could be they haven’t really optimized the performance of the graphics which is why it takes so long. I find that my graphics card causes a crash-to-reboot of my machine every couple hours. Granted, it’s a GTX 1080 and apparently NVIDIA has screwed the pooch on the last few generations of drivers they’ve released, so they no doubt bear some culpability here, but still, the load speeds are annoying.
Also, I’m curious as to why loading on the same map seems to take the same time as loading a different map. I understand that as an RPG there’s a giant state machine under the hood, and locations of NPCs and creatures need to be reset and all that, but I’d figure some time would be saved since they shouldn’t need to reload all the textures again. But all loads seem to take the same amount of time.
I really did find the ending to be a letdown. You’re railroaded into basically two equally horrid paths, which are really the same path: they both involve half of the Rangers at your base not liking your choice and killing the other half. It makes zero sense; siding with the Patriarch vs. not was a minor tactical decision, and yet these people were willing to murder their friends to defend him? Or not, as the case may be? The Rangers are ostensibly a military organization, or at least tries to act like one, and grunts aren’t going to care about that kind of thing.
Also, what happened with my companions. Lucia wouldn’t even walk away and gets shot by Deth. Doesn’t seem to bother anyone. Kwon at least gets to leave.
As best I can tell, there are no good endings. I chose to leave Angela in charge and take the supplies back to Arizona. Well, Colorado collapses and Arizona is barely improved because they were expecting ongoing trade. I could have stayed in Colorado, but then Arizona would probably have collapsed completely. I could have left the Patriarch in charge, with all the horrors that entails. Oh, and apparently arresting the siblings was a mistake since Liberty at least escaped and restarted her gang.
Anyway, I did enjoy the first 95% of the game. There was plenty of humor in the game up until that point, too. It just felt that almost none of the choices you made really made any difference at all. I tried to play a “good” Ranger, always using diplomacy when possible (with the exception of some slavers) and letting people surrender. Only worth a tiny blurb in the ending slides. I did think the
customized song was a cute touch, though. It did pretty seamlessly weave together a few of your bigger choices.
I held off on reading your post since I didn’t want to spoil for myself. I went largely straight and by the book.
I sided with the Patriarch against Angela since I decided my loyalties were to Arizona and my general/commander and my orders were to fulfill this mission. Lucia, Kwon and Jodie all stayed by the three rangers in my team. The Patriarch stayed true to his word and send regular convoys of supplies and Arizona is recovering. However, the Patriarch also refuses to appoint an heir and people are nervous about the coming chaos when he dies. He has allowed Liberty out of prison and into his mansion to rehabilitate her but she is kept in shackles and refuses to speak at all.
I wasn’t too put off by the ranger civil warfare since I assumed many of them were basically randos we recruited to run the place and not really rangers at heart. Some were loyal to the Patriarch, some loyal to ranger command from Arizona and some ultimately loyal to the rebelling citizens.
My biggest gripe was about the companions. Because the game values specialization so highly, it was really hard to justify picking any of the companion options offered later in the game. When you got someone to a 10 or close in Lockpicking, Nerd Stuff, Kiss Ass, etc then it feels like a real step backwards to trade them off for someone with a couple fives or sixes. And there’s no “stable” to keep companions around in and give them all some time in the team – once you dismiss someone, they’re gone for good and if you turn down an offer to join, you never get a second chance (except Scotchmo, it seems). As a result, I didn’t take anyone after the first couple potential picks: Kwon, Lucia and Jodie. On the other hand, most of the later picks seemed obnoxious or like douchebags so I wasn’t too heart-broken to leave them behind. If/when I run through again, I’ll probably go with a more “heartless mercenary jerk” approach and grab the later people instead.
Maybe I’ll play through the last couple of hours again.
I left the Angela decision to nearly the very end, so I can still go against her. I previously convinced the Marshals to support me in a succession plan, and when I went against the Patriarch they at least held their fire against me. Maybe they would help convince the Patriarch to choose the Rangers as successors, with a smoother plan.
I still don’t like the Ranger civil war. If they’re just rando mercenaries, then they should have just walked away.
I agree about the companions. I didn’t change them at all. The late-game skill checks need those 9s and 10s. I can’t give that up.
I didn’t realize companions disappeared if you dismiss them. I dismissed Major Tomcat since he was starting to get pretty weak, and I was hoping he’d just roam around the base, but he disappeared instead. Same with the parrot.
For what it’s worth: I chose to leave Colorado and return to AZ. Had I stayed in CO, it’s possible that the Rangers could have influenced the Patriarch’s succession choices. I might play that last bit again just to see what difference it makes.
I need to say that I read elsewhere today that replaced Companions (the ones you meet along the way) go to the HQ bar and aren’t permanently dismissed. This goes against what I had originally read in early articles about the game but I’d be thrilled to have been wrong since it takes out one of my main complaints. Unfortunately I don’t have any saves in a good spot to test it myself but I wanted to potentially stop anyone else from making choices based on my bad information.
I do know once they officially join your party, you can trade them in and out just like you would any PC character.
However, I’m pretty sure you need to escort them back to Ranger HQ. Which means if you want to keep them, dump one of your PCs on the map, replace it with the NPC, and return to HQ. Your PC will be available to switch back from HQ.
NPCs don’t seem all that able to make it to HQ on their own for some reason. If you have them join you. And then kick them back out for the one with which you just replaced them, they hang out on that map indefinitely. It’s quirky, but not all that bad.
It’s better than Wasteland 2 on the whole. They fixed a lot of the issues Wasteland 2 had. It’s not perfect, but few games are. I would say it’s probably going to be the best cRPG of 2020, and would argue that it’s one of the best games in general for 2020.
It really is good. I’m about 80% through at this point. There are some minor issues which I’ll probably detail when I finally finish, which might be a while since I have a lot ramping up right now, but most of the issues I have with the game are more quirks than anything. I think my favorite is the disappearing animal companion quirk. I didn’t even notice it at first, and then thought it was some obvious bug, but then realized that it’s actually a complicated bug and works in the favor of the player, rather than against them.
My second favorite quirk is when Antiques Appraiser, which has a 5% chance of occurring every time you sell junk, happens to hit upon rare junk. I was finding myself running out of ammo and realizing that purchasing it can quickly drain your resources (playing on second hardest difficulty level–Ranger, if I recall), until I happened to dumb luck have a $700 unique piece of junk hit the Antiques Appraiser when I sold it at the Bizarre (not a typo) and suddenly found myself $35000 richer. I never had issues with ammo after that fact. Yeah, barter can actually be the greatest skill in the game, just for that perk alone.
Pretty sure I got hit with that and Major Tom poofed on me. But my character kept the +Crit bonus for most of the game.
If you’re feeling cheesy, you can just keep selling and repurchasing large stacks of scrap and eventually you’ll hit the lottery. The game considers a 3,000 item stack to be one item so you’ll get $3,000 times the bonus and wind up with a quarter or half million dollars. Of course, there’s nothing to really buy for that price – like you, I was financially set once I hit $30k on my wallet.
Didn’t realize Tom has that issue as well. Tom is tied to another character than my animal whisperer, so I never triggered the bug.
For those wondering, animal companions are always bonded to one character. That character gets the benefit the animal brings to the table. And the animal moves with the character (except during combat, where it moves during the “friendlies” stage).
If you pull that character out of your party and replace them with someone else at HQ, then reload the map in anyway, the animal companion disappears. Permanently. (I lost a lot of cyber-chickens this way before I realized what was happening. And cyber-chickens, unlike regular animal companions, aren’t limited to only one.)
However, the game still saves the companion bonus because the companion has neither died nor been dismissed. So your animal whisperer can accumulate a lot of bonuses this way. And because the companion technically isn’t there, you can always recruit another one.
I do miss my Waste Wolf, though. And my flock of cyber-chickens.
Oh, and the reason it was the animal whisperer that I kept pulling out was dumb luck. I have a guy devoted to only Toaster Repair. I pull him into my party to go after toasters. Since my animal whisperer also has lock pick, she ended up being the most experienced person in the party, even more-so than the guy I had start with 10 charisma (i.e. 30% xp bonus from the beginning of the game). That’s how much experience lockpick gives (granted, this character had a 2 charisma and a 3% bump from her first chicken). But anyway, my removing her from the party triggered this bug and it took me a while to realize why my animal companions permanently disappeared.
I don’t think my Ranger with the Tom bonus (+6%? “This kitten has claws!”) had Animal Whisperer at all; she was just the one I waved the cigarettes with.
But that might have had something to do with me losing Tom after a time.
Only if they aren’t already there, I guess. I met Scotchmo at HQ, never let him into the party, but he stayed there the whole time. Maybe they just stay where they were originally found?
For the others, they showed up at the final showdown. Which is good because otherwise I wouldn’t have had any companions.
I didn’t create the animal whisperer until ranger HQ. I used the cigarettes as well to recruit Tom.
Still have him.
On a side note, removing the whisperer from the party isn’t the only thing that causes animals to disappear, though. I had a bison for a bit, and it disappeared without me ever trading out the whisperer.
But it seems to only happen to the whisperer. I’ve never lost Tom or Discobot, each of which are bonded to two other characters.