Preferred party size in Wasteland 2 [poll added]

[Mort2]

Same here, I agree 100% with this:

It's not about whether or not you have played Wasteland. It's about whether or not you are willing to support a game like Wasteland.

That is as long as you understand what like means:

some have come thinking they're going to get Fallout Redux. Some thing they're going to get Wasteland Redux. Some think this is Crowd-Designed Dream-RPG Project. Some think this is Tactical Combat Reborn. Most are going to be wrong - a game cannot possibly be all these things.

[MDF_MadDogFargo]

Am I the only one who thinks this poll makes too many assumptions of what a "party" may look like?

Perhaps it's a valid assumption that Wasteland 2 will have a party something like a cross between Fallout and Wasteland. Most likely it is a valid assumption and we will see parties of under 10 with a combo of PCs and NPCs.

But IMO this Phaederuss makes a good point:

Yet, what is Wasteland exactly? Yea post apocalyptic, turn based, party game. Ok. Can you really say much else from the one precedent that we have?

krellen also makes a good point:

There are plenty of things we can take from Wasteland as indicative of what defines Wasteland. The visual style - contrary to popular argument, it looked that way because that was the way the designers choose to have it look, not because of "technical limitations"; there were a lot of options within those limitations they could have taken, the humour and tone of the writing, party mechanics (particularly the aspect of NPCs taking orders, but not necessarily following them exactly or at all), and especially elements of the setting and world. It's not like Wasteland invented the idea of "post-Apocalyptic"; the theme has been present in film and literature throughout history, and ways in which Wasteland differs from those earlier examples are signs of deliberate choices on the part of the games' designers (in particular, the relatively non-destroyed world, the presence of life and greenery, and the prevalence of robotics and cybernetics.)

I think I might differ from both of you what constitutes Wasteland. IMO, the 'tactical RPG' approach doesn't quite capture it. Wasteland moves you around between squares on a map. You engage enemies with a fairly simple combat interface. In Wasteland, it's a series of commands and you read what your characters do (all on the same turn), after you make your choices.

To me, this environment is like Civilization or Heroes of Might and Magic (and more like say, the original Civ, and HOMM3 than later games is what I have in mind). If you put Wasteland's command interface in place of the battles in either one of those games, you get something closer to Wasteland than you get from Fallout or Baldur's Gate.

Who's to say your Wasteland 2 party couldn't be an army? You can have multiple leaders and split up your party between different troops. I wouldn't do the HOMM hero-outside-of-party though, I would make all your characters "heroes."

So, I'm saying that choosing between 4 PCs and 2 or more NPCs is too narrow of a choice for me.