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Wasteland 2

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I've been putting off writing about this game for a while, trying to sort out my feelings on it.

I like this game. I like the realization of the concepts that inspired Fallout, and I like seeing modern computer technology able to handle the complexities of the story well - the biggest problem I remember with the Apple ][ original was that combat was baffling without a meaningful map display.

I'm really glad I participated in the Kickstarter, both because it brought the game into existence and because it became part of the groundswell of Kickstarter replacing the broken traditional publishing system. (I'm sad that Kickstarter is becoming broken in its own way, but that's for a different post another day.)

But despite all that, I am not playing Wasteland 2 much. When I sit down to the PC for my limited gaming time, and think about which game will be most satisfying to play, WL2 never wins - and it's taken me a while to figure out why.

One factor is that I played the beta as a preview a bit too much (though not anywhere as much as the folks who were really testing the game) and repeating the first dozen hours a third time was tedious. But even now when I've gotten past that part to new content, I'm still not motivated to fire it up and get further in the story.

I think I can best describe the real problem as "I don't feel like I've created real characters, just a party stats pool arbitrarily divided into buckets."

It's true that in combat, the exact allocation of skills and equipment between characters really affects tactics and outcomes.

But in all the rest of the game the separation of the characters is just a cause for inconvenience: Make sure you have the right person selected before you go into potential minefields, switch to the lockpicker to pick locks, switch to the "smartass" in mid-conversation to make an educated response. Shuffle stuff between backpacks so nobody is encumbered. Have the right NPC in the party when you go to this location to see the special dialogue (because your PCs don't have anything special to do).

What do other party-based games offer that this one doesn't? What makes the difference? One obvious problem is the real lack of ability to distinctively roleplay in dialogue. The tone of all the responses is neutral and boring - there's no snarky or clever choices, no way to consistently choose to evince even one personality, let alone four different ones. And without any sort of quirk system, there's really nothing distinguishing one PC from another. Also, the game mechanics make even selecting skills thematically a really bad idea - you need to distribute your B&E-type skills evenly through the party because they give experience points only to the skill-user. Of all the flaws in the game, perhaps this last is the most bizarre and the most correctible.

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