Wasteland 2 is one of the first games I ended disliking and deleting, and being unhappy about it. (usually when I dislike a game a lot, I just dislike it, Wasteland 2 I am unhappy I disliked it).

Basically the game has some major issues:

First, the RPG system it uses has some major issues, like descriptions detached from what things actually do (example, Charisma DOES NOT affect conversations, and despite being mentioned in the description about sneaking on enemies, you cannot sneak on enemies anyway), and there are a obvious optimal manner of creating the characters (ie: remove luck, stuff it all on intelligence, or whatever your character need)

You cannot go by with "average" characters, or more or less realistic characters, you have to minmax.

Related to my last phrase, the second problem is the game difficulty is... weird. I decided to play on the "seasoned" difficulty (not the easiest one), and had the following problem: some encounters are absurdly easy, others are absurdly hard, and there are no "medium" encounters, the random encounters don't help either (example: I started a new game, left the base, and before I reached the radio tower I got attacked by a pack of wolves and toads and promptly destroyed my party).

And finally, it is a hell buggy, and ugly game... the character models are horrible (ever tried to create a black dude? the game just paints the character black, his facial features are still obviously of an US person, with lots of sharp angles and whatnot, worse, tried to make a cute chick, you can't, all female heads look scary or weird), the models are buggy (example: one time when I was recreating my party for the third or fourth time after the previous one having failed for non-optimal minmaxing and skill choice, all models turned black, I had to quit the game and start again), the game crashes a lot for no good reason, it has terrible performance (spinning the map is the worst offender, and just to test I held the map spin button, and my computer started to sound like a airplane trying to take off) among other things.


Still, the game has shown promise, it has brilliant writing, creative (if in excess) artwork, interesting (if horribly broken) gameplay, and I wish I had liked it...

Maybe who knows with future patches it will become a better game (please devs, if you are reading this, allow more party flexibility, I noticed it is mandatory to have a medic and a surgeon in your party, because there is no other way to heal in the game, at least on the start...)

Obviously, there are going to be people that don't like the game. It's inevitable for any game. It's too bad you didn't enjoy it, because it seems obvious you really wanted to. I don't fully agree with all your comments, but some of your criticisms are spot on. Many of them will, I think, be addressed through the patching process.

I do like the game, though the character models could be upgraded to something less nasty and the RPG elements could be way stronger, but the difficulty is just fine. A bit easy on "seasoned" throughout. I don't experience crashes or graphical glitches.

It could also be optimized much better and perhaps even allow crossfire support.

The UI could be improved as well.

Wasteland 2 is a gem, with some fixable imperfections and some permanent ones.

It's still a gem :)

Fair enough. Much of your criticism is spot on, especially regarding difficulty (I found it too easy on seasoned), graphics (Unity engine, although that's not an excuse - look up Shadowrun as to why), but since I play almost completely zoomed out, I don't look at character models all that much.

Since the last patch, performance has improved considerably for me, and my computer doesn't sound like an airplane taking off, although it's still loud. It's actually your graphics card heating too much for some reason when playing W2.

Don't know so much about Charisma only that the game look at the average of your entire party, and that this is important to recruit NPCs. I made a party where everyone has 5 which gives additional 30% experience and a party wide charisma value of 20. As for the leadership skill each charisma point increase your aura buff range by 1 grid square.
On my second playthrough I will do a two point charisma party, to see the difference. Especially about the exp loss.

I played during beta so I had a few restarts of the game and on normal difficulty min/max of stats is not important.
Only if you got with ranger and higher where enemies hit really hard min/max is important to buff up hit points, CI and AP is important to survive.
Especially you don't need 4 damage dealers. The luck stat isn't that useless as people say because each point gives 1% chance increase to all dice rolls. There are trinkets that gives bonus to multiple skills. Like weaponsmithing, mechanical and toaster repair. Or perceptions & demolitions and an other for lock picking and safe cracking. Stacking these skills on 2 characters at start makes things hard, but later on you will end up ahead instead spreading them out and the luck bonus will contribute to your lead on skill rolls. Smooth gaming I tell you.

The change in difficulty on your encounters is normal for open world games. Freedom to go where you want can also mean to walk right into you death. Like the Gothic games, where when the game start and if you follow the path through the wood you will be fine, but stray away and you will quickly run into an monster you have no hope to defeat. Don't walk into the woods until you ready. :)
There of course are the Elder Scrolls game with their level creatures list but most agree this sucks ass. Having monster level with you is just lame.

I see you had some technical problems. Well in 40 hours of playing the game never crashed for me once but I found that two programs tend to interfere with game resulting in performance drops. One is Microsoft Security Essentials, as result I put the Steam/steamapps folder in the excluded list. Should have done this a long time ago. Lazy me
The other is the new version of EVGA Precision X (version 5 and higher including Steam version) which I use to control my GFX card. I don't have a problem with the old version 4.2.1 which use RivaTunerStatistics. Version 4.2.1 is more stable in general as it seems so I went back using it. However RivaTunerStatistics it self seem to cause a random performance drop for me caused by the 64bit hook. Don't know why, but I disabled it in the properties and since then I don't have any slowdowns more. Game runs otherwise pretty fast and smooth on my GTX 670 at 1920*1200. I have no problem with rotating the map, but I don't know what GFX card you have.

Edit. For comparison. My GFX card on max settings while on 60fps (Vsync) heats up to 67 Celsius and 40% fan speed. On the world map where my GFX card down clocks it drops to 53 Celsius and 35% fan speed.

I can't agree to all things Speeder wrote.

The game runs smooth, no crashes up to now (I'm just cleaning the three infected places after AG-Center. I'm playing on "Ranger". It's difficult but possible. And I do not min/max characters, that's not my way to play RPG's. I was never attacked by wolves and toads on my way to the tower, even with Outdoorsman skill 0.

Charisma seems to have an effect. F.e. with charisma 5 I only got scrap from the guys at the tower, with charisma 6 they gave me the coordinates of a useful shrine.

It's a good game.

But one thing is true : There are some issues that need to be fixed (imo).

- Outdoorsman seems to be a usable skill (it's in the hotkey list) but I never found a real use for this hotkey. It seem to work only on travelling automatically.

- There are only a few ways to upgrade attributes. With some strange items, that seems to be borrowed from a fantasy game. But Wasteland 2 is not fantasy and no akita figurine will change anything in a world of bullets. The same are the shrines. Hide items there (but do not spend skillpoints.)

- Some items or illnesses are (let's say) strange. Concussion f.e. or what is all that junk for? Who will buy (especially the ranger traders) legs of a fly without the possibilty of using them somewhere? Or ist there a market for toad tongues?

- There are other minorities I can live with.

I finished the game yesterday, and i enjoyed it alot.
Didnt experience crashes, but noticed at least 2 quest bugs in the Hollywood hub. Also was surprised and abit sad about an event near the end of the game, wich i should have seen coming. All in all one of my best KS investments.

In Ag Center you can pick a couple of herbs using the Outdoorsman skill actively. Wasteland 2 being an extremely open RPG, few skills are necessary to "beat the game". Outdoorsman is one of many non-essential skills you can invest in for ROLEPLAYING flavor. I think both of these points are just for laughs. Wasteland is a silly universe and the traders buying exactly any kind of junk no matter what is typical of at least older RPGs. The point of roleplaying is not to simulate reality but to have make-belief come true. If you want your character to believe in luck, give him a rabbit's foot and the game will make it appear this belief is true.

So I just beat the game and I can say that you don't need to min/max. In retrospect, there are a few skills you'll need on your team, namely lockpicking, surgeon, demolition, and field medic. (you don't need to max surgeon either but it does do story things and field medic does no story contributions to my knowledge). The rest of the skills provide different bonuses but none that are vital. I built my characters with high intelligence and I found that I was overflowing with skill points. So max intelligence isn't necessary. So unless you want the perfect run through I think this game offers the same or more character options in comparison to other rpgs. I actually think it encourages diversity in that it gives you your starting weapon and plenty of ammo. I felt that it was nice to have an energy weapon user and heavy weapons guy from the start. Usually a game forces you to save those skill points until late game. My brother is playing the game and he built his characters how he wanted to, ignoring intelligence, and hasn't had a problem. Also to be fair, Luck has always been kinda a shit skill and charisma. I mean who maxed luck in Fallout 3 or Charisma. Almost every RPG I play luck is the skill I drop first and usually charisma on everyone except the guy doing the talking.


I would say the bugs seem atrocious and the user interface was clunky. I also wish I knew what skills I'd be getting from companions and found that combat became a little to simple as the game went on. BUT I would say that I really felt like a badass who was bringing good to a God-forsaken land. Not many games have made me do choices based on how I feel rather than what I think will give me the best game outcome. In the end, the combat was probably the weakest aspect of the game and what I wanted to get rid of until I face down a slaver or a rapist, then I felt some odd passion from bringing down the hammer of justice. I suppose what I'm saying is to keep an eye on the game to see if htey fix the problems.

The problem is that most people expected a great game able to match fallout or any other old and classic game.
When some people feel that they haven't gotten that they bash the game too hard and can't be objective.
I am not saying that OP is doing this.

I think it's an ok game, not great but not at all bad. I enjoy it and I'm not dissapointed by it. It is almost impossible to live up to expectations. Many people comment on the graphics when Inxile ignored fancy graphics, focusing on other things. The graphics is most noticeable in the beginning, after a while at least I didn't think about them. Sure it could have been better in several areas. It wouldn't have taken so much more time or skill to make better character models or more exciting enviroments for example.

People confuse w2 with fallout, it's not hard to see why but if you do that the chance you will be dissapointed is bigger.

I have to say that *ducks the rotten fruit* I'm likeing this game better than Fallout 1. I've started over four times, fiddling with character ideas, and haven't left Arizona yet with a single team (I did get one team up to around level 20) and am really enjoying this game. As I said: I'm liking it better than Fallout (and I really enjoyed Fallout).

Nothing controversial about your opinion. Fallout has a lot of filler material and ideas that aren't fully realised. The RPG system in Fallout is great, but not everything in it is actually used in the adventure. There are many skills and perks that either do almost nothing or are completely non-functional. Wasteland 2 by comparison is much tighter. Barter and Leadership may be duds but everything else is relevant and actually worth investing heavily into if you want to. They are not just good ideas on paper, they are implemented in a story where you can make use of them.

Visual character customisation may not be much, but compared to Fallout 1 and 2, Wasteland 2 is very engaging and fun. I have spent at least 6 hours just designing characters and writing biographies for them. It is a lot like starting up a pen & paper roleplaying game. Very engaging.

Maybe it's just me misinterpreting what's going on, but I found that higher Leadership skill seems to help a lot to reduce the amount of times NPCs go Rogue. The aura bonus is a nice perk as well.

I agree, Wasteland 2 is IMO better than Fallout 1.

I like Fallout 2 the most of all. It's not as dark and serious as Fallout 1 yet keeps a pretty straight face. Wasteland 2 lands in between Fallout and Fallout 2, but it reminds me a lot of Fallout 1.

Wasteland 2 is not perfect, but it is very, very good. Especially for Fallout fans. And apparently XCOM:EU fans :P

It does indeed reduce the chance for NPCs to go rogue. It does this well enough that you do not need to invest heavily into the skill. The leadership aura however is not important as it is only 1% per skill level (not even 2% as in the description). 3-5 levels to keep NPCs in line is about as much use you're going to get out of it.