#VALORANT Nach den Streams ist vor der Closed Beta. Das müsst ihr vor dem Start wissen:
Nachdem am gestrigen Freitag, 03. April 2020, endlich jede Menge neues und teils sehr kompetitives Gameplay aus VALORANT gezeigt werden durfte, freuen sich bereits einige fleißige Twitch.tv Zuschauer über ihren gesicherten Zugang zur Closed Beta in der kommenden Woche. Denn die vielen Content Creator und Streamer durften nicht nur ihr mitgeschnittenes Material den insgesamt zirka eine Million…
If one day I meet Arkasia, I will ask him to marry me. Can't wait for the full song to come out, I'm a huge fan of this artist. I love every song he wrote.
Because we go up to 11, the final previews that came in as we enter release week...
Eurogamer took a look at the most recent Early Access version.
PCMag.
Wasteland 2's combat is a highly strategic turn-based affair that is reminiscent of the XCOM games. Each character has a set number of action points they can spend during their turn, which they can use to move and/or attack enemies. The weapon type determines a character's attack range, so a melee weapon will have an extremely limited range of attack, while a sniper rifle can pick enemies apart from across the battlefield.
Beyond attack and movement ranges, the height and positioning of a character is crucial to a character's effectiveness. Attacking from a vantage point, obviously, gives a character more of an advantage than a character caught in a melee. The flipside is that accuracy is improved the closer a character is to their target. Crouching and taking cover are also critically important to mitigating or avoiding damage from enemy fire. Conservation plays a role as well, as the wasteland is hardly abundant in healing supplies and ammunition.
Stevivor.
This game will feel very familiar to anyone who’s played the original Fallout games – after all, they are deemed to be ‘spiritual successors’ to the original Wasteland. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic alternate timeline where nuclear war kicked off in 1998 and destroyed the world as we know it. What remains is a barren desert wasteland (I couldn't resist), where resources are scarce and water is a precious commodity. You take on the role of a team of new recruits in the Desert Rangers, a self-described peacekeeping force of the wasteland.
Digitally Downloaded.
Special mention goes to the combat engine, which is excellent. Whenever a hostile encounter occurs, the action switches to a turn-based tactical interface. It’s very retro – Fallout veterans will be right at home – but it shares the pace and excitement that made the recent XCOM reboot such a success. And, just like XCOM, the game’s mechanics are solid, and the graphics and sound create an atmosphere which makes it easy to keep playing for longer than you originally planned.
NZGamer.
For those of you, like myself, who missed out on the classic RPG years of PC gaming, Wasteland 2 puts you in control of a party of characters who traipse around the... well, wasteland. The nuclear holocaust has left a group of ex-soldiers, now going by the ‘Desert Ranger’ moniker, to patrol and protect the civilian survivors. The Desert Rangers are, perhaps not surprisingly, quite similar to The Brotherhood of Steel from the Fallout series. You play the part of four new recruits, although you’ll likely pick up a couple extra party members as you go along. Like any good RPG, there’s a tonne of customisation for each of your characters. My mullet-donning, smooth-talking, cowboy-type is joined by a drug-addict punk surgeon, a tough-guy bruiser, and a Native American pacifist. The characters, both in the party and out, all have a delightful flavour to them.
Review Well.
Prepare to spend an unhealthy amount of time agonising over the attributes and skills sets for your posse of wannabe rangers.
Not that this isn't fun, It's a good kind of agony trying to build your perfect team but if this kind of stat tweaking isn't for you, there is a roster of pre-built characters all lined up like puppies in a pound waiting for you to give them a new home in your squad.
Middle of Nowhere Gaming.
Wasteland 2 feels like the Mad Max version of Oregon Trail. You start out by creating between one a four characters, using an old school party design system. It might look a little intimidating to some players, but I found it simpler than many RPG character creation systems, especially those from the era of games this one is based on. After making your team, the game then sets you up with some starting gear and off you go.
A few previews from our Paris press tour as we prepared to head out to London and Germany as well, as well as new writeups based on playing through the beta in this roundup.
RPGFan.
Strong writing is the hallmark of the classic cRPG (the "c" standing for "computer," for those born after 2000), and Wasteland 2 brims with atmosphere and wonderful dark comedy. Raiders attacking friendly encampments seem rather blasé, but there's also a science station developing a particularly dangerous brand of flora and fauna. There's a strong representation of known science fiction tropes, but they are told well with a great deal of humor. A wonderful printer on the bottom of the screen narrates your adventures, and it had me giggling over and over again. It's great to read, "It's a door. You've seen many like it," when you examine a piece of wood guarding a portal to another room.
Leviathyn.
An RPG full of wonderful writing and cool story consequences could easily be brought down by mediocre combat (unless you’re Planescape: Torment), but thankfully the turn-based, action point system in Wasteland 2 is not only fantastic, it’s one of the best I’ve ever played.
Shotguns offer a nifty area of effect that you can manually aim.
Fans of Fallout 1 and 2′s AP system (and most recently, Divinity: Original Sin) will be overjoyed here as Wasteland 2 employs the same system. Moving, firing, reloading and couching all cost action points, as does using skills in combat like healing teammates. You can equip two weapons to switch between, and each weapon type has its own damage penetration, rate of fire, and AP cost – you can swing a crowbar far more often than fire a rifle. All the information is presented in the clean and attractively thematic UI (that dot matrix printer-style text window), which has undergone significant updates over the course of the beta.
VentureBeat.
Having a balanced and versatile party is key to success in Wasteland 2, and the game will not hold your hand! Didn’t bother to give anyone the “Field Medic” skill? Then you won’t be able to use any of those first aid kits your find. The only person with the “Surgeon” skill went down in the last fight? Well, now there’s nothing you can do but swear vengeance as you watch them bleed out. And death is permanent in this game. So now, that character is gone forever and you’ve got to pull a replacement from the new recruits back at Ranger Citadel. You can recruit other companions for an extra hand in combat, but these characters will never be full-fledged members of your team and can even go rouge in the middle of a fight and throw off your careful planning.
Wasteland 2 drops you right into the thick of it and the game expects a lot from you. However, if you have an appreciation for the PC RPGs of old like Baldur’s Gate or the new wave of savage games like Dark Souls, then W2 will definitely scratch that same itch.
Chalgyr's Game Room.
A big part of the entire gaming experience comes from the audio of a game and good audio can certainly make or break a game (as I have stated many times in the past). Even in the Early Access build the audio is quite rich and provides an excellent ambient audio track. When using my SteelSeries Siberia Elite headphones (you can find my review of them here) the sounds of gunfire, dogs barking, voice acting and other standard environmental effects are super crisp and clean and helped to suck me right into the game. Providing such high quality audio is generally a struggle and if the Early Access build is any indication of what is to come, Wasteland 2 will contain phenomenal ambient audio and environmental effects. The soundtrack is well-composed though I found it to be a tiny bit distracting, though that may be due to the stellar sound effects that I was very much enjoying.
@Mochocolate26 Brings his #DestinyBeta #RealTalk Thoughts to you! Im not the biggest First Person Shooter fan. Is this Destiny preview enough to make me change my mind?
More previews have been coming in of the Wasteland 2 Beta. MMORPG.com.
Wasteland 2 takes place about fifteen years after the original game but the post-apocalyptic setting remains the same. Players are not wet-behind-the-ears characters but take on the role of a Ranger, a group tasked with keeping the peace in dusty Arizona. From the initial game moments, the party is tasked with important duties that include helping area settlements and discovering what happened to a Ranger sent out to fix a communications array nearby.
Sounds simple, right?
Wrong. As with most classic RPGs, players are faced with important and game-altering decisions. After finding the missing Ranger's body and picking up the required materials to fix the communications array, players are then sent to a pair of strategic nearby villages to get things up and running again. Problem is that both are under attack and both need the Ranger's assistance now. The dilemma, of course, is where to go first at the expense of the other call for assistance.
Once the decision to 'save' one or the other is made, the story progresses with attendant consequences. On the first time through, players, because of their choices, may only see half the game leading to an opportunity to replay later to see the other side.
Mouse n Joypad.
When it comes to actually playing the game, Wasteland 2 delivers again. The balance between exploration, interaction and combat is well struck. While more variety in the clothing department would be nice, there’s a load of things to collect and you will always have something to do. Quests aren’t hard to track down, and neither are goons to kill. As soon as you come into contact with hostile creatures, the game smoothly transitions from real-time to turn-based system. It’s seamless, to say the least. When fighting, your Rangers can take cover behind objects, somewhat akin to how XCOM soldiers do. There are no dynamic combat sequences here, though. Every firearm in the game hits like a bag of bricks and feels equally powerful. This is good because the ammunition isn’t all that easy to come across, so you’ll want to use melee whenever you can, at least until you stockpile an entire armory’s worth of ammo.
Invision Game Community.
The gameplay is very familiar of the first Fallout games and Xcom, where you control a squad of people with differing skills and abilities with varying weapon types and advantages in battle. The four base characters can be moulded to whatever you want, within the skill point allowances, so you can make a team of a Sniper, Pistoleer, Shotgun lover and Laser gun pro, or something completely different.
There are several components to the gameplay in Wasteland 2, the zone spaces, the overworld and the dungeons. The Zones are basically any area you enter from the overworld, like cities, towns or dungeons and are where you spend the majority of your time, either trading items or hunting for a killer or objective. The overworld is the main map of the wastes, where travel requires water and there are hazardous areas full of radiation, you use this to navigate between your main base, other towns and areas of note. The dungeons come in varying types, some are basic canyons, caves and open areas while others can be decrepit towns where you hunt and kill any enemy in sight.
Entertainment Buddha.
Combat is the central gameplay element in Wasteland 2. Micromanaging your squad and the equipment they carry will have you optimising their combat effectiveness, squeezing out slight stat improvements to give you that extra survival edge. The combat will seem familiar to those that have played the earlier Fallout games, or even those that have played turn-based strategy games such as X-COM, for that matter. Squad member placement on the combat grid is important and using the environment to your advantage can be essential, especially for melee squad members. Decisions and dialogue options are another large aspect of gameplay which will have players making tough choices, or smoothly talking their way out of fights. Dialogue wise, the game seems to be well written with a wide array of voice actors that really do bring the setting of Wasteland 2 alive.
Morbid Play.
After completing the first set of tasks you’ll have to decide to rush to the aid of two separate radio distress signals; one telling of sort of little shop of horrors-esque shenanigans going down at the region’s Agricultural Centre with plants and oversized flies killing the populace, and the other coming from the town of Highpool who are under attack from raiders that if you couldn’t tell from the name deals with purifying the region’s water. Seeing as it was the closest I headed for the AG centre to do a bit of hardcore gardening and very quickly I realized something, Wasteland 2 is brutal.
GAU Studios.
Wasteland 2′s environments beg to be picked through with a fine – toothed comb to find hidden loot or NPCs that can give you a sidequest and can flesh out the backstory. The entire Wasteland world is well realized and full of life. You can travel from settlement to settlement and quest area to quest area through the larger world map. This map is quite large, yet is often sparsely populated. Of course, the game is not completed yet.
The world map is full of irradiated zones and random encounters, with the odd oasis here and there. Speaking of the random encounters, you have the ability to run away if you really don’t feel like fighting. However, as the enemies waylaying your group become stronger, your chances of successfully running away diminish.
Strange Five.
One of the features of this game that follow along with many RPG’s is team structure and build. What is intriguing about what they have done in Wasteland 2, that makes it unique compared to other RPG’s that I have experienced, is that you get to create your team before you start. They have pre-made characters that you can pick from to makeup your four man team, or if you’re feeling really creative you can create your own character. Just like in any RPG there is a point spending system that lets you increase specific skill sets (automatic weapons, medicine, lock picking, etc) and specific base stats (strength, agility, intelligence, etc). Along with that typical growth model, you have the option of changing the way they look with an assortment of different faces, hairstyles, and clothes. A fun addition they added is the chance to write a short biography for your character (I don’t know that there is any purpose to this besides the fun of it..). I had myself a fair bit of fun with this.
One-Gamer.com.
So how does it currently play? Well, if you never experienced the ancient original but have played Fallout 2, then you’d be forgiven for seeing it as very much its offspring. Trekking the hostile landscape takes place across a parched map where distance is measured in how much water will be consumed travelling between points, but as soon as you get anywhere of interest you’re treated to a close-up view where your team can explore in detail as well as engage in turn-based battle. So far what we have here is Fallout 3 from a parallel dimension.
Part of what ties the whole thing back to Wasteland, however, is the use of a lot of descriptive text displayed in a window whenever something of interest is clicked, as well as countless references to recognisable people, places and situations. There’s a definite feel that the first game is bubbling away underneath. Responses to conversations are cute, too; you can select a key word that somebody has mentioned and ask them to elaborate, or type in your own sentence as if you’re suddenly playing a classic text adventure.
Game-Debate.
The desolate world is also filled with NPC’s and some are offering lots of information via an interesting chat system (certain words will be highlighted and added to your vocabulary to enquire about as the conversation proceeds).
Wasteland 2 is also full of decisions and consequences, some are small like attempting to pick a lock early on with low skill level can destroy the lock forever to much bigger decisions that will decide the fate of entire towns and NPC’s, who you decide to save or let die is up to you but you’ll inevitably have to face the consequences later on.
IncGamers.com.
So far, Wasteland 2 has excelled in giving me choices I’ve actually needed to put some thought into. The character creation is a proper throwback to the days of agonising over whether to bump a point in charisma or reduce the chances of a gun exploding in your hands and leaving your powder-covered face looking like a scene from Looney Tunes. You have four characters to add to your party (either custom-built or chosen from a few pre-created options,) but this is nowhere near enough to cover all eventualities.
You’ll want a medic, of course. Nobody wants to be stuck in the desert with four people who don’t know how to work a bandage. Dangerous situations are a dead cert, so some kind of firearms expert will help (handguns, shotguns, rifles or others is your call.) You might be out of ammo though. Better take a melee bruiser too. Lockpicking sounds useful. Leaving without an electronics wizard seems foolish as well. Crap, that’s five people already. Time for a re-think.
