...Once I got around to it, I pretty much fell in love with Wasteland 2 before I even began playing it in earnest for one simple reason: you get to build your own party.
I hadn’t thought about this, but it has been a really, really long time since I had the opportunity to craft a party of my very own. I mean when was the last time I got to create a full team of adventurers from the ground up? Some Ultima or Might and Magic game from the 90’s? I CAN’T REMEMBER! And that, my friends, is just not right. It’s one thing to choose from a selection of existing characters or shape their skills as they level up, but another experience entirely to make them exactly who and what you want them to be from the get-go down to clothing, ethnicity, and even an optional biography. It’s been so long I forgot how satisfying it can be.
The next obvious question in that train of thought was “why don’t more games do this?” What kind of filthy casual wouldn’t want to lovingly craft their very own group of adventurers? Why are we being robbed of this classic gaming experience? It’s pretty much standard operating procedure to have gamers create their lead character in modern solo RPGs, but in party-based games you pretty much get what you get and have to work from there.
The focus on story and characters is one reason we don’t see these kinds of games very much any more, but another reason is the increased prevalence of handholding. As games have become more popular, more casual folk are playing them, and while they may fail at hardcore RPGing, their money is at least as green as yours or mine and there’s more of them, so they win.
