Wasteland 2 - Preview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Couchpotato

Part-Time News-bot
Joined
October 1, 2010
Messages
36,185
Location
Spudlandia
Rock, Paper, Shotgun is back with another preview of Wasteland 2. The topic this time is how the game will acknowledge gender discrimination.

If all goes according to plan, Wasteland 2 will be one of the most reactive, choice-driven games to grace PCs since man first rubbed two sticks together and invented the keyboard. Everything from juicy bits of dialogue to party members to entire locations can vanish or appear in an instant, all thanks to your actions. And wastelands, well, they tend to be pretty nasty places, radiation-scorched cesspits of violence, prejudice, and, er, waste. So naturally, some characters are going to hate you for simply being, well, you. inXile’s hinted at the system in Kickstarter updates, but I found myself exceedingly curious about how it’ll all actually come together. Here’s what the developer told me.

I adore Fallout 3, but even I’ll admit that it was hardly water-tight. If you poked at it enough, you’d eventually find holes: glitches, uninteresting characters, some sloppy quests, and so on. But there was one area where Bethesda’s Fallout revival fell flat on its face that I honestly didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me. And truth be told, that fact makes me feel a bit ashamed.

"We want to be true to the individual characters, and not try to apply some sort of global morality."

So I was quite pleased to hear that Wasteland 2 will pay close attention to precisely that. Party composition and your various characters’ identities will be under frequent scrutiny by wastelanders’ mistrusting glares, a holdover from the real world turned up to 11 by the fact that this setting isn’t particularly kind to those who hand out free hugs with reckless abandon. Or anyone really, for that matter.
More information.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Oct 1, 2010
Messages
36,185
Location
Spudlandia
Bet he had to look real hard to see those tiny little flaws in Fallout 3. My, how skilled he was to find them. After all, it's so unfathomably deep and labyrinthine in both its roleplaying systems and its open-endedness.
 
Joined
Aug 7, 2013
Messages
89
You got a quote in that quote of yours, Couchpotato, if you know what I mean!
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,508
Wasteland 2-s 1st combat video was awesome. The inventory video is sub-par with bad UI design, confusing icon coloring. Recent screenshots are somewhere between 5/10 and 6/10. Still they can surprise with awesome gameplay, then the INV won't matter.
 
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
3,453
Wasteland 2-s 1st combat video was awesome. The inventory video is sub-par with bad UI design, confusing icon coloring. Recent screenshots are somewhere between 5/10 and 6/10. Still they can surprise with awesome gameplay, then the INV won't matter.

Not to defend the inventory look or UI (I'm not cheerleading it at all, I want it all to look different) but...

what game did you think had a good inventory system, or good UI?

I'm just curious because I think it's helpful to understand what a person is comparing something to.

I honestly cannot remember an inventory system that I liked so much that I fondly remember it and compare others to it. I do remember being annoyed with Mass Effect 1's inventory, however, and that scrolling through tons of crap in KoA:R was a bit tedious.

For UI, I do like how Dragon Age: Origins looked on the PC at 1900 X 1200 resolution. I cannot think of another one that comes to mind as "yay" and I honestly only remember thinking this about DA:O because I hated DA2's layout.

I also don't remember inventory or UI ever BOTHERING me, except in a few instances - WHEELS on PC games suck, so both NWN and ToEE drove me crazy with their wheel-command structure.
 
Joined
Apr 16, 2012
Messages
160
Location
Rochester, MN
I'm not thrilled about the trend, or rather the pressure that people seem to feel, to put everything and the kitchen sink into a CRPG. This genre has enough issues as it is, without overcompensating for the lack of identification between players and characters in almost all genres.
 
I'm not thrilled about the trend, or rather the pressure that people seem to feel, to put everything and the kitchen sink into a CRPG. This genre has enough issues as it is, without overcompensating for the lack of identification between players and characters in almost all genres.

This. I really can't stand the modern culture of entitlement.
 
Joined
Oct 3, 2007
Messages
594
Location
NH
I'm not thrilled about the trend, or rather the pressure that people seem to feel, to put everything and the kitchen sink into a CRPG. This genre has enough issues as it is, without overcompensating for the lack of identification between players and characters in almost all genres.

Err… what? Could you clarify, because this seems like a dubious position in many respects?
 
Joined
Mar 22, 2012
Messages
5,521
Location
Seattle
Err… what? Could you clarify, because this seems like a dubious position in many respects?

Making an RPG reactive towards gender/ sexual preference throughout the game takes a lot of work. It's also debatable if it really enhances the game. Still, a number of people seem to think that RPG's are THE genre where they can have such expectations; I don't see sports games making any effort for allowing for meaningful playing of bisexual stock car drivers or lesbian soccer players. Lastly, CRPG's have a very lofty goal (simulating an entire fictional world), and there are many, many areas in which they should be advanced in the years to come. I think allowing for different sexual identities in characters should be very far down the priority list.

Can you clarify what you find dubious about this?
 
Making an RPG reactive towards gender/ sexual preference throughout the game takes a lot of work. It's also debatable if it really enhances the game. Still, a number of people seem to think that RPG's are THE genre where they can have such expectations; I don't see sports games making any effort for allowing for meaningful playing of bisexual stock car drivers or lesbian soccer players. Lastly, CRPG's have a very lofty goal (simulating an entire fictional world), and there are many, many areas in which they should be advanced in the years to come. I think allowing for different sexual identities in characters should be very far down the priority list.

Can you clarify what you find dubious about this?

I agree, not only it is a whole lot of work and time spent the more specific you get (gender-specific, race-specific, class-specific, faction-specific, etc) but also is a lot of work that if you only play the game once, you won't experience.
 
Joined
Sep 23, 2008
Messages
5,645
Location
Tardis
I also don't remember inventory or UI ever BOTHERING me, except in a few instances - WHEELS on PC games suck, so both NWN and ToEE drove me crazy with their wheel-command structure.

I've hated the UI in every Bethesda game after Morrowind. It's always one of the first things I mod.
 
Joined
Oct 21, 2006
Messages
39,138
Location
Florida, US
playing Skyrim right now and have to agree. I keep getting vendors closing their stores down on me for example, it's infuriating. And navigating the skill tree was a novel idea, now it's just annoying.

Just fucking KEEP THE MORROWIND UI FOR EVERYTHING. Keep it boring, boring data is fine with me. i'd be more than fine with that.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
5,228
Location
San Diego, Ca
Not sure what problem with Skyrim vendors are you talking about.
Get married, use your spouse as a vendor, all problems gone.

Hell, I'm defending Skyrim, must be from the heat outside.
 
Joined
Apr 12, 2009
Messages
23,459
playing Skyrim right now and have to agree. I keep getting vendors closing their stores down on me for example, it's infuriating.

Yeah, I think I know what you mean, although that's not so much an issue with the UI, as it is with the way the mouse-pointer functions. I had the same problem infrequently until I realised that it was just a case of being accurate with the very fine point of the mouse cursor when choosing options. Twas a minor annoyance, as were most of the issues with the Skyrim UI for me really.
 
Joined
Jul 12, 2009
Messages
1,974
Location
Australia
Back
Top Bottom