We creep up the ridgeline, the six of us. Cressida Two-Fists and Vulture's Cry crouch
on the cliff's edge, sniper rifles drawn.
Thomas Gray and Angela Deth protect the approach from light cover,
waiting to rain down a hail of bullets on any raider foolish enough to creep
up. Raymond the Mystery Man and Amara
Realis sit behind line-of-sight cover, ready to pop out and engage any enemies
foolish enough to rush the approach.
With pistols and shotguns in hand, they wait. Cressida and Vulture take aim at the biggest,
meanest raider they can, popping off two quick shots before the screen blurs
and spins and the tension of my haphazard engagement setup suddenly coalesces
into a series of furtive turn based choices.
Suddenly, Cressida and Vulture and Tom and Angie and Ray-Ray and Amara
are all separate parts, instead of a self-contained whole. They're all working towards a single end, but
in a fractured way, a way that sometimes involves them accidentally shooting
one another in a high stakes environment, or involves them suddenly ignoring my
orders and diving from cover to pop shots off at enemies from open ground. When the dust clears the makeshift base
formed out of cargo container is littered with bodies, some of them glowing
with potential loot. My team is bloody,
but still walking. I tap the space bar
to highlight all of my team members and click the reload button. Fresh mags slam home with a satisfying
cacophony of clicks, but there's something wrong. Vulture's Cry just shrugs instead of reloading. I bring up her inventory and see that she
doesn't have any .308 left in her backpack, so I dart over to Cressida's
inventory to pull some out of her bag and shuffle it into Vulture's. Then, in Cressida's inventory I notice an
unloaded sawed off shotgun just sitting in her off-hand weapon slot: a great
weapon to have in a pinch, sure, but worthless if unloaded. So after shifting the ammo I click reload
again, then shift over to Cressida, change weapons, reload, change them back,
and suddenly realize: Raymond's light machine gun is unloaded too! Back to the inventory, this time to Tom, the
.556 ammo mule, so that I can top off Raymond's supply, then hot swap out his
weapons, reload, double check his stocks, and shift objects around accordingly.
This is the bulk of Wasteland
2.
There's far more to it than that. The combat recalls the best parts of the Fallout series with more than a little Shadowrun Returns to it. The exploration layer has a simultaneity of
danger and excitement, and such a wealth of options to engage with one's
environment that the game itself just explodes each time you enter a new area,
uncovering land mines, picking locks and cracking safes. The incentive for certain kinds of action,
like recruiting new characters and returning to base to sell certain kinds of
supplies, is very real, even as the temptation to hang out in the wastes
endlessly hunting down baddies exists as a tremendously inviting
counterpoint. But all of this hangs on a
layer of micromanagement, made necessary by the nuance of the system itself,
which forces me into carefully monitoring and distributing ammunition, matching
weapon usage patterns to the types of ammo available, and, in a sense, carrying
my ammo-crazed craven attitude into each new engagement with enemies, as I
cross my fingers and hope my sniper's rifles don't jam mid-fight.
This layer of micromanagement doesn't just saturate the
inventory management system: it occupies the game entire. Wasteland
2 is only about surviving in the wastes on its surface. The reality of the game is that it's a
tremendously malleable interactive story with dozens, nay, hundreds of moving
parts under the hood, reshaping with each tiny action, each furtive decision. Your choice to free a gaggle of pigs or
rescue some sex-workers will impact the long term story. Your choice to solve problem X in Y way will
totally reshape the whole outcome of the game, which is amazing. That's excellent. But what problemitizes that system, what
makes it worth discussion, instead of blithe praise, is that all of this
happens invisibly. There are no faction
bars telling you where you stand with people, nor is it readily apparent how
each event and the choices you make will shape the narrative. Sometimes it's clear enough: do good things
in a small town and they'll elect a mayor who directs their growth in a way
that's favorable to you. But sometimes
it's not so clear: repairing a train can lead to a genocide, following the
letter of the law can keep you from getting a new friend. Keeping your team alive will keep you from
meeting new party members with fresh perspectives and personalities.
It would be easy to call this a shortcoming, to say that Wasteland 2's lack of transparency with
regard to its own complexity is a failing, but I don't think that's actually
true. See, in the before time, before
every game was mapped out on the internet in excruciating detail within weeks
of its release, before we highlighted quest paths and ran players through their
paces so that they could uncover objects in just the right order, lest the
scripting language of the game shit itself and render saved game files un-usable,
this was the way of things. And it was
amazing. Unexpected things would happen
all the time, and as a result, narrative immersion actually presented itself in
these games. In the real world, you have
no idea where your actions will eventually take you. There's no way of knowing if you'll end up
exactly where you want to be, and you are, in the end, just doing your best to
get there in an imperfect world where all the moving parts aren't readily
apparent. Likewise, I'm never entirely
sure who I can trust in Wasteland 2,
or where my actions will take me.
Choices that I'd like to go back and re-make, as transparent as choosing
to save Highpool instead of The Ag Center, occur every time I enter an
area. Living with the consequences of my
blind, flailing choices is just part of the game.
Of course, sometimes it isn't. After settling into Rail Nomads I set upon a
series of decisions that I thought would allow me to bring peace to the rival
factions in the settlement. But, lo and
behold, trying to satisfy both peoples just wasn't an option: if I helped one,
I'd destroy the other. So, after
discovering this through trial and error, after helping someone with something
seemingly innocuous lead to what amounted to a genocide, I decided to reload
the whole god damn game, effectively losing a day and a half of progress.
In the end, that might be for the best: I'm still learning
about Wasteland 2's systems, and I'm
learning to take my time and really listen to the dialogue that I'm being
presented with, something most RPGs don't really treasure. It's very apparent that in-Exile is intent on
making gamers pay attention again, something that we haven't really had to do
since Torment. Even Baldur's Gate,
fantastic game it was, consisted of dialogue options that were mostly flavor
text; real game changing conversations were few and far between. In Wasteland
2, every conversation could be game changer. Every minor decision could reshape the entire
game world. Choosing to kick the wrong
totem pole over could kill a potential party member and insure that peace never
comes to a particular region of the wastes.
But it's never entirely clear what the outcome of each decision will be,
or even what all the potential outcomes are, and that's where Wasteland 2 excels. It forces players to engage with the game
world through an imperfect apparatus and, in doing so, forces them to make
executive decisions as players. Most
games remove notions of "executive function" from their decision
trees. It's a shitty, lazy move,
something that seriously curtails the value of games as an educational
tool. But when games do present constructions
of executive function, they do so in a way that actualize notions of consequences,
actions, and critical decision making skills.
Wasteland 2 forces you to
engage with the consequences of your actions, even when the consequences aren't
entirely clear. Sometimes, it gives you
hilarious options just to see if you'll take them. Will you exhume the body of a town's mayor in
front of the town's inhabitants? What
would you gain from doing that? In a
normal RPG, the answer would be "some loot" and the town would just
ignore you doing so. If you decide to do
that sort of thing in Wasteland 2, an
entire town will try to murder you. Then
it's kill or be-killed, and if you end up somehow killing an entire town, that
town is just gone. The population of the
titular wasteland will have just become a little sparser. But why would you try to dig up that grave in
the first place? That's like something
an insane person would do. But digging up
supply caches randomly scattered around various settlements? That's just good sense.
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