Wasteland 2

"I just don't need none of that Mad Max bullshit.
Well the suit got tight and it split at the seams
But I kept it out of habit and I kept it real clean.

We are hummingbirds who lost the plot and we will not move"

Modest Mouse - Bury Me With It

 
So here's me doing some shopping in Wasteland 2.

Judging by the NPC merchant's nonsensical chatter, how far into the RPG would you say I've gotten? Is this a lighthearted tutorial where breaking immersion doesn't really matter? Is it the early game played for laughs to offset the more serious story later on? Is it some mid-campaign comic relief? I'm almost done with the game, in fact. I have been almost done with the game for some weeks, making less and less progress every time I fire it up only to think "ugh, not another badger fight" and shut it down again.

A month ago when I finished my replay of Fallout I noted the jarring tendency for old-school computer game designers to lean on pop culture references instead of developing a coherent game world. As a throwback to 80s/90s gaming, Wasteland disappoints by failing to disappoint in that department. Not only does it begin with a gratuitous old-timey FMV cinematic but carries on with one cheap sound bite after another. Leve L'Upe Mine? Honey badger don't care? Screaming goats? The James King Bible? Don't get me wrong, I laughed my ass off at some of these as well as some of the other humorous elements like the perpetually blind stinking drunk Scotchmo or Ralphy singing 99 bottles of beer on the wall - he sounds so earnest!

But, ever so gradually, you get to scraping little to nothing underneath those pop culture crutches, that overtly charming facade. No truly engaging or memorable characters. The world, far from capturing the monomythic feeling of escalation in Fallout fashion, jars you out of your desert reverie with an early mission against plant zombies then continually sabotages itself by shoehorning humor into otherwise dramatic situations, managing neither to pass it off as dark humor nor to isolate it into comic relief moments. Worse still, this tendency only deepens as you leave the first half, Arizona (largely dedicated to nostalgic developer masturbation over the first Wasteland game from 1988) for California, where the developers seem to have lost any and all interest in their own story. One of the final zones, Hollywood, obviously meant as very memorable for its quirky pimps, hoes, teenage runaways, junkies, pushers and religious extremists, somehow manages to fail at being either sexy, outrageous, moralistic or in any other way engaging.

This would all be less noticeable if Wasteland 2 hadn't also been an overambitious project which simply lacks the content to fill its dozen different quest hubs. Everything gets reused ad nauseam, from character portraits and generic banter to random encounter maps to enemies. Most groups of humanoids contain the same mix of ranged / melee combatants and the animals are even worse. Three of the four major species re-appear from the beginning of Arizona to the end of California with no rhyme or reason. The few well-orchestrated fights get lost in the redundancy.

In terms of more practical gameplay options, it's again a pot luck of good but poorly integrated features like ammunition stockpiling and management, status effects which can be cured with consumable items, very powerful but single-use AoE missiles. The skill system trips into the recruitable NPC system. You create 4/7 of your party at the start and pick three more out of the tramps and thugs you encounter along the way. Since skills don't stack, this inevitably yields very high redundancy. Many skills were also poorly thought out and end up next to worthless (Animal Whispering) while others like Lockpicking are blatantly over-emphasized.

And on and on. There's a solid line between telling a joke and being a joke, and InXile sinply did not treat this project as professionally as they should have. There's only so many times the player can be gratified by thinking "I've heard of that!" when encountering references to old 1980s video game consoles and other non-sequitur trivia. Almost aggressively badly written at times, its balance wrecked by "toaster repair" easter eggs and other exploits, over-stretched far past what its actual content could illustrate, Wasteland 2 just wears thin much too quickly. Which would be fine if they weren't taking customers' money for an actual game and not a self-congratulatory trip down memory lane.

For the same post-apocalyptic Fallout-ish turn-based roleplaying, Dead State did more with less production values.