Wasteland 3

I get that is the skill method, but that requires ridiculous optimization and frankly knowing whats coming in the game in advance. There are too many skills to have them at 4 in most cases, even with a full party and knowing what the two mandatory schlub NPCs are likely to have. And if you blow any of it, its basically a mandatory reload due to (credit to Yatzee) a Cascade Fuckup situation. I get that a fight with those guys if you lack the gatekeeper skills should be hard, but the stats on those guys for a level four quest was just ridiculous. The thing was designed around people exploiting the game, rather than what a balanced party not rules raping the system might be like. And its not the only one like that in the first areas. Pretty much everything in the first main quest causes bleeding left and right. And the first few fights would be ball busting without the KS backer weapons to abuse.

And lets be clear, I love the game (and all in the series). Its just eye rolling tiresome to always have your guys stand up out of cover at the start of every fight while always squaring off against enemies that have long range, cover, and spam bleed status constantly. There is also the tiresome habit Tactics like RPGs have of hit % in reality meaning ten percent chance to hit for every 1% over 90 the interface says and forget about ever trying anything less than 80% chance to hit. WL2 did some of that, but not as bad as this game so far. And he bleeding spam is especially egregious because their cancerous interface pretty much means you are fumbling after a fight trying to get a suture into the limited gear slots and apply it before the fully armored guy who barely got scratched bleeds out, because there is no pause in MP mode while you are in menus. Some of this may also be MP specific, to be fair.

What is good is the look of the game, the voice acting, and the change of desert for winter. The weapon and gear variety is decent, even at early levels. The shared inventory is amazingly better than WL2, even if the equip part of it is somewhat janky. And as the only tactics game with MP other than the Divinity Series, it gets major kudos for that. Finally, their agro mechanics in this game actually make sense with the AI making sensible target priority choices instead of focus fire on the sniper a mile away while all the close range guys rush in. That last bit threw me off as WL2 had me so conditioned to it I built my sniper to be able to wear heavy armor.

I'm about 20 hours into this and not even close to done but have a few thoughts

This game is pretty close to 9/10 territory, but falls short of that for several reasons. Load times. Fucking load times..... It's enough to make me not want to play as much as I otherwise would want to - you change area's fairly often and everytime you zone (super noticeable in cities where you're in and out of buildings for quests) it's a solid 60 seconds - this is game is on one of the fastest drives on the market and it's still baffling how slow it is. I can't imagine this on a normal SSD or (shudder) old HD.

Also there is a ton of jank, and a ton of bugs to contend with. One of my pre-built characters (my lockpicker and general badass assault rifle girl) completely lost all of her skill points when I switched her out for my weapon/armor modding mule at base. When she got back in my party, she had no skills and -37 skill points to assign. Not game breaking as I just fired up another one, but annoying.

Doesn't seem very well optimized either - lots of stuttering, pretty poor menu/ui etc. Graphics as well are very bleh to me for a game in 2020, that it has the optimization/stuttering is flat out unacceptable for a game that visually, looks so mediocre.

I'm having a great time regardless and for $1 gamepass sub this month, I'm over the moon but this doesn't feel like a $60 game to me. It certainly isn't a 9/10; 10/10 or whatever I keep seeing on all these reviews. It feels and plays like a very well done kickstarter game for $30.

I love these XCOM/BG/CRPG games, but I would like one - just fucking ONE to release and not be janky, ugly and have dogshit ui's.

This game is so much better on my PC over Xbox One X. Load times are non existent on my M.2. Initial load time is about 4-5 seconds. Everything is super fast - max settings, etc.

But holy hannah PC is so much better with controls. I am zipping around much easier and able to speed up my gaming session with that alone by 600%.