#inxile

I grew up on the original Bards Tale games in the 1980s, and recently got into InXile's remaster. The updated version lets you chose character portraits, so I gave my spellcaster the Geomancer portrait. Wanted to have a try at remaking her in Hero Forge, and I feel it's a decent translation.

Started from AKR Sorceress from Custodian (radshibliter-6122) who says the body proportions are by KNIGHT WITCH.

Spoilers for Wasteland 3

The first moment I knew that Wasteland 3 was something special was when Blood of the Lamb played during the battle with the Dorseys on the dam; the second was when this NPC eloquently criticised punitive justice.

The game backs her up in a later secondary mission:

My last day and a half was spent dealing with failing hardware and attempts to prop up my system better to avert outright PC death. Guess I’m gonna have to look at upgrading to a new machine very soon, but it’s a bit annoying since new AMD chips and NVIDIA cards are all due shortly as well. The latter, well, I can keep my 1070 Ti and just change that later, if I can’t wait..

Oh and the whole “Microsoft bought Zenimax / Bethesda” thing happened! I have a few thoughts on that, as you might imagine!

InXile is now working on Wasteland 3. The first Wasteland was the precursor to the Fallout series. The whole story behind Wasteland is pretty darn interesting, especially today since Electronic Arts owned the IP for wasteland and then sold it to Konami... some good tea there.

Then you’ve got Obsidian’s Outer Worlds which is... its fucking brilliant. I’m high right now so I need to pace myself before I end up doing a long post deep dive about how Bethesda has nothing left to offer the Fallout Universe as a video game after Fallout 3/4. So back to my original reason for making this post: 👋 hi, if you want a good fallout-like game seek out InXile’s wasteland 2 and eventually Wasteland 3 in 2020. If you want more of the post-interplay fallout games that isn’t Fallout 76 then try Outer Worlds if you haven’t already tried the last 3 Fallout games.

If you want a story-driven, action-survival, Post-Apocalyptic FPS try Metro Exodus, if you want less of the survival aspect try the previous Metro games. (I don’t think any of that was grammatically correct/ oops spelling errors. Sorry.)

Basically: here are some single player games that are good.

Finally finished Torment: Tides of Numenera. It was a good story.

Everything that I love gamewise was there. Abillity to avoid combat, non-lethal crisis solving, classic for a CRPG amount of dialogue options. Still, I think the Extended Cut ending would be a great DLC.

First thing’s first: I helped to kickstart this game at around $150 (gotta get dat collector’s edition) which is about the softest “conflict of interest” possible I think. You see, I’m a huge fan of all the Infinity Engine games, with Planescape: Torment holding a very special place in my heart. Furthermore, I’m a big fan of pretty much anything being worked on by the legends over at Obsidian Entertainment and inXile Entertainment, and while this particular game may not be made by Obsidian directly, it does use their excellent Pillars of Eternity engine. I say this because Obsidian is easily my favorite game dev studio.

Long story short, the bias is strong with this one.

Now, I’ve played the new Torment for a few hours, so this isn’t going to be anywhere close to comprehensive, but I can share a few of my feelings and thoughts thus far.

1. 90-95% of my time has been spent reading. And I’m not even counting the reading of skills and such, which would bump things up closer to 99%. So far, the amount of written material in this game is mind-blowing. I’m only in the first “major” map and I feel like I’ve spent more time there getting to know the characters and world than I have in any other game I’ve played before! Considering that PS:T’s greatest strength was the writing, I feel like it’s safe to say that they’ve managed to capture at least some of what made that game so special.

Now, that being said, I don’t know how reactive the dialogue is going to be throughout the course of the game, but I have been experiencing little snippets of consequence for my decisions, even if those decisions are as simple as my lore-hound ways of dragging out every conversation branch getting on some NPC’s nerves. I honestly feel like I’m going to have to carefully consider what I should or should not ask (either that or do a ton of save scumming).

All of these little reactions that I’ve witnessed so far, including their occasional tie-ins to the Crisis system, are giving me a great deal of hope for how things will be by the end of all this.

2. This might be a small thing, but this has the best control scheme for a conversation system I’ve seen. Really, it’s as simple as being just like the IE conversation system I know and love combined with responsive selections, and the ability to progress using the spacebar and select my decisions using both the primary number keys AND the numpad (something that I have seen ignored by so many similar games)! Considering how text-heavy this game is, fucking this up would have had brutal consequences for my user experience.

3. The UI is just pretty slick in general and very responsive. I love how all items have lore behind them, and am so happy to be able to examine the environment all over the place. If I had one big complaint, it would be that while pressing ‘TAB’ to highlight interactive areas in the world was executed extremely well, the highlighted NPC names are just too large, flashy, and easily jumbled together. If there was an option to minimize NPC names during TAB highlighting, I would enable it in a heartbeat.

4. I haven’t done much in the way of combat at all, but ho boy am I glad it’s turn-based. I don’t know how enjoyable it’s going to be in the long run, but at least it can’t be any worse than the sloppy combat in Planescape: Torment. Honestly, just the fact that there appear to be so many varied options available to you during the resolution of Crises will probably make it infinitely more bearable.

5. Which brings me to my final impression, which is that I have almost no idea what I’m doing... and that is GREAT! A big problem with PS:T is that it’s shackled to the AD&D ruleset, which automatically puts me into a min/max mindset. Now, that game turned things on their head a great deal what with making Wisdom the most important stat in the game, along with all the other tweaks emphasizing thoughtful exploration over tactical combat, but everything was all still fairly obvious and it wasn’t tooooo hard to min/max everything in that realm either.

Conversely, Torment: Tides of Numenéra has so many “skills” and “descriptors” and you can’t even see a big list of them all at once, and it’s not immediately obvious what they all do outside of providing assistance in context-sensitive situations. What this means is that I didn’t feel bogged down in trying to make the perfect all-rounder character. I went through the tutorial bits, was told I was a Graceful Nano, looked through some of the other stuff, but by no means all of it, and just said, “Fuck it, I am a Graceful Nano! Let’s get this show on the road!”

This might all be a grand illusion, but it feels like even if I tried min/maxing, I simply wouldn’t be able to cover all of the bases out there, so there’s no perfection to be had, just a unique experience. The stat pool system also seems like it could throttle being able to pull off every single situation you encounter. The only thing that worries me is the fact that conflict resolution seems to center around pushing up percentage chances through skill, stat, and circumstance, potentially leading to judicious save scumming bursting that illusion.

Okay but Grombley’s outfit in the Clockwork Revolution trailer is a whole ass LOOK.

The bronze armored prosthetic

The feathered epaulet

The gold toe caps on the boots

The walking stick carried Like That