Wasteland 3 - Review Roundup

Looks good to me. I've seen some criticism that the combat isn't the best, so I'll be curious to hear from folks around here how they feel about it.

While I I've just played through the tutorial to the point where you get your ranger base, combat left me with an overwhelming feeling of "meh."
 
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Only played the first hour or so until you get to the base:

The performance is horrible and graphical settings don't help in any regards, no difference between min and max.
But…if you switch to fullscreen it suddenly runs buttersmooth.

You have tons of character customization options, including the looks but also skills, background and "Quirks" - very cool. There is also pre-made characters which have own dialogues. Though I haven't seen much of that yet.

The combat system…cant really judge yet. Might end up in a similar spot as WL2. If your sniper rifle needs 6 AP to shoot, you don't want a character with 11 AP
But I think a machine gun needs 4, and positioning might play a bigger role than before, and you can take over points to the next turn, so I think it got at least a bit better.

Apparently INT does not give you additional points on level up anymore. However…the desciption for INT still says otherwise.

Edit: Removed the retroactivity part of the comment. They actually changed it, but due to having an item, I didnt get the result I expected.
 
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Apparently INT does not give you additional points on level up anymore. However…the desciption for INT still says otherwise.

Technically the INT description is correct when it says you get a skill point for every 2 levels of INT - if you level your INT from 5 to 6, you will get an extra skill point at that point in time, you just won't be getting the extra point again for subsequent level ups.

It could certainly be worded better.
 
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Technically the INT description is correct when it says you get a skill point for every 2 levels of INT - if you level your INT from 5 to 6, you will get an extra skill point at that point in time, you just won't be getting the extra point again for subsequent level ups.

It could certainly be worded better.

Just checked the English Description and yes, that one surprisingly is much, much shorter than the german one.

German one reads:
"Intelligenz ist deine Fähigkeit, gedankliche Verbindungen herzustellen und taktisch zu entscheiden. Darüber hinaus ist sie eine Voraussetzung für bestimmte High-Tech-Ausrüstung, und gewährt dir zusätzliche Fähigkeitspunkte, wenn sich dein Level erhöht."

translates to:

"Intelligence is your Ability to make mental connections and decide tactically. Furthermore it is the prerequisite for specific High-Tech-Equipment and grants additional skillpoints when your level increases."
 
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What do you mean by 'fullscreen' exactly? Having multiple monitors on my PC, it's a clunky nuisance to run in true fullscreen, rather than windowed fullscreen.

Yup...but thats exactly what I mean and what you got to do. Got the same issue.
 
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Couple Steam reviews paint a Tale of Two Games

Positive:
My favorite rpg this year. I had it on Xbox Game Pass but decided to buy it on Steam anyway. The story, gameplay and atmosphere are all fantastic. The decisions you make affect both the general world around you and your companions as well. One thing that can be hit or miss in these games is the humor, Divinity Original Sin 2 for example, while it is one of my favorite games the attempts at humor usually fall flat with me. Not so with WL3, I have had some genuine lol moments with this game. The black humor seems appropriate for such a dark setting.

Some have reported bugs and there may be some, but that seems to be exaggerated to me as I have not had a bug in my 11 hours of playing.

Negative:
What a crying shame.

3 colleagues and me got the game via xbox pass an we wanted to play parallel playthroughs in coop.

I can't comment on the singleplayer experience.

Sadly the multiplayer is such a slog...Last night we literally ran into a new bug every 5-10 minutes.
Problems we have encountered so far:
- Seemingly random crashes and disconnetcs
- disappearing UI elements such as prompts & minimap
- Voicelines cut out midword
- the infamous questlog/world reset around every 2nd time we change zones (luckily we always got around that by reloading a previous safe)
- Dialogbubbles not disappearing over heads
- Serialkiller perk giving AP to random characters, not the one with the actual perk
- Starting combat with 0 AP, sometimes across the whole party, sometimes 1 character had any AP
- Being stuck in a coop conversation where the 2nd player lead its own dialog for some reason and couldn't click any options, nor leave the conversation. This happened multiple times

Yesterday we had to reload/restart around every 15 minutes. Combine this with the very long loading times (yes, even with a SSD & rather fast internet connection) and it's a very unpleasent experience.
When the game works it's glorious!
But I can't give it a thumbs up in it's current state.

So the verdict appears to be: if you want to play Multiplayer, stay the hell away; if you want to play single player (and judging by comments on this board as well), your experience may vary from frustrating to blissful ;)
 
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I was kinda hyped about the multiplayer in this game, they even had videos selling this feature quite high. I started 2 different playthroughs with my partner because of it, but in the end we gave up because it's literally unplayable. Literally.

I'm enjoying the game on my own and I think it's a very good game, but I've only began enjoying it when I became a scarred veteran in its many bugs and flaws and learned how to tread around them. The amount of bugs, some of them completely game-breaking, is insulting for a product that costs 60 dollars to the average human. We get it, Covid kept causing delays in the developing, as efficiency obviously suffers when most of your employees work remotely, and Microsoft demanded inXile to push the game out to cash in, another delay would be unacceptable, and they had to comply, finding shortcuts through some features, and just not adding others that were planned, which also shortened all bug-testing - afterall, their souls don't belong to them anymore, they had no choice. But most 10 dollar indie games are way more polished than Wasteland 3 at launch, and that's something that can't go unsaid, regardless of how good the game is in the theoretic perfect world in which nothing in it breaks while playing.
 
I'd agree but the game had at least fours years of development time. Wasteland 2 was a bug-fest as well before/after release. We cant blame Microsoft as much as I want to.

This is an inXile problem.:(
 
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After reading the bug reports I don`t feel so sad that my computer cannot run this game (have GTX 680M). Once they have fixed the bugs, would it be too much to ask to place the game to the PC cloud gaming services? At least the NVIDIA one seems to be an easy addition but what do I know (please Microsoft don`t start waging that stupid platform war with this one)…Cross-platform multiplayer would be great too. That`s probably too much asked though.

I don`t think 60$ is too much asked for 100+ content (it`s less than 60 cents per hour) but 2000$ every fifth year is seeing how little I have time for gaming.
 
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Looks good to me. I've seen some criticism that the combat isn't the best, so I'll be curious to hear from folks around here how they feel about it.

When compared to full-scale tactical combat games like Phoenix Point and XCOM2, it's not the same as most battles (for now) are small-scale.

However, compared to Wasteland 2, it is hugely improved with cover systems and each weapon having really different impacts in the game.

I'm about 6-8 hours into the game I think.
 
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Yep, I am pretty much in the same stage and would agree with the combat. It's not great, but much better than in WL2.
So far I also didn't have any hard fight though (playing on hardest difficulty). The hardest one I had, was easily solved with grenades. So I don't quite feel any impact of Weapon Mods or Equipment yet.
 
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Yep, I am pretty much in the same stage and would agree with the combat. It's not great, but much better than in WL2.
So far I also didn't have any hard fight though (playing on hardest difficulty). The hardest one I had, was easily solved with grenades. So I don't quite feel any impact of Weapon Mods or Equipment yet.

Where are you ? I have had one difficult fight I had to start thinking more on placement.
 
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Where are you ? I have had one difficult fight I had to start thinking more on placement.

I just "finished" the City, and the Nightclub. That was also the only fight so far were I thought "I cant win that yet". But then I threw 2 grenades and won. :p
 
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Are you sure you're playing in the highest difficulty? Grenades do about 50 damage and the bosses in the Little Vegas area have 700-800 health if I remember well. Neither them or their followers die with 2 grenades. I remember being able to beat the final fight in there only thanks to a massive rocket launcher crit and a couple of well placed sniper shots.

Now, there are different ways to do the Little Vegas scenario, so I'm not sure what exactly was the fight you're talking about, but basically ever since that area, I'm finding that in most encounters unless I get the jump, I'm pretty much toast. I don't usually get the chance to fight back proper unless I'm actually the one engaging the enemy and getting the opening turn, which is fine by me, I love the challenge, and it's the one thing that's keeping me suffering through all the game's bugs and shortcomings.
 
Three days in and I'm almost finished, so the game certainly isn't a 100+ game. Based on my play-through the first city is the largest area in the game. Actually the only real city.

If you break it down it's only two cities, one ski resort, and other small places of interest. The second citiy isn't even a city just the white house and airport. Disappointing really.
 
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I was thinking also I'll be done in about 30-40 hours, with full exploration and killing everything that moves pretty much, but maybe they were taking into account the loading times, and rebooting from bugs/crashes, then the game will easily keep you busy for 100+ hours.
 
Loading times are a bit annoying, especially when traveling from one end of the city to the other. Haven't lost any time on bugs or crashes yet though.

Regarding the fiddiculty: Boss had 602 HP, some of the smaller ones 200 and even 138.
My attack was pretty much a fail, pretty sure that with a more planned approach I could have killed them all before the boss. But that way, I thought "no chance", used the grenades, hit 4 people with that twice, "killed" the boss and well, won the fight with that without having that planned either.

So yeah, first impression "How should I manage to do that?", but in the end it was easy peasy if you know what you are doing. Focusing on the boss I wouldn't even have needed the grenades.
 
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Loading times are a bit annoying, especially when traveling from one end of the city to the other. Haven't lost any time on bugs or crashes yet though.
Yeah load times are annoying for me also with an SSD. Had a few crashes as well that I'm starting to wonder if the game might have a memory leak the longer you play.:(
 
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Three days in and I'm almost finished, so the game certainly isn't a 100+ game. Based on my play-through the first city is the largest area in the game. Actually the only real city.

If you break it down it's only two cities, one ski resort, and other small places of interest. The second citiy isn't even a city just the white house and airport. Disappointing really.
Odd, I'm at the bizarre and I feel like I've been there for 4 hours already and haven't even gone in yet.



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