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Wasteland 2 Director's Cut

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I've put a little time into this this week, and although the changes seem like little tweaks, the sum is a huge change in how fun the game is.

Except for a few buggy places which probably involve uniquely scripted objects, switching characters to use a skill has been smoothly automagicked, and during character generation and leveling up, tooltips and shading help you see which skills are already in the party at which levels. So while your party is still basically a bucket of skills, you spend so much less time tracking who has what that it doesn't break immersion.

The traits and quirks don't have a huge effect, but they are sufficient that you can have two characters with the same weapon skill who feel distinct in a fight, and some pairings of skills (combat and non, in all three combinations) yield interesting synergies.

A lot of tuning also shows. There are no longer runaway best and worst choices in NPC recruits, and some of the more tedious, less interesting "puzzles" have been cleaned up or just removed. So the replay value has risen far enough above zero that starting anew feels fresher, and I've already gotten as far as I did before, without feeling bored or burning out.

One big problem, though, is the presence of game-twisting or game-breaking bugs that show a lack of careful QA. If you trade out a recruit to allow one in, so you can get the achievement and the in-character rewards for finding them, and don't know how the bug works, you will lose the ones you switch out permanently - they fail to show up back at base. And apparently if you play exclusively with a controller, a key plot flag doesn't flip and you are stuck at about the 1/3 point of the game.

The presence of console ports means a drag on the pace of patches, but if/when the bad bugs are cleaned up this will be a much better game than the original version.

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