Been spending some time with Wasteland 2. Please indulge me as a I rant.
On one hand I've only just completed the introduction assignment and returned to base, but on the other hand, I've fought through five or six large areas, found several other points of interest in the world map, and probably spent well over 15 hours on the game already, with everyone on level 10 or higher, so I think I have a good idea what the game is about by now.
And I gotta say I have no idea why people have been celebrating the game so much. I should preface that I'm actually quite invested in the game. I want to keep playing whenever I have the chance, so it must be doing something right. But looking at this game critically, it does everything wrong, and I think highlights a ton of issues this whole family of games in general.
Right off the bat, I hate how everything is made unncessarily """complex""". Even ignoring the blatant bugs and complete lack of competent UI design, everything in the game comes down to an intricate web of stats and skills that all affect eachother. I'm glad I managed to find a recommended party setup on the internet, or I'd just have wasted my time with a lot of trial and error. Now this can be exciting if it means that the game has a lot of different ways you can design your characters for different approaches through the game, and really affect how things play out. But it doesn't - The core gameplay is extremely simple. There's really two elements to it - the "tactical" turn based combat, and the walking around and figuring out how to get ammunition and other gear out of boxes lying around. Occasionally you'll speak to people too, to get some exposition and help draw out the game world, but that part really takes up a surprisingly small part of the game. Most of the time you'll just be fighting stuff.
So yeah, you'll need to spread out and focus on different weapons skills to be able to cover all potential ground across fights. And I can totally see challenge runs focusing entirely on melee characters or similar approaches that might add a little to the game. But overall combat is very basic no matter how you go about it: Use up your action points to get in cover and/or attack the enemy. You can attempt to cripple the enemies in various ways to give you an edge, but it's always designed as a gamble that evens out the tactical advantage. It's not very involving, but it's entertaining on a basic level. The exploration fares a lot worse. All your interaction skills are based on the P&P RPG inspired "chance to succeed/fail", giving each action a percentage rating for this. You can do stuff like pick locks, crack safes (two different things apparently), break stuff open, disarm explosives, disarm alarms, hack computers, repair machines, or repair toasters (again, two different things, and I think that's supposed to be a joke).
All of those skills work the exact same way - beat the percentage to succeed, or either try again or fail so bad you'll have to reload the quicksave you made immediately before attempting. The game practically encourages save scumming, which makes it confusing to me why you'd even have the percentage in the first place. Either make it so that you either meet the skill level or don't, or take away the ability to go back to earlier saves. All the skills serve the exact same ultimate purpose, too, and it's never very role play'ish - Gain access to caches of gear, ammunition, healing items, or junk you can sell. Different skills will be required for different caches, so you either lock yourself out from some and specialize in the rest, or you cover the entire ground across the seven team members you can have, which completely nullifies the entire concept. Since the skills all work the same, the places that allow different ways to solve one problem, are essentially just allowing the same solution twice. This kind of "choose your approach based on your invested skills" is rarely executed well in video games, but Prey 2017 IMO stands out of a good example of such decisions feeling much more organic. Wasteland 2 feels like they wrote the idea down on paper, and then never took it anywhere. Did I mention that the act of executing any of the skills all involve the riveting implementation of watching a progress bar fill up as you wait around. Why? I can think of no purpose other than annoying the player. Do people think this makes a game fun? Do people think Wasteland 2 is fun?
The interface in general just feels like it's trying to annoy you. There's a lot of stats on the character screens, but rarely the ones you are looking for. And information about them seems like they are intentionally obscured so badly From Software would be envious. Did you know the intelligence stat affects your ability to use healing items? Well, the game certainly doesn't want you to know. See a new rad suit for sale and want to see if it's better than the one you're already wearing? Too bad, once you equip them, they disappear from view. Want to see if the new weapon you found is better than your current one? You'll get some of its stats, displayed in different windows across different places of the interface, but the most important ones will require you to open up the "compare" window. Don't expect to compare your character's equipped weapons to the ones you see for sale though, if it happens to be equipped as their secondary weapon. You'll have to exit the shop, exit the conversation with the shop keeper, and then open the inventory to switch it out momentarily. Of course, all menus lag so bad you'd think you're playing remote play from a computer in Fiji, so this will take a while. The secondary weapon also comes in play with the party wide reload button, which only works on the weapon currently in hand by anyone. So you'll have to switch to each character invidiually to swap weapons if you want to reload their off-hand weapons too. Why you even need to manually reload between fights is a mystery in the first place, as there is no reason you'd ever want to not do that. Instead of just making the characters do it on their own, the developers opted to write a reminder on the loading screen. Is this "immersion"?
Wait, I'm not done. Let's talk about how healing characters works, because it's a glorious disaster. You need to bring up your skill radial. Wait, close it again, first switch to your team's dedicated healer and *then* bring up the radial (this makes sense, but it's not necessary for any other skill). Pick the healing skill and cycle to the character you want to heal using the L/R buttons. Of course, I hope you didn't actually "select" the healing skill first, since you can't pick a character at that point, and you'll have to go back. You need to highlight the skill first, and then highlight the target character. If you did that before highlighting the correct skill, the selection will be reset, and you need to highlight them again. But before actually pressing the button to select it. Then on the next radial, you'll pick the item you want to use to heal them. No indication about which one does what, you'll have to remember that from the inventory screen, though for basic healing that's done frequently enough that you don't need to worry. For surgery actions, it's a little more annoying. This screen also doesn't tell how many you have of each item, so if you're worried about wasting some of the more rare ones, you'll have to exit out and check your inventory screen for that as well. Highlighting target characters isn't exactly intuitive either. The only indication you get as you cycle through them, is that their name pops up over their head and then lingers for a while, so usually you'll have multiple names floating there and have to pay attention to which one of them popped up last, which means you'll usually be cycling through every character at least once before ending at the one you need.
Of course it doesn't help that I'm playing the PS4 version, which was ported by people who obviously didn't care for anyone who doesn't want to play games without a mouse, and delibrately made targeting anything even harder than it has to be.
tl;dr Everything this game does is done better in Divinity Original Sin. Everything. And that game definitely has its own slew of UI annoyances and game breaking bugs. At least in that game, different skills feel like different ways to interact with the world in a genuinely immersive way.
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