Do i have to save them one by one?
Does this game pretty much play like Fallout 1 and 2, then?
Yeah, I had to stop and look for custom portraits. Now, I like bare midrifts as much as anybody, but I had a strong preference for portraits that looked like they’re living in a sun-and-radiation-baked desert. Yet, when I got back to the game, I found that the outfits you could pick supported sexy-desert-ranger just fine. Feh.
Following the given advice, I created four somewhat beefy scholars. One slightly less than average strength fucking genius. We’ll see how it goes. If there’s a cybermod that boosts INT I’ll feel like a tool, but if I end up replaying this game the way I used to do the Fallouts, I’ll learn to optimize my own playstyle eventually.
Random screen grabs and fan art of Fallout 3 or NV would work too, after being resized & cropped to 256 × 256. This guy, for example.
Does this game have a console to enter cheats like Elder Scrolls or Fallout 3(and New Vegas)? I kind of want to explore it a bit and turn on god mode to mess around. Is this an option?
Whoever wrote that review is a fool. Combat in this game is excellent. Of course, I still enjoy the combat in the original Fallout games, so YMMV.
Gah, 9.0gb download, going real slow on a weekend.
Talk about your record bloatware, I think Wasteland came on 2 double sided 5.25s. That’s what 360*4. = 1.4mb? 600000% increase between releases. 
You’re telling me - the free copy of Wasteland 1 that comes with the purchase is a 254 mb download.
I’m not sure what they filled the other 253.616 mb with.
From what I’ve seen so far, social will either give you a free item or let you accomplish something before doing favors. They don’t all seem to be useful in all circumstances.
Well, you probably (eventually) want a one-point backup surgeon in case your real surgeon gets dropped. Mechanic opens up quest paths, as does Computer, but one is enough, same as lockpicking, safecracking, demolitions, etc.
Toaster Repair is the special loot chest lockpicking. There’s a limited number of toasters lying around, and they all have specific, usually valuable loot in them. The level of skill determines whether it blows up in your face.
There’s also shrines that give group boosts when you examine them (one-time only) so you may want to avoid them until you’ve picked up your full roster.
They all do basically the same thing, but they’re not interchangeable. Some NPCs will react to, say, Smart Ass, but won’t give you an option for Hard Ass or… the other ass.
My one major complaint with the game so far is the percentage-based skill successes. Fixing the first radio tower, I had a 78% chance of success. Failed the first try, so I did it again. Failed the second try, so I did it again. Failed the third try, so I did it again, and fixed it. What’s the point of making the player do all that? I like the way Fallout handles, it, where there’s a fixed value you need to accomplish something, and if you have that value in a skill or attribute, you succeed. W2 has critical failures for skill checks, which is, I suspect, meant to discourage someone with a 10% success chance from just spamming skill checks until one gets through: at Highpool, I tried to fix a valve to complete a quest, and got a critical failure, permanently breaking the valve, and making it impossible to complete the quest. So, I reloaded my last save, did it again, and finished the quest. I’m not seeing how that really adds to the game experience.
So, it incentivizes savescumming? As in, you don’t strictly have to but even if you don’t want to, if you don’t save scum, you’re liable to miss content whereas if you do savescum, you’re likely to be able to enjoy more of the game?
If so, how often does that situation occur?
A friend of mine was nice enough to buy me a copy of this game, and I’m loving it. Binged like 7 hours of it already. It captures the old-school CRPG feeling very well and I’ve missed it.
I like the combat, it does a very credible re-creation of fallout (the real fallouts) style fight mechanics but with an even better interface. I like that only a little bit of the dialogue is voiced - voice acting for dialogue is seriously one of the worst developments in gaming and the absence here is refreshing, it allows for more dialogue.
I love the little dot matrix printer in the corner constantly printing out area descriptions and flavor text.
Character creation is good. About the same amount of complexity as fallout 2 characters. I’d like it to be a little deeper, but it’s pretty good.
The world is okay so far. I’ve really only faced the ag center overgrown biodome. Those rabbits are like the rabbit in Monty Python and the holy grail, those little fuckers slaughtered me. It’s not as fun as the fallout world, and not as interesting as a more realistic take on the world, but I haven’t seen much of it yet. I’m not looking forward to when it becomes dominated by robots.
The game is legitimately hard, which is refreshing. I’m playing on difficulty 2 of 4, which is the “I’m not a newbie gamer, but I’m new to this game” difficulty and I’m struggling at times. I’m always short on ammo, forced to use nail boards on characters that weren’t really meant for melee. I’ve run short on medical supplies at times although the game does provide a lot of them. I’ve failed a lot of fights. Particularly the fight with Dr. Larsen at the ag center - I think I failed that one 6 times in a row because he seemed to get 4 shots for every one of my team’s.
I like the skill system overall. I mean, most of the skills are variants on the same thing - the three social skills, all weapon skills, and having lockpick, computer science, safecracking, and brute force all variants on the same sort of limitation. But they’re well done, and I like the fixed success table against a challenge rating system. I would’ve liked more flavor skills and random utility, but pretty good.
XP seems a little unbalanced so far. Those damn rabbits that gave me tons of problems only gave 15 xp, but random encounter raiders that I easily slaughtered gave 25 each.
I don’t quite understand the initiative system. It’s not like D&D where you simply roll initiative and take turns in that order, sometimes people with high initiative get to go multiple times. Does anyone know how it’s determined?
I don’t quite fully have a grasp on the stat system in general - which stats are useful and which aren’t, and they’re all sort of interrelated particular with action points and initiative. I’ll have to get more experience with them.
The bad… there’s very wordy, text based dialogue, which is good, but it rarely appears to be a dialogue tree, with meaningful choices. It’s usually just a laundry list of topics that you can discuss - some pop up after talking about others, but rarely do you actually have a choice about how to pursue the dialogue option. You can basically always click the first option and almost always end up discussing everything you can with that person. That’s inferior to the Fallout 2 design philosophy.
And I’ve yet to make a meaningful moral choice either, which is a pretty big deal.
Overall, though, I’m thrilled with the resurgence of the old school CRPG. These are the same people who are working on the new torment game, and they’re going to have to change their dialogue design philosophy to have any hope of giving that game justice, but mechanically I really like it.
Did you do the Ag Center before Highpool? I went the other direction, and have been getting increasingly panicky radio transmissions from Ag. I wonder if there’s a story difference depending on which place you rescue first.
Are you supposed to fight the big toad? I mean, the one you find as you follow the blood trail in the first mission. That thing killed my four guys very quickly.
What characters builds did you go for?
I went for:
- High strength and speed guy who acts as damage taker/melee/heavy weapons
- high intelligence sniper/medic who hangs back
- high charisma bard with kiss ass/hard ass/smart ass
- high awareness and coordination whiz guy with energy weapons and tech skills.
My experience has been mostly positive, but a few points of complaint or confusion.
For such a polished game, the map/terrain is really buggy, pathing in particular. I’ve found several items that can’t be gotten to at all because the characters won’t walk across a step or two of open ground. The camera is hideous in small spaces unless you spin it all the way up, at which point small things can’t be clicked on.
A few questions: the difficulty seems to jump really high, even on “Rookie”. I’ve spoilered some early content here:
I did the Radio Tower, Ag Central, and Hightower, all of which were reasonable, and a half dozen or so random encounters in the wild. Then I got a distress call from the creatively-named Levele d’Upe mine, and was faced with honey badgers in fairly large numbers that were devastating (party wipe almost immediately).
I was wandering a bit when that last one came up. Anybody know, did I get the distress call just because I wandered near the place, or does the difficulty take a massive jump right about then? I’m also concerned about the number of safes/locks/traps/mechanicals that are listed as very high failure rates in early locations: I’ve got level 3 or so in all those skills, and I still find a bunch of stuff with difficulties like 10%, with a critical failure chance of 35%. It seems like I’d have to basically spend all of the skill points for a couple characters on these skills to keep up with the increase. Coupled with the above, I’m concerned that there’s a “right build,” and no reasonable victory path if you don’t choose it, even on lower difficulty levels. I’m enjoying the game, but I’m not going to want to have to play it through again so soon.
Finally, what does the percentage number on enemies actually mean when you target them? I assumed it was chance to hit, but it didn’t seem right, so I kept track for a while: I missed 19 out of 22 attempts that were shown 75% or higher. So is it maybe a miss chance? Although that doesn’t seem right, either. I second the recommendation above to spread out the weapon skills: some of the ammo types are extremely rare in practice. (And sniper rifle, in particular, seems of limited use: you can generally only use it for at most the first round of combat, then everything’s too close to hit. It’s moderately powerful, but not worth spending skill points on for a maybe once per combat shot with very expensive/rare ammo.)
Despite the above, I’d definitely recommend the game; I’m having fun, and they’ve definitely made it more modern and playable than the original Fallout games (I never played the original Wasteland for some reason).
This was smart, I think. I made my medic a shotgun guy and my sniper was a different character.
I’m actually getting ready to start over and choose my skills better now that I understand the game a bit more.
As far as the frog goes, I had my sniper take a shot before it noticed us, and that let us take it out pretty quickly. It had to spend a round hopping over and by the time it got an attack it was nearly dead.
Is there some way to manually initiative combat? If I see a bunch of raiders in their little camp, what I have to do now is basically micro-manage everyone in real time to try to line them up in the right position, and usually the fight is going to trigger somewhere in the middle of that while my group isn’t set up. It seems obvious that you should be able to manually initiate turn based mode to get your team ready for the combat ahead, since you’re the ones sneaking up on them.
Also, I don’t know if I had this option at first, but I went back to the citadel and talked to Rose for the first time around level 8. She offered to join me. She’s level 14, by far my best fighter. Is that the way it’s supposed to go? Am I supposed to get a character way ahead of the rest of my party?
Oh, and in dialogue, sometimes words which will become new dialogue options are either in red or green. What does that mean?
Yeah, choose your sniper, click on the big gun button in the middle, then click on an enemy to get a free opening shot. (If you choose your entire party, sometimes you can get a whole firing squad thing going.)
If you dither in Highpool before going to the Ag center vs. going to the Ag center first…that is a huge difference in the mission.
You CAN get passe him without fighting, I think you need the animal whisperer skill.
I’m kind of regretting not giving everybody a point in sniper. Early game at least, sniper owns, plus the extra starting bullets would be really nice about now.