Yeah I'll take a look at 2. I mean I been interested in the series but I played this one shitty one years ago that had like irl time limits for shit you did to your base.
How is 3? see it's mixed review right now, however more positive then negative right now.
There's been a lot of knock-off and series adjacent releases that tried to ape the Jagged Alliance 2 formula but none of them were really proper sequels, and certainly none of them had Currie's blessing or help. He comes across as a little bitter how much the JA name has been dragged through the mud over the years, so for him to throw in with Haemimont and give them his help, they really must have sold him on the pitch or at least bribed the fuck out of him.
JA3 feels pretty good from what I played so far, it's missing a bit of the charm that 2 had with the character personalities but I've only really dealt with 3 characters so far since my fourth is the custom lad and they seem to lack the kind of integration the other hireables have. Gameplay isn't bad, at first I had opinions on how limited and weird it felt but then I came to terms with the fact that I was comparing it against 1.13 mod which has had near two decades of autistic programming to make it what it is, so in comparing it to baseline JA2 it's certainly not as huge of a gap in experience. Certainly feels a bit more refined with the progress the tactical gunfighting genre has had in the last 24 years. There's less guesswork in how much you're benefiting from cover, though I do find it weird their initial idea for balance and design was to eschew the CTH calculations on aiming and relegate that to a day 1 supplementary mod. Their excuse is that gunfights should feel chaotic and the AI doesn't account for the idea that you might know how likely you are to hit, but I personally hate the idea of leaving a lot to chance. There was a comment made during the pre-release lead up stream earlier today about not wanting to promote minmaxing your gameplay as much, which I felt was kind of a weird take to have in the most autistic wargame I've ever played, but at the end of the day while they released the game in a state to share their vision of the product they still have a day 1 option available for any players that disagree with that, so I'm not going to harp on them for it and am appreciative they're not trying to force their vision either. The one goofy thing I feel about the game though is the weapon modifications being able to be cobbled together from generic 'parts'. It grates my sperg soul to imagine just whipping up a whole-ass functional Uzi suppressor from 'parts' I attain form disassembling 10 Browning Hi-Power pistols, but at the same time it saves the ballache of trawling in game merchants for random rolled loot pools of add-ons, and who knows if that is a feature or not still, I've not even hit the mainland yet.
It feels pretty Jagged Alliance. The characterization isn't all there but I can't really fault them on that too much, they're reviving a franchise a quarter-century after the last main entry with only the original designer on board for oversight and direction, there's only so much they can do to capture mid-late 90's cheese and character tropes. I've only used one returning character so far in my squad -- Michael "MD" Dawson -- the others being my IMP custom and two new comers. MD's a simple character to write, he's not a skilled combatant, he's much more a civilian doctor than a combat medic, and he's not that talented in combat on paper, though he does seem to have an innate perk/trait thing that I'm not entirely sure how it's triggered but looks like he can achieve a combat high and become surprisingly capable. He's got his usual attitude of not really liking that he's got to kill people as a mercenary, has a compassionate outlook on things and in general still has his softboy demeanor. He's not retreading the same voice lines or dialogue from 2 but the essence of his character is about 80~90% there from how it feels. The other two newcomers I've been using, some woman I can't remember her name right now but she's a bit of a goofball, comes across as a manic pixie dream girl type calling her voice mail 'talking computer' and always going on about heroes and quests with a sort of conviction that makes me split on whether she's completely delusional or really a psychopath. The other, Omeryn(?), is a mistake. His kit comes with a sawed off shotgun that has miserable range for what I feel to be safe engagements, and every line he has is either about sleeping or eating to an annoying degree, to a point where he comments about others killing enemies as a good thing since then he doesn't have to do anything. It's all delivered with this kind of upbeat, jovial-sounding tone that just comes across like huge passive aggressive bitch mood. The only contribution he's had so far in my capturing most of the first island is the rare chance I get to make use of his double-barrel fire mode, which seems like if it catches someone in cover it forces them to exit cover and become more likely to get hit. Maybe he's actually really good and the tactical application he brings is worthwhile but I'm still learning a lot of the mechanics, I only got about ~4 hours to play and I spent a good 40 minutes testing how skill rolls feel and whether or not savescumming is still a viable method for dealing with static checks, I'm not 100% on this but it feels very seeded so savescumming for favourable skill checks likely won't work near as well as it did in JA2. No training Explosives by attempting to place a mine and then disarming it and picking it back up in a loop, saving after every success and reloading if you blow up. It also seems kind of resistant to basic level memory address hacking but I also didn't try super hard.
I've heard there's some people complaining about the skill/perk tree stuff on leveling up, I don't know what these people are on. Sure, gaining perks is a new thing but JA2 characters had relative levels from 1-10 to determine field experience that went up over time, only difference was that if a merc comes into the field and has Psycho, Ambidextrous and Night Ops as their traits, then they're always going to be the kind of character that you send running in, in the dead of night to gun down patrols with two semi-auto pistols so they don't blow tons of ammo flipping on the full auto and spraying an entire pair of magazines into one grunt. That same character has a chance to develop new skills in the field and have an evolving utility that can change to match whatever focus on skills you take and become an adaptable member of the squad that becomes more than a one trick champion. It can really only be a benefit. As well, even if the game doesn't hit all the markers of being an amazing game, they're planning to release their modding tools within about a month time frame. Said to be the same kind of tools they used in making the game in the first place, spoke of looking forward to see if JA3 gets it's own 1.13 type mod, and if dedicated fans are going to recreate the entirety of JA1 and JA2 in the new engine once they push out the map and quest mod tools in the future. Even if I'd say right now it feels a 7/10, it was built and designed to be modular with the intent of making it accessible for modding, as it was only through modding that JA2 became as long living as it has been. Hearing one of the developers saying that they decided to make actual tools for it all since some other JA-hopefuls that've come out in the past had to be brute forced apart to add in new content made me really understand that they do get that what made JA2 such a treat for the fans is that the entire game's programming had been stripped and externalized to xml files in order to transform it into something much more than what it was originally released as. They get that in the end it'll be the fans that make the experience perfect for themselves, but they can still strive to give us the best base experience possible and in that regard I'd say they did pretty good so far.
It also helps that up to the hour of release it was on sale 20% off and still only costs some $45 despite that, so it's a decently solid feeling game as well as reasonably priced in this year of our mag 2023 where rape dungeons masquerading as AAA developers think $90 is a reasonable price to pay for something that has a coinflip's chance of being unplayable due to zero programming standards. Thank you Haemimont for having the humility to know that their product might not actually be worth $90, and enjoy my part as a satisfied fan that aside from my copy I've also bought two friends the game as well at full price.
i'm hype for soulfighter yeah and all the noobs who will insta lock the new champ and flop with her because assassins seem to get chumped in this game mode outside of expert piloting.
yeah they really need to bring back rotating game modes but they really want you to play that ranked mode instead of having fun. they do have TFT now but that stops being fun once you realize which combos win you the game most often right now it's shadow isles/zaun to their credit they are trying to add more to the gamemode so it's not X wins every time but they clearly don't want to dilute the main game mode.
honestly what i would do is add old game modes to the riot client and let people play them on an older build of leauge. there now you don't have to update / balance 20 game modes. just have a thing that tells you which patch your playing on and ban champions that were not available with said patch unless rito lost the data that should be doable.
especially with the most popular game modes StarGuardian and Odyssey
Just give us a permanent free pick URF, and every two weeks just scrape the data of the top 12 most picked champs and disable them for the following 2 weeks, on top of giving us the bans. Keep a lot of the worst fucks to deal with in URF from being a permanent fixture if/when they squeak through bans and force people to branch out.
Also yes, all the previous game modes as semi-permanent features too. I miss Dominon, and don't give me any shit about the difficulties of balancing multiple game modes, Riot, you already don't fucking balance your one.
