Quick Look: Wasteland 3

*Deleted*

@hud209: I just heard that bit. Kind of awkward!

@hud209: Wait, did they cut it out? I want to hear this!

@daiphyer: It wasn't much, just a quick quip about recording this QL

loving the increase of Rorie in content lately :D

You can always count on Rorie to lay bare a bit of inside baseball on office operations, haha. I'm grateful this quick look was made! I'm interested in this game.

Love Rorie but please stop leaning into your microphone back and forth. :')

I've heard a rumor they all hate each other!

Gotta say, Rorie does make every piece of content he's on just so much better - and I sincerely do think he's pretty good at quickly and efficiently explaining game systems.

More Rorie is always a treat.

The first 4 minutes are interesting.

@rorie I'm not sure if the opening was meant to be cut out or left as flavor.

@daiphyer: It's at 3:33.

Hahaha! I heard this too. Sounds like the Ror-Dawg is not impressed with Wasteland 3.

@rorie PLEASE leave in the first 10 minutes of this QL; the definitive reason I've subscribed to this site for so long is because of the unscripted nature. Also, it's a great inside-look into the unique challenges that can be encountered when "working from home". :D

As to why Jeff would insist on covering the game, I'd guess it's partly because of this game's long dynasty (one of Interplay and EA's first titles ever, in 1988), the fact that it directly inspired the creation of Fallout 1 and 2 and the fact that the Fallout isometric-RPGs are now tainted with Chris Avellone's dark cloud.

In a universe where Dan's Metro quick looks exist this doesn't claim the title.

Generally I think it's better when a Quick Look IS run by someone who is invested in a title because they're better able to cover the nuances/concept that someone whose been stuck with it and of the current staff the next best fit for an isometric RPG would be Vinny. But ultimately, I'm happy to get any QLs lately.

I'm pretty sure this is a perennial issue but does anyone track the frequency of uploads?

WTF, Wasteland 3? Yikes!

Melee and brawling weapons are extremely powerful Wasteland 3. The backbone of my team is two beefed out boys with high HP, AP, and movement. There's a perk that gives bladed weapons a third free hit if you hit an enemy twice consecutively. The final Brawling perk reduces the AP cost of those weapons by one. Just found a weapon that only needs 2 AP and the perk reduces that to 1 AP. Lots of damage and damage soaking between the two.

Rorie is right in that the content of the writing is great. Brian Fargo was tweeting about the tone before the game came out. Wasteland 2 also had a good amount of that but this ramps it up and really bleeds into the sidequests.

They are really focusing on nothing is good and you'll have to compromise your morals a lot. Pretty much every choice has negative consequences.

Combat is fantastic and there are many different ways to approach a situation and nearly every quest has multiple outcomes.

It was just some inside baseball and we intended to start from the...intended time, so we trimmed it. Sorry!

@rorie: Oops, sorry if I was a narc Rorie

@rorie: Just wait til Jeff forces you to write a strategy guide for this game!

@rorie is a good egg.

Ah! A fellow long-term community member!

To wit: I heard Brad's leaving at the end of year!

@femaletanks: Ya this game has some...moments. Some are off-putting. Some are cringy. Some are moderately funny. It's certainly got a tone...just not one that I can really get behind.

@undeadpool: next thing you’re gonna tell me is that the site is getting sold!

this game is pretty fantastic! More streamlined than 2 so far.

Haha! What a funny running jo-oh wait. Shit.

I downloaded the original version of this quick look. I had no idea it would be trimmed. Sometimes I just feel like downloading a video and then watching it in Daum PotPlayer. I love that media player.

@vectortheangel: I'm curious, what platform are you playing it on? I'm Xbox and between 60-70 hours and 5 (yes, FIVE) restarts in, thanks to a laundry list of bugs and other game-breaking performance issues. While I love this game dearly, I've never played anything so utterly broken.

Characters that walk off into landmines and other hazards on their own, audio cues that constantly, randomly play at the wrong times (imagine hearing your level up sound fx for 2 minutes randomly, when you're not being levelled up), randomly having high level characters attribute, skill and perk points be either randomly reassigned, or in one case shown as a negative value, and most recently having a level 27 character quit my squad for no reason, with no ability to re-add him. All the animal companions (and a Golden Toaster, bro!!) that were following him, also no longer in my party. That last made me put it down for good. That's honestly about a tenth of the issues; and I'm trying to be concise here!

The gameplay, story, writing and general game loop are seriously one of the best in this style of RPG, but with all that's broken with it, breaks my heart to say I'm deleting it for good. I've very little faith they can get this Unity engine game to properly handle all these extremely dense mechanics, in the next future update but I honestly wish them all the success in the world. It could be so special.

Loved Wasteland 2.

I'm in.

I found that the Ranger HQ was profoundly fond of crashing on the X-Box version of the game, which was a real bummer as the narrative has pretty good reasons for you to return there throughout the game. Yeesh, pretty much any menu/dialogue/action could crash it, and with the restart/load times, it killed whatever momentum the game tried to build up.

Managed to beat it out of pure stubborn resolve and was a bit disappointed in how combat focused a lot of the resolution becomes. I would like to revisit it in say, a year, with the Game of the Year or whatever edition that hopefully gets it in a stable, functional state.

Rorie just deadpanning that like he was still explaining the combat mechanics was pretty funny. To further explain this scene, at the brothel you are free to pay for any prostitute, each of which is named after a face card from a standard 52 card deck. So you've got a cisgender male and female option, a transgender option, a bdsm option, and for the Joker card you have a goat with a bucket in front of him/her with the price. In context the sequence kind of works because the brothel is part of a mini-Vegas club run by a long running character in the series who in named after studio founder and Wasteland creator Brian Fargo. So there is a decent amount of backstory there that kind of sets up expectations for how a club run by this character would work. Also worth noting that your mission at the time is to shut the club down, so the game doesn't force you to accept the morals of the club, although you absolutely can if you want. A lot of the humor here is really commentary on the hypocrisy of the religious right in America, and some of it lands a lot better than others.

This game is basically the continuation of Fallout 2. Old-school hardcore RPG with amazing writing. It's a great game despite the bugs!

No harm, no foul! The Behind-the-scenes banter probably detracted from the gameplay discussion in any case.

On topic, with the addition of the vehicle(s), I'm getting flashbacks to Fallout Tactics - but with a much deeper roleplaying and adventuring system. Humor is subjective of course, but it's a shame that they tried to go for the stale Borderlands-ish "woo hoo, we so wacky and edgy" tone in places. In any case, bugs not withstanding, WL3 seems like a general refinement over WL2.

Jesus that fucking tank

I'm actually excited to play this now. Thanks Rorie!

This game is SUPER buggy on my Xbox, but it is probably one of my favorite games all generation. I have found the game legitimately funny and engaging, and the writing clever and meaningfully interconnected.

... can the voice acting be turned off?

Did anyone else try Wasteland 2 and found it waaaay too punishing? I played it on launch and found that I had to check for booby traps on any interactable otherwise it was pretty easy to have a character insta-killed. I think I managed to get through one story quest (overgrown plants in a facility or something) but my pace became so slow as the risk of mines and traps increased in the following mission/s. Not sure how far I got but was pretty bummed.

I figured they may have patched it later but never bothered to look again. A real shame as Fallout 1&2 are some of my fav's and always held a special place in my heart (ahead of Bethesda's titles).

I played Wasteland 2 on a whim during a random free weekend on Steam they had, not having any idea what the game was like. I instantly became engrossed in it, and turned around and bought it immediately. Over 40 hours of gameplay later, however, they did something in the game that completely turned me off from it. In the beginning, for what is essentially a tutorial mission, you have the option of taking along this "training wheels" character. She's higher level than your starting party. But she stays in your party even after the tutorial bits, and she's a fully-fledged character in her own right that you get to level up in the way you choose and all of that. She was integrated into my party completely - she covered some of my bases in the leveling choices. And then, like 45 hours in or whatever, a story beat happens where she gets recalled to base and leaves your party. Completely out of nowhere, super deep into the game, with no warning that it would happen. I looked it up online, and found out that she never returns. It left a hole in my party, and I lost interest in continuing to play soon afterwards.

Anyways. I hope this game doesn't do something like that. I think I want to try replaying Wasteland 2 with this event in mind, and finish it, before playing Wasteland 3. This looks great.

I loved Wasteland 2, but it looks like I'll wait for some patches on this one.