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Zaii posted:One thing I'm incredibly guilty of; is treating this as if it were a sequel to the Fallout franchise. I didn't play Wasteland, and beyond knowing that Fallout was the 'spiritual successor' - I know very little of Wasteland. There are surely going to be people complaining about how this is not enough like Fallout, and of course those people were setting themselves up for disappointment from day 1 by thinking "Wasteland 2" really meant "Fallout Van Buren" when obviously that would probably be illegal as well as not in the spirit of the project in the first place. After all, Fallout only existed in the first place because Brian Fargo could not afford to license the rights to make Wasteland 2 twenty years ago. The amount of enthusiasm going into this project was palpable. AND THAT IS HOW WE ALL ENDED UP HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE WOOOOOOO Upmarket Mango and others who will be interested: This would be a good time to link to the Vision Document(tm) again, I think, particularly since this is apparently on a new page, as a lot of questions about "what is this game like? What was the first Wasteland all about? What kinds of character customization will there be?" and others are answered there: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxMevjNSr2EjbDBpZ2ZMdmNnc28/edit?pli=1 We do know some things about character creation--it will follow the original in a lot of ways, which since Fallout actually worked somewhat similarly will feel a lot like Fallout character creation, except with a party rather than an individual, and with all the balancing (or intentional unbalancing) that comes with it. (My personal favorite feature is being able to import your own character portrait--a feature that seemingly died with Black Isle until now) Wasteland's contemporary references and general wackiness walked an amazingly fine line--there were plenty of references to Cold War and 1980s pop culture things, but often either disguised or in out-of-the-way locations. But then, the robots looked like those pictures of the robots just posted, and one of the most memorable early encounters is probably with the gang of mohawked thugs with knives who attack you because you were stopping them from playing a RATT song on the jukebox. I like to think they were trying to play this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKU7AadwZ7o
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Jul 21, 2012 22:47
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I think the goal of this game is to bring back what made old rpgs great and it certainly wasn't graphics or UI. These screenshots, to me, just mean the original went from funny little squares to something like a tabletop rpg with pewter figurines and is just a bonus to me I don;t think any FPS-born gamer will understand. My own tabletop experiences and RPG snobbery aside, if you can't be fully immersed into the lives of your squad by the story they unfold, the random events that happen to them, and the sheer diversity of your characters, you have no imagination. It's like complaining a good book doesn't have enough special effects and CGI. Edit: Also, many new games features "diversity" in the sense you can choose a tank, a wizard, a distance attacker, etc.. and the devs say "Play what you want! You can beat this game!" old-school was: "You can play what you want! It's possible to beat this game! Let's hope you didn't screw yourself half-way through." crashdome fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jul 22, 2012 |
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Jul 22, 2012 00:35
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Rebel Blob posted:Here is something interesting that I don't remember being posted in the thread. The developer of Statis was inspired a few months ago to do some independent Wasteland 2 mockups based on the concept art and the original game. This is exactly the vision I want Wasteland 2 to go towards.
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Jul 22, 2012 02:06
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spider wisdom posted:ToEE Goodness. This is, for me, THE DnD game to get the combat the closest to tabletop. When I played this game, had only played NWN so I got my rear end handed to my in the first encounters. I rage-quitted and went to rant somewhere. After I came back I start learning more about the combat systems, like charging, taking 5 foot steps, using entangle, web and grease and I understood the brilliance of this game. If you haven't, grab the game, slap the Circle of Eight patch and enjoy DnD as it should have been played. Like a tactical game.
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Jul 22, 2012 06:30
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TerryLennox posted:This is, for me, THE DnD game to get the combat the closest to tabletop. When I played this game, had only played NWN so I got my rear end handed to my in the first encounters. I rage-quitted and went to rant somewhere. I haven't played TOEE (heard bad things about it, often) but if you want some unforgiving D& mechanics, play the old Gold Box games. You'll need DOSBox, but it's worth it. Combat is tile-based and turn based, complete with adding cast time to your initiative when you act, delaying your moves appropriately. Fights in the later games like Dark Queen of Krynn can be a bigger pain in the rear end than Baldur's Gate 2 fights*. *Unless you're playing dragonlance and in a dragon heavy fight. Then it's time for your fighter/knight to one-shot dragons left and right. 
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Jul 22, 2012 07:19
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Tippis posted:“Evil robots started to come out of the deserts to the west and stalk the streets of Las Vegas”  I want to go to there. So I guess that this was more fun/crazy game than serious business game?
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Jul 22, 2012 18:29
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I need at least 9 more buckles pre-paid if we are going to do this thing. Paypal $26 to sideshowcody@yahoo.com if you are interested.
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Jul 22, 2012 18:50
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machinegunmessiah posted:
I was googling for more images of VAX, and came across this image from Niklas Jansson, where he redesigned some classic Wasteland robots and other adversaries for fun: 
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Jul 22, 2012 19:07
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Young Freud posted:I was googling for more images of VAX, and came across this image from Niklas Jansson, where he redesigned some classic Wasteland robots and other adversaries for fun:  Oh, and those images I posted (and more) can be found here (N.B. spoilers on the last page). It gives a fairly good sense of the style and tone of the game (the other parts being the tilesets used for the walking-around view and the hint book, which you can find if you go back to the main page of that site). Yes, it was definitely more in the “fun” category than dark and brooding and serious.
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Jul 22, 2012 20:36
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TerryLennox posted:This is, for me, THE DnD game to get the combat the closest to tabletop. When I played this game, had only played NWN so I got my rear end handed to my in the first encounters. I rage-quitted and went to rant somewhere. With the Co8 patch, ToEE gets crazy good -- still bugged but far more playable than before. I'd play it more often if I learned exactly what the spells do and wasn't rubbish at rolling characters. I have a better grasp after reading some LPs, but I haven't invested the time to understand the systems and I'm not super familiar with D&D rulesets. That's also why I haven't given Baldur's Gate a fair shake. But yeah, ToEE just nailed turn-based tactical combat and the darkish-fantasy aesthetic.
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Jul 23, 2012 04:34
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RagingBoner posted:I need at least 9 more buckles pre-paid if we are going to do this thing. Paypal $26 to sideshowcody@yahoo.com if you are interested. Sending money to my paypal as we speak
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Jul 23, 2012 11:02
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spider wisdom posted:With the Co8 patch, ToEE gets crazy good -- still bugged but far more playable than before. I'd play it more often if I learned exactly what the spells do and wasn't rubbish at rolling characters. I have a better grasp after reading some LPs, but I haven't invested the time to understand the systems and I'm not super familiar with D&D rulesets. That's also why I haven't given Baldur's Gate a fair shake. But yeah, ToEE just nailed turn-based tactical combat and the darkish-fantasy aesthetic. We're way off topic, now, but Baldur's Gate is baby's first D&D compared to ToEE. It is far, far simpler.
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Jul 23, 2012 11:21
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Xik posted:There is also a couple of negative comments about the scorpitron, but they seem to be from people who don't understand this is a sequel and the back-story/setting has already been established. I hope he was just being silly, because otherwise...  Dumb people commenting on stuff they know nothing about.
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Jul 23, 2012 11:30
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Ddraig posted:We're way off topic, now, but Baldur's Gate is baby's first D&D compared to ToEE. And it is all the better for it.
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Jul 23, 2012 13:12
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Evil Fluffy posted:Combat is tile-based and turn based, complete with adding cast time to your initiative when you act, delaying your moves appropriately. Fights in the later games like Dark Queen of Krynn can be a bigger pain in the rear end than Baldur's Gate 2 fights*. BG2 fights are fairly simple anyway.
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Jul 23, 2012 15:45
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RagingBoner posted:I need at least 9 more buckles pre-paid if we are going to do this thing. Paypal $26 to sideshowcody@yahoo.com if you are interested. Money sent! Let me know how much extra for shipping.
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Jul 23, 2012 15:47
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crashdome posted:Edit: Also, many new games features "diversity" in the sense you can choose a tank, a wizard, a distance attacker, etc.. and the devs say "Play what you want! You can beat this game!" There are a lot of aspects of "old-school" gaming that are dead for good reason, and that is definitely one of them. Nothing sucks more than finding out that the game is unwinnable - or, arguably even worse, technically winnable but not at all fun - thanks to choices you made hours ago. Doubly so if there is no way to make those choices in an informed manner without reading a guide or having already beaten the game, and quadruply so if it isn't even clear where you went wrong. It's easy to go too far in the opposite direction and end up with a game where none of your choices have any significant effect on gameplay (hi, FF12) but even then I consider this less offensive than the dead-man-walking scenarios that characterized 80s adventure games and IF and were, for the most part, buried with them.
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Jul 23, 2012 21:12
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Having choices have consequences beyond the cosmetic was good, though. Nothing should (without knowledge from outside the game) stop you from finishing the thing, but you should be able to make things easier or harder on yourself.
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Jul 23, 2012 21:56
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Wasteland also LOOKS goofier in retrospect. Make no mistake, obviously the jokes were there, and some things were definitely unabashedly comical (particularly things in the external Paragraphs book), but the main goal was to have a game that had no qualms about murdering you but was still able to be light-hearted at times. There are plenty of things in the game that could have probably been played for laughs that were instead horrific in their presentation.
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Jul 23, 2012 22:17
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ToxicFrog posted:There are a lot of aspects of "old-school" gaming that are dead for good reason, and that is definitely one of them. Nothing sucks more than finding out that the game is unwinnable - or, arguably even worse, technically winnable but not at all fun - thanks to choices you made hours ago. Part of the appeal of old-school games to many people is that it requires you to think about the choices you make in building your characters - it's part of the strategy of the game, and it rewards those smart enough to fully understand the underlying mechanics of the game - mechanics which are usually completely explained in great detail in the phone-book sized manuals that came with such games. In my (personal, anecdotal) experience, the people who complain longest and hardest about ending up in an unwinnable scenario due to poor character creation and/or leveling choices are those people who are unwilling to actually put in the time to real the manual before playing the game - something most younger gamers who've grown up on in-game tutorials and the gradual introduction of new mechanics and options tend to skip. What you consider bad game design is, for many people, the best part of the game. Part of the challenge/difficulty curve of games like the original Wasteland was learning how to make better characters/parties and fully exploit the mechanics of the game world.
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Jul 23, 2012 22:29
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Bad game design is still bad game design even if there are people who eat it up because they're enamored with the idea of being hardcore gamers who play hardcore games, like that means anything. Actually I'm one of those people. But I don't think it should ever be necessary to read the manual, and quite often even the manual failed to convey things in a way that allowed me to make informed decisions, and I'd usually just end up playing the first couple hours twice. And that's to say nothing of getting stuck in an unwinnable or just unfun situation halfway through the game. Basically what I'm saying is Deus Ex is the only good game ever. e. Also, when it's all about objectively better/worse character builds, and not about the actual gameplay, that's just terrible.
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Jul 23, 2012 22:42
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HotCanadianChick posted:Part of the appeal of old-school games to many people is that it requires you to think about the choices you make in building your characters - it's part of the strategy of the game, and it rewards those smart enough to fully understand the underlying mechanics of the game - mechanics which are usually completely explained in great detail in the phone-book sized manuals that came with such games. Really? Because in my experience, the people who complain the most about this poo poo are the people who grew up on games like King's Quest, where no amount of reading the manual and paying attention to in-game hints will save you from situations where you are irrevocably screwed because of something you did four hours ago and which you could not possibly have known was a bad idea. I have no problem at all with putting important information in the manual; what I'm objecting to is games where the important information isn't anywhere except, perhaps, GameFAQs. quote:What you consider bad game design is, for many people, the best part of the game. Part of the challenge/difficulty curve of games like the original Wasteland was learning how to make better characters/parties and fully exploit the mechanics of the game world. There is a difference between "rewarding good play" and "punishing bad play", and there's a huge difference between "punishing the character for bad play" and "punishing the player for bad play". Forcing the player to restart the entire game, or giving them a choice between restarting and throwing away hours of progress or continuing to play with a character or party that is mechanically viable but soul-drainingly boring to play, is the latter, and is bad design. I really enjoy games with a lot of mechanical depth, where as your - the player's, not the characters' - understanding of the game improves, you go from "muddling through" to "kicking rear end" to "a force of nature". But the game should still be enjoyable even if you are only muddling through. At minimum, it should be clear* when you're making suboptimal choices with far-reaching ramifications. Oblivion is a good example of doing this wrong: it's very difficult, probably impossible, to create a character in Oblivion who is truly incapable of completing the game. But it's very easy to create a character that is no fun at all to play and/or makes the game much harder than you intended, and furthermore, in most cases you won't find this out until several hours in. And no matter how much you  about how people need to read the manual, it won't change the fact that reading the manual will not help you avoid this, and indeed, the in-game character builder will recommend badly built characters with exactly this problem half the time!* To a reasonably informed player, ie, someone who has read the manual and paid attention to the game but hasn't been reading FAQs or asking other people for hints. If the manual says "play a Tourist only if you want an extreme challenge" and someone doesn't read the manual, picks a Tourist, and finds out they aren't good enough to complete the first level, that's their own fault. Electric Pope posted:Bad game design is still bad game design even if there are people who eat it up because they're enamored with the idea of being hardcore gamers who play hardcore games, like that means anything. This is 100% true. quote:Actually I'm one of those people. But I don't think it should ever be necessary to read the manual, and quite often even the manual failed to convey things in a way that allowed me to make informed decisions, and I'd usually just end up playing the first couple hours twice. And that's to say nothing of getting stuck in an unwinnable or just unfun situation halfway through the game. Honestly, I don't see a problem with making the manual mandatory. gently caress, I enjoy reading manuals as long as they're well written and have some degree of character to them. But there are a lot of badly designed games where even if you know the entire manual inside out and have paid attention to every hint the game has given you, you can still take a seemingly reasonable course of action and end up completely hosed much later as a result. quote:e. Also, when it's all about objectively better/worse character builds, and not about the actual gameplay, that's just terrible. This is the #2 type of this bullshit that I am railing against (#1 is "this puzzle has four different solutions, but only one of them doesn't unavoidably kill you five minutes before the end of the game"). In some games this can work - in Nethack, for example, the different character classes basically act as difficulty selectors as well as playstyle selectors. So, for example, Valkyrie is "easy melee" and Samurai is "hard melee". In a lot of games, though, it fails badly, usually after you've invested several hours minimum. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Jul 23, 2012 |
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Jul 23, 2012 23:24
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It would be nice, especially in a roleplaying game, if the choices you made could be informed by the knowledge/judgement of a real person rather than a manual or tutorial. I don't mind if you can shaft yourself and make the game difficult-bordering-on-impossible, but I'd like for the whys of that to make sense within the experiences of a real world person and never be game-y or arbitrary.
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Jul 24, 2012 01:43
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…and anyway, Wasteland never really did any of that. Yes, it had some skills that were utterly useless, but that was mainly because they didn't have to time to implement it fully or add in the content where it came into play. Even so, it would require severe cranial injury to create a character that couldn't be saved from the accidental poor initial selection. It was quite apparent what you needed and what you didn't, and if you picked any of the obviously less useful skills, they'd still give you access to special areas or nice shortcuts towards the end game. Yes, “Toaster Repair” is a very handy skill for the hardened desert ranger to have, as it turns out. 
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Jul 24, 2012 04:48
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RagingBoner posted:I need at least 9 more buckles pre-paid if we are going to do this thing. Paypal $26 to sideshowcody@yahoo.com if you are interested. Just sent mine over as we speak.
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Jul 24, 2012 12:49
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I need at least 7 more payments before I place the order.
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Jul 24, 2012 13:09
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RagingBoner posted:I need at least 7 more payments before I place the order. Sorry guv, can't use Paypal.
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Jul 24, 2012 14:00
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ToxicFrog posted:stuff Whoa, slow down there pardner. It sounded like you were complaining about games with any kind of variation in character build and/or choices at all. (I've never played KQ, or indeed finished any of the old classic Sierra/LA adventure games specifically because adventure game logic is so bullshit, so no idea what you're on about there). I actually know people IRL that will not play a game like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect because, and I (roughly) quote: "what if I make the wrong choice leveling up and screw up my game? There's too many options, I don't like this - I'm sticking to JRPGs where I don't have to make choices", which is what I was referring to. There are people out there who seriously cannot deal with any kind of choices or options because they would have to actually spend time learning the game lest they make a choice they end up not totally happy with, and it sounded from your post that you were one of them.
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Jul 24, 2012 16:28
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There is a difference between catering to different playstyles/offering player choice and just plain bad game design. You can create situations where character choice matters and can gimp your character in certain things in exchange for being good at others, that's cool. It can add variety and re-playability. It's not "fun" to get 20-30 hours into the game and find you have to reroll because the game only gave you an illusion of choice, what it really wanted you to do was pick the most efficient and/or the exact correct build to get past some arbitrary checkpoint in the game.
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Jul 24, 2012 17:18
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HotCanadianChick posted:Whoa, slow down there pardner. It sounded like you were complaining about games with any kind of variation in character build and/or choices at all. (I've never played KQ, or indeed finished any of the old classic Sierra/LA adventure games specifically because adventure game logic is so bullshit, so no idea what you're on about there). The conversation so far (crashdome talking about "screwing yourself halfway through") and your talk about "ending up in an unwinnable situation" made me think you were talking about the same thing - ie, games where: - you are offered choices where the wrong decision makes the game unwinnable; - the player cannot reasonably be expected to have the information needed to make the right choice; - the feedback from this choice is significant delayed. which is what I'm objecting to. If that's not actually what you meant and by "unwinnable" you actually meant "suboptimal", or if you mean immediate failures like "you have died" or "you are stuck in the pit forever", that's not what I'm railing against - by "unwinnable situations" I mean things like "dead man walking" scenarios where the game is already lost but there is no indication of this until much later, or the not-quite-as-bad situation where the game is technically winnable, but only if you're willing to subject yourself to unimaginable tedium. (If you haven't played KQ, here's what I was getting at - the LucasArts games had a lot of "adventure game logic", "why the gently caress would that work" moments, but if you got it wrong you just wouldn't solve the puzzle and would have to try something else. The Sierra games, and KQ in particular, preferred pretending to have it succeed and then killing you automatically at a much later point in the game with no indication of what you did wrong.) quote:I actually know people IRL that will not play a game like Fallout 3 or Mass Effect because, and I (roughly) quote: "what if I make the wrong choice leveling up and screw up my game? There's too many options, I don't like this - I'm sticking to JRPGs where I don't have to make choices", which is what I was referring to. Yeah, I have no problem with games that offer you a variety of options - indeed, I prefer them. Some of them are objectively better than others? Still not a big deal as long as they are all in some way fun. Hell, I'm even ok with games where you can permanently screw yourself as long as there is some warning that this is what you are doing - whether it's in-manual (such as warnings that certain character classes are hardmode, or that here are some things that you must be able to do regardless of built) or in-game like Morrowind's "you just murdered a plot-critical character, might want to reload". What I object to is, well Xik posted:There is a difference between catering to different playstyles/offering player choice and just plain bad game design. You can create situations where character choice matters and can gimp your character in certain things in exchange for being good at others, that's cool. It can add variety and re-playability. It's not "fun" to get 20-30 hours into the game and find you have to reroll because the game only gave you an illusion of choice, what it really wanted you to do was pick the most efficient and/or the exact correct build to get past some arbitrary checkpoint in the game. This. ToxicFrog fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 24, 2012 |
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Jul 24, 2012 17:35
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Sylphosaurus posted:Transarctica will always have a place in my heart for representing the "Quit Game" option as a loaded revolver on your desk. Don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.
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Jul 24, 2012 18:57
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RagingBoner posted:I need at least 7 more payments before I place the order. Can you take amazon payments again?
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Jul 24, 2012 21:35
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Beefeater1980 posted:Don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you. Did Dungeon Keeper or maybe some other game reference this? For some reason I remember something very similar coming up when I quit a game, and I've never played Transartica.
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Jul 24, 2012 22:00
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Jonny Retro posted:Did Dungeon Keeper or maybe some other game reference this? For some reason I remember something very similar coming up when I quit a game, and I've never played Transartica. "Don't go. The drones need you." is a reference to Alpha Centauri, not Transartica.
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Jul 24, 2012 22:06
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Duh. Thank you, that's why it sounded so drat familiar.
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Jul 24, 2012 22:10
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njark posted:Can you take amazon payments again? Yeah, if you still have the original email from the t-shirt sale, just use the "2 shirts, US shipping" option and we'll work out shipping after the fact. Quarex just got Brian Fargo tweeted: https://twitter.com/BrianFargo/status/227874012590665728/photo/1
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Jul 24, 2012 22:15
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RagingBoner posted:Yeah, if you still have the original email from the t-shirt sale, just use the "2 shirts, US shipping" option and we'll work out shipping after the fact. I don't have the email anymore but if you could forward it to lextherius at gmail dot com i can pay Thursday.
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Jul 24, 2012 22:42
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Beefeater1980 posted:Don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you. Boo will miss you.
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Jul 24, 2012 23:03
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RagingBoner posted:Quarex just got Brian Fargo tweeted: I noticed on the Wasteland Wikipedia page a few weeks back that someone had actually filled in the "artist" section of the game info page with a link to Barry Jackson, who did the original art. Considering I spent about a week trying to track that guy down a few years back when I decided to see if the original art was for sale, I basically flipped my poo poo immediately and e-mailed him on the off chance he had not sold the original in like 1991. Against like all odds ever, he still had it. I was about to make him an offer when I thought to myself "one, there is no way I can afford this. Two, there is NO WAY Brian Fargo does not want to buy this." Edit oh and I forgot this one: "Three, Brian Fargo owning these is going to be WAY more useful to the world than me owning them," and that is already seemingly being confirmed by him considering making a limited edition lithograph print series available of the art, something I obviously would have not had the legal ability to do even if I had wanted to! So since I have the luxury of being able to direct message him on Twitter anyway, I figured I would make good use of that, asked if he was interested, blew his mind that I had tracked the guy down, and he said he was. At first it seemed like something weird was going on and the sale was not going to go down after all, but then I was like "surely there is a misunderstanding!" and re-contacted the artist and got things figured out and helped the whole deal go down. I have a promising future now as a game PR man and also as an gaming art broker. Oh cool, he did buy both the exterior and the interior pieces: https://twitter.com/BrianFargo/status/227889565665488897/photo/1/large Dr. Quarex fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Jul 24, 2012 |
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Jul 24, 2012 23:20
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Quarex you are the best fan ever 
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Jul 24, 2012 23:46
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