Wasteland The Wasteland 2 Beta Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Ulminati]

Massive overhaul to difficulty after the gold master and without the benefit of outsider play-testing.

This should go well.

Welp, I gave the current beta a try. Only time any of my party members dropped below 50% health was when we were in a tiny house and an enemy popped up and immediately initiated dialogue. He always has first turn in combat since his dialogue initiates it. He dropped a grenade at his feet and killed himself + 2 party members.

Rest of the beta was banalshiteasy.

okay dis my party

Barter is tallied up across the entire party as far as I could tell. You'd be spending less skill points by giving 3 party members 3 barter each than 9 points on one.

 

[Jaesun]

Brian Fargo @BrianFargo
The funny thing about the gambling is that the player is told the casino cheats and its un-winnable. Is it still gambling?

Just like real life?

 

[Zed]

okay dis my party

Barter is tallied up across the entire party as far as I could tell. You'd be spending less skill points by giving 3 party members 3 barter each than 9 points on one.

hmm. alright. but, shitty game systems aside, that character was designed to be bad.

 

[Roguey]

When inXile releases the mod tools they should allow me to rename Supreme Jerk to Supreme Gentleman so I can roll out a party of four Elliot Rodgers.

 

[Volourn]

"He dropped a grenade at his feet and killed himself + 2 party members."

GENIUS.

Suicide bomber.

LOGIC.

 

[Eyeball]

Massive overhaul to difficulty after the gold master and without the benefit of outsider play-testing.

This should go well.

Welp, I gave the current beta a try. Only time any of my party members dropped below 50% health was when we were in a tiny house and an enemy popped up and immediately initiated dialogue. He always has first turn in combat since his dialogue initiates it. He dropped a grenade at his feet and killed himself + 2 party members.

Same here. Horrible encounter design, that, particularly as his grenade also kills the NPCs in the hut you're supposed to protect from him.

 

[Darkzone]

The problem here, as we've been discussing on the official board, is that this would mean using full AI on the highest difficulty level, and then "dumbening" the AI progressively for every level lower. This would mean horrendously stupid AI on the default difficulty level! No one wants that. The only other options are changing the actual encounter design or tweaking stats. I for one don't expect them to design every fight in the game 4 times for 4 different difficulty levels, so tweaking stats is the only realistic solution.

Hmm.. As a someone with a degree in informatics (computer science) with the specialisation on intelligent systems including cybernetics study, robotics and some physics (not relevant here), i can only say in a very short form this: it depends how the scripts of algorithms are made.
Even if the have a very simple 'coloring (applying vectors to a field) the fields of the grid (graph)' algorithms, a clear level of distinctions can be made. In worst case you are making integrals (by grouping) of values, which can have shuffled internally for not so good choices.
I can write essays about it and still it would be futile, if the will is not there to make it good. Basically the scripts are not necessary like an machine, that has only one on and off switch. There are many variables that can be influenced. Look at the chess computers and programs how they handle there. Currently the algorithms are very simple the melees charge in, and the long range enemies try to optimise their position by the opt attack range of their weapons and their possible cover and the strongest weapon is used first (view: grande example above). If you look at my text you will see that i struggle a bit in the writing of this. The reason is simple: i don't know how to explain it very simple and with few words.
But i can tell you how to make the algorithms better, in a very simple way:
1) Let the scripts consider the order of agents in the execution / turn queue. (This makes every good player.)
2) Group the attacks towards one specific agent, even if it is more easy to attack an other agent. (This makes every good player too.)
3) Consider the blast radius or spread, if a weapon has one. (Also this makes every good player.)

Think about:
The pittbull / bulldog encounter is not bad designed, but the actions of the agent by the scripts is not good. He throws the grenade killing all including himself. This is the result of the scripts (a bad result).
If the script would consider a max attack damage ratio optimisation (which seems it does (yes this makes every good player too)) on the fields centering the attack on a specific field and the blast radius, he could first move out of the danger fields and then throw the grenade.
This would accomplishing the death of the rangers and he would be alive (a good result for the agent and a bad for the player).

 

[Infinitron]

That degree is really paying for itself!

FYI Eyeball and Ulminati, I've spoken to Brother None and it's already on their to-fix list.

 

[Country_Gravy]

Now if only he would go for a degree in English I could read his posts without getting a headache.

 

[LESS T_T]

Hey, translators. Is the manual fun to read in itself? I was a bit underwhelmed by D:OS's dry manual.

 

[Scroo]

Ok guys so I tried the game for 15 minutes and I really liked what I saw, can't wait for the full release (also my whole party was wiped after said 15 minutes in the first encounter)

 

[Zombra]

[things]

I don't disagree with anything you said DZ ... maybe good AI is easy to do. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about deliberately making bad AI at the lower difficulty levels.

Supreme Jerk - full AI
Difficult - some AI routines removed
Normal - most AI routines removed
Easy - AI pretty much turned off

So you have 60,000 people playing at Normal with very stupid enemies, and maybe a few hundred playing Supreme Jerk. Only a few hundred people get to see your cool AI. This is a waste of resources and an insult to anyone not playing on highest difficulty. I want to see cool AI routines too! I want to see super smart enemies on Normal difficulty. I just want to be able to still kill them.

 

[Owlish]

Brian Fargo @BrianFargo
The funny thing about the gambling is that the player is told the casino cheats and its un-winnable. Is it still gambling?

Just like real life?

You can win in real life. You just get banned, or chopped up and left out in the desert, if you do.

 

[DosBuster]

was bored, started work on a mod kit that hooks into the source code.

EDIT: Before anyone gets excited, I realized that I don't have WL2 so I can't hook into anything. I'm waiting for the full release. Secondly, I don' really know C# mainly due to how I'm porting a mod kit for WL2.

 

[Darkzone]

Infinitron
It is a freaky study, and it does really pays for itself. And if you ask me how freaky?
This kind of freaky:



Or let me give you 'the answer', like this:



And at the end you feel like this:

But do you know what is more than freaky?
If i control a robot hand with just my mind, using a eeg system device or a drone with a camera and with a oculus rift. Or if i let the drone fly by itself and map an entire building just by using an attached handy. I live on the frontier of an age.
And if i will have enough money and my children are out the house, i will study again and the next study will be literally the Master of Space.

Zombra
Sorry if i have been a little maybe somehow misleading, but i don't wanted to make am impression that a good behavior for an agent is easy to make. It can be very difficult, especially if the game theory has to come into play. I'm just playing the beta, and there i do not have seen a good behavior of the npc agents. But i see now where you are coming from, you are using a top down prinzip with the assumption that the 'A.I.' (i do not use this word in this connection, because it can be very misleading, but not false) is full on the Supreme jerk level, and then successive the case handling is removed from level to level. Yes this is a possible way to do it. And i also don't want a bad behavior for the agents at the lower levels.
But let me show it a little bit different, using both chess and military expressions:

Easy: Current beta agents scripts.
Normal: Easy level with added: turn queue, specific agent targeting (dependent on weapon) and necessary blast radius consideration.
Ranger: Normal level with: hit and run (into cover) attacks from single agents, attack on covers, strong points by grouping deliberately agents, concentrated fire on one target, Fork at certain targets(for spread weapons) , Pin, Sacrifices of melees as decoys or Desperados. (sadly we do not have suppression fire, but this would be great thing.)
Supreme Jerk: Control of center (control of certain good defence points), Space (gain space while using less pawns/agents) , retreat and group at stronger positions by giving up attacks, point values of agents (protecting the agents with the most value).

This is also a way to do it. There are so many ways to do this things that i would be really an essay if i would try to write it down. And yes you are right that only around 5% (depends also on the difficulty of this levels) will play at the Supreme Jerk level, and yes also this is the question of investing the ressources that one has at hand. If the ressources time and money are running out, than a cheap solution should be prefered. Some things at ranger level would be better at the Supreme Jerk level. While the attack on more enemies is used, the Fork in itself is not used directly, or at least i have not seen it.
Let me put this in a good sentence from a chess master (i don't know who this was anymore): While tactics requires observation, strategy requires thinking.


The encounter of the Pittbull / Bulldog, is a encounter that is hmmm.
Basically Pitbull / Bulldog has only one attack, he will not survive to his second one. (Not even if he had 300 hitpoints.) So this is a decision how we handle this or how we think about this. A first time player does not know if and when he arrives and what will happen. But on a reload he can better prepare the situation. While on lower levels i can dispatch him without a problem, the damage (200 damage) of the grenade on the 'supreme jerk' level is quite a constraint on my chosen actions. (The last time i had just over 50 hp.) And there is not enough cover and space to evade this kind of damage, and if he does not use this granate, he is dead. The questions should be what want the devs do / show us with this encounter. (another inXile 'why' questions)

 

[Ulminati]

Have pitbull wait outside the building. Let the other NPCs follow the player out and do the dialogue there. Give pitbull some mooks and cover. Remove instaderp grenade. Problem solved.

To up the difficulty of the encounter, leave players out in the open and have pitbull open fire from cover while melee mooks block the players path to him.

Having 3 npcs and 4-7 pcs all in a 3x9m room with no furniture doesn't make for interesting encounter design.

 

[Roguey]

JES sez it's easier to lower difficulty from a high bar than it is to raise it from a shallow baseline. We've seen the high bar of PoE, and the shallow baseline of Wasteland 2. Keenan might as well call himself Sisyphus.

 

[Zombra]

JES sez it's easier to lower difficulty from a high bar than it is to raise it from a shallow baseline.

There's truth to that in this case. We seem to be having a fuck of a time getting balance to a point where strong players take the difficulty seriously. My prayers go out to the inXile number crunchers.

 

[Darkzone]

JES sez it's easier to lower difficulty from a high bar than it is to raise it from a shallow baseline. We've seen the high bar of PoE, and the shallow baseline of Wasteland 2. Keenan might as well call himself Sisyphus.

Yes. Rolling a ball down the hill is much more easy, than to force it upward. That is a thing that every 2-3 year old child discovers the first time it tries out a slide. But every sophisticated development and evolution goes the other way, from the easy / simple towards the difficult / complicated. And every level cost more and more energy (that is the necessary work to climb up from one level to another, also falling down or lowering the bar results in release of energy).
Sisyphus and his ever doing of a punishment for his arrogance, is a greek metaphor and stands for the human life and his constant repeated work to survive. If the work is futile (without an endresult) and remains the same, then we can call it sisyphuswork. But if the work is in different fields and produces an endresult we cannot apply this term anymore.
Question: Roguey are you from NY?

 

[Roguey]

Question: Roguey are you from NY?

No, what an odd inquiry.

 

[Zed]

roguey is some sort of asian or eskimo or something.

 

[tuluse]

Call me a pleb, but I do like some of WL2's humor.

Spoiler

 

[Darkzone]

Zed
Hmm Eskimo could be possible, because of the times, but a north american is more probable.

Roguey
Odd inquiries and statements are made by odd people. Think nothing about it, i have sometimes interest in other cultures.

tuluse
There are many good things about Wasteland 2, but also not so good, and if i bash at something is only because i care. Else i would give a shit and would shut up, which will probably happen after Wasteland 2 is released.

Tomorrow i will ask again some 'why' questions, and this time about Darvin Village and what the heck has happened there.

 

[Zombra]

Tune in tomorrow for another spellbinding edition of "Darkzone Speaks"!

 

[Darkzone]

Tune in tomorrow for another spellbinding edition of "Darkzone Speaks"!

:D

sea and Brother None or MLMarkland

Today on 'Darkzone Speaks! Out the 10 WHY Questions' we will look specific only at the Darwin Village. Why? Because i think that currently this location only hurts Wasteland 2 and provides nothing good to the story. Therefore i would even state, that it would be better to remove the whole location in its current state, than to let it in the game. First of all let us take a look at Darwin Village and at Darwin Base in Wasteland 1.
In the Wasteland 1 the Darwin Village has 2 shops, one doctor, one library, one lab and one bar. You can hire 2 NPC named 'Mad Dog Fargo' and 'Metal Maniac' by curing them, in the bar. One of the shops is the Black Market, where you can buy the best weapons and armor (Rad Suits AC5 and Pseudo-chitin armor AC10) from any shop in the entire Wasteland. In the Village you were attacked by Bikers, Commandos, Police and Mutants, overall it was a tougher location than Las Vegas (besides the good old scorpitron (love this one)), only beaten by the Base Cochise and perhaps also by the Guardian Citadel. The area and the village itself was green and with grass. It's size was as large as Ag Center or the Highpool. I admit that a lot can happen within 15 years, but this Village was also a promise for Wasteland 2. The base had a 3 levels and a biological testing ground, here it was that Finster turned himself into a cyborg with the help of the Cochise AI. Now to the current thing:

Spoiler

Currently it is a 'zombie' infested dump that has nothing to do with the Village from the first Wasteland. And that is the best thing that i can state about it, because everything else raises the hairs on my back, like a cat before atacking.
1)Why is this thing so desolate? Without anything of value? (Besides the Night Terror.)
2)Why is there only one entrance to the canalisation (as i call it) and not the heavy steel doors in concrete (probably to a small hill) from the first Wasteland?
3)Why is there the murder / kill list of the synthetics in the safe, if the synthetic was killed as he forced himself into the base? Total nonsense.
4)Why does the base look like a fucked up dump, besides the area with the night terror? Did Finster missed to educate the mutants on the necessity of cleaning up or did only the Night Terror (the only smart one?) has listened to Finster?
We all are basically mutants (everyone of us has at least 1 mutation) and we do not live on a dump (at least not all of us).
5)Why are there no necessary laboratories for research or etc? In the first Wasteland there was even a whole artificial habitat zone (biological testing grounds) for the mutants.
But now to the main problem:
6)Why the heck is activating the purification system pacifying the 'infected' ones? Do they love the sound of an air purifier and become calm? Or do they smell fresh air and everything is fine? This is not how an infection would work. A infection that would have an effect on the behavior of a human being would spread through the brain or would be in certain centers of the brain. Dependent on the kind (Bacteria or Viruses or etc) of the infection, a treatment on (accurate) antibiotics or a (accurate) antiviral drug (virostatikum) would be indicated, and not a air purifier.
The Air Purifier would only make sense, if the infection would be not an infection by biological means, but an effect by an chemical compound in the air. But this would be even more nonsense. The necessary amount could be not brought in by a small test tube like container. And the mutants on the outside would regain her sanity on the fresh air, like with the air purifier. So only the virus, fungus, parasite or the bacteria comes into the equation.
A virus attacks the cells, in our case it would be the brain cells (there are more then the neurons) probably damaging the brain forever, resulting only in a no cure situation (same applies to a parasitic infection). A bacterial or a fungal infection on the other side could be quite possible, and even without a permanent brain damage. This two kinds can produce chemicals, that can influence the behavior of a species, without killing or permanently damaging the host / infected person. The infection can be then anywhere in the body, most probably would be the lungs where there is a direct connection to the blood or the digestive tract. Why do i write all this? Because im stupid or because i want to show that we need a basis for making it a more elaborate task then to switch a simple air purifier on. A course of action would be to seal of the contaminated Mutants.To go into a laboratory, which can be used for chemical / bacteriological analysis and to analyse some body fluids or body parts of mutants. This was in a way in the Ag Center. Then we need to identify the culprit and search for a fungicide or antibiotic treatment. After this we can use the air purifier, to spread the treatment / drug this way, which result in heal us and the infected mutants. (Ag Center and infected places.)
Look how interesting such an quest would be, how immersive and real. Tons of films with similar topics have been made. Shadowrun Returns DF made it much better and with much more thought than you did. SHADOWRUN RETURNS!!!
7)Why was there no automatic lockdown in case of a detected contamination? In Marburg they exactly know what this and why this is in place. Jan seems not to be the smartest Mutant.
8)Why do we assume that a stupid package in a safe is the cure for an specific cancer kind or even for all kinds of cancer? There are many different cancer kinds, each has different and specific cure. Even an all cure would be not simply in a safe in a dump room, with nothing else, besides a Wasteland disc. It would be far more logical to ask Ian for the cure, and then Ian would ask a different Mutant to get it for the rangers, as a reward for curing all the mutants. Even better it would be if we have to radio in to ask which kind of cancer this is.
9)Why is this the same topic like in Ag Center? (Attention not negative meant.) I think that this location could give way more then the Ag Center towards this topic: old military base of an evil and mad genius, with zombies and the Night Terror (if you do not feed him human flesh he could attack you), without lights perhaps with activated defence systems and an cyborg laboratory (perhaps with a dangerous cyborg) or even a partially uploaded Cochise AI. This has so much potential, that it really hurts how this is currently made. I think that to attack the enemy with different biological system and depriving him of ressources or possible help and without losing much ressources is quite a smart way to attack. Matthias seems to be my kind of guy, like Finster.
Most important:
10)Why do i have to ask this questions about Darwin Vilage and the story writers did not do it? Suspension of disbelief is only good, as long the story is consistent and logical within itself.

So please think again, before you release this in it's current state.
Darkzone out.