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naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
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Wasteland 3 Review/Critique
I guess this is becoming somewhat of a series now, my previous reviews on the Motte are:
Cyberpunk 2077
Terra Invicta
I finally got around to finishing Wasteland 3 after playing it off-and-on for months, some of you may have remembered that it inspired me to make this post when I first started playing it.
Overview
Wasteland 3 is a tactical (think modern XCOM) RPG set in the post-post-apocalyptic Colorado, where you control a group of Arizona Rangers, a kinda-military organization who arrive in Colorado from Arizona after making a deal with the 'Patriarch', the leader of Colorado Springs, the only really civilized and stable polity in Colorado to aid him in exchange for supplies. The Rangers are ambushed and nearly wiped out en route, which kickstarts the game.
Disclosure - I have never played either the ancient original Wasteland, or its modern prequel Wasteland 2, though I never felt I really needed to, the game is a bit of a fresh start.
Overall, I found Wasteland 3 to be solid, fairly competent game. It does have some notable issues, is surprisingly short and feels rushed at the end, but is enjoyable enough. The gameplay is decent, the writing and RPG-elements are passable. It's nothing remarkable. I would only recommend the game if you are a fan of tactical style, turn-based RPG.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Wasteland 3 is nothing revolutionary. The gameplay is most directly similar to the Shadowrun series. Like many CRPGs, you have a party of customized Rangers and/or companions who you run around the world with, completing missions, have skills to interact with the world (lockpicking, 'nerd stuff' (hacking) etc), or use for dialogue choices (speech checks). You find new weapons and armour as you progress. There is also an overworld map to travel between city/combat hubs. The combat is basically extremely similar to the Shadowrun games, or to XCOM:EU/XCOM2 if you haven't played it. Now to focus on the actual criticism:
I didn't like the progression system in this game. You get perk points every few level ups, but there are so little perk choices available that never used most of them because it never felt worth it, entered the endgame with most of my perk points unspent before finally just using most of them on minor perks I didn't care about. Similarly, I rarely used any special abilities (not counting the Strike Meter) outside of a couple that were pretty broken. It never really a reason to use anything than basic attack 90% of the time. But that might just be laziness on my part. I think I might have screwed myself over too, because I played the game without any melee characters which I think the game really wants you to have, as melee damage and health are tied to the same stat. I tried to make my heavy gunner my tank and it didn't quite work. The time to kill on my characters even with moderate health investment was extremely low. Enemies would often have anywhere from 4x-20x my characters HP, and my characters would die in one or two hits. As such, fights were usually feast or famine, as if more than one of your characters go down at once it's highly likely you will lose. I think they had to have this low time to kill on player characters because healing items are functionally unlimited. I wished they would have balanced it better, limit healing, lower damage have have slower, more deliberate and methodical fights.
One of the more fun parts of the combat/gameplay is amassing a large group of NPC followers (animals, robots and others) who will proceed to maul and absolutely destroy the enemy (they also usually have 3x-10x amount the HP of your characters). But this is pretty blatantly overpowered and gets boring pretty quickly. It also reduces the amount of actions you can take, because it becomes hard to use any kind of AoE weapon.
Choosing skills seem really superficial and isn't really a meaningful choice. Realistically, you want and can easily have at least one member of your team max out every skill, combat and non-combat. While the game has some pretense of the being able to play anyway you want, with any skill combination, it quickly becomes apparent that maxing out skills like lockpicking, explosives (defusing) etc becomes pretty much mandatory. There are a couple of exceptions like Toaster Repair and Survival, which just add additional funny content and reducing tedium respectively. The worst part of the skills is the armor modding and weapon modding (crafting) skills - you can just have a separate Ranger not in the main party who you just swap in and out whenever you want to craft something, making the whole crafting skill check redundant. Wasteland 3 suffers the extremely common issue in RPGs where speech checks are almost always strictly better than other options, meaning picking them is a no-brainer.
Equipment is also an issue. You find new equipment fairly quickly, and higher level gear quickly outclasses old gear. This means whenever you find a piece of equipment you really like, you might be tossing it away after a couple of levels, no way to upgrade its level. Wasteland 3 isn't the worst game in this regard, but it is annoying.
The game is deceptively short. The game honestly feels like it's missing the last quarter of the game, and was rushed to completion (I have no idea if this was actually the case). The game builds up to the final confrontation, finally a meeting of all the major characters... and it goes nowhere. It all resolves itself incredibly quickly, game ends. More on this later.
Story, Writing and Themes
MAJOR SPOILERS
I have a lot to say about the story, but I first have to briefly summarize the story to provide context to those who haven't played (but don't mind being spoiled!).
The Arizona Rangers are in desperate need of supplies after they had to blow up their own base to destroy the Cochise AI, the antagonist of Wasteland 2. The Patriarch of Colorado contacts the Rangers and promises them long-term supplies if they send a contingent to Colorado to help him find his wayward children who are destabilizing Colorado in various ways. Along the way the Rangers are ambushed and nearly wiped out by the Dorseys, one of the various wasteland raider gangs destabilizing Colorado. Despite this, the remaining Rangers establish themselves and proceed with their mission foil the Patriarch's kids and return them to him. The Patriarch's youngest son Valor is a snivelling insecure genius who is aiding a Ronald Reagan cult who want to overthrow the Patriarch, the oldest son Victory is a crazy, brutal psychopath who enjoy torturing and brutalizing his victims and is holding members of Colorado Spring's elite hostage in a skiing retreat. The whereabouts of the middle daughter Liberty, ostensibly the primary antagonist of the game, is unknown but you eventually find out she's uniting all the various raider tribes into one war party to overthrow her father, destroy Colorado Springs and theoretically set up a despotic raider empire in Colorado and beyond. Along the way you come across Angela Deth, one of the original Rangers (she was companion in WL1 and WL2), who was part of a forward part towards Colorado, who went AWOL after she learnt that the Patriarch isn't the exactly heroic saviour of Colorado he portrays himself as, refused to help him and is now trying to overthrow him. At the end of the game, the main endings are either to side with the Patriarch and fight Deth and some of your fellow Rangers, or to side with Deth and overthrow the Patriarch (either violently or peacefully if you got the support of some factions) and rule Colorado yourself. There's also an ending where you side with one of the raider gangs and help them raid and destroy/rule Colorado but I don't really consider it a 'real' ending, because it's so inconsistent with the whole ethos of the Rangers. It's the comically evil for evil's sake ending. Okay, now to the actual critique about the story:
Continued in below comment
Story Continued
The major theme in Wasteland 3 is about compromising on values to achieve your goals. It is true of the Patriarch, ruling Colorado with an iron fist despite false promises of elections and appeals to pre-War America, signing a secret deal with raider gangs to leave Colorado Springs alone in exchange for giving them supplies and slaves. Angela Deth does this, she goes AWOL and commits treason against to the Rangers to bring down an unjust tyrant, to the point she is even willing to free and work with a leader of a slaver gang (betraying the Ranger good guy ethos), if indirectly, to bring down the Patriarch. You as the Player Rangers, have to make plenty of compromises which leaves no one happy to get (in my opinion) is the 'best' outcome.
The theme and the story WL3 is trying to tell doesn't work is because the Patriarch is unambiguously the good guy. Here I don't mean unambiguously to mean there's nothing to criticize him for, but rather he is obviously the correct choice, at least morally. The Patriarch basically built/formed Colorado Springs from scratch, the only beacon of real civilisation for anywhere in Colorado. He did defeat many of the raider gangs, but eventually he reached a stalemate and struggled to beat them. So eventually he reached an agreement with the gangs to pay them off to protect Colorado. As presented by the game, this was pretty much the only way to keep Colorado safe. Angela Deth doesn't seem to appreciate that that the Patriarch might actually be a just tyrant rather than an unjust tyrant and he had good reasons to do what he did. This is a (post-)post-apocalyptic world! The Patriarch actually seems like a decent guy otherwise and seems to genuinely care for the people of Colorado. While he obviously doesn't tell you the whole truth, he never actually lies to you and completely upholds honours his deal with you. Ironically, his biggest flaw is probably the fact he allowed his dangerous, crazy children to run free and didn't punish them earlier like he should have when he had the chance, the most human of the flaws, not wanting to punish his children out of fatherly love.
I'm really not sure what the developer intentions were here. I've seen some people try to explain Angela Deth's stupidity by saying that's the point, she's being a Ranger forever, she's become disillusioned and radicalized. I really don't think that was the intent, and I think the intent was really genuine attempt to portray some deep tale of grey morality that just falls flat. I think Angela Deth wasn't meant to be an disillusioned idiot is further evidenced by the "best" ending of the game, where you overthrow the Patriarch peacefully (rather than violently), which you do pretty unapologetically to the Patriarch (you get no choice), which seems to completely vindicate Deth. I think this is just a case of bad writing.
This is really compounded by the fact you are offered virtually zero opportunity to interrogate the Patriarch or Deth or any other major character about their beliefs and philosophy, you really have to try and just piece it together and justify it in your head. Even at the end of the game, where you meet Death and/or the Patriarch at the end of the game before you clash, there is no real examination of the characters and their beliefs. The conversation lasts five seconds and you even just pass a shitty speech check for them to stand down just because to skip the fight. To make a direct comparison with Fallout: NV, which Wasteland shares DNA with, you get multiple opportunities to talk in quite some detail with each of the major factions and their representatives and their justification. Even at the end of the game, where you can use a speech check to 'defeat' your enemies (e.g. Lanius), FNV doesn't just have some generic 'surrender please' dialogue, but puts serious effort into actually justifying how you convince the factions and it relates to their circumstance. The last section of WL3 does seem rushed and incomplete, and I wonder if it was their intention to flesh it out more.
I know it's perhaps unfair to WL3 to compare it to FNV, but WL3 is emblematic of what as I see as a growing negative trend in video game stories. The writers will raise some complex themes or ideas in their story, fail to or only superficially engage with those ideas, and then conclude like they've said something meaningful. It seems like they think that merely raising these ideas is good enough on its own. It's like the writers think they have to deconstruct their own story and characters (because they're overeducated hacks who were taught to do that in writing school), but don't actually have the writing chops or philosophical depth to anything interesting with it. The writers routinely fail to imagine living in post-apocalyptic society like Wasteland's would actually like. They're stuck in a presentist mindset where I think they just take things like 'Patriarch = despot, despot = bad' for granted because it appeals to modern sensibilities, even if such a moral judgement doesn't make sense in context of the world. I would rather they just stick to simple good vs evil stories rather that have the pretence of moral complexity without actually doing the work.
Another thing that I found really annoying was the portrayal of (true) AI/'synths' in Wasteland 3. As far as I know (mostly reading the wiki), prior to Wasteland 3, AI and synths were unambiguously evil, and the primary antagonists of the game. All the synths were created by the Cochise AI, an evil genocidal AI. Wasteland 3 I guess tried to change this I guess because there's numerous friendly AI/synth you come across in Wasteland 3. It feels incredibly jarring, because synths are meant to be the mortal enemy of the Rangers, and some dialogue reflects this, but they also seem to be going really hard on trying to get you to empathize with the synths. I've seen it suggested that this is deliberately done to try and create some moral ambiguity, or complexity. Maybe the synths are just pretending to be good to get the human's trust! Again, I don't buy it. In the endings where you help the synths/AI it's portrayed as unambiguously positive. It's just so jarring.
Other characters aren't really developed either, Liberty, who is presented as interesting character and antagonist, you only have two very brief conversations with which don't say much. All the companions are uninteresting or one-note except for Lucia Wesson, a daughter of an elite family who matures through the game (and her presentation is basically identical that of Mattie Ross in Coens' remake of True Grit), and Ironclad Cordite, the former leader of one of the gangs who has a grudge against the Patriarch and believes his destiny is to become the next Genghis Khan.
Other than that, the writing is just generally wacky, Fallout style dark comedy style of writing which can be pretty good in some parts and in the side quests.
Music
One of the best parts about the games is the music, it's utilized really effectively. During major boss fights or set battles, a really interesting and unusual song will usually play that relates to the circumstances of the battle. Usually this will different-genre cover of a song. For example, the final song of the final DLC plays a country western cover of a old sitcom theme song. The songs are surprising enjoyable, even if I don't really like all the genres that play. I wish more games tried something a bit unorthodox with their soundtrack.
DLC
Quick comment on the two DLC:
Battle for Steeltown - Help the leader of a super advanced factory that supplies all the advanced goods to Colorado resolve issues in her factory. Superficial anti-capitalist commentary with striking workers, and more synth-love. Some new gameplay mechanics. Alright, worth buying on sale.
The Holy Detonation - Help restore an experimental nuclear power plant to power Colorado, the power plant is being worshipped by two warring cults who deliberately radiate and mutate themselves. I guess this is meant to be some 'biting' satire of religious belief 20 years out of date? Has some interesting gameplay ideas, atrocious execution. Not worth buying.
Conclusion
I have criticised Wasteland 3 a lot, especially it's writing, but mostly because it's more enjoyable to criticise than it is to praise. I mostly enjoyed my experience with Wasteland 3, even if it was frustrating at times. It's a competent game that gets the basics right, but is otherwise pretty unremarkable. I would recommend it to anyone who likes tactical RPGs and is looking for some time to kill.
I also enjoyed it quite a bit, I think I got about 3/4 through the story but ended up dropping off. Played probably around 40 hours.
I had a more balanced team and I actually thought that the game was pretty easy on the harder difficulty. I’ve also played a ton of tactical games, and I am an obsessive scavenger though.
Overall I agree that the music and the dark humor were the best parts about the game, I think the world building was pretty good too there were a lot of tiny details in different areas that helped flesh out the world. Overall though the story failed to compel me at all.
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