Wasteland 3

AI is really odd in certain ways. You can cheese most fights early in the game just by hacking a turret or throwing one out there. The AI just goes fucking bananas trying to kill turrets, especially when you get the Perk to up their aggro generation. Assault rifles seem really weak, at least early on in the game. Wife and I are not at the halfway mark yet, but a max Luck Sniper just seems to wreck shit to this point. Ammo seems strangely abundant, as well, compared to WL2.

Word of caution: Monitor your saves because there is a pretty big bug in MP that resets all quest progress in the game randomly.

What about Pistols and Sniper Rifles? The pistol specialist I have seems pretty damn strong after the Rank 6 pistols started showing up. Sniper was always good, but is in his own world now that he hit max Luck and got the R6 Rifle. Mele person has been dependable, but I mostly use that person to hack.

This game has some odd bugs or design oopsies. Wife and I were playing Coop and ran into Liberty for the first time and decided to try to fight her. The Devs clearly did not want this fight to be winnable at this point in the game, but my max luck sniper berserked one of the two robots and it proceeded to murder the other robot and Liberty while we ran for our lives. Kept it locked down most of the fight and grinded it down with a shock rod on my melee person and some rockets. Credits roll with basically zero explanation LOL.

ronne said:

Yea only real complaints are balance really.

My pet honeybadger could solo skorpitrons and have AP left over lol.

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Meh, I don't really agree on balance being super out of whack. There are shitty weapons for every weapon type (doesn't make the skill shitty, just bad weapons), but if you find the right gun/weapon, every single weapon type is pretty good in certain situations. Small arms is great as long as you stick with shotguns - jackhammer is fucking nuts and the tactical shotgun before that is pretty solid also (pistols kinda suck, except if you don't want to aoe for some reason). Automatic weapons are amazing and SMGs (especially the PDW or whatever it's called) are dumb because the perks are so good (assault rifles are total ass, however. Double tap makes them a little better, but they are still probably the weakest weapon type). Melee weapons are good with swords (1 less AP to use, chainsword auto-bleeds and you can put the +poison mod on it also, for crazy DOTs, plus the bonus swing perk). Big guns are solid especially once you get the minigun and flamethrowers can have fucking insane AoE (plus, pressure cooker saved my ass a few times). Brawling is ridiculous once you get the 1ap per swing perk, because you can constantly thunderstrike and thus stun/deal crazy aoe damage. Hell, I even built my sniper around +crit modifier items(the goggle utility item, underbarrel mod, and the hidden skill that gives you +5% crit per level etc.), used the .50cal and had my highest crit on a headshot of 6.3k. Plus, I also gave her the -1ap per shot and with rally, she had 15AP to start the round, allowing her to fire 3 times. She'd pretty much wipe out 3 guys right at the start of combat, even one-shotting a few of the "boss" type mobs with crits. The only "balance" issue I saw is with armor and how poorly it scales into endgame, when weapons have insane penetration and things hit so hard that even on my char with 62 armor, he couldn't survive a full round of shots. Part of the issue is health too. Either health has to come up or damage has to come down, especially as you get toward the "end-game". I guess explosives kinda suck because you have to reload so fucking much with launchers, but I'm not sure I'd consider them a true weapon type - more of a utility item.

Other than that, I thought the game was fantastic. Much better writing than Wasteland 2 and some really interesting/hilarious characters. The Mexican clowns were a crackup, Polly had me rolling, and I thought Vic's voice actor did a fantastic job. I really got a kick out of the Reagan cult as well. There were a few spots where performance took a big nose dive, but those weren't too numerous. I also thoroughly enjoyed the games music. The "Land of Confusion" and "Green Acres" covers really stood out and were awesome.

I doubt I'll play it again, even on the likely release of a "director's cut" like they did with WL2. I'm not once that usually replays CRPGs very often, no matter how good they are. I tend to look up any story spoilers I might've missed or alternate endings I didn't choose.

Well, the pendulum went the other way after ARs were the super weapon of the previous game. Wife and I are about halfway through and its just fucking pointless to use them. I feel pretty much the exact same way about rocket based weapons, at least past the initial few points of the game. They do so little damage that we just mainly use them to just clear cover or set off explosive barrels. The nuke special is a bit better, but still not enough once you hit mid game and past it. So two core weapon types of the franchise are pretty much dogshit, probably as an overreaction to how good they were prior. Outside of pistols, the energy weapons are fairly meh as well.

Armor is all kinds of fucked up, but that was the case in the early versions of WL2 as well. Basically once we hit midgame, the armor stat became ignored by us in favor of evasion and any side bonuses. Once you realize that the initiative is completely pointless and AP are king (drastic change from WL2), you can build around that and Death Wish becomes a viable option as a quirk. My melee weapon specialist is the only one wearing armor at all and that character doubles as my hacker so getting in close is good. Thats the only character who even remotely gives a shit about armor, and even then not really because you take the super taunt my robots perk and either hack something or shit out a turret. For some dumb reason the best way to avoid getting hurt is to slap a taunting turret in the face of the computer, as the AI will completely ignore anything else until it is gone. You can save loads of money on medical packs by buying turrets instead, actually.

I will say the snipers are solid all the way so far, particularly if you keep pumping luck on them. Pistol is pretty damn good too, and you can help weaker attackers with low pen a lot by using Mark > Trick Shot > Precise Armor break tactics. Doing that with a pistil packer can turn the Scorpitron fights into a faceroll really fast, especially if the Luck 10 sniper sticks the CPU Berserk on them. Honestly, mid game, my pistol specialist probably is the most all around effective character in the group. Brawling is awesome (my sniper has the 1ap thing but only middling weapons at present) but very stat intensive for most characters and takes a while to pay off. I built it up on the sniper to deal with all the close quarter rush fights the game throws at you, especially when you have to initially focus ranged shit at suicide bomber enemies. Now when we get bottle necked or rushed, the fisticuffs come out and chain thunderstrike basically protects the entire group.

The bugs are annoying, though. It crashes a lot, especially in Single Player. And a lot of things in the UI get bugged in aggravating ways. Finally, some items and gear just do not work. Example, by hacker mele guy is the one we gave cyber tech to for the zappy eye, with the idea being I could have a ranged option while keeping the two mele weapons equipped to get the move perk. But, guess what? If you do not have an active ranged energy weapon equipped in a weapon slot, the eye says "Out of Ammo" and you cannot use it. Fucking aggravating and not unique in the game.

So wife and I finally finished up our MP playthrough and some thoughts after beating it:

Weapon balance is all over the place, but mostly manages to be fun. Assault Rifles and all Heavy Weapons basically suck balls, with the exception of the very early parts. This is largely due to the fact that most of the end game strategies seem to be centered entirely around critical hits and hit point sponge enemies. Basically, you want a spammy as fuck weapon with high crit rate on a guy. Then you just wait for the inevitable crit that one shots the mob, because the regular hits don't do shit most of the time. You do want one sniper, because they are good at nailing the suicide bomb mobs that can magically run from miles away and self destruct before you ever get a chance to hit them otherwise. Plus the sniper mark makes pistoleers ridiculous....

So I think pistoleer builds are probably the most broken for a number of reasons. First, outside of having someone to drop Mark on enemies, you do not need any outside help to make the build work. Second, great pistols drop like candy the entire game, enough to have two pistoleers well armed the entire run. Third, they can double as shotgun specialists (the next most ridiculous setup) for next to know investment when needed as such. Notably, they only really need one Perk to function in their own build, which is trick shot. Finally, mod wise they only need range and crit stacking on their pistol to really shine, which are much more easy to come by.

Process for pistol guy is thins: Have sniper mark something close by with a lot of health. Trick shot that whenever you need to reload meter, but mainly just spam away with pistil until the crit happens, which is a lot. Cover in the way or lots of guys? But out shotgun and correct the problem. You can easily crank out three shots a turn (four with Rally or other tricks) and by the end of the game every other shot will be a critical and every third shot will be a Precision shot. Our pistol character just flat out embarrasses the other characters with their kill rate. And all they need are two melee meat shields and the AI leaves them completely alone.

So, melee guys are also ridiculous but moreso for the AI's obsession with killing them. By mid to end game, you can have a sword guy who stacks movement enough to run the entire length of the map and still get three swings off. With maxed out STR and the crit immunity cybertech item, plus the abundant chest mod that just reduces most damage types by 60%, the character is basically immortal and can run in the middle of the enemy backfield and sponge damage, gobbling some toast if they get whittled down too far. Then you get your 1 AP punch spammer running midfield interference with the same defensive setup. The sword guy can crit and damn near one shot Scorpitrons, but thats not relevant. What is relevant is that the AI will swarm the one or two Melee duders and let your ranged guys pretty much do whatever it is you want. The suicide bomb enemies are the exception to this, so you just need to single them out first. The SMG guy is still doing decent, but realistically he might as well not exist because the melee and pistol characters are facerolling things.

I really wished they had learned from the last game to make armor worthwhile. To a degree they did, but basically it just stops mattering at all by mid game, except for the melee guys. Crit spam is also a dumb way to build combat and it would be nice to see steady damage be the staple tactic instead of waiting around for a crit to do 99% of the health so that I can apply the last love tap to the enemy. The rework of Initiative is also really stupid and I wish they had kept it to what the last game was, but I guess their focus was on multiplayer and the old Initiative mechanic would have made it unplayable. Instead, we are back to AP is king and coordination being the god stat again.

Other major criticism I have is the distribution of mods in the game. Most gear has decent drop rates. Ammo especially is well thought out because you will always have enough if you diversify weapon selection a bit. The mods however, are annoying. Specifically a number of bread and butter mods (+ Range, Leg Armor movement, head armor mods in general) are way to infrequent and practically stop appearing at all in later stages of the game. This would not be a big deal if it was just the really outstanding mods (like the reduce all damage or -1 AP per shot clip) being rare, but many of the more powerful mods drop like crazy. This is further aggravated by not being able to break down armor (so those are harder to obtain) and not being able to remove mods to preserve decent ones. End result is you wind up spending most of the game with the mod collecting dust, because you know the moment you cave and slot it a better version of the same gun/armor will drop ten seconds later and make you rage. Being able to remove mods once you hit a certain skill would end the issue with minimal effort and I hope they consider this.

Those gripes aside, this game was fun and about on par with WL2, though it felt different (more tripple A less raw) than its predecessor. Bugs and balance aside, its worth the money and has some good replay potential. It is somewhat shorter than WL2, but the quest variety is much better and the story has a little more meat on it rather than being a soft retread of WL1.