I was following W2 for a while. Then was playing something else and decided I'd get it when the Director's Cut came out. If finally did and I went to the forum and asked one simple question. "Are the characters, both player created and NPC companions, acting like just mindless bots with skills or is there some personalty to them, some personal quests, etc. to make playing with them actually interesting?" Well while the answers I got back seemed very honest, I really didn't like them and dropped the game off my STEAM wishlist.

i played wasteland 2 for a while but i have to say the isometric style just isn't my thing, it was ok for the 90s but not for modern games, fallout 4 is a superior game to wasteland 2 and it just seems fargo is a little bent out of shape that bethesda is in the drivers seat of fallout.

Yeah, this.

Though at least it just console UI and technical problem this time, instead of the latter half of the game being pushed out without testing and there being only one weapon class worth using

PS. Heavy weapons are still worthless

The NPCs all have personality, and the NPCs you can pick up to add to your party all do as well, and some of them you have to do quests to get them. What I don't understand in your question is "player created"... isn't that your job, being an RPG and all....ie you play the characters with the personality you give them.

Daggerfall had nudity galore, and the quest for curing lycanthropy actually involved forcing a child to transform into a werewolf and then killing it. (since the majority of NPCs were just talking billboards, though, it was impossible to kill any of them arbitrarily - Morrowind was actually the only Bethesda game without "essential" NPCs)

Bethesda's shift in tone may be more attributed to the fact that really no major studio can get away with that kind of stuff any more. Although Todd Howard has gone on record saying he doesn't really care, either.

I don't know, I made a heavy weapon explosives guy this time around. The major problems before was not enough ammo and gun jamming in almost every turn. But I haven't had any problem with ammo and the gun hardly ever jams. My heavy weapon guy has the second highest kill rate at the moment. First is my sniper, third was Angela Death before she went away and now it's Vulture's Cry. Snipers really rack up the kills. ..they probably wouldn't be as effective if you didn't have the others on the front lines acting as bullet sponges though.

Oh, it will 4% jam chance per shot and seven shot burst, that's about every fourth burst that'll jam on average. Though Big Betsy at Damonta and Minigun in the end do not jam at all. Still, they are heavy, use a lot of ammo, slow down movement speed and give nothing in return, since SMGs at close range and Assault Rifles do more damage than them.

They did manage to make other weapons to have their niches, but Heavy Weapons still jam, are heavy, expensive, and do not justify all that in damage

And yes, Sniper Rifles are [censored] awesome now And Energy Weapons eat Slicer Dicers for breakfast

I'm not sure we're thinking of the same thing. New Vegas is just as cynical as Fallout, Fallout 2, and Wasteland 2 despite being published by Bethesda. Bethesda's own take on Fallout is warmer, funner, and has a sense of hope that you don't get from Black Isle/Obsidian/InXile's post-apocalyptic RPGs. I'm not saying Fallout 3 has an outlook comparable to a Disney movie or anything - it doesn't, but it's certainly not as pessimistic as the other post-apocalyptic RPGs referenced.

Likewise! Except I also love playing the first Wasteland.

I will admit, their dark humor is something that I love from both series and keeps me playing them.

I play the Director's Cut.

I play on easy.

So I bought Wasteland 2 yesterday and had a blast playing it. I also get my ass kicked all the time. Long time since I played a game "old style" like this.

I've never liked games where I create the whole party. I like focusing on just one PC and the game filling that PC's life with NPC's that I have to actually learn about in game, see what they like or dislike, determine for myself whether I want to adventure with them or not, etc. I know in W2 you can do it either way, so my question was if I did just use one player made character, are the NPC's that join me interesting. The resounding answer from players who liked the game and played many hours was no, they are not. I get that some people like to create and develop the entire party. To me that just tends to make the game too easy as your are just custom designing the 'perfect' party. I prefer to have a party with some weaknesses in it or unknowns. I also prefer all my companions to 'auto-level' so I again can't customize them into perfect NPC's (I loved that DAO let you do this).

DOS was more unique in that you actually had two PC's. Oddly enough even playing both there were times in game that they actually disagreed with each other and I couldn't do anything about it. At the end of the game I wanted the two to go off together as a couple but instead one wanted to be together and the other said "see ya later". So even playing both I somehow screwed up making them a couple. Hopefully the enhanced edition makes things better. I think it comes out next week.

Pretty sure if you just wanted to create one PC you can, and even if you can't you can dump players and switch out your party as you see fit, once you get the recruits you meet in the Wasteland. This would make the game a lot more harder.

As a player of strat games like Jagged Alliance and Xcom, Fallout Tactics, this never been an issue with me, however. I find it kinda fun developing multiple characters with their own strengths and weaknesses.

I generally play games are normal difficulty, but make them harder by adding the use of pre-made NPC's and not custom designing the party. To me that's more enjoyable challenge than building a custom perfect party and all the enemies having double HP and doing more damage. But again I can see why some would like doing it the other way.

PS - Loved XCOM also (classic and new).

Something to be said about the setup in Wasteland 2 is that even though you do create 4 characters (or use the stock characters provided for you,) you still have to make some tough choices. There's just too many skills to spread around, even with a party of 4 and the recruits you can add later. You sort of have to choose which skills each character is going to specialize in and divide them up between the party, and even then there's really never quite enough skill points to go around.

In my experience, my first attempt at the game I tried to get it so that between my party I had all the skills covered, but this spread me too thin. Trying to cover all the bases meant I was often just short of the skill levels I'd need for what I wanted to try to do. So I started over and tried to be more selective - I pretty much had to drop some skills off my party's list so that I could specialize in a couple of the skills that were most important to me. This meant, for example, maybe I wasn't disarming all the alarms I'd come across, or charming all the animals I encountered, but the nice thing about the level design is that you just find another way to accomplish things.

And that's just skills - you can try to give everyone really high Intelligence so that you get more skill points per level, but then you're gimping yourself in other ways. Either your party moves to slow as a group in combat, or you don't act quick enough, or you don't have the AP to do very much once you do get a combat round.

In essence, the game is set up so that you need to have a varied party that each have their own strengths and weaknesses - and even your party as a whole is going to have it's own "personality" and quirks, just due to which skills you're focusing on and which ones you have to leave by the wayside or hope another recruit can fill. And even then once you think you have everything balanced, you have to keep those guys alive or you're almost back to square one. I've had instances where my "tracker" that I used to spot hidden traps and avoid encounters died and then I had to totally change my approach since I didn't have anyone readily available to fill in for that character.

Everyone's got their preferences, but I rather liked that system (I equally enjoy party-based and solo-character games, though.) There was a kind of elegance to their ruleset, I thought - I think it's a good sign when there's no "right" way to advance or build your party and you're always wishing you had just a couple more points to spend in things. It's kind of impossible to create the "perfect" party or the perfect character - you just will never have the skill points available to do so. You're always going to come up short from the "perfect" setup.

Good points.

Is Fox News even relevant in the video game controversy scene any more? Then again, considering how closely tied the video game journalism industry is in with the voices and outlets currently more relevant to matters of video game controversy, I can't say I could see PC Gamer actually addressing anything beyond the usual dead horse punching bag.

I think it was more a generalization of what Fox News represents rather than a specific video game reference.

Alls I know is you'd better have more than one surgeon

I learned THAT the hard way!

The game sounds really cool after looking at these comments. I might even consider enjoying turn-based games...

My original W2 playthrough died out in original, pre-patches Hollywood.... such a convoluted quest path through that area, with all the factions, all the quests that would only trigger if you did certain things/went certain places in a certain order..... gah.

Well, it's true that it is very much like the "old style" party-based RPGs of the 80s/90s - your player created crew of people are a group of combat units/skills. There's no "roleplaying" or characterization on an individual level, there's "what does the party do". It's what we had, back in the "good old days". And what some people kept asking for ("why don't they make them like they used to? Everything now is dumbed down/streamlined/casual/etc!") And honestly? Most of the old RPGs were tactical combat games at their heart. Not character studies.

Yeah, and then Baldur's Gate came out and the RPG landscape changed forever. Not that I didn't enjoy the Gold Box D&D games, but having NPC's with more personality really appealed to me much more, and based on BG success I would assume to others as well.

I found Wasteland 2 to be underwhelming.

The graphic and tweaks ( quirks etc ) was a great upgrade in the DC version.

But it's still not a good game, it's ok, but bugs, idiotic weapons and armor balancing , weak story telling , plot and uninspired combat leave it flat.

For me anyway.

I didn't play the game on launch, and I haven't tried the DC version, but I played the fully patched version as soon as I got my PC, around May, and I never experienced a bug, crash, zip. Was a pretty solid playthrough, and I felt the story was better than FO 3 by leaps and bounds.