Actually playing old Wasteland: things I dislike

[CaptainPatch]

Finally completed the game. I think I had all of 5 spare power packs left in the entire party. Finished with Hell Razor from initial selection, my three created Rangers, Ace, Covenant, and Vax.

[Chiba City Blues]

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.

The only one I entirely agree with is point 8. Why would an NPC take an action in combat that needlessly puts them in danger or that squanders resources that they need as badly as you do. I can't imagine that sane, sober adults who have committed to joining your adventuring party will take actions that are irrational to their own interests just for the sake of disobeying you.