Wasteland Merc 2 Released

[VasikkA]

Hey, you forgot Fallout: Yurop!

Well, since 90% of the mod projects never get finished, what's the point of posting a couple of screenshots of mods that are never going to be released? Wasteland merc 2 was finished. At least that deserves some attention no matter how crap it may be.

[Haris]

Maybe I should let the subject lie, though, as Haris isn't really accepting any criticism. That makes it a bit pointless

Its not about not taking criticism. If i make another mod i will take alot of what you said in to consideration. Not everything but alot of things. I just aint touching this mod any more. Its done as it is. Except the expansion that we are working on that will add some stuff and fix all bugs that effect gameplay.

[Brother None]

... at least, not lately and those are all things NMA has posted since 2nd August. It's a tragedy, really.

Yes, you are

Lolage!

what's the point of posting a couple of screenshots of mods that are never going to be released?

Since when does DaC not do that? It posted the useless "news" from both FMF and MR, both of which considered no show of progress whatsoever. If you're going to post about mods that have nothing to show, why ignore a mod that does? Black Steel offers a demo that creates two new (somewhat crappy) locations, which is more than "concept art" from FMF or "joke screenshot" from MR, both of which DaC posted

[DarkUnderlord]

Since when does DaC not do that? It posted the useless "news" from both FMF and MR, both of which considered no show of progress whatsoever. If you're going to post about mods that have nothing to show, why ignore a mod that does? Black Steel offers a demo that creates two new (somewhat crappy) locations, which is more than "concept art" from FMF or "joke screenshot" from MR, both of which DaC posted

I'm on staff here at DAC and FMF is my project so clearly all FMF news is nepotism on my part. As for MR, we only post their news because we pity them.

[Spazmo]

The key thing about MR is that people from that mod come and complain every time DU posts an FMF item, reminding DAC news posters that, hey, they exist. If people from those other hopeless mods you mentioned came and complained at DAC like MR does, they'd probably get posted too. Unless too many of them came and complained. Then they'd all just get ignored out of exasperation.

[MR Snake]

The key thing about MR is that people from that mod come and complain every time DU posts an FMF item, reminding DAC news posters that, hey, they exist. If people from those other hopeless mods you mentioned came and complained at DAC like MR does, they'd probably get posted too. Unless too many of them came and complained. Then they'd all just get ignored out of exasperation.

I did that once, and onlny because he wrote it was the greatest mod out there.

[Brother None]

I did that once, and onlny because he wrote it was the greatest mod out there.

Consider that only Haris has released full game conversion mods right now, that's a pretty mute point. Wasteland Merc 2 is the greatest Fallout 2 total conversion mod out there because it's the best of the existing ones, which are sparse.

If I remember correctly, though, FMF won the DaC poll on Fallout 2 mods. DaC's poll stands as representative of the Fallout opinion, so if it said FMF is most expected, FMF = teh win.

Unless DU cheated

[Haris]

Unless DU cheated

Hah, i never even thought of that.


Anyway here are 2 player submited pictures from wm forums.

[Tenkoy]

Okay Haris, I've been playing your mod for a few days. I'd say that it looks rather promising, but is defeated by quite a few areas I feel really drag it down.



First I'll talk about the good.



I rather enjoy the food element, I think it's a lot better than the simple stimpacks that somehow so many survived the war. It gives you more reason to hunt down rats and creatures, not just for the xp (which rats don't give) but for the raw materials for cooking.

Every level counts. Gaining a level in Fallout was no big deal (Atleast to me), but here gaining a level is very important and a lot tougher to make at the beginning.

The crafting. I have to admit, that's a rather neat feature, it's good to actually feel a reason to hunt down useless items so they can be crafted into more useful items.

The 'static' talking heads is a step in the right direction I feel, it did give a bit more feel of life in the game. Some of the pictures were rather awful looking though, to be honest, perhaps a bit more touch-up would have been in order. It was strange seeing one bad looking static head and then suddenly running into others that looked high quality.



Now for the bad.



1. The starting curve is just way too hard. A large pack of wild dogs often when you're level 1? You simply have to run away to survive. Having tough fights is one thing, but the fact that you have to run, and in the process save and load often just to survive the beginning, is preposterious. Perhaps you were going for a more dangerous game than Fallout, but I think the beginning was just going a 'bit' overboard.

2. No life within the camps. So far I have only encountered static 'non-moving' people in the cities that seem to mostly only offer "do this and get this quests". It's simply not interesting to do these quests. I want to feel a need to do these quests, a reason to do them. More than just for the reward, but for the adventure of it.

That's what I loved about Fallout, the variety of quests.

Finding Anna's locket and putting her to rest,
Finding out what was in the church in the Den
The raid on the church and how you went about it.

Also, where is the gossip? The jibber jabber in the cities? It really made it feel like a city in Fallout because not everyone was trying to offer a quest, some people just had junk to say. The floating text is okay, but talking with them about nothing in particular, or getting info here and there would have been nice and would have made for a more immersive mod.

3. Starting storyline, a purpose. Being a merc is all well and good, but that still doesn't mean that a story wouldn't be nice. I mean a real story that grabs you right from the start. Sure you can be a merc, but even a merc has a background and a history. Maybe there is an underlying story that I'm missing, but I'm not seeing it right now and that's what matters the most to someone like me who's picking it up. I want to be immersed, I want to feel a reason for everything I do.


Overall, I think this mod has a lot of promise, I just feel it lacks in a lot of areas that would have really boosted it up. It was fun, but hardly something that sucked me in like Planescape Torment, Fallout or Fallout 2. I'm not going to say that it sucks, but it can be improved in a lot of ways to make it vastly more enjoyable to many more people. Afterall, isn't having fun and enjoying the game the whole reason for making it?

[Haris]

Well i dont like to retype all i wrote in WM forums so i just quote it here. And feel free to have opinions on this one. Its still not to late to change. Plus we are gonna add alot more with this addon. This is just whats finished.

Big WM2 addon in the working progress
Yes we are making an addon that will balance the game out and give it a eazyer start and make it a bit eazyer overall and not make the tasks equally time consuming so that you can actually menage to gain those big levels.

This is what done so far. At start there will be a npc that explains why you are at infested flagstaff and that gives you start equipment according to your taged skills. This will make creating the char even a bigger joy.


This is what he gives according to those taged skills. We allredy implemented him in to the game.
SMALL GUNS - Mauser, 200 shots
BIG GUNS -Flamer, 50 shots
ENERGY WEAPONS -Plasma blaster, 80 shots
UNARMED COMBAT -Spiked nuckels
MELEE -Combat knife
THROWING -10 glowballs 10 trow knifes
FIRST AID -5 rad aways
DOCTOR -20 chemicals
SNEAK -Leather Jacket
LOCKPICK -Expended lockpicks
STEAL -25000 botlecaps
TRAPS -20 glowballs
SCIENCE - 20 chemicals
REPAIR -10 steelbars
SPEACH -10000 botlecaps
BARTER -15000 botlecaps
GAMBLING -25000 botlecaps
OUTDOORSMAN -100 water, 50 raw meat

-------------------------------------------------------
Example if you taged Outdoorsman, Speach and Small guns you will start with 100 water flasks, 50 raw meats, 10000 botlecaps, Mauser and 200 shots for it.

We are also planing to implement so you can pay a guy to transport you from black market to trashyard in just 1 day instead of 20 days it takes to walk. This is mainly for those that have to good pcs and 13 years runs by like nothing. And yea dog encounter is gonna get eather nerfed to 3 dogs or just removed. And you wont have to hunt for water for 6 in game months before you get to mine. We will make it a bit less rare.

[Agrajag]

I've been playing this mod for a while now, and I thought I might give some feedback. Although I know Haris is not planning to improve it or anything, I figured he might still be interested in what I have to say, as it might improve any future works. Nice of him to make a mod anyhow, credits to him for that.

After running around the wasteland killing rats and sporeplants (if I got lucky) for what seemed like an eternity, I finally got enough money to buy a mauser, so I can start taking on the smaller towns like radville, and start looting for once. Uh, but wait a minute... The only way I could ever kill an armed guy was by saving and loading till I got a critical hit knocking the guy unconscious... And as if that wasn't hard enough, I couldn't manage to get the locks on the lockers open, so I got no loot. Fine. I try fishing. I buy a fishing rod, go to the coast and for about fifteen minutes I get the "you fish for a while, but catch nothing message". Wtf? I try cook some meat, but everything is burnt. I try mining, but I get nothing, no matter how many times I reload. The only option left is running around the wasteland, killing rats, which don't give any xp, until I have enough money from the raw meat so I can buy xp from the guy in the black market. Wow, that's fun! Before I gave the whole thing up (no way I'm gonna waste the rest of the summer killing rats) I took the liberty to edit my character a bit. I was kinda curious of what this mod had to offer after killing a billion rats, so I went to the alien lair. Holy shit..! Obviously, after getting a really good character the hard way, you're supposed to kill off hundreds of aliens. And not just ordinary aliens. No, there were at least 3 alien queens with 999 (lol) hp, and then this white super-duper-alien boss... I give myself 999 hp, 99% damage reduction on everything and about 500 melee damage and 30 action points. Man, these things _still_ put up a nasty fight. How good are you supposed to get? And it's not like there is much variation in it either, it's not a few very hard opponents, it's a motherload of them. I mean, seriously, with my almost immortal character, it took me about 20 minutes clearing that place, they were so many. Also, what was the reward? A few bottles of booze, a few piles of logs, a nixon doll, some radios and that's about it. No sane person would ever go there more than once. Holy shit...

I took the opportunity to try out the mining and crafting while I was at it. I must admit it was pretty fun, it's a very good idea. Not to say it can't be improved, but it was what lifted the entire mod in my opinion. It was almost fun when my character had 300% in all skills, but come on! How is anybody going to endure mining when it costs so much and you get so little? It would take forever to get enough stuff for, let's say, a power armor. Oh, I just gotta mention this, it's so ridiculous... To get an advanced power armor, you require, among other in comparision fairy easy things to get, five systalic motivators (not to mention mark II, which require an additional ten). And the only way to get them is through the randomized loot. It took me forever to get just one of them with my immortal character who turned all turrets into scrap metal in two turns... I am serious here, I did the shelter more than one hundred times without getting a single chip. In total, to get enough of those motivators to create an advanced power armor mark two, you would have to do the shelter several thousand times. Come on, by the time you could even do that, you wouldn't need the armor anymore.
On the positive side is the mining and crafting skills. It was severly flawed, however, in that you need to have such immense skills to even start doing anything, that people who actually have a life besides the computer screen, and most of those who don't, would give up before they even had enough steel bars to make anything. And even if you (as in my cheating case) had enough skill to mine and craft, you still need to do hundreds and thousands of fighting encounters to get some of the items to build the best stuff. Personally, I would probably have enjoyed it more if you could go the whole way with mining and crafting, without doing any fighting (and preferably avoid killing a thousand rats before you can even afford a pick-axe). There should be more different kinds of materials, maybe even blueprints, instead of having ingredients like a drill (rofl) and electronic lockpick sets to create advanced power armor. Those things we're seemingly just added to make the armor harder to get, because they surely don't make any sense. Why not use a few hundred cooked meats, and a human brain as well?
In the finishing words, I want to admit that I really had a laugh when I found a kidnapped child in a locked and trapped ammo-box, guarded by turrets and a cyborg... Oh, also, the new guns was a big upper. Great work on the designing apartment there. Too bad nobody ever dropped anything, so you could start using any of them yourself though...

[Tenkoy]

Well i dont like to retype all i wrote in WM forums so i just quote it here. And feel free to have opinions on this one. Its still not to late to change. Plus we are gonna add alot more with this addon. This is just whats finished.

Snip

We are also planing to implement so you can pay a guy to transport you from black market to trashyard in just 1 day instead of 20 days it takes to walk. This is mainly for those that have to good pcs and 13 years runs by like nothing. And yea dog encounter is gonna get eather nerfed to 3 dogs or just removed. And you wont have to hunt for water for 6 in game months before you get to mine. We will make it a bit less rare.

Sounds like some good improvements. Removing or easing up on the dog encounters is the biggest plus in my opinion.

[DarkUnderlord]

If I remember correctly, though, FMF won the DaC poll on Fallout 2 mods. DaC's poll stands as representative of the Fallout opinion, so if it said FMF is most expected, FMF = teh win.

Unless DU cheated

I would just like to say that I did not cheat on the Fallout mods poll. The database records every vote as well as every user who voted (but doesn't record how those people voted because that's just wrong or something).

To recap, the results were:

What Fallout mod were/are you most interested in?
Fan Made Fallout 30%
Mutants Rising 16%
Fallout: Yurop 15%
Fanout (deceased) 3%
I don't care. 33%

Total Votes: 110

I did that once, and onlny because he wrote it was the greatest mod out there.

FMF is the greatest mod out there. So there.

[Haris]

I translated the poll on http://madbrahmin.bonusweb.cz/index.php?id=home wrongly. Here is the real translation.

Co říkáte na Wasteland Merc 2? - What do you thing about WM2?

Super MOD! Tohle mi ve Falloutu chybělo! - SUPER MOD! Thisis what i missed at Fallout(s)!

Je to dobré, ale má to svoje mouchy - Its good, but it have some mini-mistakes. (or how to say it in English...

Není to úplně Fallout, ale lepší než nic - It´s not pure Fallout, but better than nothing

Zkusil jsem a nebaví mě to - I play it and I dislike it

Nezkouším, nechce se mi - I don´t play it, Im too lazy

[A_M]

Yo Harris. Can you mak e patch or sth. That would make the whole cooking stuff faster ? U know, like you use a oven and a talk screen pops u with choises
Cook meat
Cook fish ect.

It would be faster to just hold eg. "1" for cooking meat than using it on the oven all the time. Besides the mod is quite fun, yo !

[Haris]

Here is th full list of things in the addon.

Start equipment according to what skills you taged.

Rats now give 25 exp when killed. That was actually just a bug that they didnt give xp.

You can as i mention travel from Trashyard to black market and the other way around now.

Merc in haven will reveal all combat locations to you if you have 50% Speach.

Bug with kingpin, bos and slaver crashing the game when your karma is to high or low is fixed.

Water is eazyer to find in wastes, plus we stocked town shops with some more water and stuff like that.

We are allso planing to implement a high tech expensive device that will teleport you from anywhere to war tech facility if you have science 50%. It will thoe burn out one circuit board each time you do that and damage your char for 100+ hp.
You will allso be able to purchuse expensive cards for it. 1 will enable you to travel to craft areas (mines and black market) if you science is 75%, 1 will enable you to travel to all civilised areas if your science is 100%, 1 will enable you to travel to all combat areas if your science is 125%, 1 will enable you to travel with no hp damage if your science is 150% and 1 will enable you to travel with no circuit cards removing if your science is 200%.

We are allso gonna implement an npc that will cook 100 meats for 1000 botlecaps if your speach is above 50%. She will thoe burn around 20-30% of it. But still helps out.

Bug where game crashes if you use craft comp in combat is fixed.

Dog encounter is gonna be nerfed from 6-8 dogs to 2-4 dogs.

You no longer have to have 50 steel bars on you to make power armor. It takes 30 to craft and now you will be able to craft it with 30 steel on you to.

Firewood, pile of junk, gold ore and uranium ore will all weights only 1 pound

[A_M]

Huston, we got a problem;p Ive gone to the Haven city, gave the guy 20 gold chunk's & 10 water chips. I got the 100 water flask's for this, but now I CAN'T LEAVE THE AREA (the game crashes ://////// ) WTF is this ? some sort of bug ? Is there a way to overcome it ?

[ApTyp]

Yeah. Don't play crappy mods. Megaton will blow them away.

[Haris]

Have you maybe sold way to many items to the shop keeper in the town?

[A_M]

Have you maybe sold way to many items to the shop keeper in the town?

Nope, the only thing are the bottle caps (the guy has about 20K from Me because i suck at Barter ;p ). I mostly bought from him. Might that be the water flasks ? Cuz it appears only when i trade ore and water chips for them.