Actually playing old Wasteland: things I dislike

[CaptainPatch]

I expect this to become quite a lengthy list as I play the game. Individual items are being numbered to make directing responses easier; NOT by degree of importance.

1. Right off the bat: You can NOT start a new game until you complete the game. As long as there is one PC alive, you are anchored to that point in the game. No fresh start allowed. If you made some bad choices based on a lack of information, you're stuck. The ONLY way to start a fresh game without first completing the one you already started is to uninstall the game and then reinstall it.

2. Once combat starts you can NOT simply quit out of the game and then start it up again so you go back to where you were before combat started. Nooo. You have to sit there and watch as your party is butchered one member at a time because the party is seriously outmatched by the current enemy. Only after the last member succumbs and you are declared dead can you go back to your last Save point.

3. Only ONE Save slot. 'Nuff said.

4. No sense of urgency. Get to where you need to be in one day, one month, one decade, it doesn't matter. Apparently the cosmos revolves around your party.

5. Because there are no insta-heal items, after taking a beating, you find a safe place and then speed up the clock until everyone is healed. One Hit Point recovered for each half-hour of rest. When you get up there to where party members have >50 Hit points, and they've just been hammered down to <10 Hit Points, it takes nearly a full day or more to recover. So the game becomes this tedious passage of walk for 15 game-minutes. Fight a battle. Spend half a game-day recovering. Repeat endlessly. It will be over a game-decade before I get to THE END.

6. Variable capacity Clips. In a pistol, it's 18 rounds. In an Uzi, it's 40 round. Same Clip. Duh.

7. Swapping items between party members takes forever.

8. It's all well and good to say that the additional 3 party NPCs are independent minded. But the mechanic is pointless. "Ace disobeys you." Or more commonly, "Ace doesn't want to trade." During the activities where these comments appear, the clock is stopped. All you have to do is order the NPC to do the exact same thing and within 5 attempts at most, he complies. So, what was the point of the disobedience? All it does is make the _player_ waste time.

9. There are no containers in the Wasteland. None. And anything that you set onto the ground instantly disappears. So swapping items between party members becomes a royal pain as you try to make everyone's backpacks be divvied up efficiently. A REAL royal pain when there are only three or four open Inventory slots in the entire party.

10. Movement arrows and action arrows are the exact same keys. You step up to a suspicious looking area in that --> direction. You Use Perception in that direction --> to see if you detect a trap. If your fingertip twitches, you look and then immediately step onto that landmine to suspected was there. (I call this a Palsy penalty.)

Ten should do for starters.

[Drool]

1. Right off the bat: You can NOT start a new game until you complete the game.

The reset tool (which was missing from the re-release in the 90s and thus missing from most copies floating around the internet) took care of that issue as well as giving an unofficial New Game+ mode.

2. Once combat starts you can NOT simply quit out of the game and then start it up again so you go back to where you were before combat started.

I just close the DOS Box window.

4. No sense of urgency.

Personal opinion, but I like that. It gives me a chance to explore. I have more than enough urgency in my life as is.

5. Because there are no insta-heal items, after taking a beating, you find a safe place and then speed up the clock until everyone is healed.

Yeah, that does suck, especially in the Vegas Sewers and Cochise where you're going to get pummeled mercilessly. However, using macros does speed this up immensely. In a few minutes real time, you can burn away a day and be mostly, or completely, healed. Also, once you have money, there's always doctors.

It's a pain, but I think health recovery is one of the toughest things to get right, because no matter how you do it, someone's gonna complain. Stimpacks suck because they're instant. Modern FPS suck because hiding behind a wall for 5 seconds heals you. Wasteland sucks because you have to lean on the Esc key.

Just be glad it wasn't like Bard's Tale spell point regeneration: only during the day, based on the amount of real world time elapsed. Oh yeah. That was a nightmare. Especially in 3 where just buying a recharge wasn't an (insanely overpriced) option.

6. Variable capacity Clips. In a pistol, it's 18 rounds. In an Uzi, it's 40 round. Same Clip. Duh.

I think this was mostly a coding limitation. It shipped on 4 5.25" floppies for the C64 (which you had to copy), so space was precious. Making three generic clips was easier than 8 (9 if you count the Red Ryder). However, as an 11 year old, I never questioned this, heh.

8. It's all well and good to say that the additional 3 party NPCs are independent minded. But the mechanic is pointless.

Well, yes. It was more of an issue in combat where they might attack the Jerk who was running away instead of the Leather Jerk who was kicking the shit out of you. Or they might burn a full clip on their AK-97 against a wandering lizard with 5 HP.

And even though it didn't consume game time, seeing "Christine disobeys you" when trying desperately to make her use her Medic: 6 skill on my MORtally wounded characters was horrifying. And if they're only ignoring you 5 times, you haven't gotten them to higher levels. And some NPCs were more likely to give you the finger than others (like Christine). Ralf was a pretty get-along kind of guy, but you'd also saved him from agonizing torture and all.

10. Movement arrows and action arrows are the exact same keys.

Can't say I ever had this problem, but I can see how it'd be aggravating.

[CaptainPatch]

2. Once combat starts you can NOT simply quit out of the game and then start it up again so you go back to where you were before combat started.

I just close the DOS Box window.

I Alt-Ctrl-Del to bring up Task Manager and close the application. Then start the game... again.

5. Because there are no insta-heal items, after taking a beating, you find a safe place and then speed up the clock until everyone is healed.

Yeah, that does suck,... However, using macros does speed this up immensely. In a few minutes real time, you can burn away a day and be mostly, or completely, healed. Also, once you have money, there's always doctors.

So I'm wondering, "What's the point?" NOT using stimpacks is because it's way too miraculous; I get that. But having the party camp out for half a day after having only marched for 15 minutes is just as ridiculous. And just as artificial. Concede the point and use a mechanism that doesn't waste the players' time so much. Something that involves just a few keystrokes instead of leaning on the Esc key for five minutes. (I'm almost certain this one mechanism is wearing out my keyboard at a seriously accelerated rate.) And I don't mind paying doctors so much. What I DO mind is wasting time and having to go waaaayyyy out of my way just to get to them. (That doctor in Highpool is getting rich off of just one party of Rangers!)

8. It's all well and good to say that the additional 3 party NPCs are independent minded. But the mechanic is pointless.

Well, yes. It was more of an issue in combat where they might attack the Jerk who was running away instead of the Leather Jerk who was kicking the shit out of you. Or they might burn a full clip on their AK-97 against a wandering lizard with 5 HP.

That part I don't mind. The refusing to trade is simply wasting my time for no good reason because it doesn't stop me from having the task done, eventually. If once they said "No," that ended the possibility, it would be a different matter. "No" works best when "no" means NO; not ""Try again a few more times and I'll do what you want."

[Drool]

2. Once combat starts you can NOT simply quit out of the game and then start it up again so you go back to where you were before combat started.

I just close the DOS Box window.

I Alt-Ctrl-Del to bring up Task Manager and close the application. Then start the game... again.

Well, it takes you to your last save, just like dying would, but it cuts out the last painful moments of a horrible battle.

Concede the point and use a mechanism that doesn't waste the players' time so much. Something that involves just a few keystrokes instead of leaning on the Esc key for five minutes.

Sure, but what were their options at the time? I'm trying to think of how other games of the time did "free" healing. SSI games involved making camp. Bard's Tale had magic. How did Ultima do it? Making camp? I guess they could have gone with block resting like SSI did (or, more contemporary, like Bethesda does) but I don't know how much space that would take. Wasteland felt like it was bursting the seams of data storage as is, and anything more robust than holding the escape key might have been too much.

Or maybe they were just evil bastards. Dunno.

What I DO mind is wasting time and having to go waaaayyyy out of my way just to get to them. (That doctor in Highpool is getting rich off of just one party of Rangers!)

There's docs all over besides Highpool. Almost every location has one. And if you like Doc Bob's getting rich, check out Nuclear Medicine in the Mushroom Cloud Temple. They're freaking gougers.

Thinking on healing more, it would have been nice if the Medic and Doctor skill could be used to help with HP recovery. Maybe they'd give X points back at the cost of Y time autoadvancing. So, you use Medic and the clock jumps ahead 3 hours (incidentally healing everyone 6 points; except maybe the one using the skill) but the target gets double or triple the natural regeneration. It would still be slow, and would risk ambush (like hitting escape does), but it would integrate the skills, avoid a new interface screen, and not be insta-heal. Ah well.

"Try again a few more times and I'll do what you want."

I always viewed it as the Rangers browbeating and screaming at them until they caved in. "Fine! Take the fucking gun, just shut the hell up!"

[krellen]

Incidentally, I believe a high-charisma Ranger in the first position increased the likelihood of NPCs behaving.

[Lucius]

Thinking on healing more, it would have been nice if the Medic and Doctor skill could be used to help with HP recovery. Maybe they'd give X points back at the cost of Y time autoadvancing. So, you use Medic and the clock jumps ahead 3 hours (incidentally healing everyone 6 points; except maybe the one using the skill) but the target gets double or triple the natural regeneration. It would still be slow, and would risk ambush (like hitting escape does), but it would integrate the skills, avoid a new interface screen, and not be insta-heal.

Regarding health, it seems like the game was balanced on running around with 5 health at any time. Healing to full health, with all the random encounters, was nearly impossible and I don't think that's how you were suppose to play. I do agree though waiting is too long and I like drool's idea here. Healing tied to a time-advance and skill check? Yes please. Healing items not tied to a character skill? No thanks, I'd prefer pressing the esc key.

Regarding character personality I think it was very innovative but very limited by technology. I'd expect this aspect from Wasteland will be far more fleshed out in WL2.

As for sense of urgency, are you moving through the game as quickly as the game allows or are you chit chatting with Laurie for hours on end in the hotel? I bet you're moving through the game, working on your mission. It's difficult to be side tracked in Wasteland. There isn't a lot of fluff to waste time with. Considering your mission is pretty much explore the wasteland, it's hard to do anything but. I like this about the game. It's so open ended with such an unclear mission goal and such little direction. I just don't see this as an issue with Wasteland.

EDIT: Side note, Krellen you realize you have the most posts of any poster on the forums, and Drool I believe you are #2. Fun facts.

[CaptainPatch]

Concede the point and use a mechanism that doesn't waste the players' time so much. Something that involves just a few keystrokes instead of leaning on the Esc key for five minutes.

Sure, but what were their options at the time?

(R)est
For how long? _____

Enter a number of hours during which you will be healing at the rate of 1 Hit Point per half-hour. The game checks to see if any foes stumble upon you during that amount of time (resulting in healing interruptus), and then skips ahead to the end of that period. Time elapsed is about 30 seconds, as compared to leaning on the Esc key for five minutes.

What I DO mind is wasting time and having to go waaaayyyy out of my way just to get to them. (That doctor in Highpool is getting rich off of just one party of Rangers!)

There's docs all over besides Highpool.

All over the place? 1) Highpool. 2) Needles. 3) The Mushroomer Temple in Vegas. Up to the point where you are slogging your way through the Vegas sewers, those are your ONLY choices where you can Cure Sewer Rot. After being washed down the river, usually over half your party are unconscious, and the party is stranded literally in the middle of nowhere. Then you must drag them all to the nearest doctor (Needles, or if you want to be economical, go a little further to Highpool) hoping nothing too powerful doesn't attack on the way.

Thinking on healing more, it would have been nice if the Medic and Doctor skill could be used to help with HP recovery.

Heartily agree! If you can Heal a party member all the way up from MORtal to simply UNConscious, why not even further, at least until they are conscious and functional? Or as a nod to improved Medicine and favorable mutations, a "healing potion" equivalent that accelerates the healing rate so you don't have to spend so much time leaning on the Esc key? Call it Fast-Heal (TM) or Insta-Heal (TM) or Penta (TM). [The last is a reference to the SciFi Vorkossigan novels.]

[krellen]

There is actually a second, slightly less expensive, doctor in Las Vegas. Not that it invalidates your point - just sayin'.

[Rzarkrusz Rowa]

I disagree about 5. A rest button would be nice, though.

[Noble]

All over the place? 1) Highpool. 2) Needles. 3) The Mushroomer Temple in Vegas. Up to the point where you are slogging your way through the Vegas sewers, those are your ONLY choices where you can Cure Sewer Rot. After being washed down the river, usually over half your party are unconscious, and the party is stranded literally in the middle of nowhere. Then you must drag them all to the nearest doctor (Needles, or if you want to be economical, go a little further to Highpool) hoping nothing too powerful doesn't attack on the way. [The last is a reference to the SciFi Vorkossigan novels.]

Actually, there are five doctors.

1.) Highpool 2.) Quarts 3.) Needles 4.) Las Vegas 5.) Las Vegas Temple

[CaptainPatch]

Actually, there are five doctors.

1.) Highpool 2.) Quarts 3.) Needles 4.) Las Vegas 5.) Las Vegas Temple

Ah, Quack's Clinic! Totally missed that one.

[Drool]

There's also two doctors in Sleeper One and a doctor in Darwin.

Enter a number of hours during which you will be healing at the rate of 1 Hit Point per half-hour. The game checks to see if any foes stumble upon you during that amount of time (resulting in healing interruptus), and then skips ahead to the end of that period. Time elapsed is about 30 seconds, as compared to leaning on the Esc key for five minutes.

Essentially SSI, yeah. That would have been a lot more convenient, but again, I don't know how much room they had, or how complicated (code-wise) that would be. It's possible that they would have had to sacrifice something else to add that. Or they didn't think of it. But, like Lucius said, you were generally okay running around with 10 or 15 HP. About the only times I would stop and wait long enough to heal fully were in the Vegas sewers and Cochise. And both made it reasonably easy to get to a safe room (my Rangers have wasted plenty of time in the Funny Rooms).

Up to the point where you are slogging your way through the Vegas sewers, those are your ONLY choices where you can Cure Sewer Rot.

Well, yes, but with a rope you can completely skip Sewer Rot. Also, by the time you're in the Vegas sewers, you should be well enough equipped that even a single Ranger can handle any over-land random encounters.

[CaptainPatch]

Well, yes, but with a rope you can completely skip Sewer Rot. Also, by the time you're in the Vegas sewers, you should be well enough equipped that even a single Ranger can handle any over-land random encounters.

How do you use a rope at that first crossing? That's the one that Rots me every time.

[Drool]

It's kind of a bastard. The game mentions something about being able to "attach a rope here" to help with crossing. When you stand on the edge and select to use the rope, you use it with the spacebar, not with the down arrow. Kind of like how you had to back at Highpool for the cave.

[CaptainPatch]

It's kind of a bastard. The game mentions something about being able to "attach a rope here" to help with crossing. When you stand on the edge and select to use the rope, you use it with the spacebar, not with the down arrow. Kind of like how you had to back at Highpool for the cave.

THAT is to cross the pit. I figured that one out. I'm talking about when you first arrive from the Temple. Go straight South from there to reach the North bank of the river of sewage. Trying to cross to the South bank is what kills me. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Sucked under and moved to the next section of Sewers further East.

[Drool]

Oh, then you use the rope to the south.

[CaptainPatch]

Oh, then you use the rope to the south.

We shall see....

[Interloper]

A lot of those seem like technology limitations that should be easy to avoid in WL2, but it does seem like it'd be tedious to play nowadays. That's why I watched the LP Brian linked. I might give it a go later, but I've got Fallout 2 to finish first.

Regarding stimpaks as a healing mechanic, why not just have them instant outside of combat, but take several turns in combat? If you aren't fighting there's no reason for them to take time, and you're not using a turn system so it doesn't matter. Inside combat you don't want to be able to instaheal , but it's easier to just use the same item.

[MDF_MadDogFargo]

3. Only ONE Save slot. 'Nuff said.

Yeah; but that limitation always seemed inconsequential to me, since I'm usually disk-swapping anyway. Just keep an extra disk or two (apple version)/backup folders (dos version). Not disk swapping makes it like hardcore mode!

4. No sense of urgency. Get to where you need to be in one day, one month, one decade, it doesn't matter. Apparently the cosmos revolves around your party.

5. Because there are no insta-heal items, after taking a beating, you find a safe place and then speed up the clock until everyone is healed. One Hit Point recovered for each half-hour of rest. When you get up there to where party members have >50 Hit points, and they've just been hammered down to <10 Hit Points, it takes nearly a full day or more to recover. So the game becomes this tedious passage of walk for 15 game-minutes. Fight a battle. Spend half a game-day recovering. Repeat endlessly. It will be over a game-decade before I get to THE END.

Yeah, but none of that time really matters, aside from healing you. Waiting doesn't age your characters. You might "wait" for a virtual decade; but nothing in the game advances because no events have taken place. No story time passes during your waiting. With respect to the events and NPCs in the game, i.e. the story, time on the game map passes in a vacuum. Time being the thing that keeps everything IRL from happening all at once, doesn't exist as such in Wasteland until you (the player) introduce it by playing the game and (virtually) rolling the dice. In Wasteland the only "aging" that can be said to happen is the skill improvements that change your characters and the local/global events that change the game world.

This is often taken for granted and regarded as a limitation of technology. But it's the same when you read a book or play a PnP RPG or play discrete strategy games like chess. No story time passes between the action. WL world map time and encounter time are on a different scale (or maybe more accurately, a different dimension) from story time.

Time is a funny and relative thing in Wasteland due to its flexibility. In the encounters, the dice are rolled in order of initiative (speed) and resolved sequentially even though the narrative places the actions all in one phase together. The number of moves a character can make in a single action phase is sometimes relative to the character's speed, agility, or skill levels. For example, four or more melee attacks for high Brawling skill. Therefore, the game invites us to imagine a mixture of faster and slower moves simultaneously.

In Wasteland, we read (or skim) the combat descriptions as paragraphs out of a book. Graphically, WL2 has some options for displaying simultaneous faster and slower motion; in a still picture, fast motion could be displayed with some time-lapse (blur) effects characteristic of a comic; in an animation it couild be shown with trails (smear) effects like you see in the movies Matrix or Next. The disjointedness of time in that format of presentation lets you watch many simultaneous actions, one at a time. You might say it emulates subjective time.

Personally I don't see the advantage of emulating absolute time in a turn-based game. Why would I want to age my chess pieces on every turn of the game? It would only make a difference if by aging they would be too old to make certain moves. IMO It's a more fun game if there is no absolute time aside from skills improvement and story events; which should be frequent, and maybe those (if we want) can introduce character aging, while allowing lots of subjective time for the characters to stuff more experiences into the same relative time frame of the story.

Think of how time passes in a book. There's no clock in a book. Nothing happens until you read it, and things you're reading don't always happen in the order you read them - they can be presented out of order or across time. That's how Wasteland is. It's an advantage and a flexibility of the game. It makes it more of a strategy game and less of an action game.

8. It's all well and good to say that the additional 3 party NPCs are independent minded. But the mechanic is pointless. "Ace disobeys you." Or more commonly, "Ace doesn't want to trade." During the activities where these comments appear, the clock is stopped. All you have to do is order the NPC to do the exact same thing and within 5 attempts at most, he complies. So, what was the point of the disobedience? All it does is make the _player_ waste time.

That's definitely something i would improve upon. So far from Brian Fargo we've heard some characters might steal from you. I wouldn't push the annoying aspect of it. I would flesh out the trust among the party as something that characters can build, for example by using recreational/occupational/social skills.

Incidentally, I believe a high-charisma Ranger in the first position increased the likelihood of NPCs behaving.

Yes; and if we flesh out this principle we can have characters responding in unique ways to each others' attributes, skills and so on, not simply to interfere with player control in an annoying way. Characters' personality interfering with player control could manifest as something more attractive, like opening up unique story elements; there can be advantages and disadvantages to each character.

[CaptainPatch]

8. It's all well and good to say that the additional 3 party NPCs are independent minded. But the mechanic is pointless. "Ace disobeys you." Or more commonly, "Ace doesn't want to trade." During the activities where these comments appear, the clock is stopped. All you have to do is order the NPC to do the exact same thing and within 5 attempts at most, he complies. So, what was the point of the disobedience? All it does is make the _player_ waste time.

That's definitely something i would improve upon. So far from Brian Fargo we've heard some characters might steal from you. I wouldn't push the annoying aspect of it. I would flesh out the trust among the party as something that characters can build, for example by using recreational/occupational/social skills.

I absolutely insist that if the game is going to place a Thief (one that you didn't know was a Thief more than likely) in the party, and the Thief _will_ steal from his team mates, then when he gets caught with his hand in someone else's kit, the others pound the snot out of him to teach him that actions have consequences. "Steal from _us_, and we beat the s*** out of you. Do it again, next time we won't be so gentle!"