Incline Wasteland 2 Discussion Thread

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Pre-rendering is a lot more work-intensive though. To do it properly you have to render every possible combination of gear and pose, for each frame of each animation. And if you want to tweak a texture a bit you have to do it all again. And when all that is done it only looks marginally better than a real-time render using a modern 3D engine. Or worse actually, since you can't do things like real-time shadows and lighting that conform to the environment.

3D models, whether pre-rendered or real-time are not "drawn". Artistic touch up is a poor alternative to actual hand-drawn graphics. Pre-rendered 3D was a dead end technology for games, offering neither the charm and beauty of hand drawn art, nor the flexibility and fanciness of real-time 3D.

The thing that makes no sense to me is that WL2 has 3 companions in a party. That's more than the Mass Effects allow you in party and the same as Dragon Age.

So really, functionally he's still playing what he wants but now he gets to LARP 4 characters instead. He can be 4 times more emotionally engaging with his companions in a single playthrough! Take that Skyrim! I call it "quad wielding radiant engagement (tm)"!

Hell if it really bothers him he can just kill off the other 3 and roam around with a party of 4, I'm sure he should still be able to play the game that way.

Why he's bitching about it instead of realising the obvious is beyond me.

I think he assumes the 3 NPC companions will be shallow, something like the NPCs in Storm of Zehir.

LYDIA ISN'T SHALLOW! YOU CAN MARRY HER!

I guess the real issue then is why that's his first assumption and instead why he's not directing his efforts towards asking for interesting and well written companions instead of asking for something that'll never happen.

Well written companions with their own side quests and arcs where you can actually influence the outcomes for the companions, as opposed to just deal with daddy issues and then fuck them i.e. Bioware, would be a reasonable request and I think enough people would support that and the devs might even listen to that.

I mean, before breaking down in a mess and vandalising wikipedia entries you could try to think things through calmly and make requests that could change the game to what you want without completely destroying the whole idea of it.

fuzi0n never claimed to be an Elder Scrolls/Bethesda fan. He appears to be more of a Biodrone.

Who cares what he thinks then. Thanks for the money, r00fles!

To be fair, I think his complaints have more to do with how party based games have a less personal approach to story and dialog. Like, Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment try to put your character as an important piece of its story (I think PS:T is much more successful with this, but that is besides the point). In a party based game like Wasteland or Wizardry, the dialog usually doesn't refer to the PC, but to the party, which is what I think is his issue with the game.

... and Baldur's Gate and Planescape don't do that? It's a conceit of party-based games, especially if you have a fixed player character - you can't guarantee who will be available at any given time, so dialogue either has to be written generally as possible, or have a few keywords changed based on who's in your party, or 1-2 occasional situations where it matters... otherwise it becomes a massive clusterfuck of conditionals that takes a really long time to write. I never felt dialogue in a "true" party-based game was especially less personal than in one with a fixed protagonist... at least in those cases I can imagine who's being spoken to, answering, etc.

Planescape definitely doesn't do that - to the point that if you try to talk to someone with an NPC companion, the Nameless One will run up and talk to him instead.

Don't really remember, but isn't it the same in BG where the dialog is focused on the Bhaalspawn or whatthefuck?

No, you can talk with anybody in Baldur's Gate (though I'm not sure the dialog always makes sense if you do that, ie during plot critical dialogues)

going through the vision doc reactions

http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2333&start=20

<---- pretend I photoshopped this onto an astronaut's helmet

there's that need for completely avoiding combat again

oh wow, there are people not too sold on the interface customisation thing, because they're afraid it'll be too complex

what the hell, just don't touch it then you luddites

I can see that the new backstory is going to be a little contentious.

Interesting suggestion. Not too sure about how many people will bother with that once their all-star team is dead though.

brother hiver dropping some meteoric thoughts:
http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2342

what is this shit seriously
that's like saying being able to customise your party is bad because then the designer has no faith in his preset characters
because one automatically leads to the other

Then why have them as keywords then when they can automatically be in the conversation choices
don't make this into a per-character bolt-on morrowind dialog dictionary

That would be fine, no one has to like one approach or the other. His retardation comes from being butthurt because he was supposedly fooled into thinking Wasteland 2's party style would be like Baldur's Gate, instead of...er, Wasteland.

Actually, depends what you consider customizable interface. You could say NWN2 interface was customizable, but no matter how you customized it it still sucked shit.

Camera controls != interface

No shit. But I was really talking about the interface, not the camera which is in a whole other level of suckage.

I know about customisable interfaces that were crap, but how does it follow to assume that WL2's customisable interface would be bad just because it was customisable?

I'm cautiously optimistic about this game. Is my stance justified?

Hmm, was it that different from NWN1's? I only remember the "quick spellcasting" window being kind of clumsy.

this is a bold move that will send off a cascade of various relationship modifiers with the other npcs on the codex setting

Well, I haven't seen too many customizable interfaces to he honest. And what I remember sucked (like NWN2), so "customizable interface" doesn't sound that good to me either. Of course, it doesn't mean it will automatically suck, just that based on previous experiences it doesn't sound good.

my view would be to assume that they have a workable default interface that would nevertheless have an inbuilt moving shit around as you please factor in the HUD section of game options

this strikes me as the specific UI based strange reaction version of 'what, modding support? IS THE BASE GAME GOING TO BE SHIT BECAUSE WOW THIS IS GOING TO BE NWN OC AGAIN RITE'