I’m not sure if it’s the current state of the world or simply my getting older, but I find my perception of time is starting to unravel a bit. For example, my first reaction upon learning Wasteland 3 had been released was something along the lines of “Wow, it wasn’t that long ago that I reviewed Wasteland 2!” only to then realise that that was back in 2014 and that developers inXile have had time to put out two more RPGs in the intervening six years – Torment: Tides of Numenera and Bard’s Tale IV — both of which I have also played and reviewed and then immediately forgotten. While all of these games have been heavily flawed they have, at least, demonstrated that inXile are on a generally upward trajectory; there’s been a noticeable process of slow improvement with each one as they gradually figure out how to best put together writing, structure and systems design to create a compelling RPG. So my general expectation for Wasteland 3 was that it was going to be okay, even if my previous experience with inXile’s games has also taught me to expect bugs and combat balance issues and entirely missing chunks of game. I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be more than that, and probably wouldn’t have bothered if I’d actually had to buy the thing for fifty quid instead of getting it as part of my £4-a-month GamePass subscription.

And I think these comparatively low expectations were key to my somewhat enjoying Wasteland 3, in spite of all of its problems. It’s not the next great party-based CRPG, and neither does it recapture the pulpy, gritty fun of the original Fallout games. It’s definitely not a Disco Elysium, but then, importantly, it’s not The Outer Worlds either; the bad taste of the latter still lingers with me almost a year later, and so I was actually somewhat relieved to play an RPG that was solidly and competently made, even if it was also screamingly conventional and had zero ambition to be anything more than that. Its writing is more than a little bit juvenile and its implementation of choice and consequence is also a little dubious, to say the least, but it is backed by a surprisingly solid set of character progression systems and combat mechanics that kept me hooked almost until the very end of the game.

So, Wasteland, then. The original Wasteland was released in 1988 and laid the groundwork for the first two games in the Fallout series, which are all-time classics; it’s somewhat ironic that now that Bethesda have twisted Fallout into a parody of itself, inXile’s revival of Wasteland is the closest thing we have to a modern Fallout game. Like Fallout, Wasteland takes place in the post-apocalyptic ruins of an America that has been ravaged by nuclear war. 2014’s Wasteland 2 was a straight update of the original Wasteland concept, with everything good and bad that that implied: you took control of a set of player-generated Arizona Rangers and roamed the wastelands of Arizona, fixing problems, righting wrongs and occasionally engaging in one of the wonkiest combat systems it’s been my misfortune to interact with in the modern age. Wasteland 3, on the other hand, is a little more modern, updating the formula in both form and function. You’re still playing the part of a group of Rangers, but this time you’re invited to the frozen hellscape that is Colorado by a local warlord — the Patriarch — to help him keep his grip on power in return for shipments of food and supplies for a starving Arizona. The Ranger convoy is ambushed on the outskirts of Colorado Springs and all of the Rangers are slaughtered except for your party, but the Patriarch still expects you to honour the deal by capturing or killing his three adult children, who are all challenging him for his throne.

This immediately dumps three quests into your quest log — one for each kid — but the easiest of them is rated at level 9 while your group of novice rangers is only level 2. Clearly you are going to have to level up a bit before you can even start tackling the main mission of the game, and that means engaging with Wasteland 3’s sidequests and world map. Dangling an explicit long-term goal in front of the player while they do what would otherwise be a bunch of random bullshit is a common way of lending an RPG focus, of course, but it’s been an effective one ever since Baldur’s Gate 2 – hell, ever since the original Fallout – and it works just as well for Wasteland 3 here. Perhaps it’s just me, but when I’m given this kind of target to hit in an RPG and no time limit that forces me to progress the story before I’m ready, what I will actually do is hoover up every single bit of side content I can find first, no matter how wonky it is, simply so that I can get as much XP as possible and hugely outlevel the poor chump I’ve been asked to kill by the time I finally meet them. I know game designers don’t particularly like it when you circumvent their carefully balanced combat encounters like this, which is why so many of them keep implementing the coward’s solution of scaling enemy difficulty with your level. The way I see it, though, is that I can either go straight for the plot mission when it’s level-appropriate and spend half an hour or so finagling my way through the ensuing bossfight using all of the tools available to me, or I can spend additional hours clearing out the wasteland for the tradeoff of the same bossfight taking thirty seconds as my team of cybernetically-enhanced supermen pound him into the dirt. Either approach is a perfectly valid player choice, not to mention feeling viscerally satisfying when the time you spent powering up your squad has such a visible payoff, and I do not understand why modern AAA titles keep trying to nail you onto an Intended Power Curve. That Wasteland 3 was apparently willing to let me spend multiple hours powering up much like a Dragonball Z character was, initially, something that I very much appreciated.

Unfortunately Wasteland 3 isn’t quite as open as it would like you to believe given its setup. It does at least avoid being one of those games where the amount of available “side” content in the game is exactly equal to the amount of content required to level you up so that you can do the next plot mission (hello, Shadowrun), instead preferring to limit both your party’s power and your narrative progress in slightly subtler fashion. For example, while levelling up one of your rangers will make them move faster, attack more often and hit more often, the actual amount of damage they do with each attack is determined solely by the type of weapon they’re clutching in their hands at the time. The weapons they give you at the start of the game do 20 damage per attack while endgame weapons do somewhere in excess of 120, so there’s quite a significant power progression in place here, but the rate at which new weapons become available to you is largely dictated by your progress through the main story rather than any active exploration on your part. Enemies don’t often drop weapons, and when they do they’ll be a grade below the actual level of the enemy themselves; you can sometimes find some decent weapon upgrades in the treasure chests they were guarding, but not enough to outfit your whole party. Mostly your weapons are bought from merchants, and the quality of merchant stock is mostly based on where the merchant is located – the further away a merchant is from your base in Colorado Springs, the bigger the guns they’ll sell. If you want your big high-tech weapons, then you’re going to have to travel to the ends of the wasteland to get them.

This is where the second form of gating comes in: radiation, which blankets the wasteland in greater or lesser quantities based on where you are and where you’re going. One nice thing Wasteland 3 does is skip the “Why am I travelling around the wasteland on foot and not in a car?” question, along with its followup “Why am I travelling around the wasteland in a car instead of something a bit more practical, like a tank or something?” by immediately handing you a quasi-tank called the Kodiak to get around in. The Kodiak has a lot of armour and a very large main gun and can pitch into certain combat scenarios as long as it’s nearby, but it’s limited in where it can go on the world map by the amount of radiation shielding welded onto the side. Improved radiation shielding is available from precisely one shop in Wasteland 3, and this shop doesn’t even sell it until you’ve knocked off a certain number of main storyline missions. It’ll periodically update its stock after that, but only after you’ve made additional progress down the main storyline. And by a strange and curious coincidence the radiation shielding required to access the area where your final target is hiding doesn’t unlock until you’ve finished all of the story missions prior to that.  Wasteland 3 pretends to be an open, freeform game, but it’s secretly just as linear as any Bioware RPG. It’s just a little more artful about camouflaging the barriers keeping you on that linear path, is all.

This makes me a little bit sad. The classic example of sequence breaking in these games comes from Fallout 2, where you could beeline for the Navarro airbase, kick a guy in power armour a few times until he fell over¹, and then take his armour and plasma gun and have a whale of a time blasting your way through the rest of the game with endgame equipment. You can’t do that in Wasteland 3, and while I saw more than one news article boasting about how inXile had put in a special ending for people who attack and kill the Patriarch without bothering to find his kids first, this is an achievement that would place an awful lot of strain on the “theoretical” part of the phrase “theoretically possible” since you have level one popguns and tiny health pools and he and his goons all have power armour and bazookas. Wasteland 3 is instead a rather conventional take on the modern party-based RPG — far more so than Wasteland 2 was, which is both a good and bad thing. The game has lost a lot of its narrative and structural freedom and many of its mechanics involving factions and reputation and choice and consequence feel more like an exercise in RPG feature box-ticking than anything else – they’re functionally identical to what you’d find in any Obsidian game made in the last five years, for example — but in exchange it’s got a much more polished and interesting set of systems driving its character progression and combat, and these were by far the weakest parts of Wasteland 2.

Let’s tackle the character progression first: Wasteland 3 preserves the classic Wasteland traits of Coordination, Luck, Awareness, Strength, Speed, Intelligence and Charisma, as well as sets of specific combat and non-combat skills like Automatic Weapons, Lockpicking, Animal Whisperer and so on.  Wasteland 2 also had all of these things, but made a horrible mistake in modelling them closely on the way the sixteen year-old Wasteland used them; as a result, Wasteland 2’s character system was full of traps and counterintuitive systems, like Safecracking being totally useless since you encountered maybe five safes in the entire game, and the best way to build a big burly Brawler character being to treat Strength as a dump stat and instead pump that character’s Intelligence stat as high as possible, since this would grant them lots of skill points that they could invest in the Brawling skill. Wasteland 3’s first and most important job is to fix all of this, and I’m pleased to report that it mostly succeeds. The link between Intelligence and skill points has been almost completely broken, as levelling up Intelligence now merely grants a few one-off bonus skill points instead of doling out multiple additional points each level-up. The seven core character traits have instead all been given a specific niche of boosting secondary stats that complement — but do not overlap with — character skills. For example, if I wanted to make the Brawler character above in Wasteland 3, I’d put points into the following:

• Strength, since this boosts character constitution (i.e. hit points) and melee damage, and also allows them to wear heavier types of armour that are crucial to their survivability.
• Coordination, as this grants additional action points to use in combat.
• Speed, as this lets the brawler cover more ground per action point in combat.
• The Brawling skill, which lets the brawler use more powerful punching weapons without penalty, as well as increasing their chance to hit with brawling attacks.

This is much more how you’d expect to build a brawler in an RPG, and while that’s a low bar to clear Wasteland 3 leaps it with aplomb. Most impressive to me, I think, is that each of the secondary stats granted by the character traits is always a desirable thing to have on any character. Intelligence increases your crit chance. Luck gives you mega-crits and occasional free actions in combat, and this happens frequently enough that levelling Luck feels like it could be a worthwhile choice to make. You want to take Charisma on at least one character since it boosts the size of that character’s leadership aura and the stat bonuses it grants to everyone inside that aura, but while only the character with the highest Charisma projects a leadership aura all characters can use Charisma to benefit from more frequent Strike attacks, which are supercharged moves that can often one-shot multiple enemies at once. Everything here is useful, and there’s no such thing as a bad choice since all of the skills you can take are used frequently enough in interactions and conversation checks throughout the game that they feel worthwhile — even the joke skill of Toaster Repair.

In fact it’s a measure of its success that the worst thing that I can say about Wasteland 3’s character progression system is that, since you have a party of four player-generated rangers plus two NPC companions and only the highest stat in the party matters for most non-combat interactions, it over-encourages specialisation. Even in combat a generalist character with five points in all stats will be okay at everything, but they’ll be less useful than a dedicated sniper character with ten points in Awareness, Coordination and Intelligence and one point in everything else, and while there’s plenty of stuff the sniper can’t do you have three other members of the party you can build from scratch who can take up the slack.  The Wasteland 3 character system is a min-maxers’ dream, and while I personally happen to love min-maxing you might not enjoy the feeling of having to min-max in order to get the most out of it.

Wasteland 3’s combat system is an interesting demonstration of how you might go about backing modern XCOM-style gameplay with a slightly crunchier, more old-school set of mechanics. The combat interface is pure XCOM – square tiles, with an orange overlay denoting the maximum movement range of your current character and a smaller blue one indicating where they can move to while still having enough AP left for an attack. Wasteland 3 even integrates some of the important UI innovations from Mechanicus, such as popping up a selection of dotted lines when you mouse over a prospective destination square that indicate which enemies will be in range of your currently equipped weapon from this position, as well as your projected chance to hit. There’s high and low cover that reduces your chance to hit by a greater or lesser value respectively, and that chance to hit will cap out at a maximum of 95%, always leaving a small chance that you’ll miss what should otherwise be a sure thing. It all looks and feels very familiar — and I think this might actually have been a bit of a misstep, since Wasteland 3’s combat is balanced very differently from XCOM’s.

For starters, Wasteland 3 retains the core Wasteland and Fallout concept of Action Points. Doing anything in combat costs a certain amount of action points — attacking with a weapon costs between two and six action points, using a utility item costs three or four action points, and moving has an action point cost determined by your character’s Combat Speed stat, with a higher speed resulting in more squares moved per action point. As your rangers start with 6 AP and can collect up to four more by levelling their Awareness stat this gives Wasteland 3’s combat considerably more granularity than XCOM, as a character with a fast-firing, low-AP weapon such as a pistol can eschew all other actions in favour of firing three or four times in a single turn. The enemies you face can do this too, and this makes the damage potential of each individual unit in the game considerably higher than it would be otherwise. The increased damage output is balanced out by Wasteland 3’s armour system, which is a simplified version of what you’d find in Pillars Of Eternity or (going back much further) Darklands. Each weapon has an associated Penetration value which must match or exceed the armour value of your target in order to do full damage. Falling short by a single point knocks a whopping 20% off your damage total, and the damage reduction increases on a sliding scale from there — you’ll always do some damage, but if your weapon’s Penetration value is small and your target is heavily armoured its damage will be reduced by as much as 80%.

Already there’s a lot more going on here than there is in XCOM, which massively streamlined basic combat mechanics and preferred to present you with variety in the form of character skills and utility items. (Not that Wasteland 3 lacks for those, either, with Fallout-esque perks providing you with powerful special attacks and weapon effects, and a whole host of combat consumables such as drugs, decoys and sentry turrets.) What remains constant, however, is an HP mismatch between you and your enemies: a tough enemy will always have around 50% more HP than a player character of equivalent level who has taken every single HP-enhancing trait, perk and skill available. They do roughly the same damage with each attack as you do, but they also tend to have a numerical advantage, and so as a group their damage output is much higher than yours. If you’re stuck in the XCOM mindset this seems drastically lopsided and unfair, and it is rather wonky in some ways — if the enemy gets the first turn in combat they’ll often alpha strike one or two of your party into unconsciousness before you can lift a finger, which is the sort of thing that prompts a reload in the early game. However, the reason enemy stats are so artificially high is because you can do something they can’t: revive any member of your party who gets blasted to zero HP, and a character with a high First Aid skill can then heal them up to full health using one of Wasteland 3’s supercharged healing items, which start by healing a character for 50% of their health bar and increase in effectiveness with First Aid. In contrast to XCOM, where losing a squaddie represents a catastrophic failure with long-term consequences as they get sent to the hospital for a month to recuperate, in Wasteland 3 it is expected that you will have characters knocked out and revived in almost every single combat.

Inflating enemy stats and/or numbers in order to provide challenging combat is usually something I’d deride as clunky and unimaginative. Hell, it is clunky and unimaginative, even here – but I can’t deny it works², once you get out of the mindset of reloading every time you have a squad member downed. Something you quickly come to grasp is that while the odds might appear to be stacked against you there’s a lot of things you can do to adjust them in your favour, especially once you start to level up your characters. You’ll almost always be given the opportunity to initiate combat, either via a conversation prompt or a sneak attack, and if you have the first turn you can easily kill two or three enemies before they have a chance to respond. Deployables and consumables help a lot; the first thing I did on finding any new merchant was to buy up their entire stock of decoys and drone deployables, as combat is much easier when the baddies are shooting up your disposable robot goons instead of your rangers. Explosives are less useful than they are in XCOM — they’re disappointingly underpowered and surprisingly hard to find — but it’s still worth having a dedicated grenadier character for those rare moments when you can catch four or five enemies in the radius of the blast, since this will be the most damage you will ever do in a single action in Wasteland 3.  Since your characters will occasionally be downed in spite of this it’s useful to train up a combat medic who has the speed and the action points to cover large distances quickly, who can instantly revive and heal a downed squadmate to full health, and who gets tremendous stat bonuses whenever a character is downed or revived.

And then there’s the ludicrously overpowered dedicated combat builds you can create; for the first half of the game the heaviest hitter on my team was my sword ranger, who got a damage boost for charging and multiple free attacks from his melee perks and his Luck stat. The crown was then taken by my brawler ranger, who I managed to build into taking just one action point per attack, allowing him to punch ten times per round and keep whoever he was punching stunlocked indefinitely via his special Strike attack. Towards the end of the game I picked up a Jackhammer, a combat shotgun that hits everything in a cone and which fires three times per attack (all other shotguns up until this point hit just once, which is why the Jackhammer is so powerful); in theory this gun is limited by its ammo supply, but there’s a very useful Weapon Modding skill in the game that let me triple the size of the magazine whilst lengthening the range of the attack cone so that it encompassed approximately half of the combat arena. I then handed it to my shotgun ranger, who had taken all of the shotgun perks that added bonus damage for each enemy caught in the attack cone and which let her effectively ignore cover, and spent the last two hours of the game watching her mulch anything and everything she fired it at. My sniper ranger never rose to the top of the damage rankings but spent the entire game putting out reliable damage against heavily armoured targets, while the combat medic didn’t shoot people much but was pretty much single-handedly responsible for letting the rest of the team do their jobs by distracting enemies with decoys and gun turrets. Each team member felt powerful and useful in their own way, and I felt like it was my choices in developing these characters that had made them so. It doesn’t matter to me that many of these combat builds are arguably broken, because I had to put in a fair chunk of thought and effort in order to get them there; Wasteland 3’s character progression and combat systems offer enough interesting decisions that I felt engaged with them in a way that I haven’t in an RPG for quite some time.

And that’s good for Wasteland 3, as it means the character progression and combat systems can take up the considerable amount of slack left by the writing and the world, which are… underwhelming. Upon starting the game for the first time it immediately got off on the wrong foot by presenting me with a disclaimer that stated that this was a work of fiction and that any similarity to the real-world state of political and socioeconomic affairs was purely coincidental — this is usually the approach taken by Ubisoft games to try and excuse all of the “accidental” fascism they keep doing, but I think Wasteland 3’s motivation is slightly different: it’s genuinely, pathologically terrified of saying anything meaningful at all. This is despite the main storyline encompassing several hot-button political issues such as a tyrannical family-run government and the treatment of refugees fleeing war-torn states, because the ultimate outcome of including these things is that Wasteland 3 shrugs its shoulders and says “Well, that sucks, I guess,” without ever attempting to explore them in detail. The writing veers between shades of dark and horrific, with slavery, human sacrifice and cannibalism making regular appearances in Wasteland 3’s questlines, and the sort of depressingly juvenile tosh written by people in their thirties who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s and think that the crashingly unsubtle edginess of games like the original Wasteland are an appropriate thing to include a game in 2020. This extends from the in-game writing, which is full of jokes about killer clowns, sex robots and eating shit, to the character skills; the stealth skill is called “Sneaky Shit”, the persuade and intimidate skills are called “Kiss Ass” and “Hard Ass” respectively. Which is a good summary of Wasteland 3’s writing in general, since it’s stuck in the very teenage mindset that swearing and sex and bloody, bloody violence are all the coolest shit ever and so it’s going to do all of them at once as hard as it possibly can.

Given that attitude, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Wasteland 3’s handling of the actual adult concepts in the game is the most superficial treatment possible. It’s not capable of the self-introspection required to say anything lasting or meaningful about the plight of refugees (for example), instead preferring to use them as props for precisely the kind of binary good/evil choices I got tired of around the time Mass Effect 2 released ten years ago. Do you let the refugees stay in your base, decreasing your troops’ morale, or do you kick them out to make room for your soldiers? Do you arrest the person responsible for getting them to Colorado Springs, or do you help smuggle them into the city? I took the bad option for both of these choices just to see what would happen, and the answer was apparently “nothing, except I got a slightly larger reward”. Far from being complex shades-of-grey moral choices, in Wasteland 3 you can either be a dick to the refugees — and indeed everyone else — or not, and as far as I can tell your choice doesn’t even affect the now-standard Fallout-style ending. The uncharitable part of me (i.e. all of me) suspects that this is because Wasteland 3 wants to have its cake and eat it too; it wants to be able to sit at the grown-up table by including real-world topics like this without ever suggesting that it might be possible to address them in some positive way, or in fact to adopt any concrete position on them whatsoever for fear of pissing off a portion of its audience. I’m increasingly tired of games which unthinkingly defend the status quo like this, which acknowledge that a problem exists but which don’t attempt to explore a potential move towards a better world or to even deconstruct the root issues causing it, because to do so might make people who aren’t directly affected by that problem a little bit uncomfortable. Wasteland 3’s brand of centrist nihilism might have been cool back in the 90s when certain people thought we were staring the end of history in the face, but it’s flat-out offensive in the hell-year of 2020 after decades of liberal inaction have proven that to be a lie by enabling the rise of reactionary forces just about everywhere.

(And yes, perhaps it’s unfair to rag on Wasteland 3 for this when there are hundreds of other games out there which are guilty of exactly the same thing. However, there are a couple of things that make me far less forgiving than I might have been in the past. One is that Disco Elysium exists now. The other is that if you don’t want me to rake your game over the coals for using real world tragedies as delightful splashes of background colour for your story and setting, don’t put those things into the game. Either handle them properly, or not at all.)

This lack of followthrough even extends to Wasteland 3’s handling of the more familiar comedic themes of Wasteland and Fallout. One of the areas that was heavily trailed in previews was the headquarters of a cult of Reagan-worshippers called the Gippers. They’re led by an AI simacrulum of Ronald Reagan who lives in a giant statue with laser beam eyes, is referred to as “God-Emperor Reagan”, and whose spokesperson is called Sister Nancy. The writing hits all of the easy targets that you’d expect — ha ha, he keeps referring to Sister Nancy as “Mommy”, just like Reagan did with his wife! Hilarious stuff! — but when you go looking for an actual narrative to this area it turns out there isn’t one, really. Oh, there is some guff about transferring the Reagan AI into a human host, and how you have to deal with the hated society of communist robots who live over the next hill to do it, and you eventually end up picking one faction or the other to side with because in order to compete with Obsidian we apparently have to copy their games exactly now. I am struck, though, by the frivolous nature of the design philosophy on display here; even the most inexperienced D&D dungeon master would, when designing a quest, sit down with a basic concept and first think about how they wanted their players to feel as a starting point, and then go from there, spinning that vision out into characters and encounters and a narrative arc. Wasteland 3’s answer to this question starts and ends with “I want my players to go ‘lol, robot Reagan’”. Because of that, because the sole characterisation either faction gets are some extremely obvious jokes that turn them into the flimsiest of caricatures, it’s impossible for me as a player to be invested in the outcome of anything I do there.

So when I was stood in the Gippers’ underground vault, surrounded by heavily armed Gipper goons and ready to do the AI mind transfer, when the option came to choose who to side with I sided against the Gippers largely because they were all standing right there and killing them would take a very small amount of time compared to trudging back over to the robot camp and turning all of them into scrap. I knew by this time that there would be no in-game consequences for this choice — you can show up to the Patriarch’s palace with one of his worst enemies in your party who you’ve literally sprung from one of the Patriarch’s prisons moments before, massacring dozens of the Patriarch’s goons in the process, and the game acknowledges this with three lines of dialogue and then everything’s fine — and as it turned out all it did was change that segment of the ending narration. I, personally, did not give a shit one way or the other, because the game had given me no reason to.

For something that’s so, so edgy, that’s trying as hard as it can to be cool and mature, Wasteland 3 totally lacks any sense of impact. It does hit the right tone sometimes, with its jokey approach being appropriate in (for example) the quest involving the car from Knight Rider, while the mechanical side of it was interesting and some of it is even good enough to further stack the deck against Firaxis as and when they get around to announcing XCOM 3; there’s a lot of genuinely good design work that’s gone into Wasteland 3’s character progression and combat systems, which is not what I was expecting from an inXile game given their history. This makes it all the more disappointing that, while the writing is always serviceable from a purely technical “these are words from the English language that we have strung together into a collection of sentences” standpoint, the world and story are a largely incoherent series of bad jokes and over-the-top encounters that are impossible to take seriously. I can’t finish this review without mentioning the loading times, either, which are frankly ridiculous, almost approaching Anthem in both length and frequency — getting around Colorado Springs often meant sitting through three or four minute-plus loading screens one after another, even though I had the game installed on an SSD. I very much enjoyed the first half of Wasteland 3 in spite of all of this, when I was playing around with character builds and seeing what was possible in the combat; if nothing else it let me put a clown horn on the Kodiak that played the main refrain from Entry Of The Gladiators every time I moved it, which is one of the few things Wasteland 3 does that I did find genuinely, hysterically funny. The further I got into the game, though, the more the writing grated and the more everything just started to drag, to the point where I was somewhat relieved to actually finish it because it meant I didn’t have to play it any more. If I hadn’t been expecting it to be Outer Worlds-tier trash, and if I’d actually spent any substantial amount of money on it, I would be considerably more annoyed with it than I am; as it is, and much like inXile’s other games, I view Wasteland 3 as thirty hours of almost entirely disposable entertainment that I will have totally forgotten in six months’ time.

The post Thoughts: Wasteland 3 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Ah, it’s inXile, my favourite developers of middling RPGs funded via Kickstarter. What do you have for me this time, inXile? What’s that? You’ve made a new iteration of Bard’s Tale, an RPG series so old that its last installment was released in 1988 and which even I would never have heard of if my flatmate didn’t keep going on about it all the time? Ah, well, given the highly uneven quality of Wasteland 2 and Torment and my complete lack of caring about the source material I think I might pass this time, thanks.

…wait, it’s a first-person dungeon crawler? Tell me more.

First-person dungeon crawlers are a genre I’ve belatedly discovered a lot of affection for despite not really playing any back in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s when they were actually a big thing. There’s something about being transported down to a party’s-eye view of the dungeon that really appeals to me, and modern takes on the concept (I’m mostly thinking Grimrock here) have also effectively leveraged the interactive and tactile possibilities that the first-person perspective affords them. I was a little worried that the brief renaissance heralded by Legend of Grimrock had come to a premature end after Grimrock developers Almost Human got put on pause¹, but it turns out Kickstarter had me covered all along; not only have we got Underworld Ascendant slated to come along in November, but The Bard’s Tale IV is flying the flag for this particular subgenre right now.

To my surprise, though, while Bard’s Tale IV is very definitely a dungeon-crawler and is very definitely first-person, it jettisons one of the core aspects of the formula by not being tile-based. Instead you have full FPS-style free movement within the sometimes rather-artificial boundaries of its levels. Your viewpoint is still supposed to represent what a party of up to six characters sees as they wander around towns and dungeons, and the game segues into a turn-based combat segment whenever you blunder into a group of enemies, but otherwise Bard’s Tale IV feels much more conventional in terms of its movement and methods of interacting with the world than either Grimrock or Might & Magic X. I won’t deny I was a little bit disappointed in this; yes, the tile-based nature of those old dungeon-crawlers worked was somewhat down to a necessary abstraction of the mechanics for machines that were nowhere near ready to handle full 3D environments, but it also arose from the translation from the paper maps drawn on graph paper that are the classic driver behind D&D campaigns. I liked that I was playing something so overtly game-y, that felt quite deliberately retro, and which contributed quite significantly to the distinctive atmosphere that Grimrock and Might & Magic X both had in spades.

Still, while I think the decision to abandon tiles does materially diminish Bard’s Tale IV — in places it feels much more like a generic first-person adventure game than it really should do — I appreciate that’s more a matter of personal preference than anything else. As it happened I got over it pretty quickly, because Bard’s Tale nails the two key things it needs to get right in order to be any good whatsoever: exploration and puzzle-solving. Unfortunately the opening hour of the game is both miserable and baffling, as you’re led by the nose along a series of scripted tutorials that teach you game mechanics while setting up the game’s extremely generic world, story and characters with no opportunity to see what the game actually does well. Once you get into the first proper dungeon, however, the reason people seem to have such a soft spot for The Bard’s Tale as a series becomes somewhat clearer: it’s a moderately sprawling affair chock-full of puzzles and secrets, with stone mouths scattered around spouting riddles containing clues on how to progress. Combine this with a copious number of spike traps and spinning blades and you get something that feels rather more like classic kids’ TV show Knightmare than other examples of the genre have managed so far, which is always going to be a significant plus point in my book.

The puzzles throughout the game are, for the most part, admirably well-pitched in terms of difficulty. The most basic ones involve pushing stone blocks around, and if you ever wanted to find out precisely how many ways there are to spin the concept of pushing stone blocks around I recommend picking up Bard’s Tale IV because it comes up with quite a few more than I would have thought possible, ensuring that this simple idea never becomes stale. Bard’s Tale is also very taken with its cog puzzles, which involve sliding cogs along tracks to join up a spinning drive cog with a target cog that’ll open a nearby door. Later on you come across more complicated mechanics such as running over a track of light gems so that you light them all up without backtracking, or ringing a set of bells in a certain order (that will often be dictated by subtle environmental clues), or something that’s basically akin to ensuring electricity flows the right way around a circuit, and these are all moderately tricky without ever becoming frustrating — which is a good level of difficulty for your puzzles to have, I think. I did wind up stumped in one area that was basically nothing but a single giant puzzle where you had to pick out constellation patterns on a control console, and this was slightly annoying because there was nothing to really indicate what the right solution was or that I was progressing towards it; it’s one of those puzzles where you have to guess what was in the designer’s brain first before you make any attempt to solve it.

Still, this is a notable blip in puzzle design that’s otherwise consistently excellent, and easily the equal of the puzzles in Grimrock. Exploration is similarly pleasing; Bard’s Tale 4 takes place in a mixture of overworld, underground and dungeon maps, where you can often find some big surprises by not following the path the game seemingly wants you to follow, and instead taking a moment to examine your surroundings for anything that’s conspicuously out of place. There are several entirely optional dungeons in the game with powerful artifacts awaiting you at the end if you can survive their gauntlet of puzzles, traps and enemies — and if you can figure out how to get into them in the first place, as three of them are locked by puzzles that you’ll only solve by scouring the nearby areas for clues. At set points in the story you’re given special exploration abilities (in the form of magic songs) that can be used to remove obstacles from your path — building a bridge from shattered rock, or removing an overgrowth of giant vines — and these are used to hide optional secret areas and alternate routes through a level. There’s never anything too interesting in these areas, unfortunately, as they’re very easy to miss and the development effort has been spent on things that are more likely to be seen by the majority of players, but I appreciate that they’re there. The fact that they’re largely wasted is more down to the randomly-generated loot system used for most treasure chests; it really takes a lot of the fun out of hunting for secrets when you uncover a new one and all it’s got in it is a treasure chest containing 100 poxy gold coins, but there was enough unique loot scattered around to make exploration more or less worth my time.

In yet another surprising move, Bard’s Tale IV even make a surprisingly good fist of the combat — this was something that I felt Might & Magic X and Grimrock both failed to make interesting, but while the system Bard’s Tale uses ends up being heavily flawed it’s also something that promotes some very engaging tactical decisions for approximately two-thirds of the game’s length. When you’re out exploring and you spot some enemies, the first thing you should do is stop and hover the mouse cursor over them; this will cause a coloured highlight to appear that indicates that group of enemies’ power level relative to your party. If the highlight is green (indicating they’re trivial) or yellow (indicating they’re near equivalent to you) you should then immediately sprint towards them as fast as possible, as initiating combat before they can spot you gives you the first turn. No matter where individual enemies happen to be located when everything kicks off (and they can wander a fair distance away from the main pack) every enemy in the area gets dragged onto a four-by-four grid of tiles. The two rows closest to you are reserved for your party, and the two furthest away are reserved for the enemy; party members cannot move on to enemy rows and enemies can’t move on to party rows, meaning each side is restricted to a very thin two-by-four slice of the battlefield. When your party can accommodate up to six characters and enemies come in groups of eight (and more, in which case they’ll attack in waves), this means the battlefield can get very crowded.

And as you’d expect, when everyone’s packed so closely together it means positioning — both yours and the enemy’s — is key to winning fights. Each of your party members has access to four “Mastery” abilities, plus any additional abilities they’ve picked up on their way through their class’s skill tree or granted by equipment they’re wearing, plus a basic move ability. Masteries are also granted by the skill tree and you can unlock more than four, but while your active Masteries may be chopped and changed at any time outside of combat you can only ever equip four of them. Masteries are split between powerful physical attacks, spells, and utility abilities such as Taunt, and what most of the Masteries have in common is that they all have a certain range and area of effect. Some attacks can only target the two squares immediately in front of that party member. Some attacks can also target the column to the left and right. Most attacks will strike the first thing in their path — so if you have a squishy caster it’s a good idea to put them in the back row and plonk a beefy fighter-type in front of them to soak up the punishment — but there are some spells which have penetration and strike all squares in a column. Because ranges are so limited, and because you only have a certain amount of action points to spend across the whole party before your turn is over (starting at three, and steadily growing as you progress through the story) you really want to maximise the value of your attacks; moving one of your characters into range via the Move ability costs an action point and is very inefficient, when it’s far better to drag the enemies around via the Taunt ability or the Levitate spell, both of which are free actions, and then potentially hit them with one more attack that turn than you might have been able to otherwise. If you have an attack that penetrates, or which affects multiple squares, and the target squares aren’t all occupied with enemies, it’s a good idea to rearrange their formation via these positioning abilities so that you’ll hit as many as possible.

If you’re clever like this you can kill off one or two enemies in your first turn, which is a big deal in terms of reducing their damage output and is why getting to go before they do is so important. There are mechanics in place to prevent these alpha strikes from getting out of hand; nearly every ability has a cooldown or a spell point cost, and you start battles with zero spell points and many abilities on cooldown, so the amount you can achieve on your first turn is limited — however, once you start getting more action points, more party members and more powerful equipment you can often wipe out the enemy force before they even get to lift a finger. Ordinarily I would call this broken, but it takes some work to get your party to that point and sequencing your actions and your manipulation of the enemy position in just the right way to kill all of them before your turn is up is still a pleasingly knotty conundrum. The classes and stats are all simplified, but in a good way — the way stats translate to combat performance is very easy to understand, and the classes (Fighter, Rogue, Caster and — of course — Bard) all have multiple, clearly distinct roles on the battlefield that they excel in. There’s no respec option available for your character builds, which is something I deeply disagree with as a matter of principle; however, the skill trees are simple enough that it is very, very difficult to screw yourself over with a bad build, and while there’s a significant quantity of enemy model recycling going on (where the higher level variant of an enemy looks almost identical to the easy low-level ones you’ve been fighting for the last two hours) the combat difficulty highlights mean that you never blunder into a bad fight, which ensures that the combat in Bard’s Tale IV manages to avoid the pitfalls that claimed Might & Magic X.

So the combat is plenty of fun — a bit broken, sure, but still fun. The real problems with the combat in Bard’s Tale IV stem not from the combat itself, but from the way it is used. For the first two-thirds of the game the content is balanced fairly evenly between puzzles, exploration and combat, which is precisely what I signed up for; there’s a nice feeling of power progression as you steadily level up and acquire better equipment that lets you go back and beat previously unbeatable enemy packs, and at this point the game hasn’t yet devolved into a one-sided slaughter. Unfortunately once you hit about eighteen hours in you get to the Stennish Isles, which is the game’s cue to go totally overboard on the number of enemies it throws at you. The Stennish Isles have been overrun by undead and they’re absolutely everywhere, with a new combat encounter lurking practically around every corner while the puzzles and exploration take a backseat to smashing all of these skeletons. The gimmick the undead have is that while they’re comparatively weak as individual enemies you have to kill all of them on the same turn, otherwise they spring back to life at full health on their following one. Which would be an interesting concept, except for two tiny problems:

• I’d just spent eighteen hours perfecting a party that could one-shot a group of normal enemies in a single turn. One-shotting a group of weaker enemies is child’s play.
• Because of the resurrection gimmick Bard’s Tale massively overvalues skeletons in terms of the experience reward you get for killing them.

And this means the Stennish Isles end up being an incredibly high volume of easier-than-normal combat encounters with disproportionately high experience rewards, and by the time I got to the end of it three or four hours later I was both sick and tired of the combat system despite the good work that’s gone into its design, and grossly overlevelled for the rest of the game. Not only was the combat in the Stennish Isles so repetitive it became tedious, but it made all remaining combat encounters in the game tedious, which is quite the accomplishment.

Given the, how can I put this… somewhat lean nature of the areas you visit post-Isles, especially when compared to the puzzle- and secret-packed regions you’ve been exploring up until that point, I have to conclude that Bard’s Tale suddenly turning into a combat-heavy nightmare represents inXile’s attempts to pad out the game’s running time. They have previous form on this, with the Los Angeles region of Wasteland 2 coming across as unfinished content that was thrown in because their Kickstarter promised it, and The Bard’s Tale IV definitely goes on for about six or seven hours past the point where I started to seriously lose interest — not because I was bored, necessarily, but because the last third of the game is noticeably worse than the consistently excellent dungeon-crawling experience I’d been playing up until then.

Actually, I suppose we have gotten to the part of the review where I go on the Kickstarter rant. I appreciate that Bard’s Tale IV would not exist without Kickstarter, but as time goes on I increasingly resent the idea that funding a game via Kickstarter means you let your fans dictate what your game is going to look like, whether it be via unwise promises to deliver a specific amount of content if the game is funded to a certain level, or via backer rewards that allow them to insert content directly into the game². Here it’s resulted in a game that goes on for another six hours past the point where it really should be wrapping up, and which is chock-full of rubber-faced, awfully-voiced NPCs that I assume are backer rewards of some kind, and whose only function in the game is to vomit forth some hackneyed backstory when you interact with them. The irritating thing about this is that there’s about twice as many of these NPCs as there are actually useful NPCs such as quest-givers and merchants, and there’s no good way to tell the difference except by going around and talking to every. Single. One. At least Pillars of Eternity had the good grace to identify its fan-insert characters via coloured nametags so that I could safely ignore them; here it seems like the only NPCs in the game are fan-authored ones and it really drags the experience down.

Then there are the bugs and performance issues. Unlike certain other games that have released recently I didn’t encounter so many showstoppers that I could put them together into a big list (there was only one crash to desktop, for example), but Bard’s Tale still has plenty of minor irritations like items suddenly becoming non-interactable and stupidly long pauses in combat between you telling one of your party to do an action and the party member actually doing it. Probably the most annoying one was when I skilled my Caster into one of the big endgame class cap skills, and then ten minutes later the game un-skilled him from it and wouldn’t let me select it again, effectively eating that skill point. Towards the end of the game — precisely at the points where Bard’s Tale IV starts to drag, in fact — I started to experience significant amounts of framerate lag, which I found curious because while Bard’s Tale looks perfectly serviceable (at least when you’re not talking to an NPC) it’s also really not something that should be overly taxing on my machine. It feels very unpolished, which is something I’ve almost come to expect from Kickstarted games now but which I’m still not going to forgive in spite of that.

These bugs created rather more friction between myself and the game than there should have been, which together with the generally unfinished feeling of the back third of it almost caused me to pack it in. That I did not is largely because of my love for dungeon-crawlers combined with a little of my own personal brand of sheer bloody-mindedness. And I feel that that’s the kind of person you have to be to enjoy The Bard’s Tale IV; I thought the first half of the game was good bordering on excellent, and easily the equal of the two Grimrocks, but if I didn’t like the genre so much I would not have made it to the end. I finished Grimrock 2 in 20 hours and it felt like a perfectly satisfying experience, so there was absolutely no call for Bard’s Tale to be 30 hours long when the plot is total balls and doesn’t remotely justify a final ten hours that feels like it’s mostly padding. inXile really need to learn to pace their games properly because I haven’t yet played one that felt like the ending arrived when it should have; it’s either far too late (Wasteland 2, Bard’s Tale IV) or far too early (Torment). Arguably this is more an artifact of budgetary/development constraints than it is an intentional screwup, but this is their third Kickstarted game. They should know what’s involved by now, and plan accordingly. I think that in spite of all of that I still like Bard’s Tale IV the most out of all of their games, but first-person dungeon crawlers are a much smaller subgenre so it gets to make a commensurately bigger splash, and if you do not particularly enjoy them as I do it’s going to be far harder to overlook the many flaws of The Bard’s Tale IV.

The post Thoughts: The Bard’s Tale IV appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I have something of a bone to pick with the Numenera setting. By extension I also have something of a bone to pick with Torment: Tides Of Numenera – as is implicit in the name, this is a spiritual successor to the immortal Planescape: Torment that replaces the oddball worlds of Planescape for the even weirder reality-bending madness of Numenera. Planescape: Torment is considered by many to be the Best RPG Ever; I don’t go quite that far and merely consider it to be the best-written RPG ever, but nevertheless these are extremely large shoes to fill for Wasteland 2¹ developers InXile. The strategy equivalent would be trying to make a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri or Master Of Orion, and I’ve completely lost track of how many contenders have shattered themselves trying to ascend those heights over the last couple of decades. Doing something like this is all but setting yourself up for a fall, in other words, and so I’m not all that surprised that Torment ultimately fails to attain the lofty goal it has set for itself. What is interesting here is the manner of that failure, however, as it hasn’t fallen down quite the way I expected it to.

First, let’s tackle the setting. Numenera is set one billion years in the future, largely because that means they can put ONE BILLION YEARS IN THE FUTURE… on the back of all the sourcebooks. A world that is puportedly Earth is somehow still around and is the primary setting for the adventures of Numenera, however that’s basically lip-service because nobody calls it Earth; it’s referred to as the Ninth World and might as well be Narnia for all the relation it bears to modern-day Earth, as one billion years of technological advances and the rise and tumultuous falls of successive civilizations have left it completely unrecognisable. The base level of society is supposed to be very early industrial period at best, but as the inhabitants of the Ninth World exist on top of the ruins of the previous eight worlds there’s a lot of impossibly advanced technology left over for them to turn to their advantage – if they can figure out how it works.

This makes Numenera something of an “Anything goes!” setting. You want to hit somebody in the face with a sword? That’s fine, the world is supposed to be just about post-medieval anyway so nobody’s going to look twice. Of course, the hitting would be much more effective if your strength was being boosted by an advanced battle-armour exoskeleton, and that’s fine too – who knows how many of those things are still lying around after one billion years, after all. You want to go dimension-hopping, or even travel in time? There’s more than enough wiggle room in the fiction to allow for that, as Numenera takes the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic and thrashes it to within an inch of its life. Anything is possible here, which means the breadth of stories you can tell is only really limited by your imagination.

Which, incidentally, sets it up quite nicely to be used to tell a story that is in many ways a literal cut-and-paste from Planescape: Torment; InXile have managed to tie the setting in enough knots that it almost seems like a natural fit, despite many of the key beats having been copied across wholesale and only receiving the most superficial coat of paint to try and make them blend into a whole new game. You play the Last Castoff, the most recent vessel for a body-hopping entity known as the Changing God, and you represent his latest swipe at immortality. Every couple of decades when it looks like his bullshit is finally going to catch up to him the Changing God simply transfers his consciousness to a new custom-built body, which kind of sucks for the old one since it becomes self-aware the moment the Changing God packs up shop, with no memory of events leading up to that point. As the Changing God tends to use the body-switching trick as a get-out-of-jail-free card when facing some impossibly lethal situation this does mean his castoff vessels have a tendency to experience just a few short seconds of life before getting torn apart by whatever the one billion AD equivalent of wolves is. In your case you wake up plummeting through the atmosphere at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound, but fortunately for your the Changing God likes to build his bodies pretty robustly (he has to live in them, after all) and most of the time you can regenerate from wounds that would otherwise be lethal, which is a convenient ability to have when you subsequently smash into the ground at a hundred miles per hour.

So, much like the original Planescape: Torment, you’re playing a protagonist with amnesia who treats death as a minor inconvenience (most of the time, there are still some situations that can kill you), and who immediately starts trying to uncover how they ended up this way. And much like the original Planescape: Torment you’re being pursued by a malevolent entity called the Sorrow that really doesn’t like the way the Changing God is upsetting the natural order of things; even if you were entirely uninterested in your backstory you would still have to deal with the Sorrow, and since it can erase castoffs from existence just by touching them figuring out how to get it off your back is something of a pressing concern. One significant way in which this Torment does differ from the original is that the Changing God has been at this for thousands of years and has accrued a significant number of castoffs, many of which survived the circumstances that caused them to become castoffs in the first place and which now inhabit the world alongside the more regular population, who are all extremely familiar with the Changing God’s MO as a consequence.

This does mean that Torment loses the potential for some of the more impactful moments of the original (the tattoos, the tomb, the business with the Nameless One’s previous party) and the story is far less personal for the Last Castoff than it is for the Nameless One. Their companions too are curiously insubstantial – I think they’re a damn sight better than the ones found in Tyranny or even Pillars Of Eternity through dint of actually having backstories and personalities that evolve throughout the game, but the chances are that in five years I won’t remember any of them and that’s not good enough. This is why casting your game as the spiritual successor to anything is simply setting yourself up for failure, as it’s constantly being measured against the idealised version of that thing that exists in people’s heads and coming up short even if you do a decent job.

Anyway, while the hook of the Last Castoff’s individual story is a little duller this time around, it’s compensated for somewhat by the exploration of the Numenera worlds being at least as in-depth as Planescape managed. It’s in the locations, sidequests and vignettes that Torment shapes up best as a true spiritual successor, as it successfully captures much of the essence driving stuff like the Sensorium, the Godsmen, the golem inside the siege tower etc. etc. and distils it into new forms that feel fresh and original while also sharing something in common with their inspiration. In the first city I wandered into a bar populated by the few remaining veterans of a psychic war, one of whom I persuaded to gift me with an attack meme that destroyed an entire civilization². Outside I met one of the city guards, automatons created by each citizen donating a year of their lives to one of the mysterious technological marvels dug up by the Aeon Priests, but this one was upset because the particular year used to create him was an extremely bad one. Underneath the city I ran into a man selling meat that grew back as soon as he carved it from the dead animal carcass he had roasting over the fire; he told me he’d used yet another mysterious device to trigger regeneration in the carcass, but the one time he tried to use it to heal one of his own injuries he ended up with some… unpleasant side effects. None of these things has anything to do with the main plot, but all of them display precisely the sort of imagination required to build a convincing world out of Numenera’s catch-all setting, and all of them are backed up by a lot of very good writing that lends a significant amount of colour to what could otherwise have been some very dry fetch-quests.

Torment feels like it gets more and more comfortable in its own skin as it goes on. Or perhaps I was getting more and more comfortable with Torment and its setting, but I did find it interesting that the first area — which is something like Sigil in that it’s the setting’s take on a traditional RPG city — came across as being a little weaker than the bulk of the rest of the game, and that the third area, which was the most alien of them all, was the one that I enjoyed the most by far. The more Torment embraced the range of possibilities enabled by the inherent weirdness of the Numenera setting, the better it got, and I was more than happy to play through to the end of game based on the setting alone. Why, then, did I say I have a bone to pick with it in the opening line to this review?

Well, it’s because while the anything-goes nature of Numenera makes it an excellent place to tell a story (for the right writers, anyway, which InXile do seem to have), it is a really, really shitty place to try and apply any rules to. Unfortunately when you’re cooking up an RPG system that is precisely what you have to do; if you don’t want to turn it into pure interactive fiction you have to come up with stats and skills and mechanics to support the game-y part of it. The moment you try and impose any order on this madness it suddenly becomes far less interesting, as walking around in a suit of living Maw-flesh with a miniature interdimensional portal swirling in the centre of your chest is abruptly boiled down to having an armour value of six and a resistance value of eight, rendering it far more mundane.

I’ll reserve the bulk of the kicking for the combat system and associated mechanics, but I will say that I did find the way you make use of non-combat skills in Numenera interesting, if also completely broken. You have the usual set of skills — Quick Fingers, Persuasion, Intimidation etc. etc. — and you’re given the opportunity to try and use them in a given situation via a special dialogue prompt as you’d expect. However, success is not determined by comparing the difficulty of the task against the level of your skill; instead this merely determines the baseline chance of success, and you’re then given the opportunity to improve that chance by burning points from one of your stat pools as extra Effort you make on that particular attempt. You have three pools — Might, Speed and Intellect — and a check on a given skill will require you to invest Effort points from that skill’s associated pool — so a Quick Fingers check will require Speed, Smashing will require Might and so on.  Each Effort point invested raises the chances of success by 20%, so by spending enough Effort you can pass any skill check. The catch is supposed to be that you only have a limited amount of stat points to spend on Effort, and by spending too lavishly you’ll run out before you get to other important skill checks later on. Unfortunately the problem with this system is that it’s trivial to refill the stat pools either through the use of common consumable items (which refill 3 or 6 points from a given pool) or by resting, which refills every pool to the maximum, and this means that in practice you just spend as many points as are needed to get the chances of success to 90 or 100%. If you run out you can fall back on your companion’s stat pools (this might even be preferable if they have a better skill level than you do) and if those run out you just spend a couple of minutes running back to the nearest inn. I completely understand the intent behind this system and I actually think it’d be a good idea if you weren’t able to refill your stat pools so casually, but in practice it amounts to automatically succeeding on every single skill check you’re called on to make, which is no fun at all.

Anyway, the combat. It’s the usual turn-based two actions, one attack deal popularised by XCOM. Enemies have ranged or melee weapons. You have ranged or melee weapons. There are magic spells in the form of Nano abilities. Armour blocks physical damage. Resistance blocks magic damage. The various technological marvels of the Ninth World are, in combat, reduced to Cyphers, which are limited-use items that are essentially equivalent to scrolls in D&D, albeit with unique effects not replicated by the Nano abilities available to you. You heal mid-combat by spraying yourself with Synthflesh, which totally isn’t a healing potion, honest. In other words, combat in Torment is almost exactly like combat in every other RPG under the sun (bar one astonishing omission that I’ll get to in a second), when that’s exactly what it shouldn’t be. For starters, are you seriously telling me that the suit of technologically advanced reactive plate armour I am wearing can block all of 3 points out of the 12 points of damage that was just dealt to me by the cultist dressed in rags and wielding what appears to be a rusty knife? That the transdimensional blade I am wielding, that I can use in special conversation options to slice open the very fabric of reality, will itself only do 4 points of damage, plus 3 for every additional point of Effort I invest? Shit, just give me whatever that cultist was using since it appears to be far more effective. I pick up a cypher that says it’s a bloodsucking seed that takes root in the body of whatever enemy I throw it at, but the in-game effect is that they take 9 points of damage now plus 3 points of bleeding damage for 3 rounds afterwards.  This is absolutely criminal: Torment takes all of this fascinating esoterica you pick up during your travels through the Ninth World and transforms it into the most boring numbers game possible. I know a lot of people hated Planescape’s combat (although curiously I’m not one of them) but that at least gave you some very entertaining spells to throw around. Torment doesn’t even have that.

Still, to be merely boring would be a step up for Torment’s combat. In practice it’s borderline offensive because for some absolutely inexplicable reason it doesn’t have any concept of zones of control, where front-line melee tanks can control the area around them by making free attacks on any enemies who try and move past them to the squishier backline members of the party. You are always outnumbered by your enemies, and the baddie AI will usually pick one of your party members and focus them down, running straight past your impotently flailing tank to shank the mage. Or, even worse, the player character; while your party members will get back up if they’re downed and you win the fight, the Last Castoff getting taken out means an immediate restart as their “death” and regeneration is represented in-game by your party being teleported back to the start of the area. In the areas where you can die, the Last Castoff getting alpha struck in this way results in an instant game over. I had one fight where she didn’t even get to move before being swarmed and stabbed to death. It got slightly better during the late game as I managed to stack enough items on her to get her evasion to 135%; the rest of the party would often get taken out in two rounds, but she’d just keep on going as her enemies missed her again and again, and even soloed what I assume was supposed to be a challenging optional boss (you get an achievement for killing him) without dropping below half health. I shouldn’t have had to effectively break the game in order to make the combat bearable, though; before I’d managed to set her up like that I was genuinely afraid that I might have to give up on Torment altogether purely because I couldn’t face dealing with its godawful combat system.

Interestingly I think InXile are very aware of how weak that combat system is, as evidenced by my having to deal with it precisely four times in the opening nine hours of the game. That it managed to frustrate me to this degree even though I encountered it so infrequently is a pretty damning indictment of it, but it does also speak well of Torment’s general approach to resolving a crisis as there is almost always a non-violent solution. It might require some work, and some judicious reloading after you realise you’ve gone past a point of no return without the magic word required to defuse the situation, but you can usually avoid a fight. This leaves you more-or-less free to soak up the ambience in the process of running down the Changing God, which means you’ll probably have great fun with Torment for about 18 hours before discovering it suffers from a malaise that’s becoming all too common where modern RPGs are concerned. I ran into it in Mankind Divided, I ran into it in Tyranny, and now that I’ve encountered it in Torment I suppose I should give it a name: No Third Act Syndrome. That is, I completed what I assumed was the middle portion of the game, moved one step closer to discovering the secrets driving the main plot, and was ready for a third and final act where it would be resolved in a comprehensive and satisfying manner… only to discover instead that there was less than an hour of gameplay remaining after that point. Torment rushes its revelation, condensing most of it into two Choose Your Own Adventure segments and then having you talk to an NPC to pick which ending you’d like.

That was the surprising thing about Torment, for me, since up until that point it was actually doing a pretty good job of living up to the extremely lofty expectations invoked by the name; it never had a chance of equalling Planescape’s accomplishments, but it could have at least called itself a spiritual successor without me laughing in its face. Torment does do quite a lot that’s admirable, or at least well-intentioned, and makes good use of its setting to build a world that’s leaps and bounds beyond any other RPGs I’ve played recently. As several prominent RPG developers have learned to their cost over the last few years, though, stuffing up the ending like that does rather tend to retroactively ruin everything that came before it, and it turns out that even 4 million dollar Kickstarter success stories aren’t immune from running out of resources and having to push out a final product with a conclusion that feels more like an amputation. At least I assume that’s what happened, and that it’s not just that there’s nobody left in all of games development who knows how to properly structure a story. Whatever the reason, Torment concludes with a wet fart where it really needed a crescendo to push it over the finish line, and that’s something that puts me off ever playing it again.

The post Thoughts: Torment – Tides Of Numenera appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

My overriding thought during the first few hours of Wasteland was that somewhere — etched into a stone tablet carried down from a mountaintop, written into human DNA, inscribed in the basic atomic structure of the universe, I don’t care — the following message needs to be preserved for posterity:

THOU SHALT NOT FILL THE STARTING DUNGEON OF YOUR RPGS WITH ANNOYING GIANT RAT/ANT/FLY ENEMIES. (delete as appropriate)

It should be a fundamental law that you don’t do this. Ever. Shooting rats isn’t satisfying. Poking giant ants with a spear for an hour at the start of Fallout 2 is what puts me off replaying Fallout 2. When I play an RPG I want to feel like I’m doing something meaningful, not like I’m a pest exterminator for hire. Say what you like about modern RPGs but they’ve successfully moved beyond what I shall term Daikatana Syndrome¹; Wasteland 2, on the other hand, proves to remain firmly entrenched in the past by having you spend your first hours with the game shooting giant flies and maggots

This conscious rejection of modern design principles and ideas is something I’ve seen before several times now in other Kickstarted games. When you Kickstart something based on nostalgia for – in this case – Fallout, which most people have played, and Wasteland, which most people haven’t, and you get three million dollars to do it, the temptation to just copy what worked in the past must be overwhelmingly strong. and inXile have caved to that pressure with everything good and bad that that implies. Wasteland 2 plays like I imagine the infamous Van Buren prototype² of Fallout 3 would have before Black Isle got shut down. Had Wasteland 2 been released instead of Van Buren, I imagine everyone would have gone away quite happy that they’d gotten a worthy followup to the first two games – but that was ten years ago. That Wasteland ignores everything that’s happened in RPGs in the last decade ensures it feels like it’s stepped right out of a time capsule from 2003, and while the Fallout style has aged far better than the previous games I slated for doing the same thing I still think this attitude hinders Wasteland 2 far more than it helps it.

Take skills, for example. The above screenshot shows the character creation screen when you start the game; you have to make a party of four characters, so you have to navigate this overwhelming array of skills and abilities four times without any idea of how useful each individual skill is going to be. If they’d followed through on making each of them genuinely worthwhile I wouldn’t complain about it, but having gone through the whole thing now my assessment is that fully half of those skills are either useless, not used anywhere near enough to justify the skill point investment, or are just flat out redundant skills that have been split in order to promote the illusion of choice. For example, there’s the Lockpicking skill, which is used to open locks, and the Safecracking skill, which is used to open combination safes. As you can imagine you come across locked doors far more often than you do locked safes, so one is very useful while the other just gives you a little more loot. There’s absolutely no reason those two skills couldn’t have been rolled into one, and yet Wasteland 2′s stubborn refusal to streamline itself in any way whatsoever means that the arbitrary split remains and the player ends up getting confused. Alarm Disarming is another good example, this time of a skill that is just flat out useless. There are never any negative penalties for having an alarm go off; most of the time anyone who would have been alerted by it is already dead by the time the alarm is tripped, and so the skill simply functions as a trap during character creation for unwary players who think it’s going to be more useful than it actually is.

Speaking of traps during character creation, I was absolutely dumbfounded at how awful Wasteland 2′s attribute system is. In most RPGs a characters intrinsic attributes (Strength, Dexterity and so on) are very important and affect almost everything they do in the game world, with individual skills granting specific abilities and bonuses on top of the innate stats provided by their attributes. That’s how Baldur’s Gate did it, that’s how Fallout did it, but it’s most definitely not how Wasteland does it. In Wasteland skills are everything. Take a brawler archetype, for example. In most games you’d pump their Strength and Constitution and leave them with low Intelligence in the expectation that a character who exists solely to punch things in the face isn’t going to have to do any heavy thinking on the way. If you do this in Wasteland, though, you end up getting screwed since Strength has minimal impact on melee damage, while you get the skill points you’ll need to level the Brawling skill from your Intelligence stat. More Intelligence equals more skill points per level, and more skill points equals high Brawling – and so the ideal brawler character in Wasteland maxes their Intelligence first and their Constitution second, with Strength a distant third in consideration. If you made a brawler character with low Int I’m not even sure you could max the Brawling skill by the end of the game, which would make them decidedly useless.

This is the story of Wasteland 2′s attributes: Intelligence trumps everything. I spent the entire game lamenting the fact that I’d given only two out of my four characters high Intelligence scores, since only they could learn combat and utility skills quickly enough to be useful. The other two were largely relegated to carrying around huge piles of loot, since this was all their high Strength values made them good for. Other attributes are similarly awful — each point in Coordination gives you +1% chance to hit an enemy (exciting, I know), while a single level in a weapons skill will raise you chance to hit with that weapon by five or six percent. Speed and Awareness affect combat movement and initiative, but while always taking my turn second was annoying it absolutely wouldn’t have been worth taking points out of Intelligence to make it up. Because so much is invested in the skill system, it renders the attributes almost entirely one-dimensional, and counter-intuitively so.

Then you’ve got the weapons themselves, which are very inconsistent. Melee weapons are (again) split into two types, Blunt and Sharp, but both are equally useless. The power of Brawling scales exponentially with skill and character level from awful at the start of the game to downright overpowered at the end of it. Heavy Weapons are terrible since all of the guns you’ll find up until the Minigun fire large bursts of expensive assault rifle ammo and have underpowered armour penetration. Shotguns hit all enemies in a cone, which is a nice idea, but the enemies in Wasteland 2 get special cheat moves that let them run across as many squares as it’ll take — even halfway across the encounter map, if necessary — to close to melee range with your party, meaning that nine times out of ten you’ll hit your own party with friendly fire if you try to take advantage of shotgun spread.  Handguns start out decently, but are so underpowered by the end of the game that you might as well be throwing the bullets at your enemies for all the good they do. Once again, the problem here is that there was apparently an overwhelming desire to have as many skills in the game as possible, and so each weapon type has its own skillset, except half of them are crap and function as point traps for players unwilling to abandon the skill because they don’t have the Intelligence to properly retrain.

This skillset design is just plain dated. It’s exactly what I’d expect to see from a game released in the 90s – the designers had all these cool ideas, either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out how to properly make use of them, but left them in rather than cutting or streamlining things back to a more sensible state. All this false quantity does is present the player with the illusion of choice – and not even a particularly meaningful one when all most skills do is increase the chance of success when doing something by five percent. When you have to wait two or three levels to scrounge up enough skill points to raise skills by a single level, this is an incredibly underwhelming and unexciting way of doing business.  I’d probably point to the skill system as the single weakest part of Wasteland; because it’s so poorly thought-out, and because it’s so easy to cripple characters in ways that aren’t easily recoverable, level ups are more useful for the full heal that they bring your characters than they are for actually improving their stats.

Still, now that we’ve got that out of the way I can talk about the part of the game where Wasteland’s refusal to streamline is actually something of an asset: its quests and locations. You start the game as a squad of rookieDesert Rangers, sent out into the post-apocalyptic wastes of Arizona to investigate the death of another Ranger, and from the word go the game branches out without quite sprawling out. The first choice you get is forced down your throat a little bit; you’re told that both a water station that supplies the Rangers and an agricultural centre that grows their food are having difficulties and that you should attend to them at your earliest convenience, but what you’re not told is that whichever one you pick, the other one succumbs to the thing that’s attacking it while you’re dealing with the first problem. In my case I ran across the agricultural centre first and ended up shooting flies for several hours, but what I found interesting about this artificial choice was that once you’re done with the first location you still get to visit the second one after it’s been destroyed, to pick through its smoking ruins and wonder about what could have been. Wasteland is pretty big on showing you the consequences of your actions — not just tying things up neatly in a cutscene, but actively having you explore a location after something horrible has happened to it, which is a far more effective way of communicating cause and effect. And while this first demonstration of its willingness to do this was a little hamhanded, I admit I did end up accidentally destroying a couple more communities before the game was over, and this time it was entirely my fault. I’d gone in expecting the usual no-strings-attached Paragon resolutions to quests, but it’s very rare that Wasteland’s solutions to its quests are neat enough that nobody gets hurt.

It’s also pretty open about the order in which you tackle stuff, and in how you tackle stuff. You move from location to location via a world map, and while radiation blocks the route to anywhere you’re not supposed to go yet because of plot reasons you can do pretty much anything else as long as you have the map location for it and can get there without dying. As for methods, well, during the second half of the game I came across a town that had been taken over by a bandit gang. There was a non-lethal option for gaining entry to the town, and it was chock full of named NPCs who hinted at an intricate questline for getting the bandits to vamoose. If there’s one weakness with Wasteland’s quests, however, it’s that too many of them involve repeatedly running back and forth across a map shuttling items and weapons between NPCs, and I wasn’t really in the mood for dealing with that at the time. So instead I just started killing. Killed the bandits at the gate. Killed the bandits roaming the streets. Killed the bandits and bandit NPCs inside the casino, the bar, the distillery. I didn’t stop killing until I ran out of bandits, and the game still accepted this as a valid resolution to the quest: the objective was to remove the bandits from the town, and I’d definitely achieved that in a very comprehensive fashion even though I’d sidestepped what was probably a couple of hours of subquests in doing so.

Structurally the game is split into two halves. The first, Arizona, is by far the best part of the game. You’re unravelling the mystery of who killed the Ranger, you’re exploring a map that, while visually uninteresting, at least has some topographical features like mountains on it, and you have the Ranger Citadel to retreat to as an HQ, which provides a whole lot of attention-grabbing backstory for people who didn’t play the first game (i.e. nearly everyone). The locations are, on the whole, interesting and varied, with the high point being the mountain pass guarded by the sect of crazy monks with nuclear grenades who threaten to detonate an ancient Titan II missile if anyone breaches the peace. The way Arizona is put together — the way the quests are designed and the options it gives you to resolve them — definitely made me think of Wasteland 2 as a first-class RPG despite the horrible skill system; after all, it’s what you do that makes up the essence of role-playing game. It’s the choices you make and the consequences of those choices, not the numbers attached to your characters, and Arizona is excellent at demonstrating both.

Unfortunately once you’re done with Arizona you then get shipped off to the ruins of Los Angeles, and its here that the game falls over massively. Where Arizona comes off as a well-designed, complete and satisfying experience, LA feels like content that should have been cut from the game but wasn’t because of the developers’ mistaken belief that more == better. It’s far more simplistic than Arizona, with even more fedex quests and encounters that simply consist of “Go to location, kill thing”. It didn’t help that finishing up in Arizona takes around 18-20 hours, and I thought that after that I was leaving for the finale, not to experience another ten hours of substandard content. At one point I got so fatigued that I murdered the population of yet another town just because I couldn’t be bothered to figure out who to talk to start the quest chain to get some plot-sensitive items that were needed to finish the game. LA doesn’t substantially add to the Wasteland experience; it just prolongs the game with tedious make-work, seemingly in the belief that people are expecting a 30 hour RPG so dammit, they’re going to get one even if the last third of it is a dull, dull grind.

Like Wasteland 2 itself, then, this review has ended up being very uneven. It’s a decidedly old-school RPG with some fantastic content built on top of a very shaky system and with an unnecessary second world map bolted on to the end of it. Its a very wordy game, and the writing doesn’t usually dip below the level of “competent”, but I didn’t come away from it feeling any particular attachment to the world or the characters in it.  It’s done a lot with a budget that, while large in Kickstarter terms, is still a relatively small amount to fund the development of a game, but it ironically may have tried to do too much. And I think that’s Wasteland’s cardinal sin; if it had been more focused, if the designers had had the courage to cut content that wasn’t working and not spread everything out for the sake of it, it would probably be my RPG of the year and a true modern update of the classic Fallout series. As it is, not only did it overstay its welcome by about ten hours, but it made me spend the first three hours of the game shooting flies and maggots, which I’m having a really hard time forgiving it for. I hate games that do that.

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The post Thoughts: Wasteland 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

My first draft of this piece involved simply making a list of everything that was wrong – everything that I hated – about Hunted. After playing two out of the six chapters making up the main adventure, this list clocked in at 1,552 words. It was obvious I was never going to get through the entire game this way without writing a small book. So when I say that the flaws in Hunted are far too numerous to list, that’s not just a figure of speech: I actually tried.

Hunted is a co-op game whose gameplay mechanics have been designed by Kafka and implemented by Bloody Stupid Johnson. Every single thing about it – the breakable shields, the way pressing the attack button locks Caddoc into an attack animation rendering him unable to dodge, the complete absence of lock-on leading the game to make its best guess as to who you want him to hit and getting it completely wrong – is almost intentionally designed to alienate the player. The problems aren’t confined to gameplay either; Hunted is the worst PC port of a console game I’ve ever played. Kenti and I booted up the game at 8:30pm on a Monday evening, yet wasn’t until 9:25 that we managed to start the co-op adventure, due to various misadventures with port forwarding, having to disable the always-on built-in VOIP via a config file buried in My Documents and – inexplicably and criminally – having to play through the game’s tutorial before it would entrust us with the dangerous ability to log on to Gamespy and send the other player an invite.

(I should mention that the game never even hinted that we had to do the tutorial before we could start a co-op game. The co-op game option was completely missing from the menu with no explanation as to why, which I thought was a somewhat unusual move for a game whose entire selling point is that it’s built around co-op from the ground up. The only reason we did the tutorial – not actually labelled as a tutorial but rather as the prologue of the single player campaign, adding to the confusion – was because it was literally the only thing the game would let us do. It wasn’t even a very good tutorial, since it took the trouble to explain tricky concepts like cover and over-the-shoulder bow aiming in painstaking detail but never mentioned things like the battle charge system, which we still don’t know how to use properly.)

You see? I start talking about what’s wrong with Hunted and entire paragraphs just write themselves before I can get a grip and stop. It’s easier to assume the majority of the game is awful and instead mention the things it does right. These do exist, although I must admit they kept a low profile during the first few hours of the adventure.  First, a common complaint levelled against Hunted is that it has terrible PS2-era graphics. If you see somebody say this you should never ever trust their opinion again because:

1) Of all the things in Hunted they could have bitched about they picked the graphics as the number one issue dragging their game experience down.
2) The graphics aren’t actually that bad. Some of the effects are prehistoric and the animations aren’t great either, but the visual design lends itself to lush, eerie environments very well. Which makes it a bit of a shame that most of the game takes place in grey towns/grey caves/grey dungeons/grey castles, really.

The most atmospheric areas in the game are the side-dungeons, which are optional areas the can be explored for a bit of extra loot. These are mostly very well done, containing different puzzles¹ and traps and so-on, and if the entire game had been more like that I would probably not be as harsh on Hunted as I am. Unfortunately the game proper is a series of hack n’ slash battles against the same four or five types of enemy, with the occasional turret section and arena fight to liven things up. Even this wouldn’t have been so bad except for the way Hunted handles character progression.

The way it works is that once you meet a certain milestone – X number of monsters killed in melee, partner revived Y number of times – the game gives you a bonus to your health, the number of potions you can carry, your damage and so on. The problem with this setup is that Hunted isn’t an RPG, where you can go off track and grind out some experience points to boost your character. It’s as linear as they come with too few baddies in the side dungeons to make much of a difference to the progression rate, meaning that said progression rate is essentially fixed. There’s no way to speed it up. This has the effect of intentionally crippling the players at the start of the game in a horrifying example of Level-1-in-Baldur’s-Gate syndrome.

As a result, I hated the first third of Hunted. It was one of the most unfun gaming experiences I’ve ever had, when I was wrestling with the rubbish controls and the awful melee mechanics and went down in just three attacks from a berserker baddie – and to add insult to injury, the first two chapters take place in dark, bleak environments with no warmth whatsoever. Things did improve when we got into the forest since we could carry more than one health + resurrection potion and so had options in the case of an encounter with an enemy going horribly wrong, but it’s still one of the most baffling design decisions in a game absolutely chock full of them. And it didn’t end there.

No, towards the end of the game we started to encounter the reverse problem: our characters were so absurdly powerful that most encounters were over almost as soon as they’d started. Minibosses that had been challenging when we first encountered them spawned and attacked only to be beaten to death with a shield in a couple of seconds. There was one occasion when the game presented us with a room full of pots containing potions, magic weapons, weapon racks, clearly gearing us up for a big fight – which consisted of Kenti hitting the big cluster of berserkers with a freeze arrow before exploding them in place while I batted the sorcerer type into the air with my shield and then tore his head off. I won’t deny that dispensing that level of mayhem after struggling so much at the start of the game wasn’t fun. It was fun, so this particular issue isn’t a bad thing, as such. It’s just symptomatic of the overall problem with Hunted, which is that it’s a game that hasn’t really been thought through. Time and again we ran into situations that hadn’t been tested properly, badly designed fights that were either far too easy or far too hard, bugs with bosses that resulted in a torrent of never-ending swearing. One time I even fell through the bottom of the level during a scene transition.

The end result is a game that feels like it’s been made by amateurs – amateurs who may have had the best intentions, but amateurs nonetheless. There’s no other explanation I can come up with for why the game happily disregards so many of the basic tenets of game development I had – until now – taken for granted. Things like “basic UI features to monitor your co-op partner in a co-op game”. Things like “a boss whose presence and threat is built up over the course of a chapter only for the actual boss fight to consist of shooting it in the face with a fixed turret for thirty seconds”. Things like “the breakable shields are bad enough, so why would you intentionally piss the person playing Caddoc off more by having him comment on how flimsy his shields are every time he picks up a new one”. It’s a litany of hate that is almost never-ending, and so while I may have had some fun with it I can ultimately only give Hunted the scourging it so richly deserves.

Note from glorious space-year 2013: The development team behind this game is inXile, they of Choplifter and the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter. I wouldn’t expect Wasteland 2 to be anything special.

The post Thoughts: Hunted. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.