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

[Kem0sabe]

I hope they learned their lesson with WL2, and setup a proper development team for Torment, the extensive pre-production can help with laying out the game, but the execution is where it's at...

Essential things like UI design, zone design, encounter design and combat mechanics were/are all problematic for WL2, and unless inxile puts some serious weight behind improving these, Torment will suffer from much of the same.

On the contrary, preproduction is where it's at. The groundwork for all of these things (to varying degrees, UI for example might change until the very end of development) is meant to be determined during preproduction. Preproduction doesn't mean "on paper". It (also) means prototyping systems in a working slice of the game, like what George Ziets is currently doing with The Bloom in Torment.

What Sensuki and are I saying is that Wasteland 2's preproduction appears to have been insufficient for this purpose.

I dont think WL2's problems were down to lack of planning, but on the execution itself, it just feels to me like sloppy work. They either need more hands on deck as to not burden every designer with work on multiple fronts, or restructure their workflow into an albeit slower development cycle, a better one.

 

[Infinitron]

I dont think WL2's problems were down to lack of planning, but on the execution itself, it just feels to me like sloppy work.

What's sloppy about it? They put together a gameplay video that even people on the Codex were impressed by, by February 2013. A mere 10 months of development. That's not sloppy. Fargo's boys are obviously talented enough.

Weird UI? Could have been avoided if they had the right vision for UI from the beginning (ie, NOT MINIMALIST). By now that's all been iterated away, but still.

Zone design? Could have been avoided if they knew what Fallout (and Wasteland) fans were expecting from their areas, but somehow this was overlooked.

Combat mechanics? Obviously a matter of planning.

Insufficient preproduction accounts for most of Wasteland 2's issues; it seems to me that inXile spent much of 2012 building themselves up as a company and weren't really fully hooked into the realities of what the players on the ground were interested in until around the time the Torment Kickstarter began.

But of course, we'll only know for sure when we get that post-mortem interview.

 

[Athelas]

Didn't they say they had to go with a square grid because they created the levels before designing the systems? They'd have been a lot better off enlisting Obsidian's assistance in a general capacity rather than hiring 'celebrity' cRPG designers to craft a dungeon or two. Or just read an interview with one of them:

http://anonofholland.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/chris-avellone-interview/

Also, we have invested a lot of energy in systems, and I feel it’s the right call. All the mechanisms for how the player communicates and interacts with the environment should be established first, including how the player talks with characters, how they move, how they fight… this may seem common sense, but launching into production without a finalized design on how the character’s movement set works and the interface components can be problematic, so we want to make sure we do this right.

As a simple example of the importance of this, if you attempted to design 30 levels in Super Mario Bros without knowing how high and long Mario can jump, it’s almost impossible to do correctly – and more importantly, you want to make sure the basic act of jumping in a Mario game is polished and fun naturally from a second to second experience. For us, comparable examples would be how fast a party can move, how fast to swing a sword, what the player’s camera view on the world will be, and more. From there, you want to go into systems that define the character and then systems that allow them to affect the world – like spells.

 

[Kem0sabe]

I dont think WL2's problems were down to lack of planning, but on the execution itself, it just feels to me like sloppy work.

What's sloppy about it? They put together a gameplay video that even people on the Codex were impressed by, by February 2013. A mere 10 months of development. That's not sloppy. Fargo's boys are obviously talented enough.

Weird UI? Could have been avoided if they had the right vision for UI from the beginning (ie, NOT MINIMALIST). By now that's all been iterated away, but still.

Zone design? Could have been avoided if they knew what Fallout (and Wasteland) fans were expecting from their areas, but somehow this was overlooked.

Combat mechanics? Obviously a matter of planning.

Insufficient preproduction accounts for most of Wasteland 2's issues; it seems to me that they spent much of 2012 building themselves up as a company and weren't really fully hooked into the realities of what the players on the ground were interested in until around the time the Torment Kickstarter began.

But of course, we'll only know for sure when we get that post-mortem interview.

They had the money and the time to work things out slowly but good, even if that meant downscaling the scope of the game somewhat. Inxile just played fast and loose with the game as they went, and the result shows.

Your right that the extended pre-production might help, they will have a lot of the ground work done, but wen it gets down to it, whomever gets to "drive the wagon" on this project, needs to take a very different approach to their production, more hands on, less error prone.

 

[DosBuster]

Eh. From my understanding a lot of the art team that I've seen are newcomers to the industry, talented people but fairly green. Game looks nice though in my opinion, or at least playable.

 

[Morkar Left]

The intro trailer released is already old news but I'd like to spare some comments made about it on the youtube account of a well known German gamemag:

I think everybody here is thinking it's somehow like Fallout but it's different. Just the same setting. It's played in isometric perspective and it's more like a turnbased strategy game.

-> that explains to me somehow why recent turnbased rpgs have more in common with strategy games instead of rpgs mechanicalwise

Fallout 3 impostor? I like!

Guys, it's some kind of real time strategy game and not like Fallout. It's not an ego shooter

Love the fallout scenario and Wasteland seems to be inspired by it. I would play it, unfortunately it's turnbased strategy.

The game is reminding me at Borderlands

...Unfortunately the game has turnbased combat. Why hasn't it a combat system like Men of War?

too much gibberish (in the game)

the graphics are total shit

It'S a strategy game and has nothing to do with Fallout besides the setting

I don't like the perspective. Would be cool if it would be an egoperspective similar to Fallout

Reading the comments made me laughing and crying at the same time.

 

[Duraframe300]

Didn't they say they had to go with a square grid because they created the levels before designing the systems? They'd have been a lot better off enlisting Obsidian's assistance in a general capacity rather than hiring 'celebrity' cRPG designers to craft a dungeon or two.

Which aren't around for actually IMPLENTING that dungeon aside from saying k'.

Yes, execution is the problem. Things change during development and execution. You can spend 17 fucking years on preproduction and it will not end up as imagined. Due to technical, production or whateverthefuck reasons. Thats why you need to stay close, work together and provide oversight during the ENTIRE development.

So, I disagree with Infinitron.

 

[Infinitron]

So, I disagree with Infinitron.

You do? I didn't say anything about people not having to stay for the entire development. I would say that that is part of the preproduction process, to stick around and make sure that what you preproduced...is produced properly.

 

[Duraframe300]

So, I disagree with Infinitron.

You do? I didn't say anything about people not having to stay for the entire development. I would say that that is part of the preproduction process, to stick around and make sure that what you preproduced...is produced properly.

I think we just have a different interpretation of pre-production here.

 

[DosBuster]

Pre-production should be design (game, story and technical) as well as setting up the systems to get the game rolling (asset pipelines and such). The changing to a square grid thing is slightly perplexing since those sort of technical things are done during pre-production. In terms of level designers and such implementing the dungeons and such, I've seen both examples used in my opinion it doesn't make too much of a difference. In fact, if you look at the Ag center design doc that MCA wrote (in the Project Eternity rezzed video) you will notice he marked not only the intractable props out as well as their descriptions but also the EXACT location placement.

EDIT: Uh.. something interesting I discovered in the design doc. That not only references the cut skill silent move, but also points towards possibly there being no choice between Ag center and Highpool.

Quote:
"Entrance point: if Vulture's Cry (Highpool) is in the party, he/she will indicate the players should Silent Move. Something's wrong and they don't want to be spotted.

 

[Daedalos]

But wasn't part of Inxiles development strategy and thus pre-production, that they wanted as early a "beta/alpha" as possible in order to garner large amounts of feedback on the "prototypes" and designs, to see if they actually work?


The writing seems to be suffering the most and the tie-ins with the different locations and quests, since this is usually done much earlier in the process.

Maybe they should've held a longer pre-production phase, where they involved the users and kickstarter backers more in the decicions before starting the development and THEN asking for feedback and advice..

This might be the reason why most people where so stunned that the beta was so crude and lacking, because InXile wanted the community to fill in the gaps, and "tell us what's good".. instead of showing us you KNOW what's good.. I dunno if that makes sense..

I don't mind a very iterative and active development phases, where you involve the users far more than what "normal" betas tend to do in game developments.


Alot of the problems probably stem from the fact that they didn't expect to earn that much money from the kickstarter etc. that they decided to expand their scope of the game, but failing to accurately control and lock-down that expanded scope.. and perhaps throwing too many new ideas and stuff into the mix and hoping it would sort out.

Like... Oh we got more money now and more support, we could do A, B and C now, but it's harder to determine what it actually requires or entails to implement said features or ideas properly... so something might end up a little half-baked.

 

[bonescraper]

I hope they learned their lesson with WL2, and setup a proper development team for Torment, the extensive pre-production can help with laying out the game, but the execution is where it's at...

Essential things like UI design, zone design, encounter design and combat mechanics were/are all problematic for WL2, and unless inxile puts some serious weight behind improving these, Torment will suffer from much of the same.

I can see the cooperation with Obsidian bearing some fruits here, inxile will probably try to maintain a lot of the groundwork from PoE.

And they should hire some fucking artists and let the coders code, not make game assets.

Yeah, inb4 graphics whore!!111!one. But Torment deserves better.

 

[Roguey]

What's sloppy about it? They put together a gameplay video that even people on the Codex were impressed by, by February 2013. A mere 10 months of development.

Not me.

I could point out that Aliens: Colonial Marines video as a similar example of competence.

 

[Infinitron]

I could point out that Aliens: Colonial Marines video as a similar example of competence.

Not really since ACM was in development for years.

 

[Roguey]

I could point out that Aliens: Colonial Marines video as a similar example of competence.

Not really since ACM was in development for years.

I'm saying fake is fake is fake. Fake hexes, fake stealth, blurry ugly brown and green graphics that obscured the linear level design that was seemingly only obvious to me.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm saying fake is fake is fake. Fake hexes, fake stealth, blurry ugly brown and green graphics that obscured the linear level design that was seemingly only obvious to me.

Good for you, but that's not what I was talking about.

(And the hexes weren't "fake", they were a feature that was partially implemented but got scrapped. Are you suggesting that the video was doctored to add hexes?)

 

[Roguey]

I'm saying fake is fake is fake. Fake hexes, fake stealth, blurry ugly brown and green graphics that obscured the linear level design that was seemingly only obvious to me.

Good for you, but that's not what I was talking about.

(And the hexes weren't "fake", they were a feature that was partially implemented but got scrapped. Are you suggesting that the video was doctored to add hexes?)

I'm saying it was not representative of final quality, i.e. fake. Rubber ice cubes in a drink for an advertisement.

 

[Kaldurenik]

I'm saying fake is fake is fake. Fake hexes, fake stealth, blurry ugly brown and green graphics that obscured the linear level design that was seemingly only obvious to me.

Good for you, but that's not what I was talking about.

(And the hexes weren't "fake", they were a feature that was partially implemented but got scrapped. Are you suggesting that the video was doctored to add hexes?)

I'm saying it was not representative of final quality, i.e. fake. Rubber ice cubes in a drink for an advertisement.

Things change, get removed, added i dont get the point to complain that its fake.
When devs make games you wont see most of the things that get removed due to closed door policy.

 

[Whiran]

Weird UI? Could have been avoided if they had the right vision for UI from the beginning (ie, NOT MINIMALIST). By now that's all been iterated away, but still.

I think they could have done better with the UI if they had storyboarded it from the start and dedicated one person to making it happen. The UI went through a series of iterations mainly because it appeared to be an afterthought. They had an idea on what they wanted (modular UI elements) but no one seemed to have taken the time to really -think- about the use of the UI. The character creation interface is a perfect example (and not the only one) that screams to a lack of thought about -why- things are where they are and why they were placed in those positions. It seemed more like a bad copy of other character creation interfaces and not something that someone really sat down and thought about.

They made decisions based on... I'm not sure. Thinking about it, It seems to me that they were decisions made by whichever programmer was doing that part of the game and then they'd pop an artist-type to beautify whatever the programmer did - this is pretty standard fare for most software companies. Sometimes it works out but usually it doesn't since the programmer is focused on making it work and not on how it is used. Decisions tend to be made from a position of a lot of background expertise and experience with the program they are working on so, to them, it is -obvious- why something does something but an outsider looking in becomes baffled. That's why having a dedicated resource for the UI is really important. inXile is a relatively small team and I doubt they had someone dedicated to the UI from the start. If they did... they either need to take a bunch of basic UI design courses, read a lot of UI design books, or something.

I would like to believe that inXile now has someone who's learned an awful lot about UI design, implementation, and use after going through Wasteland 2 but... it still seems to me that they've been treating the UI as an afterthought. I think they contracted out someone who was putting 'mock-ups' on the forums so maybe if that person spends some time really learning about UI design there might be something really sweet coming in inXile's next title. Maybe.

 

[Sensuki]

Pretty sure they outsourced it to a backer in the end, and all he really did was give things a more modern and cleaner look while keeping exactly the same style and functions (which were probably locked in due to backend work).

 

[Grotesque]

Zone design? Could have been avoided if they knew what Fallout (and Wasteland) fans were expecting from their areas, but somehow this was overlooked.

Oh, they knew. They just did not give a shit.



When they were taking propositions from backers, one requested aspect with many votes was also open areas as in Fallout (and as in real life may I just add).

 

[Infinitron]

When they were taking propositions from backers, one requested aspect with many votes was also open areas as in Fallout (and as in real life may I just add).

Source?

 

[Zed]

too much gibberish (in the game)

the graphics are total shit

Reading the comments made me laughing and crying at the same time.

These two are legit complaints tho.

 

[Rake]

too much gibberish (in the game)

the graphics are total shit

Reading the comments made me laughing and crying at the same time.

These two are legit complaints tho.

Not compaired to Fallout 3 though, like those...things did

 

[shihonage]

Fallout 3 has been a "successful" Fallout reboot, and modern youths, upon brain-searching "fallout", will go back only as far as 2008 to find a reference.

Back in 2008 people were derping how crappy reboots don't affect the original, and how the "old guard" is "blowing it out of proportion". And yet here we are.

Subpar intelligence always has the advantage of numbers.