Wasteland 2: Director's Cut

Çok etkileyici ve iyi bir crpg oyun olduğunu düşünsem de belirli bir zamandan sonra ve 3. oyunu oynadıktan sonra geri dönüp baktığımda pek beni sardığını söyleyemem. Serinin devamını göz önüne almazsak, bana göre oldukça iyi bir başyapıt seviyesinde bir oyun olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Ancak oyunun çok iyi bir oyun olduğunu değiştirmeyecek olsa bile seriyi hiç oynamamış olanlar için üçüncü oyunu öneriyorum. Daha güncel teknolojiyle daha tesirli ve ayrıntılı bir oynanışla o oyun bundan daha iyi durumda. Yani demem o ki zamanında çok severek oynasam bile geri dönüp oynadığımda aynı zevki vermedi. Elbette nostalji ve sırasıyla oynamak isteyenler için seriyi sırasına uygun olarak oynamasını kesinlikle öneririm ama eğer üçüncü oyunu oynamaya kalkarsanız bu size zevk vermeyecektir. Oyunu tek başına değerlendirdiğimde bence türündeki en üstün oyunlardan olduğunu düşünüyorum. Kesinlikle ve şiddetle türü sevenlere öneriyorum.

Never played the OG Wasteland, or non-Director's Cut of Wasteland 2. From what I read, the original release of W2 was very poorly balanced and with worse graphics. For example, energy weapons did much more damage to people in armor. 'Cooking them inside it' was the rationale. This made all armor so detrimental that it was better not to wear any at all. Director's Cut isn't that balanced either, to be honest, and beautiful it is not. In DC it's only heavy armor that is affected by this weird trait and graphically it's poor for a 2014 game. It reminds me of Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel on PS2, which is not a favorable comparison. Wasteland 2 uses a variation of Fallout's SPECIAL system, CLASSIC. In OG Fallout's it's flawed, as Charisma is a dump stat (a stat which isn't useful and it's better to drop it to 1 and redistribute those points on something else) while Intelligence and Agility are be all end all. Wasteland 2 has 2 dump stats: Luck, which doesn't do much, and Charisma, which is decent only in a single specific character build. At the same time, Intelligence works the same like in Fallout, and Speed is pretty much Fallout's Agility. It's one of those games where you basically have to read a guide about character creation to know how to assemble a good, custom team. Preset characters are poorly built, lack good skills, and have useless ones, e.g. the default team the game gives you has no one with Lockpicking, but has one guy with Barter which is one of the worst skills in the game. Point distribution is terrible and you will quickly discover that something is very wrong when your team either has few Action Points and can only attack once per turn, or cannot hit the broad side of a barn wasting tons of ammo of which there isn't much in the beginning. I had to create my own squad from scratch and restart after a few hours. I can tolerate this in 90's and early 00's games, but Wasteland 2 came out in 2014. There's also a comical dedication to make it as "old school" as possible. Why have a single Lockpicking skill, when you can have SIX: Lockpicking, Safecracking, Computer Science (also can be used for other things), Alarm Disarming (regularly needed to disarm doors/containers), Demolitions (regularly needed to disarm doors/containers), and Brute Force. All the way back in the 90's Fallout's First Aid and Doctor were criticized as they should've been a single skill, but at least there was only Lockpicking, and Traps were rarely required to disarm containers. What's worse, using those skills always takes several seconds. I feel like out of the 50 hours of my playthrough, two hours were spent on waiting for those skills to finish. There is no reason why they're not instant. By the way, Wasteland 2 has that double medical skill problem as well: First Aid and Surgery. Speech is the only skill which is split into three (Kiss Ass, Hard Ass, and Smart Ass) with good reason, as persuasion skills are always overpowered otherwise. Wasteland 2 has the gall to attempt multiple times to make you feel guilty for events that were completely out of your control. Without spoiling anything, the first is the starting choice of which settlement to save: AG Center or Highpool. There are also several times at the Prison. You are railroaded into these "choices" and are actively prevented from coming up with alternative solutions. On the other hand, there are instances of good choice & consequences, reactivity, and clever ways of approaching problems, but it sacrifices immersion by humor which is Fallout 2 cubed tier. Sometimes mildly funny, other times painfully unfunny; full of non sequiturs, pop culture references, and fourth wall breaks. It's just too much; and when Wasteland 2 wants to be actually serious, it doesn't work. It's like The Naked Gun having a serious scene and expecting the viewer to treat it as such. At this point just go full satire, otherwise you end up with this anti-immersion. Surprisingly, this changes rather drastically once you reach L.A., which is around the halfway point. The "humor" is severely dialed down, and instead of being presented with dubious moral choices, you have multiple scripted ways of completing major quests. The morality isn't forced upon you, but left for you to decide. Each major settlement you visit is interesting in its own way, has its own problems and various methods of solving them. The locations are moodier, the factions are creepier. Unfortunately, this is too little too late. Combat isn't that good either. Ideally you want to get everyone behind cover before starting an encounter, but either the cover is so close to enemies that they trigger combat before you get to it, or sometimes... there's almost no cover at all. So your team is crouching in the open hoping to kill the enemy before they kill them. Furthermore, there's also multiple scripted fights which leave you in an extremely poor position if you didn't know about them beforehand. You are basically required to restart them, unless you were very lucky with your squad somehow having advantageous positions by pure accident. And to finish off my rant, Mark Morgan, the legendary composer for the first two Fallout games, created a fairly bland soundtrack. I'm immensely disappointed. He was one of the reasons I even bought this game. Developers of Wasteland 2 attempted to create an old school experience and a Fallout-like, but failed at both. It has the worst parts of old cRPGs with few of the best ones, while being a very amateur try at a Fallout game. It does have instances of brilliant choice & consequence, but is as anti-immersive as it can possibly be. Skip it.

Мега супер круто Вот не побоюсь этих слов, но оно лучше фоллаута 1/2 в сто раз.

First I know this game has a hard history of development. But still some of its flaws are hard to justify and not an unwilling choice of the dev. To demonstrate the logic of some of these “deep” relation between “action and consequences”, the best example is one of the ending slides. You can save a tortoise on its back in Rail Nomad, and the ending slide will tell you how this action causes everyone live in the Rail Nomad got killed by a robot. After about 1/3 of this game's main quest, the quality of the writings seems all of sudden went down the drain. Inxile Entertainment was able to hired Chris Avellone to be their level designer plus writer and I thought we are in good hands, but no. I don't exactly know which parts were done by Chris Avellone, beside Ag Center and Highpool where he credited as the level designer. For me Ag Center is fine, but Highpool is a bad start. I was kinda excited to go to Highpool, it was my pick in my first playthrough. Largely because of it was the starting point of the first game (I played a little bit of the first title but gave up after endless combats in Ag Center Underground). Highpool's gameplay is very straight forward compare to Ag Center, you just fight a bunch of raiders and cockroaches, turn a few valves press some buttons and that's it. BUT here comes the issue with the story: In the first Wasteland the original four rangers shot Bobby and his dog Rex. When I was playing Wasteland 1, I tried many skills and items on Rex but nothing works. You have no choice but to kill it. After that me as a normal human being, tried everything in my disposal, from items like Rope to all the weird skills on Bobby. While I was trying my best to pacify him, Bobby the "unarmed" boy with only a BB gun, knock out my entire squad one by one, several times. Fruitless, I just ran away after that. But here in the sequel, Inxile Entertainment just decided "yeah the rangers just shot the kid", the four grown up and well-trained lawmen, saw a child with a gun and their first idea wasn't trying to disarm or pacify him but to shoot to kill...? Anyway this is inxile’s choice on what’s “canon”, it is their “action”, it’s their choice. In my playthrough the most aggressive action I took was to punch Bobby. But who am I to make the choice? According to a guide came with Wasteland 3: "it's that for every action there is a consequence, and for every consequence you anticipate, there are ten more you didn't." To put it plainly: inxile entertainment are going to make choices for you and they are going to subvert your expectation at every turns. With a mindset like this the story writing is already ruined from the start. Many good story doesn’t subvert audiences’ expectation nor do they need to, but when you really want one. A good twist in a story require large amount of proper build up or foreshadowing to works well. Otherwise it just cheap gimmick to confuse and "wow" the audience. Inxile Entertainment doing this by throwing logic and common sense out of the window and force whatever they want down your throat like many other contemporary story writers. In case whoever reading this haven't played the game. The approach inxile took is basically just "Somehow Bobby returned and he is a gang leader now". By following their logic, nobody seems to bothered to give Bobby proper triage and just buried him alive and nobody care about him since he somehow crawled out of his grave without anyone noticed and Bobby didn’t went to his dorm or his friend’s place but instead he crawled all the way outside of Highpool and somehow survived and somehow became the leader of RSM. (Courier Six would be so ashamed right now knowing a little boy has more vitality than him). And for the people lived in Highpool, most of them were awfully into this event and refuse to move on, they tried very hard to hate the rangers by passing down this tragedy in the form of poem and history book. Who knows maybe they even craved this story onto a rock somewhere. Why? Is this their tradition? Are they doing the same every time when there are raiders who took their stuff and killed their people with actual vile intention? Or they just into this one unfortune incident? The reputation of Ranger are pretty decent around Arizona, and it has been 15 years still some people in Highpool just cannot accept the fact this is just an accident. Vargas and his squad also don’t seems to care about this matter much and I assume they never attempt to mediate the tension? I don’t know? Maybe send someone to bring a wreath to Bobby’s grave every once in a while? But of course, inxile entertainment won’t allow that, how else are they going to use Bobby as an edgy gang leader who hates you to the bones. About the grown up Bobby – Robert Danforth. So he somehow became a gang leader even though he is just in his early 20s. Not only that, he has a “baby face”, and because how he used a BB gun 15 years ago, he now also uses a BB gun-like shotgun. And because he liked Rex 15 years ago, now he must also very like dogs. Because people… people never changes…. Am I right??? Just by listing his features out gives the impression on how Robert Danforth are just a caricature of the Bobby from Wasteland 1. And to think how FO fans criticized FO3 and 4 on how things seems to be in stasis and how the Minutemen uses musket-like rifle. Now we got the exact same ingredients in Wasteland 2. I’m not even going to talk about how his dogs are poisoned just because inxile wanted to so they not going to let you do what a normal human would to do talk and coordinate with one of the slaves. And how you can persuade the vicious gang leader who commits cruel slavery, sadistic torture and genocide with some childish teachings, so they could work with the Ranger (This is the canon solution btw). Temple of Titan is another mess, but thanks to the words limit I won't be able to rant about it here. Also there are a lot of traces of rushed, unpolished and last-second changes, can’t blame inxile too much on this since I don’t know what happened during the development, but still cases like Damonta and Silo 7, or Hollywood and Griffith Park, NPCs dialogues and texts giving you wrong information and telling you places that not actually accessible, like Glendale. Furthermore the wackiness in this is overwhelming, there are too much silly references and jokes, as if Wasteland 1 and FO1 and 2 don’t have enough of them, Wasteland 2 for whatever reason went full ahead towards this direction.

This game has many, many, many flaws that have been pointed out by others. But there's a good game in there somewhere. I genuinely hated the first couple hours, but then the game got better, then it became awesome.

If you want an RPG that truly respects your choices—even when those choices are catastrophically stupid—you need to play Wasteland 2. My journey started normally enough at the Radio Tower, but quickly spiraled into peak decision paralysis: save Highpool or Ag Center? I chose Highpool. While I did manage to successfully get Kate elected as Mayor, I also got distracted and completely ignored a guy whose house was actively burning down (oops, priority issues!). Next, I visited Ag Center only to find it looking like a salad bar from hell. After a chaotic scramble to scavenge the cure, I grabbed the serum and made a triumphant return to the Ranger Citadel, feeling like a certified wasteland savior. That was until I spotted a giant, shiny, highly tempting button on a nuclear warhead inside the base. Naturally, I pressed it. No warnings, no 'are you sure?' prompts—just a glorious mushroom cloud and instant credits. 10/10, would accidentally vaporize Arizona again.

Archaic but fun.

One of the games that kicked off the crpg renaissance of the 2k10s, still holds up really well. Has some jank to it but nothing that takes away from the whole of the experience. Still a pretty solid playthrough.

Tremenda obra de arte 20/10 y GOD