Wasteland 2: Game of the Year Edition E3 Impressions

E3 always puts the spotlight on the big AAA releases, but that doesn’t mean indie developers don’t have a presence. This year, developers at inXile were at the Los Angeles fair to showcase the Xbox One version of Wasteland 2: Game of the Year Edition. For now, not many articles on the E3 presentation of the game’s re-release have been published, but we’ve done our best to round up the few available.

iDigitalTimes has some words from an inXile developer, who expanded on the changes and improvements made:

(We were working on upgrading the game, bringing it to Unity 5,) Beekers said. (From a certain standpoint it’s easier to port from Unity 5 but we did have to do a lot of work on the controller interface. But, once that’s done we can bring it back to the PC so it’s a win-win-win.)

My run through put me in a basic firefight with some raiders. I noticed right away that the environment seemed a bit different and, afterwards, Beekers shed light on why Wasteland 2 vets won’t feel right at home.

(A lot of the combat has been improved as well. You’ll have more cover, more height differentials, things like that,) he said. (We redid all the areas, we redid all the character models, we did a bunch of extra voice acting. On the system side we added perks and quirks.)

RPGFan seems to be skeptical of the quality of the console port, based on what they saw:

Outside of combat, however, is where things didn’t shine so well. To begin with, the game had a very jaggy look to it. It ran in 720p, but just had this look of being really low resolution compared to what RPGamers who played the PC version would be used to. The developers mentioned that they were hoping to get the game running in 1080p before launch later this summer. Additionally, choosing and targeting objects in the environment was imprecise due to moving a cursor with the analog stick and it having some bugs where it didn’t always highlight what was wanted or even what should have been able to be highlighted.

I usually don’t post articles that aren’t in English, but given there are so few available yet, I’ll take the liberty to note that IGN Italy’s video preview shared similar concerns. While the journalist that attended the demo seemed to like the game itself (he recommended the console version to players that can’t get Wasteland 2 for PC), he argued that the UI was a poor fit for a TV screen (text size was specifically mentioned), and compared it unfavorably to Divinity: Original Sin – Enhanced Edition.