Finished!

[Iiago]

It took a while (about 100 - 120 hours at a guess) but I finally finished WL2!

First off, big congrats to the designers and team @ InXile - this was a great game and a worthy successor to the original, which is a game I hold dear to my heart. I've kept my original copy and box of WL1 on the Apple IIe, along with my original copy of BT1. Could never bear to get rid of them

My unsolicited thoughts on the game:

The good:
* The story. Fleshed out with enough scope of the much-emphasised "choice" aspect of this game. Big tick.
* The characters. Varied and unique. I particular loved the mayor of Demonta.
* Voice acting - considering this is an indie game, this was really good quality voice acting. This was probably helped by the good writing, but hats off to your casting agent.
* The "choice" aspects. Forcing us to make hard decision with no clear "right" answer is really interesting and surprisingly rare. Particularly as those choices actually had an impact and didn't, to take a famous example, merely result in different coloured-explosions at the end (*cough* Mass Effect *cough*). The Highpool/Ag Centre choice early on was genius because there was no right answer and it created a sense of permanence and high stakes right off the bat.
* The difficulty. Generally, beating this game took thought. Which is nice.
* Not juvenile. God I am so sick of games that look like they have been made by and for 15 year olds.

The bad:
* I know some people disagree with me, but I felt that the design encouraged save-scumming. Save-scumming isn't fun, yet I found myself doing it. I think the use of critical failures in skill checks was the major culprit.
* Learning curve was very steep. I remember that this is what all the old games (including WL1) were like - you basically HAD to read the manual to figure out how to make a character. But it's not something I've missed. Two solutions I can think of are (a) allowing people to respec their characters at a cost, so that you can learn which skills are useful without making game-long errors; and (b) a better tutorial or guidance at the character creation stage.
* Group controls were a bit weird, especially with mines. The number of times I had people walk into mines or other traps despite someone having a high perception, causing me to reload...wasn't fun.
* I wish I had been able to see the game world a bit more up close. I spent the whole game with the camera zoomed all the way out so I could see what was going on, but it would have been nice to see a bit more of the detail, and I would have felt a little bit less like I was squinting the whole time.
* The length. Another controversial one, and I know it's typical for even modern RPG's (Skyrim, Fallout 4, etc). But 100+ hours is a long time to spend with one game. When I was a kid, I wanted long games because I had more time than money. Now I have more money than time, so I want short games so I can get through more of them.

EDIT: Also, a minor point, but Animal Whisperer felt like it was thrown in at the last minute. The stupid animals kept blocking doors or getting themselves killed.

The overall:
Great stuff. Looking forward to Torment and the new Bard's Tale!

[tetracycloide]

Percent chance skill checks are simply bad design period I think because it's like you have to save scum just to make skills worth it. Why? Why not simply have the next challenge level unlock each time? Why on earth are there skill checks in the mid/late game that don't even have a 50% chance for level 10 in the skill? It seems silly.

[Marionettetc]

Save scumming is a personal problem, not a game design flaw. You're not entitled to succeed at every skill check in the game.

[fxluk]

I just finished it myself today and I also wanted to make a post like this

So let's go with good/bad.


The good:
*Pretty much agree with everything Iiago wrote about story/quests and emphasise of the choice aspect.
I like that you cannot complety everything and even when you do, consequences are sometimes very much different than you would though.

*Difficulty - I played on super jerk. I am kinda veteren of old Fallout/IE games so there was no thinking about what difficulty I wanted to take.
I am very pleased with it. It was challenging. I had to reload a lot on some fights but after tactic change every fight was doable without frustration.

*A lot of humour.

*For me skill system is very good. Almost all skills are usable and needed. I also like that even on 10 leve of skill you can still fail at something.

*Economy/balance - I was low on money for 3/4 of the game. Only late game I could really afford everything I wanted.

*Combat was mostly fun but there were some points that are badly implemented

The bad:
*Portraits. This is not something groundbraking but it's really lame when you meet another people with the same portraits.
Shadowrun comes to mind with their big, detailed portraits. It really makes a difference.

*Armor system/energy weapons. This is something that IMO is very badly implemented. Removing armor to become more resistant to energy weapon clearly should not take place. The old fallout system which wasn't perfect made it much better.
As for the energy weapon. It was very good only in mid game - till Damonta to be clear. After that the damage on regular weapons was getting higher and higher and energy weapons seemed to stay on the same level. I don't know why there wasn't any top tier energy weapons?
At the end I didn't even use any because regular ones were scoring much more damage.

*Graphics - I am not a visual geek, but it could be much better. When zoomed out it was fine but when I zoomed in a bit everything was getting uglier and uglier. Dunno if this is because of unity, but I think that it can be improved.

Overally, it was a very refreshing time I spend with Wasteland 2. Especially after Fallout 4.
It's great that oldschoold RPGs are not dead.

When it comes to score I would give it a something like 8/10.

Now I have a high expectations for TTON

[Iiago]

Yeah, I think Fxluk made good points about the Economy and the Portraits. The unique portraits was a nice touch in the later Shadowrun Returns games, although I understand that they didn't have as many people. I also had the same thought as Tetracylolde, although I considered it part and parcel of what I called the save-scumming issue.

I don't agree with Marionettetc about save-scumming, but I understand that issue's already been flogged to death in these forums.

[tetracycloide]

Save scumming is a personal problem, not a game design flaw. You're not entitled to succeed at every skill check in the game.

If you don't intend for players to save scum but they are even when they don't find it fun then it's a design flaw, plain and simple. To insist that players change instead of the design is just pig-headed, which is probably why they did change the design in the DC by adding the perks that push critical failures off the table. Doesn't really have anything to do with succeeding at every skill check in the game so I'm not sure what that's even supposed to mean.

[Drool]

It's hardly inXile's fault that you insist on doing an optional activity that you don't find fun. If you don't like stabbing yourself in the eye, stop stabbing yourself.

[macksting]

Wasn't save scumming kind of an assumption the game was built around? I certainly got that impression. It's part of what gives the game its oldskool feels.

[paultakeda]

Wasn't save scumming kind of an assumption the game was built around? I certainly got that impression. It's part of what gives the game its oldskool feels.

The assumption is that save anywhere can be used to save scum, but that the game design will not be dictated by those who do it.

[Iiago]

Wasn't save scumming kind of an assumption the game was built around? I certainly got that impression. It's part of what gives the game its oldskool feels.

It does kind of feel that way - even the loading screen advertises the number of quick save and autosave slots available (the unspoken assumption being you should save and reload a lot).

Personally I think that's something best left in the past. If I wanted to go real oldskool I would fire up my 56k modem and ask my Mum to interrupt me every five minutes.

[macksting]

Fair enough. I went into this kind of expecting that as a gameplay mechanic, but it's also a game mechanic I don't mind.

[DragonHunterG]

I finished my first play-through of the game sometime last week. I loved just about every second of my experience. My problems came from trying to tear through the game too fast and ended up with losing quite a few followers during battles that I would have rather kept. I had it set on the Normal difficulty the entire game up until the last 3 fights. I notched it down to the Rookie setting to complete the game and I definitely got the worst or one of the worst endings. Excellent game all around. I'm looking forward to trying on the hardest difficulty setting next and taking my sweet time.

[Loswaith]

The story and writing of the game were great but some of the mechanics were a bit off and often very immersion breaking.

1. Weapons: SMGs and Heavy weapons being basically pointless to the assault rifles or sniper rifles, which not only were cheaper on ammo (a perk listed for the SMGs, sure per bullet was cheaper but not per attack as SMGs would use 4-5 bullets), and often assault rifles had high burst damage (a perk listed for heavy weapons, and didnt need you to use 6-7 bullets). While energy weapons either did high damage (to very few enemies) or half damage (to most enemies) as very few enemies had no armour at all, which rarely mattered over just using a weapon with higher Armour Piercing.

2. Armour: Was mostly pointless as the majority of enemies had enough armour piercing to render the armour of little use and energy damage simply making it way to risky to even use heavier armours.

3. Skill system: While I dont mind too much that it was percentage based (though it tends to promote save scumming), it was the illogical breakdown of their difficulties. I mean needing a 10 lock picking skill to have an average chance (on seasoned difficulty) to pick the lock of a toilet? (That is the most secure poop ever). While a 5-7 was enough for military grade weapon storage or high security compound.
Along with the issue that you often had more critical failure chance than failure chance and many utility skills were not a lot of use if they were below 7 (again on seasoned). This basically made the rangers just feel incompetent in just about everything but shooting.

[paultakeda]

What if the toilet belonged to a really paranoid ex-military type?

[Loswaith]

Well that could of been fine and an isolated condition (likely with every other container locked up just as tight) however those toilets were even the public ones for the town, not some specialised personal ones (while at the end of the day it is still a toilet).

[madmaxthc]

2. Armour: Was mostly pointless as the majority of enemies had enough armour piercing to render the armour of little use and energy damage simply making it way to risky to even use heavier armours.

For what I understand, you're playing on "Seasoned". In "Supreme Jerk" things change. On SJ, both my tanks have heavy armor, with a good light armor to put on for encounters with energy weapons. It does make the difference for the front lines in my opinion, especially in the final showdown