#turnbased rpg

New Post has been published on http://elitewing.com/wastleland-2/review/

Review

“Come in Echo One, this is Ranger Command. Do you copy? I have a mission of the highest priority. It’s about that floppy disk you found called Wasteland. I am excited that we could boot it up in the Museum, and I want you to report some of your experiences. Don’t spare us any gory details; we Desert Rangers are accustomed to hard truths in the Waste.”

“Roger Citadel. We found someone out in the wastes who can help describe our duties and we believe he is up to the task. Echo out.”

Wasteland 2 is InExile’s triumphant return to a series that has not seen the light of day since 1988. It was one of the first projects to be successfully crowdfunded by fans on Kickstarter.  InExile was able to raise $2,933,252 dollars with 61,290 backers in April of 2012. With the successful development and delivery of this project, fans are able to return to the grandfather of the post-apocalyptic RPG setting. What Mad Max did for creating a gritty dark post-apocalyptic desert world for movies, Wasteland helped set up for video games. Even more important was that this Kickstarter helped introduce cRPG players like myself to this impressive series. Have you noticed that the latest RPGs coddle a player with limited choices and overblown yet ultimately simplistic stories? Thankfully, Wasteland 2 is here to provide players like you and me a gameplay experience reminiscent of the golden days of the cRPG.

When you launch a new game in Wasteland 2, cRPG players will recognize a character creation section that allows you to create 1 to 4 squad members from scratch. If this is not to your fancy, you can select pre-built characters to help form your squad. This character creation section is focused on assigning attributes and skills that you believe will help you traverse and survive the wastes. Players will be provided with 10 attribute points and 12 skill points. There are seven attributes to choose from: Strength, Coordination, Awareness, Intelligence, Charisma, Speed, and Luck.  Skills are broken down into three categories: weapons, knowledge, and general. With this limited amount of points, players will have to create characters that are tailored to a particular role for the squad, if they want to survive. You could attempt to make someone a jack of all trades; however they are not going to be especially skilled at something and that could very well spell death for the rest of the team.  From here you can determine the sex, portrait, religion, ethnicity, and even if the character smokes or not. Also, if you enjoy the experience, you can create a dossier brief of who your character is and what makes them tick. After character creation, players are ready to be introduced to the rich vibrant story of Wasteland 2.

You are Team Echo, a group of recruits who have joined the Desert Rangers. The Desert Rangers are an illustrious cadre of individuals dedicated to protecting the innocent in the Arizona Wastes. A mission of dire importance is provided to you by the head of the Desert Rangers, General Vargas. At the grave of the dead ranger Ace, it is explained that there are some odd radio transmissions coming in. Strange and mysterious words holding promises of death and destruction for the Desert Rangers have been heard over the past few weeks. Tales of man and machine becoming as one, and God smiting the sinners of the land fill the air waves, and indeed even the Desert Rangers, with dread. General Vargas asks the players to investigate the death of Ace, and to finish his mission of setting up radio transmitters in nearby settlements.  With this the gameplay can begin.

 Players expecting a tutorial or starting area that they encounter in a AAA RPG will be sadly disappointed. If you are like me though and want a challenging experience right out the gate, you will be excited! Death is quick to those who do not plan out how they are going to travel outside Ranger Citadel. Foes such as radiated animals, raiders, and robots await Team Echo and they are out for blood. The game includes features such as quick saves as well as periodic autosaves. If you are wise, you will employ these features with religious regularity. Why you ask? How about limited ammo, medical packs, and trauma kits to revive fallen squad members. How about the fact that you do not start with any kind of armor, and new weapons are few and far between? Maybe a limited inventory space for each character which means there’s no crazy hoarding of every weapon and item. unless you take all Strength characters, and then you will suffer in other aspects. Be wise, save your game often.

As the player progresses, you will be provided with difficult and compelling choices throughout the story. Right away players are going to realize that sometimes the hard calls have to be made. Team Echo cannot save everybody. Mature and compelling responses are expected and no amounts of quick loads are going to save you. This is role-playing at its finest. With over 80 hours of gameplay and the justified claim from InExile that no play through will be exactly the same. Tremendous amounts of replayability are available and the developers hope that you will take advantage of all the different outcomes and choices this game has to offer. Also, you will want to replay to find all of the awesome dark humor that InExile spread throughout this game.

In the spirit of the first Wasteland and many other cRPGs, Wasteland 2 is chalk full of humor ranging from amusing and presented to you on a silver platter to gut busting zaniness that is there only if the player can spot and appreciate it. When trekking through the Wastes, you may come across items that will get a chuckle, like a d20, a Sega Genesis, or a certain Water Control Chip. There will be characters that have humorous anecdotes or just plain slapstick occur to them. You can even find a floppy disk of Wasteland on an old CRT, and bring it back to Ranger Citadel where the game can be booted up. This humor is well done and spread out just enough so it does not grow stale. It ranges from silly to dark, reference to dry. One of my favorites is an unexpected find that can only be done if you both go out of your way to explore and are perceptive enough for a code. Trapped deep in a mutant infested ruin of a city lies an adorable creature from Wasteland; he is small and green and is the hit point heavy, The Night Terror. He will follow team Echo around and offer amusing comments, sometimes expressing his love of the rangers, other times saying an amusing fish out of water line about the current situation. He even asks for candy, which a wise ranger knows means organs. With a resounding YAY! The Night Terror accepts your harvest. There are even areas called mysterious shrines, mementoes of a time long past, that give XP to the characters. One of these was a large tv with a game controller in front of it, another was a statue of three cats. Wasteland 2 does not disappoint in the element of gameplay and humor. This humble reviewer believes it’s greatest strength lies with the excellent writing for the characters dialogue.

Characters are introduced to the players through descriptions. Wasteland 2 provides vivid and detailed content as to whom the player encounters. It is presented as if the player is at an RPG table with friends, having it be explained by an experienced Game Master. You will be presented with multiple dialogue options to ask the characters in the hope to gain information or just to get to know them. Since options besides shoot them in the face or flee are available, Charisma and dialogue skills are essential to Team Echo.  Additional dialogue skills such as Hard Ass, Kiss Ass, and Smart Ass all open up additional options for conversing with the other denizens of the Wastes. While you are not able to speak to your squad members, you are able to use each of them in the conversations benefiting from each of their unique skills and abilities.  In the Wastes, the players will also encounter characters who will want to join Team Echo. These are known as followers, and these characters do have interesting back stories as well as skills to add to your team. Oftentimes players will complete quests in order to have the followers ask to join. Sometimes you can even have animals or robots follow you . With this in mind, I need to stress that the NPCs of Wasteland 2 are what makes the characters so intrinsic and real for the player to experience.

Going around the locations of Wasteland 2, you are going to meet hundreds of NPCs. While some will just say one line repeatedly in a text box or attack you on sight, these NPCs feel like real people trying to etch a life in the Arizona Wastes. InExile has employed a stellar writing cast including Colin McComb, Nathan Long, and Chris Avellone and it shows in Wasteland 2’s NPCs. When I encounter a farmer asking me to save his pigs from the Red Scorpion Militia, an understanding of his woes and dreams are presented to me in his dialogue and his description. Important NPCs will even have spoken dialogue for the player to hear, whether it is from meeting them or over the radio. As the game progresses, radio transmissions have been received by Citadel Station and the player gets to hear traces of some mysterious broadcasts. Listening to that first radio transmission of Matthias, the leader of the Children of the Citadel left me with chills. Excellent voice work does not begin to describe the spoken dialogue when it occurs.  What is even better, there are very few cut and clear villains. If they appear, they are psychopaths such as the raiders in the waste or they are robotic. Even then, they are not evil, their programming has you targeted in their sights. Characters that are encountered have their own goals and dreams. Wasteland 2 treats you as a mature adult who understands that good and evil are not absolutes. Moral greys will fill your thoughts as you meet or hear these NPCs. Finding out who broadcasted those transmissions, who this Matthias is, they will keep the player going, even when the combat system will sometimes be a bit repetitive.

  Team Echo will encounter vast amounts of hostiles, and InExile has prepared an action point combat system for players to employ. Combat zones appear as a square grid where characters and enemies can move and maneuver. There are multiple actions that can be taken in a turn, long as a character has the action points to do so. Tactical gameplay is a must if Team Echo is going to make it out alive without too much damage or death. Elevations, cover, taking a knee, switching weapons, ambushes, all of these are actions to be considered by the player for their characters to execute. Even well-crafted plans can be foiled if the player does not take care of their weapons or a ranger lacks leadership. Followers have a chance to go rogue in combat if anyone in Team Echo is lacking in the Leadership skill. Weapons also can jam, making players spend action points to unjam it or switching from the primary to secondary weapon. From that point, turns are determined based on the initiative of the characters and the enemies. One aspect that is awesome and should be employed more often in games is the use of skills in combat. I don’t mean combat skills such as laying mines or traps; I mean the ability to use Animal Husbandry on creatures and Computers on robots in the midst of a firefight. This will either cause them to flee or join your cause. Other games have this trait in their combat; however, Wasteland 2 expertly blends it into outside of combat and combat scenarios. In the end, combat was just a means to get to more characters and story. Gameplay can sometimes be intense and the tactical thought needed is nice, it just is outclassed by the writing. Some gamers are going to enjoy the combat the most, awesome. Story and characters are more important to me. With the keyboard and mouse and a decent size options menu, InExile provides the player the controls needed to engage in Wasteland 2.

Keyboard and mouse is the name of the game for controls for Wasteland 2. Players will be presented with a point and click method of moving or with the traditional W, A, S, D to move the characters across the wastes. There is also the option to move the camera clockwise or counter clockwise with Q and E respectively or you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. Like any self-respecting PC title, Wasteland 2 lets you rebind the keys to match your play style. Personally, I kept them the same because the InExile team configured the keys rather well. Skills and items are presented on a skill bar and can be configured to numbers 1 through 8. These controls never once hindered gameplay and players will experience these as second nature as they become immersed in the world of Wasteland 2.

Graphic options are plentiful in Wasteland 2, though not everything that a PC gamer expects is available. You have the choice between windowed or Fullscreen, changing resolution, adjusting the brightness, and the HUD scale. In addition Vertical Sync can be turned on or off as well as setting the texture and shadow quality. There is also the option to turn anti-aliasing, software cursor, SSAO, anisotropic filtering, motion blur, and colorblind mode on or off. This is a decent amount of choices, however having multiple options with the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering would have been nice. Having this amount of options is handy. Also, there are some preset options ranging from Fast, Moderate, Good, Beautiful, or you can choose your own as a Custom overall quality. With my NVidia GTX 970, I can run Wasteland 2 with my custom settings that are close to Beautiful at 60 FPS. Players will experience the game with an isometric view and this lends to the idea that they are in a cRPG.  An excellent ambiance composed from the musical talents of Mark Morgan will accompany players as they enjoy the view.

When listening to the music of Wasteland 2, players of other classic cRPG are going to recognize the work of Mark Morgan. Composer of the legendary cRPG soundtrack scores for Fallout 1 and 2 and Planescape Torment, Mark Morgan is back again to work on Wasteland 2. As a player is traversing the wastes, you can hear themes reminiscent of a western. Twangs of an acoustic guitar set the mood, and as it should be, each new area has a score attached to it which helps to build tension, spirit, regret, whatever the emotional needs InExile wants to invoke in their players. The music, in Wasteland 2, like Morgan’s previous work, helps establish the atmosphere to bring the land to life. Rarely do you get an RPG where the soundtrack can be used effectively and woven in to the storytelling. InExile and Mark Morgan understand that what a player is listening to as they experience a game should strengthen the immersion. A player should have not only their visual senses catered to, but also their auditory. With this in mind, a true lover of role playing can dive head first into the world and not want to let go. An ocean of sound cascades the player at just the right moments. There is no repetitive, overused pieces, no forgettable tracks, and certainly none that grind at your ears and breaking the immersion. When you hear this soundtrack, you are hearing the world of Wasteland 2.

Wasteland 2 is a cRPG that knows who its audience is. 61,290 backers on Kickstarter made this possible for InExile to introduce the Wasteland setting to a new generation of cRPG fans. Players who encountered the good old classics via PC digital markets such as GOG and Steam will love that Wasteland 2 has old school gameplay with current graphic options and solid controls. They will be excited that there are novel length amounts of dialogue that are possible for them when interacting with NPCs. The fact that choices are not black and white and with InExile treating us as adults is a fantastic trend from the golden days of the cRPG that most AAA RPGs are lacking. Characters actually have personality and are not cookie cut outs or Joseph Campbell stereotypes. This is what cRPG fans have wanted. Solid gameplay with 80+ hours of material, replayability with the honest statement from InExile’s CEO Brian Fargo that a player will not have the same exact experience as another player. After about 30 hours in, I agree whole heartedly. Now the combat system, while finely tuned and intricate, can be a little repetitive. This is all right. Deep tactical choices are prevalent and the enemy count is varied enough that it is not boring. InExile just did such a fantastic job with their writing that I wanted to get through the fights ASAP to experience more of the story. Mark Morgan goes back to his Fallout style roots and presents a spectacular soundtrack. Not everyone will enjoy this game. It is definitely for a niche, a niche that appreciates a good challenge and understands that immersion demands excellence. Players of AAA RPGs may get angry that they messed up in character development and need to restart their party. They may be confused and scared or rage that they cannot be paragons of truth and save everyone. For those who experienced these games first hand in the 80s and 90s or if you are like me and have gained a love of the classical gems; Wasteland 2 is for you. InExile is leading the charge in the new Golden Age of the cRPG. Go to GOG or Steam and buy this game. If you love cRPGs and have not played this, you are suffering a great disservice for not giving in to this modern yet pleasantly old school cRPG.