harlock wrote on Dec 16, 2013, 11:21:
i keep hearing this and its worrying i must say:
Not all of the old-school charm is so charming, however, and in particular I am yet to be convinced by the combat. It's turn-based, but so far without the tactical depth to make it interesting rather than simply slow. There are no stances, no targeted hits, each character is only likely to have any skill with a single weapon and toys like grenades are rarer than hens' teeth. Environments also suffer from a general lack of detail or options, with the result that - so far at least - there's not much to do except stand next to cover, take pot-shots and toggle opportunity fire that may or may not actually be taken. Later, having more choices will hopefully make things more interesting.
If I had to compare the combat system in WL2 to another game, it would be more like the new XCOM:EU. When you right click to move, it shows two grids, one for how far you can move and still have enough AP to fire your currently selected weapon and a second one showing you your farthest movement.
There are no stances, but when moving, you can see when in move mode that an object in the world will provide cover, what direction the cover is provided. If you move to cover, the character will move to cover and kneel behind it.
The targeting is similar too, there are icons on the side representing all visible targets to the selected character. You can click these icons or you can click a target on the screen. You see info such as your chance to hit, the approx. damage you will do, etc.
I don't know how grenades work, I found one, but I haven't used it yet. They need to give better documentation on what keys and other things do. You can equip two weapons, but I haven't figured out how to switch between them. There are icons when in combat to reload and switch fire modes (auto/burst/single), and one that I forgot what it's called, that I think is supposed to be like overwatch. I've clicked it and had mixed results, sometimes my character immediately fires, sometimes they do nothing.
I've only played it a few hours the day I got my beta code. I've run into some bugs, but the game has been patched several times already. One was during a random encounter where there was an enemy behind cover, and no matter what it always showed a 0% chance to hit him. I assume the 0% chance was incorrect as I did hit him.
Another one was with one of the characters I created. I created a Native American Buddhist as my medic, but once I started the game, she was now a Russian Christian. Then later all of the personal bio. things you can chose during character creation disappeared completely. It only happened to that one character in my party, the rest were fine.
I'm going to start a new game tonight and see what has changed, but so far I like what I see for the most part. There are a few things I would like to see changed. There is health regen when in a map and outside of combat. There seems to be mixed opinions on this, some say it happens too fast, some too slow, some say it needs to be removed. Personally I thought it was too slow to be of any real advantage. You can't rest or speed up time to heal quicker. The original WL had health regen by waiting in map mode, but there was a chance to encounter an enemy while waiting. The regen rate was something like +2 CON every 30 seconds or so, so if you have a badly injured character and wanted to fully heal via the regen, you'd have to let the game sit idle for 10-20 minutes depending on max CON and how badly hurt they are.
I assumed you healed when traveling over the map view, but you don't. I had one character close to death after clearing out an area. I left and went to an oasis to refill water, assuming my team would heal along the way. When I was almost there I hit a random encounter, and my team's CON was the same as when I left. I would like to see healing while traveling added, since that was the way it happened in WL1 (and FO1, FO2, FO:T). You're supposed to also be able to use the field medic skill to heal, but I either did it wrong or it is/was broken because I couldn't get it to work.
One other nitpick I had is when in combat one of my team went down. It showed they would bleed out and die in something like 80 turns. I knew the encounter would end before then, and as soon as combat ended a few turns later, it went back to real time and they bled out in a few seconds, before I my medic character could get to them.
"You can either want something to be true, or you can want the truth. Pick one." - Mr. Diety