Wasteland 2 Director's Cut is out now

[thermador]

This new update is free for existing owners of the game, and launched two days ago for US owners and launches tomorrow globally. In my opinion, WL2 is one of the best video games in recent years, and a great way to spend your time while waiting for Fallout 4.



Details here: https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/backer-information/release-faq

Wasteland 2 Director's Cut changes a huge number of aspects of the game. Our main new features and changes include:

• 
  Graphical overhaul and update to the Unity 5 game engine.


• 
  Expanded voice-over with thousands of newly-voiced lines for key characters and scenes.


• 
  Precision Strikes system allows you to target individual body parts on enemies in combat, which lets you inflict negative status effects on them.


• 
  Perks system lets you pick bonuses for your characters as they level up.


• 
  Quirks system lets you pick a personality trait for each custom created Ranger during character creation, with a gameplay-modifying positive and negative quality.


• 
  Rebalanced gameplay, including virtually all combat encounters, weapons, loot drops and containers.


• 
  Controller support on PC and console. On PC, you can select from keyboard and mouse input, as well as Xbox 360, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 DUALSHOCK 4 controller modes.

There's plenty of smaller additions to be found, of course, but we'll leave those for you to find.

I will add that the rebalanced gameplay adds some nice features, including a much easier system for working with containers/traps/locks/etc. so that you don't have to pick the specific character each time, it just automatically uses whichever character has the highest skill level.

One other aspect of the rebalance is that they reduced the number of locked and trapped chests to make things a bit more realistic and faster to play through.  So your average boring loot stuff is less likely to be locked and trapped, but the good loot still may be.

The graphics upgrades look pretty nice as well:

https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/static/press/ks/068/W2_DC_01.jpg

https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/static/press/ks/068/W2_DC_02.jpg

https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/static/press/ks/068/W2_DC_03.jpg

 

[pintocat]

What's the short version of what changed in director's cut? Did they streamline anything?

[thermador]

I added info to the first post; the main thing that's been streamlined is the interface and dealing with in-game events that require lockpick/traps/medic/security/etc. skills.

[TrickyVein]

In the reviews that I've read of the game, the minigames like lockpicking and hacking seemed to frustrate the greatest number of players, so I'm glad to read that it's been updated.

[thermador]

Yeah they are not even minigames really

They are just "save your game, find the character with the highest skill level for the task, try to pick the lock/defeat the trap/hack the security, random chance of failure based on skill level. load save if unsuccessful". 

This leads people to try and pick locks way above their skill level (with a 12.5% chance of success), and just keep reloading reloading reloading until they get it.  It's bad game design (should be more like FO3/FNV, where you just can't even try), but also leads to cheap gameplaying - reloading saves.

For me, I never really had an issue with it because I designed my party from the getgo with one character dumping a ton of points into only a couple skills, so I always had a character with a really high level that I could use. 

[Knuckles128]

Honestly, I would wait a little. I found it slightly annoying that the game is still rather buggy, even after a year of supposed "polish." Things like memory leaks, framerate unsteadiness, and gameplay balancing issues haven't really been fixed since it was released last year. Technical difficulties and just plain missing features like the ability to save your character, for me, put a damper on trying to start a new Wasteland 2 playthrough.

[Risewild]

[quote=luthien]

 

It took a Director's Cut to add controller support on PC? That's developer laziness.

[/quote]

Who plays isometric turn based strategic computer RPGs with controllers anyway?

[thermador]

It was PC-only up until 2 days ago - console launch was the same time as the director's cut.  It makes sense that they enabled controllers at the same time - they had to do all the hardware interface work anyway for the console launch, might as well bring it to PC too.

From my experience it's a definite minority of PC players use anything besides a keyboard and mouse, except for niche games like flight simulators.  But as consoles continue to gain popularity in "serious" video games over PC's, you do see more and more people using XBOX and PS controllers on their PC's. 

[dekjo]

I've been looking forward to this. I started a game a while back, but then word of the re-release came out shortly thereafter, so decided to wait for it to come out before doing my first playthrough.

Knuckles comments concern me, but I'll still start a game up and see how it plays. Hopefully won't run into too many issues, but we'll see.

What I had played was only to just after leaving the first starting area and I haven't watched or read anything about the game, so going in completely blind.

[thermador]

For what it's worth, the main issues so far are related to certain AMD video cards, which can be fixed by reverting to DX9 mode.

And if you have disabled hyperthreading in your BIOS (so the game thinks you have a processor that supports HT, but it doesn't), you will get crashes in certain areas. The fix is fairly obvious, e.g. enable hyperthreading again.

So far, I've played Directors Cut with no issues.  But I have an Nvidia card and have HT enabled.