freshmeat.popsicle posted:

GlyphGryph posted:

It really bugs me the number of people who defend some of the garbage game design decisions the game makes by arguing it's "old-school". Many of these decisions are not old school. There are old school games that did not make these decisions! Some of those decisions are terrible decisions that were made in the opposite direction, for the better, in the original Wasteland!

If anything, giving players real options and anticipating what players will do and having "the devs really did think of everything" moments are very old-school notions, and yet this game doesn't even bother handling the common use cases that many players actually encounter!

Being able to flee from combat: Something the original Wasteland and Fallout games had, but you don't have here.

Being able to enter turn based mode and position your characters before combat starts without them popping off to some completely different place once people go hostile: Something the original Wasteland and Fallout games both had.

They also managed to avoid the garbage camera rotation problems and the pixel hunting and had much shorter and less frustrating dungeon crawls and much quicker and less savescummy feeling skill checks.

This game has problems. These problems are not due to the fact that its an old school game, these problems are do the fact that it is a poorly designed game in a lot of ways.

I still want more. It's made me remember how much I love the genre. Despite its flaws, its easy to see why people might love the game! But its far, far from perfect, and "it's old-school!" is a bullshit excuse for the things it screwed up.