Про скиллы и атрибуты, а также пара новых скриншотов и инфа по приближающейся бете.
Update #36: Honing Our Skills
Hello fellow Rangers!
Chris Keenan here to talk about the most recent progress on Wasteland 2 and what to expect in the upcoming months.
We last spoke about skills in Update #20 in December of last year. Since then, our team has made incredible progress on all fronts. I can say, without a doubt, that we’ve been more efficient as a team than on any project I’ve ever worked on. Much of this has to do with a clarity of vision and getting feedback early and often to make sure we’re focusing on the most important things.
Now is a good time to talk about the core character systems (attributes and skills) since in the very near future, you will be playing with them during the early beta. Some functionality of the attributes and skills have changed during the iterative process and will continue to do so as we get more feedback from you, once the playable is in your hands.
Attributes
Attributes are the starting values that define your character. You allocate them at character creation and while they can be upgraded during the course of the game, opportunities to do so are sparse. Attributes are key in determining the core characteristics of your ranger. They affect things like how many action points you have, how much movement each action point allows, how many survival points you gain per level, your carry weight, and many other variables. We’ve always said choices and trade-offs are a main design focus and character creation certainly supports this. Attributes have a cap of 10 and you will start with a smaller attribute pool than you may be used to. Each attribute point has a dramatic effect on your ranger, which leads to some very different feeling rangers based on how you distribute them.
If a specific attribute is very low, that may cap the related skill or could mean the character is incapable of using some items with attribute requirements. Of course, we will be balancing attributes and skills throughout beta, so some of these might be modified further. Outside of the core uses, NPCs in the world will react to specific characters based on their attribute make-up.
The attributes are (with some but not all uses listed):
— Coordination (CO): General coordination and ability to operate firearms. Determines action points (AP) and increases your critical hit chance at range.
— Luck (LK): Luck of the roll. Improves crits with weapons, gives you a chance to get an additional AP during your turn and affects many other interactions throughout the wasteland.
— Awareness (AW): Ability to notice events happening around you. Increases initiative in combat (turn order), increases evasion rate.
— Strength (ST): Pure physical strength. Increases your maximum constitution earned per level, increases close combat damage, increases carry weight.
— Speed (SP): Physical speed and movement rate. Increases movement per AP in combat, reduces length of skill usage progress meters.
— Intelligence (IQ): Knowledge, wisdom and general problem-solving. Increases skill points gained per level.
— Charisma (CHR): Charm, personality and swagger. How NPCs perceive your likeability or persuasiveness.
Also making a return from Wasteland 1, but still not exactly an attribute, is maximum constitution (MAXCON), or the maximum number of hit points. MAXCON is derived from strength and upgradeable when you level-up.
Skills
After selecting attributes, you will be able to place Survival Points (SPs) into your many skill options. Skills start off at a zero value, meaning they are unusable. After unlocking a skill with SPs, you can place additional SPs into the skill to increase its level and functionality. Skills have a maximum cap of 10 similar to attributes. Skills are upgraded in tiers, with a total of 10 skill levels. Roughly speaking, skill levels 1-3 mean novice, 4-6 mean competent, 7-9 mean proficient and 10 means expert. Each skill level allows you to take on more significant challenges, increasing your chance of success and level of rewards as you use the skill. Skills can also be increased from use. Some skills provide additional bonuses as you reach the various levels of competency.
Combat Skills
Increasing skills here will increase your chance to hit with that specific class of weapons. In addition, mastery of those weapons increases with your skill level, allowing you to manipulate and clear it quicker when jams happen.
— Blunt Weapons: Generally have higher damage but a tighter damage range.
— Bladed Weapons: Have lower damage but a greater range and higher crit max.
— Anti-Tank-Weapons: Generally do massive explosive damage but ammo is rare and blast radius makes them hard to use in certain combat situations. Can also be used to get through some pesky doors.
— Submachine Guns: Have a lower range and lower critical chance, for a more hail-of-bullets approach. Ammo tends to be cheaper and more plentiful than for the higher caliber automatics.
— Shotguns: Have shorter range but great stopping power.
— Energy Weapons: Usefulness varies based on your opponent, as energy weapons are less effective against flesh. If your opponent is heavily decked out in metal armor the weapon heats up his gear. The higher the armor of your target, the more damage it will deal. Think pressure cooker. It’s nasty.
— Assault Rifles: Are very versatile and powerful weapons, but ammo is harder to find. Assault rifles use higher caliber rounds with more penetration value than smaller arms.
— Sniper Rifle: Ideal in open fields due to their long range and heavy damage, but not necessarily stellar in cramped corridors. Ammo is very expensive. Make your shots count as the AP cost is very high.
— Handguns: Includes pistols and revolvers. Like SMGs, ammo is common enough to make this the go-to weapon for many rangers, but they are single shot only, trading that for a higher crit value.
Information / Knowledge Skills
Your chance of success with non-combat skills depends on the difference between the challenge and your skill level. For an expert at lock picking facing a door with a very simple lock, there is almost no chance to fail. A novice surgeon may find it very hard to remove the effects of a dangerous strain of toxin or a serious injury that renders your ranger in mortal condition. If the skill difference is too significant, especially for untrained rangers, it may simply not be possible to accomplish the task.
— Picklock: Chance of success and speed at picking conventional locks.
— Safecrack: Chance of success and speed at picking safe locks, including on vault doors.
— Alarm Disarm: Ability to disarm alarms, but also to fix faulty wiring on security doors and open them directly.
— Toaster Repair: Fix broken toasters and who doesn’t need that?
— Computer Tech: Skill at hacking computers, which gives access to a variety of possibilities. You can gain information you couldn’t otherwise, or remotely activate a security system or camera. Some computers may give you the ability to activate or reprogram security doors.
— Synth Tech: With synth tech you can repair and reprogram synthetics and other robots, turning them to your side in combat.
— Demolitions: The ability to use demolitions in and out of combat. Out of combat, its most common use is to break down doors or clear barriers that do not give way to picklock or brute force, but this unsubtle means of entry is sure to be noticed. In combat, lots of destruction.
— Brute Force: Determines your skill at applying your raw strength to break some things. Lacks the subtlety of picklock and the raw force of demolitions.
— Move Silently: The ability to sneak around unnoticed.
— Salvaging: How effective you are at finding usable items in what would normally be considered piles of junk. A ranger who is good at salvaging can find many useful items that might be skipped over by a normal person.
— Kiss Ass: Dialogue skill involving flattery, seduction, and well… ass kissing.
— Hard Ass: Dialogue skill involving intimidation and aggressive speech.
— Smart Ass: Dialogue skill involving persuasion. ***The “Ass Trio” names are placeholders but somehow they’ve taken hold around the office.***
General Skills
General skills have a variety of uses. Some involve breaking down materials that you find in the Wasteland, while others provide much needed medical care. These tend to be support skills and help you manage and solve problems.
— Barter: Ability to negotiate for better purchase prices and higher sales prices for your goods.
— Outdoorsman: Primarily used on the world map to determine your ability to conserve water as you travel, as well as expand your options for when you spot random encounters.
— Leadership: The ability to lead a team, best used by a single PC who gives a buff in combat to PCs and friendly NPCs around him. Multiple leaders around the same skill level can cause a negative reaction. Also determines how much companion NPCs will listen to you vs. doing their own thing.
— Cliff Clavin Backer Skill: The skill exclusive to the early backers of this project, it adds flavor text to the game world.
— Animal Whisperer: The ability to influence animals into staying passive, running away or following you.
— Field Medic: This skill lets you quickly patch up guys during combat, recovering some CON by using medical equipment.
— Surgeon: Allows you to provide help to rangers who have major status effects or have gone unconscious or worse. Can be used in combat but due to the amount of time it takes, will force you to protect your surgeon from being overly exposed.
— Weaponsmithing: The ability to craft and mod weaponry to increase its performance.
— Field Stripping: The ability to strip weaponry you find into parts to use for improving your own weapons.
— Perception: Can be used actively to notice enemies through thin walls, uncovering them for a short period of time. The skill also shows you the perception cone of enemies to help you sneak or get to a better starting position prior to combat. As a passive, it helps to identify things that might be out of the ordinary, including finding booby traps.
— ?????? — A few other skills that can be unlocked throughout the game.
What may stand out to you is the variation in the perceived level of usefulness of skills; animal whisperer is unlikely to be used as much as handguns. We purposefully designed skills that would not be used universally. Each skill has a variety of uses throughout the game and various levels of rewards. Lockpick might more often used, but you never know when something like Alarm Disarm will give you a huge advantage (or reward) that would be otherwise unobtainable. This level of granularity is an advantage of party-based systems and we fully intend to exploit it. We want you to build a varied, multi-skilled group of rangers who play off each other’s strength to become a kick-ass team.
New Screenshots
Here’s a few more screenshots we wanted to share with you. As you can see, there is a wide variety of diversity amongst the environments you will travel through, both in aesthetic and environment design.
Early Beta
It is now October and we are close to getting this game into the hands of our beta-eligible backers. We’re currently cleaning things up, fixing the largest issues and working on a first pass of balance across Arizona. Have we mentioned that this game is massive?
The short-term plan is to continue iterating and fixing bugs found by our internal QA until the game is stable and playable through the sections we are opening up for early beta. This process will take a few more weeks. Once we get there, we will have a very small group jump in to get a feel for if it’s ready to release to our patiently waiting beta backers. The plan is to distribute the beta for Windows PC, as we know we can get standalone builds to work in Windows. We have not forgotten about our Mac and Linux backers and will soon do some tests to try to get a standalone executable for those versions as well. Many months back we tried a Mac test in Unity and it built great with about 30 minutes of clean up. If history repeats itself, those versions will be available as well for the early beta (what’s the worst that can happen, right?).
To prep for early playable, let’s talk a little bit about what we hope to give and get from you. The game will be in an early beta. Much of the systems and content will be in and working but it will be crude in some areas. Some systems won’t be fully polished, there will be weird bugs, and balance will be far from final. We will be fixing these things throughout the beta – we promise the game won’t be released before the game plays beautifully. It’s been difficult for me to get used to personally, but we’ve fully embraced getting screenshots and demo videos out before we feel they are truly ready and polished. I’m much more at peace with it now as this has helped us get great feedback early, and give us time to pivot when necessary. This early beta is no exception.
There are two major goals for us here; bug-hunting and gathering feedback on everything from mechanics to mission design to level design. We’ve enlisted the help of the great people at CenterCode to facilitate this process and make sure that we get the best feedback possible, and are able to effectively cull the large amount of information into an actionable format. It won’t be mandatory for you to opt-in for generating feedback, but we hope that you will participate as it will only improve the final product. More info on that will come as we get closer to the early beta launch.
For us, the most important thing you can do is provide us feedback. What elements do you like? What things need more work or, in your opinion, just aren’t fitting properly? We want to know what you think of our game, the writing, the flow, the mechanics…everything. We will be updating the game on a consistent basis (approximately every 2-3 weeks) and continuing to improve Wasteland 2 throughout this process.
Initially, we will be releasing the first 4 large areas and all associated COPS maps. COPS maps are smaller scenes that can be accessed through the world map and tie into the main areas. We won’t be putting the full game into beta to prevent spoilers that would become widely known before Wasteland 2 is finished. We’ll implement game-wide changes stemming from your feedback from the first areas, and continue our extensive internal bug-testing during this period.
Ranger Center
We surveyed all our backers for their addresses soon after the Kickstarter, but a lot of you have moved or are moving since that day. We also received messages through Kickstarter about address changes. Please be aware we do not change our address listings through Kickstarter messages. All backers, whether through the late backer store or Kickstarter, have an account on our Ranger Center pledge management system. You can keep your address updated there, and the address listing on your account at the time of shipping is where we’ll ship to. We’ll send more reminders about this, but please make sure to check your address and make sure it’s up to date as we get closer and closer to release.
If you’ve gotten this far in the update, thanks for giving us your time! We will provide more info on when the early beta will be ready in the near future. The team is excited to get the game in your hands and show off what we’ve been working on!
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.
Чой-то здесь давно ничего не появлялось. В 35-м обновлении — разбор полётов демы из 34-го. А также новая тема Марка Моргана!
Update #35: We’re Still Listening
Good day to you, Rangers,
It’s Chris again to talk some Wasteland 2. We received a lot of feedback from the demo video of the Prison with many strong and important opinions that continue to help us craft Wasteland 2.
Our philosophy on this project is to put out videos when we have a decent amount of new features to show off. That way, we can follow the discussion threads and see what elements are working and what needs improvement. It allows us to see the most hotly discussed topics and react before the game is too far along to modify systems that might not be as good as they could be. Sometimes this means we aren’t able to iterate and polish as much as we want before it goes live, but we feel it’s well worth it for the valuable feedback you’ve all provided.
We will note a few below and let you all know our plan of attack for the ones that received the most comments.
Graphics and Animation
First and foremost, many of you had notes on the graphics, or more specifically animations. There were some obvious issues that we fully plan on fixing. We have to balance the trade-off between showing something that looks good enough while not impacting our schedule and production pipeline negatively. In a normal game production process, there is a HUGE amount of time wasted creating demos. We opted to instead show an actual snapshot of the status of the Prison map. Our fans were clamoring to see another update which means we weren’t able to get to some of the more detailed polish items. We know they’re there and we will continue to iterate and polish.
The floaty look of the rangers running was oft-noted. This is a height mesh issue that we are taking care of. We identified this as a risky item to fix prior to the demo as it affects multiple areas and didn’t want to slow down the teams working on other areas. The choice was made to not delay the video for some of the graphical fixes. In a wider sense, these aren’t “final” graphics. The Prison is a more polished area relatively but we’re still several passes from “final” on geometry, normal mapping, textures and post-processing.
As for the UI, the main game HUD is on its fourth pass and we will continue to make improvements. In particular the AP counter is a point we agree needs some work and it has already been updated. Other UI elements will get some work too. Consistency amongst menus is something we are working on right now. The dialog UI in particular is a work in progress. In the last video we showed, it didn’t have a field to type in keywords yourself, but be assured that mechanic is still in.
Combat Systems
On to some of the gameplay points. One often seen discussion was the change from hex grid to squares. This is one of those points where crowdfunded games are unique; in a standard development cycle you would not get to see how mechanics like that work until they’re fully tested, iterated on and polished.
Here is a little backstory on the change. Originally, we didn’t intend to have any hex or square grid during combat. It was going to be more free form movement. One of our engineers added a hex grid as a debug test to approximate spacing of characters in combat encounters. When we saw that grid turned on, our mouths watered. A few days prior to recording the first video, we made some tweaks to get our movement working with the hex grid. It worked great for our early combat. One unfortunate side effect was that since it wasn’t in our original design, we didn’t account for it from the beginning of development. We had already done tests and created our tile set sizes, including doors and surrounding props. We could have redesigned the size of the tile sets and doorways (which would have been a huge amount of work since we had grey boxed many of the levels) or look into other options. Squares came next. We had introduced cover at this point and squares lined up nicely with the doors and cover.
Of course, while the advantage in positioning, production time and map layout is there, many of you justifiably pointed out you’re losing flexibility in movement, from a grid’s six-way movement to a square’s four-way movement, and that creates undesirable situations where you move four squares east and four squares south to move to a relatively close position. With the help of backer suggestions, here are two points we have already implemented to improve the mechanics and feel:
— Moving around the world in combat is much more free form. Your player won’t just follow the exact grid, which created an unnecessarily artificial look. They will take the shortest unblocked distance from the point they are standing to the point you are moving to. Movement is still calculated based on an underlying (optional on/off) grid and is displayed to you in your AP cost.
— Moving diagonally in the calculation costs 1.5 times as much as a straight movement. Do note that your speed attribute changes the AP cost used as movement for all characters, so the calculation is never very simple.
Another pattern we saw discussed had to do with stances as a tactical choice in combat. Stances may not seem like a big deal to implement, but it is a deceivingly large amount of work to do correctly in our game. There are a few issues to consider when evaluating this as a feature. First, is the amount of work necessary to get it done vs. how much it will add to the game as a whole. It involves additional code to simply implement the base feature, UI work to get the HUD elements, a large amount of AI to have enemies react to it differently (assuming we don’t just have the rangers use it…which would be lame), design work to fit it on to all applicable humanoid enemy NPCs, gameplay balancing, bug testing and the finally largest risk comes from animation. Our animation system is pretty robust. We’d essentially be adding 2 additional states (crouching and prone), which need to have our full suite of animations related to all weapon skills. 9 skills (or 7 without melee skills) doesn’t seem like a lot but when you break them down, it gets unwieldy quick. Each weapon has firing, jamming, equip/unequip, reloading, aim up/down, multiple player damages from that pose (i.e light, medium, heavy, crits) plus all of the blends in and out that make them smooth from different player states. In all it turns into around 15-20 animations per skill, per stance. Finally, there would be visual issues from our 6 foot tall rangers with a 3 foot long sniper rifle lying prone. Weapons would clip through the world props all over the place. As we continue iterating and polishing, we will evaluate all options as they are available, but as you can see, this is not a particularly easy decision to make.
Exploring Environments
And as a final note, a few said that this early part of the Prison in the demo gave an impression of linearity. This is mostly due to it being a demo run, with us having a specific path and sequence in mind. Wasteland 2 is incredibly varied in regards to the feel of the levels. Some are more town based, others are underground maze/cave-like areas. We have large interiors of buildings, huge canyon areas (like prison) and more desolate plains. There is no template that is universal to Wasteland 2.
We’ve made sure to design a ton of missions that will take you all over. Many are optional, meaning that you will be able to do them or not do them as you wish. Others will open up (or be shut down) based on decisions you’ve made before. There will be no lack of exploration and discovery.
And more!
I’m going to link to this page on our tumblr, where you can find all the GamesCom previews rounded up as they come in. GamesCom is a very international event so you can find previews in a huge variety of languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Hungarian, Danish, Japanese and Dutch!
And finally, we’re still loving what Mark Morgan is doing for the Wasteland 2 soundtrack, so here’s a new piece we wanted to share.
Какая ещё выхлопная труба? Подобная хрень только у квазаров есть. А звезда бахнет и бахнет, во все стороны вещество разлетится. Или в чёрную дыру превратится.
Дык у вас, пидаров, двойные стандарты: когда на тротуаре паркуетесь, так чо, обойдите (похуй что по дороге), а вот пешеходы на дороге по собственной воле — так это ебланство.
Так это… Нужно было тогда во всех газетах про спасение писать, или про убийство молчать? Автор сам как считает? Потому что если первое, то это вопрос в ТВ / газетам, которые молчали, и события про убийство освещаются правильно. А если второе, то я тогда вообще хз.
Гыгы. У меня для тебя, долбоёба, есть особый пример. Представь на секунду, что 70%… Хотя, хуй с тобой, всего половина. Так вот, представь, что половина пешеходов начала передвигать по проезжей части. Прямо вдоль. А на справедливые маты отвечает — объедь, хуле, место же есть. Заебись вариант?
Как показал опыт Луиса, каждый не хочет писать своими словами — народ хочет, чтобы за него всё сделали (и отправили тоже :). Пока текст нельзя тупо скопипастить — никто не будет дёргаться.
Без правки твоё заявление для всех не подойдёт. Внезапно у всех отправителей был «приватный разговор», внезапно все узнали о ЗП директора? Эту часть надо доработать, чтобы подходила для любого заданного человека.
Это пресс-служба, у них может их и нет, чо ты доебался? Или ты думаешь, там каждый первый в курсе всех дел? Искра ведёт самый натуральный пиар-блог. И знаешь что? У ней это отлично выходит.
Моё личное обоснование неотправки (пока) — текст пиздец какой корявый. Нужен напилинг, но лично у меня времени нет на это. Как допилю эту заготовку (а допиливать нужно ВСЮ), так отправлю.
Меньше сотки — это странно. А существует возможность дать запрос в администрацию с требованием разъяснить, откуда бабло там-то и там-то? Или у овнера Колымы проще узнать? :)
Я вчера на семинаре был по новому 44-ФЗ. Так вот, там столько интересного можно этому Филе устроить, если только он не «достотысячник». Можно эту тему точнее узнать/пробить?
www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/618060
Надо понимать, что иудаизм или ислам ты считаешь религией сильных свободных людей?
www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/597376
Это всего лишь направление. А так да, она самая там.
Это выбор человека. Террор выбора не оставляет.
Точно. Ведь физикой теперь философия занимается.
Такая картинку будет везде к месту.
Если водитель припарковался на тротуаре, то он пидарас. Без всяких «ну...», «если...» и «а вот...»
Внезапно :)
Сраные пидарасы.
Опа, а я это пропустил. Когда было?
Вот, кстати, как бы ты не выёбывался, но Искра — лучши админ корпблога из имеющихся. И хуй ты поспоришь :) Остальные — это пиздец :)
Мне нужно ТЗ, если там всё-таки более сотни.