I didn’t have a computer when I was young, but I played the original Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda when I was little and I still “game” today, and I know of other people in my age group who played the Ultima games as little kids in the '80s. I’m sure my experience is far from unique.
Extremely popular first party Nintendo games aren’t a good comparison, since those were quite widespread. Wasteland is comparatively much more obscure. Fallout 2 was much more widely known and popular, and much more recent too. I very much doubt the majority of buyers for the game ever played the original, but many were lured in by the promise of the feel of a late-90s CRPG.
I’ve never played the original, so I don’t know if the sequel really follows the flow of the first game, but it seems clear to me that they’re trying to capture something close to the feel of Fallout 2, but hit something closer to Fallout Tactics.
Well, I was 11 when I played the original game. I can’t speak intelligently about how many middle aged PC gamers there were in the late 80s, but I do know that everyone I knew who played the game back in the day was around my age, and the sweet spot for Kickstarter pledgers is ~30 year old males.
Again, Brian Fargo knows where all that money came from, and all the minute references to the original game that are liberally peppered into nearly every single sentence of text in 2 are definitely not nudges for modern, young gamers to go play the original game (I can’t imagine a modern teenager having the patience or wherewithal to figure out and trudge through the primitive graphics and interface of Wasteland).
The same company is working on the spiritual successor to planescape: torment, so we’ll see. If they have a non-branching, non-decision dialogue system in that game, it’ll be a disaster.
The internets would melt.
Man, I can’t stop thinking about the game while at work. I’m really having fun with it, despite some of it’s flaws.
Right now my pet peeves are the skill points I wasted on barter - which doesn’t improve across party members with the skill unlike outdoorsman. The inability to set up your guys prior to combat - even if you spend the time to do so, they usually get up and move a round a bit as soon as combat is triggered. The lack of a formation button! And finally the way encounters unfold. I don’t know if this is just because I’ve only been fighting creatures, not humans, but pretty much once combat starts every enemy on the map makes a beeline for the party. So I sit back and fire away as they come. No one sets up ambushes, or flees to regroup, forcing me move in. I’ve manged to clear out entire areas without taking more than a few steps into them.
I’m hoping that changes.
Woohoo, hit a tough wilderness encounter on my way back from highpool, but I made it through standing. Got Angela a sweet-ass assault rifle, she is a wreckin machine now. 
Bought it, I have the hardest time entering into the game. I don’t like the aesthetics, the characters, I find the use of skills cumbersome. I don’t really care for my characters, nor for the the desert rangers.
I’m going to give it a new try, but most games give me at start the desire to play (even if it turns out that I don’t like them much later on), all the RPG I tried recently (Skyrim, Fallout 1 and New vegas, Dragon Age Origins, The Witcher, even fucking boring TES : Arena from 1992), made me want to improve my character, and this one just doesn’t for some reason 
Once you get to the prison especially, you need to get more tactical. I often find myself setting my individual characters up, spread apart against explosives, behind cover and at an encounter distance appropriate to the weapons they specialize in. The NPCs aren’t too smart to run around a corner after a snipe-and-run and end up congregated at a bottleneck. At that point I can relieve myself of those heavy-ass manglers I was saving up to create a greasy meaty vapor – wasteland stew. Pick through and make off with their fillings.
I would have had the patience for the original Wasteland back in the day, but these days it’s just two much menu flipping. And the combats are brutal, and the scarcity was brutal, and the attempts to heal are brutal. But none of these as brutal as having to grind through the menus for everything I wanted to do. Back when I played Bard’s Tale, which was a fairly similar interface, I knew ways to set up macros in MS DOS. I actually have no idea how to do that now in Windows.
The lack of ability to initiate combat with a proper first turn is irritating. You can move your guys individually to covered positions, but even then they seem to randomly stand up or move a few feet when the actual combat initiates, and you can’t get more than a single round off when you actually initiate combat, not even a burst. So fights end up seeming like surprise encounters most of the time, not properly sneaking into position and seizing the initiative and starting the fight. And since you’re supposed to be a commando team, that’s a serious flaw in the design. I suspect they did it this way because they found being able to get everyone in the right position in paused combat time made it too easy to win fights, but then they could’ve just made the game harder rather than more awkward.
It would be a little better if you could set a running formation, but you can’t, so when you actually do have a chance encounter, you’re begging for one grenade or rocket to wipe out everyone.
I’m probably going to get this soon(from GOG, I think), but I keep reading that if I screw up my party build, I’ll regret it later.
Is there a guide to making a good, all around starting crew? I pretty much want to be strong enough to survive, while still having social bonuses to have good story/immersion content.
Thanks!
Know that this game is hard, even on the easiest difficulty level. Survival is really the main imperative for quite some time into the game. I don’t mean to scare you off, but know there is a lot of grinding involved in getting your team up to a level where they have a reasonable chance of getting through even the first few areas.
The skills you need to have in some combination amongst your team as a whole:
Assault Rifle - an absolute must. Everyone should have this. Your most versatile and powerful weapons for most of the game.
Field Medic, Surgeon - you will need both of these. A good idea to have more than one person with these skills, or else you will really need to keep this one person out of the fight as much as possible.
Lockpicking - sometimes you just need to open something up.
Brute Force - sometimes you really need to open something up.
Computer Science, Mechanical Repair - you won’t even get past the first mission without someone who can deal with electronics or fix mechanical things.
Energy Weapons - you won’t need this at the start, but you will definitely want to invest in this skill at some point in the game.
Extremely useful, but not absolutely essential:
Perception - will help you spot mines, traps, and extra loot.
Heavy Weapons - you should have someone capable of picking up that Mangler and knowing what to do with it.
Sniper Rifle - probably a good way to keep your doctor character away from the fight.
Demolitions - for disabling mines and traps.
Safecracking - safes almost always have better loot than crates. Also needed to open certain doors.
Alarm Disarming - nice to not draw attention when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing.
Weaponsmithing - you can use items to improve your weapons, sometimes significantly, but you have to have the parts first (and I’m finding the parts are extremely rare).
Can be useful, but you don’t really need them:
Outdoorsman - can help you escape from random encounters in the wasteland, but frankly you’ll want to fight those fights for the XP.
Hard Ass, Kiss Ass, Smart Ass - can get you extra dialogue options, and can help convincing NPCs to help you, but you could probably get through the entire game without them.
Leadership, Animal Whisperer, Toaster Repair, Barter, Other weapons skills (Bladed Weapons, Brawling, Handguns, Shotguns, etc.) - can have benefits and/or are useful in specific situations, but are probably a waste of valuable Skill Points. If you end up with an odd extra couple of Skill Points, you can throw a few at these skills, but otherwise, don’t bother.
So I messed up massively with the pods (throw dynamite at my party, had everybody fire at the same time on the same target when starting combat three times, wasting bursts of ammunitions, and once gravely wounding a member of my team in the process, had a pod guy explode in the middle of everybody, and so on…).
Besides wasting drugs and ammunitions, I got one of my guy killed (I was expecting him to rise up at the end of the fight, as it happens in many games with several characters). Also my goat died (not like I care).
So, two questions :
-Does this mean I’ve one team member less permanently, or will I get to create a replacement character, or get one? I remember some guys out of the ranger forts were saying they were here to replace losses in my team.
-Do you ever heal naturally, without drugs or other items?
Are manglers actually heavy weapons? I got one and assumed it was at first, but then I noticed it doesn’t say anything about weapon class, just like pipe bombs don’t. I was thinking it might be in the non-weapon demolitions class like pipe bombs.
You full-heal when you radio in and level up, which a high-charisma (+2.5% xp per point) test character made good use of. But that’s it, AFAICT.
Re: skills:
Outdoorsman gives a small amount of xp when successful. Given the ammo savings, the lower xp may be just as good. If enemies dropped a decent amount of ammo, then it’d be as bad as barter (see below.)
Leadership is useful *if *you’ve got a high charisma character. A flat +to hit aura can help in a lot of situations, but only if its range is big enough to not have to cluster.
Shotguns are quite good for the enemies that rush you. Better than the melee skills, anyway (at least until you get an incredibly good blunt weapon for high-armor enemies.)
Energy weapons are only useful against high-armor enemies too. (armor is inverted)
Barter is worthless: a 1% discount per rank? That’s 44 skill points to get to 10%! The Fallout 1/2 “sell a gun for 100, buy it back for 75” this ain’t.
Animal Whisperer? Well…if you’ve increased it a lot, maybe those honey badgers won’t be quite as nightmare-inducing? Otherwise, worthless.
While that I agree that (so far) assault rifles are the best class of weapons in the game, you don’t want everyone using them. Even just having two characters heavily using assault rifles will burn through 5.56 faster than you’re getting it. Ammo is scarce enough that you’ll need to diversify your weapon types in order to use it. One or two with sniper rifles, with or two with shotguns, a handgun or SMG specialist - you don’t want to end up with 6 5.56 rounds to spread between 4 characters while stockpiling shotgun, sniper, and pistol rounds.
Definitely have at least 2 people with a point in surgeon, it’s the only way to revive people, and you don’t want to wipe your party if your only surgeon goes down. Secondary surgeons can get by with 1 point indefinitely though. Ranking up first aid is more useful, it boosts the bonus healing from medpacks, which you will use far
more often hopefully than trauma kits.
Heavy weapons is a risky weapon specialty, because it tends to use a lot of ammo, and valuable assault rifle ammo. Because of that, it seems like a bad idea - I started a character meaning for him to use heavy weapons but the last few levels I’ve been leveling up his blunt weapons and only having him pull out heavy weapons for the really tough fights because I simply don’t have enough ammo to feed him.
Give one person at least one point in this, otherwise there are a lot of things you wouldn’t be able to detect.
You can actually scrap extra weapons and have a chance at generating weaponsmith parts out of them. Early melee weapons have about a 50% chance of grip tape, rifles will have a chance to give sturdy mags or small scopes, etc.
Certain places where you accomplish missions, you’ll get friendly doctors who will heal everyone up when you visit that location and ask.
I think you’re right - Manglers are like grenades in that they have a set damage and everyone can use them. Which is unfortunate, because I think the skill should be “heavy weapons and explosives” - it would give more flavor and usefulness to that skill.
I will add that you have the chance to recruit followers who often excel at some of these skills. I don’t know if you want to know the specifics of that - planning it is the sort of character optimization from game knowledge that some people want to avoid.
I’m unclear about this : does this character need to be selected and to roam around to detect these things?
Also, it seems that a character about to open a door, for instance, will notice a trap that a character with perception didn’t spot.
So, how does perception work?
I’m not 100% sure, but if you click on the ability itself you’ll see a circle around the character with the skill, and I think if the object is within that circle it’ll get detected regardless of whether he’s selected or not.
Fallout 2 is my favorite game of all time. Love those games.
Can someone tell me if my Surface Pro 3 i5 will run this game? I’m so far out of touch on PC gaming I really don’t know where to look any more.
That’s an interesting question. I don’t know, and now I’m curious. Anyone had a character die and gone back to Ranger Center?
And where’d you get a goat? I want a goat!
This is definitely the way it works.
The group always moves together in a bunch, as well, so you don’t usually have to scout up ahead for traps with the character using the skill.