Wasteland 2 New Beta Build Released

In case you own an Early Access copy of Wasteland 2 you’ll have noticed it recently downloaded a couple of updates, but you’ll need to check the official Tumblr for the title to see the changelog, and discover exactly what changed. It’s a massive changelog too, so forgive me if I only quote the high profile changes:

High Profile Fixes

Updated to Unity 4.3 which may introduce new issues not previously seen. Please report on the Early Beta Community Site.

Implemented hardware cursor

Major combat and weapon balancing (1st balancing pass).

Eliminated a variety of crashes related to saving & loading in combat.

Eliminated a variety of infinite loading occurrences during scene transitions. (Specifically Ag Center and Highpool loading crashes)

Eliminated a variety of crashes related to Highpool & Ag Center.

The game will no longer be autosaved and a duplicate party will no longer be generated when going to the main menu from gameplay.

The name of a snapshot portrait should now be set when it is created.

Custom portrait filenames should now be retained when saving/loading.

Optimization: Pre-allocate animstates for decreased load time.

Removed XP exploit for perception.

Improved individual dropsets.

Improved overall loot distribution and balance.

Eliminated circumstance of loot drop returning no items.

Clicking on a player portrait to switch to a different speaker in conversations should now work correctly.

HOTFIX – Performance improvements, and quality settings will now perform properly

Combat & Balance

Reduced penalty for penetration vs armor class difference

Unconscious PCs now stand up at end of combat with 1 CON (doesn’t apply for Mortal, Serious, Comatose states)

Reduced AC on roaches

Reduced AC, CON, AP slightly on pod person

Reduced damage on pod person explosion

Added grenade dropset.

Fix with assault/sniper rifle hit chance penalty – NPC has to be alive and hostile now.

Adjusted falloff damage downward.

Adjusted AP to fire and reload down by 1 for many weapons

Adjusted armor penetration

Adjusted melee chance to hit

Adjusted damage windows for most weapons

Adjusted magazine sizes

Adjusted overall chance to hit

Various improvements, fixes and adjustments to grenades

Various icon, description, picture, scrap value and weight adjustments and improvements

All unconscious PCs heal to 1 hit point at the end of combat (PCs in CON states worse than UNC do not)

NPCs waiting to join combat do not face the combat center at the start of combat

Mobs climbing ladders when combat starts get teleported to a proper square so combat doesn’t break

Removed combat initiation command from Chopper to prevent an issue where combat exits on start

Add FOW revealer to clear FOW on combat start

Mobs should not turn to face in an infinite circle anymore

Small change to how cover is detected so slightly uneven terrain doesn’t give a false positive of cover.

Force attack when clicking with attack cursor out of combat (Fixes targeting with grenades & rpgs out of combat).

Removed unnecessary flanking to hit bonus

Added bonus for Melee to hit mobs holding a ranged weapon

Added a significant penalty for assault rifles and sniper rifles to hit anyone if there’s a hostile standing next to them in combat

Set damage to a minimum of 1 if the penetration multiplier rounded the damage down to 0.

Improve combat start up speed – no longer doing redundant square lookups.

Field stripping can be done on any weapon now.

Removed healing over time for PCs.