Why Wartales Fails As A Tactical RPG - Filthy's First Look

foreign here wanting to talk about war Tails so what is it it's a low fantasy open world turn-based RPG the player runs a mercenary organization and the game focuses on morally complicated decisions exploration crafting and combat why am I checking out wartels well I played an hour of it a few years ago in Early Access I didn't think very much of it then I was gonna not bother touching this title again but my community has especially since released repeatedly asked me to try it out suggesting that it would be similar to games like battle brothers which I've really enjoyed in the past and saying that the Tactical combat in this game makes it worth playing so I wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing out on a title in a genre that I'm really interested in and thought I should at least revisit this game and see if I was wrong in my initial impressions of it my initial rating was from a few years ago during the early portion of their Early Access so a lot has changed since then but my initial impression of this game was a c so since then I've played 10 hours of the full release version of this game on stream let me start with what I like about the game I like its low fantasy setting I think it's pretty well done there is some morality going on there but not so heavy-handed that you can't enjoy the game despite that there is a fair number of things to do in the game I like the profession and crafting system I think it's a decent way of attempting to give the player a number of systems they can engage with that are not just combat systems I think it's fairly well done here I like the knowledge and path system I wasn't so sure about knowledge which is a unlocked system based on accumulating knowledge points via exploration and crafting which then unlocks more recipes and more things you can do I think it plays out okay and the past system is kind of fun as well this is a passive system that kind of tracks what you're doing but as you do so many of certain things it unlocks other Buffs and play styles that are going to become available to you by doing those things so it does kind of feel like you're just doing your thing making your decisions and you get these rewards in perk points and ways to change your gameplay experience that kind of end up being pretty fun and can be different from playthrough to play through I like their implementation of of this setting there's a nice mix of just the kind of standard human enemies with occasional hints of some sort of mysticism or darker forces I liked their Crips for example I thought were a really cool feature and really kind of changed up their the gameplay from moment to moment all these things are pretty good I like their stealing I think this is a nice implementation of addressing the problem of I don't want the players stealing everything I don't want to feel like I have to take everything that isn't nailed down but still having some risk versus reward and some interesting interactions that come from that system thought it was pretty well done and I like the emphasis on the building of the mercenary company the creation of a team was supporting skills supporting backgrounds and in this case supporting professions all that I thought was pretty well done but I also want to talk about what I don't like about the game and this is an interesting one for me because I kind of flipped Midway through um initially I was quite unimpressed as I played into this game again but the problem was I was comparing it to battle brothers 2 directly and it's not so much the game comparison it's the type of game that's the that really matters for this comparison this this game War Tales is not a turn-based tactical focused game it is an RPG focused game and what that means is though although you spend a fair chunk of time in combat and combat outcomes are important to the game it really isn't the system that is their shining star of how this game is meant to be played and how you're supposed to find fun in this game combat I think has a lot of problems and we're going to get into those in a minute but I think honestly the game's emphasis isn't on combat so if you went into this game like I did with the assumption that it was going to be a turn-based tactical game where your combat decisions were going to be weighty and impactful and that was going to be the major gameplay Loop you're going to be somewhat disappointed because it isn't that however if you're coming into this game looking for a fairly interesting RPG with some fun systems and elements to it this is probably a better fit for you so I think my community framing this to me as a competitor to battle brothers or a game similar to battle brothers probably did this game a bit of an unfair comparison from from my perspective anyways but let's get into it so let's start with combat you do a lot of combat in this game it is a fairly big chunk of your time and I think it's unnecessarily slow and clunky um I think there's a number of things that play into that but one of the big problems is uh there is no player turn order um you may you have player actions in other words you may activate and use a character and that has turn order positions but there's no actual decision there's no actual mandate as to which character you have to use in any given time slot now that's really nice in one sense for player flexibility but it's a big contributor to how long the combat takes because you will often spend a moment flipping through which characters you can use and that's not clearly displays which ones have used their turn and which ones haven't and then also what they can do from that position and it's often very difficult to predict ahead of time what your character is able to do from a position because of some of the UI elements in there for example this uses a doesn't use a grid-based system it uses a open movement system it's sometimes difficult to predict how far you can move they have some features in place to kind of help you try to figure out if you can move and attack from a location but these features don't work very well when you're trying to compare between two units and an enemy enemy units movement as well to figure out the spot where you need to stand to activate your ability so you can't be hit by these enemies that type of thing is actually done really poorly in this game tool tips also lie to you in many ways in this game in the sense that uh you may hover a tool tip that says one number then you hover a tooltip in combat with another unit and it's an entirely different number because it brings into play the Buffs and debuffs but you can't tell about that that new damage number the actual damage number that's going to be done you can't tell that until you're actually in the position to do the combat and although it's turn based and single player There's No undo feature so I ca I I often run into the position where I'm unable to predict what my unit is going to do exactly when it gets to a position and that's going to be the difference between killing something or not killing something and enemy units and player units in this game are not reduced in combat capability by being wounded so there's that really pronounced binary between a unit is dead and it does nothing think to you or a unit is at one HP and it does full damage to you so you can't get a good sense often of can I kill that unit by this action until you've done that action and that's a big deal for the way the game plays to lean more heavily into that pod killing is a very big thing in this game the uh this is the standard the best crowd control effect is death and that is very true of this game enemies hit quite hard your units are not particularly robust um your best strategy is to kill enemy units in the turn order before they can move so they do not get to take actions on you and unlike with the players who can choose whatever unit they want in any turn order slot that is a player slot the enemies move in a predictable predetermined order that you can see at the bottom of the screen it is an is an option you can turn off but by and large as you're playing your best strategy remains kill the enemy before they move so you don't take any damage from them as much as possible and pod killing mechanics like that are pretty unpleasant to play with long term status effects are all over the place in this game fires and poisons weekends and bones and that kind of thing and some of them are pretty good but a lot of the dot base ones are pretty bad these are the standard failure of an implementation of dot systems where the dot is at the end of the turn so the player is penalized by having a recurring dot occurring to their units but the AI is already going to be dying in one to two turns at top so the the dot effects are really kind of irrelevant to that interaction with that enemy and detrimental in a different way just a lot of things like this that start adding up over time I don't like the way that start locations and team size scales there's a limited number of starting locations on any given portion of the map and there's no Reserve System which means you always need to full deploy all of your units but you can't always deploy your units together and it's difficult without a kind of list of your units to figure out or whether it's time intensive as opposed to difficult to figure out if you grab all your units that they're roughly put in a position where you want them and that they're roughly grouped together in a way that's going to defend them to the point that I often would just be like [ __ ] it I don't care I'd rather lose a unit than have to deal with this interface anymore um and this is particularly pronounced in some of the fights that happen there are uh fights where you take in darkness where you cannot see where the enemies are approaching from which makes it feel particularly punishing that you can't really group up your units as you would like and that enemies are appearing from a random Direction on the screen it's particularly annoying with reinforcements for the same reasons um it just became a very unpleasant system for uh for me with the start location uh the way they've done start locations in this game it's also quite repetitive you spend a lot of time in there and a lot of the fights are trash fights in a way that you don't really care about that fight you don't really take much damage from that but you also have to spend a fair amount of time interacting with that I wish there was some sort of Auto resolve or some similar features so I could avoid those the I the AI is notoriously bad in this game um two of the worst examples for me are enemies basically attack the nearest enemy so there's this whole engagement mechanic which defines a lot of the effects of abilities that forces enemies to attack certain enemies you get bonuses for attacking engaged enemies with other units you can do backstabbing kind of interactions with enemies who are engaged but the AI doesn't really interact with that system at all they they just attack the closest Target and don't really do any of the Strategic things that you as the player are deciding about which might be fine in some sense but it makes it feel like the player is engaging with the mechanics and the AI is just doing the the dumbest thing of move to the closest enemy and attack so if you have a low hit point unit that you're worried about dying you can just move another unit in between the AI and that unit and the AI will almost always just bother attacking the the front one as opposed to killing the the back one who would be the more the more reasonable Target from any sort of thinking enemy um the AI is suicidal they don't seem to really pay attention to ground effects so I have uh I've had an a mission where I'm required to keep an ally alive and that Ally was an Archer and that Archer was not threatened in any way so the Archer took their turn took a shot attacked somebody great and then ran into a a a wall of fire for no reason at all they weren't threatened there was no nothing in that area they just moved into fire and stood there and I'm like Ah that's not exactly what I was hoping for from an enemy that or Ally that has to survive the fight or I have to restart the fight um I also found this skill in build depth pretty uninteresting there's a mechanic in this game that allows you to force skill points into an area for a very low cost of a really really easy to harvest resource so you basically don't have any Randomness with your upgrades and that felt a little bit uh shallow to me I didn't find the perk builds a very interesting there seemed to be a very few number of builds I might get on any given class the weapons and uh skills are class based so the warrior can only use a certain very small selection of weapons and it's basically one weapon per class so you're not really making decisions about that basically the combat was fairly shallow and fairly bad in both UI and AI Ai and just overall not very enjoyable for me I also found the difficulty to be quite bad in this game there's two versions of difficulty you can select from region based scaling and uh like equivalency based scaling I think is what it is so in the one you're in an area and then when you uh there's mobs of a certain level in that area there's a range and once you leave that area and go to the next area the mobs will basically be a higher level in the next area and the other one is mobs are always your level when I started the game my chat suggested I take the region-based leveling system because the other leveling system would be extremely grindy that a lot of these trash fights I'd be taking would be much harder and much slower than I needed to be than they needed to be just to with the with the equivalency leveling the problem I found was my expectation was I would be able to leave an area when I over leveled in that area and go to the next area but the area progression is locked by storyline quests so I found the first area that I quickly gained power and was much more powerful in the enemies but I could not leave that area till I finished this storyline which meant I had to place for that whole area before I could get out of there which meant I wasn't fighting interesting enemies and then I got into the new area and no interesting enemies there the fight's still super easy until I happened to go into a crypt and the Crypt still wasn't too bad until I ran into this one fight in this Crypt where I had I was lowest level for the region and I fought enemies that were the highest level for that region and they were essentially two-shotting my units and I went from nine hours of never losing a unit to two units lost in that fight and am I okay with that outcome sure it's not so much the loss of a unit that bothers me it was how spiky that was as the player you kind of want that progression of of fighting on the edge of what you can handle but uh not being totally blindsided and surprised by some super spiky fight that you couldn't avoid and that kind of happened to me in this game I found that kind of unpleasant as an experience um continue on the user interface just seems to be not well optimized for player time I spend way too much time diving through menus looking for things than I do actually making selections so let's say I want to craft this item well now I've got to go to uh or I want to decide if I want to invest in an item to craft I gotta go look at the crafting cost for that item and then I gotta look at the upgrades for that and that might be a different window there and then I go back to my inventory for this the D or another example perhaps leveling a character the attributes and talents are on different pages from the uh the perks of that character so if maybe I have a character who has some innate bonus to strength and shields well I can't see that when I'm leveling my uh my talent selection uh so I'm forced to juggle multiple screens to get information that should be cleanly available on a single screen and this seems to be a recurring theme of their UI I found that quite unpleasant by and large just wasted a lot of my time looking for stuff the tool tips are pretty weak too so I often couldn't tell exactly what a thing did until I actually had taken it and used it this is in part translation stuff but it continues to add to that the problems with their combat system that if I don't know how skills are going to behave until I've done them then I have to take these things and waste that time to figure that out before I can actually make predictions and all that feels really bad if I'm trying to min max a combat experience I just felt like their overall UI really needed some more attention to giving the player all the information to make the decisions they might want to make on any of the screens that they should be interacting with because I I just had to juggle so many screens to do that and my final large complaint with this game is I really dislike their where's Waldo system they use this in two areas there is a whenever you encounter a location in this game the location is a a fixed thing on your screen that you can interact with it's not quite a picture because you can rotate the camera around and whatnot and there's interactable elements on that screen there's a there's a highlight button you hit alt to highlight in this game but the Highlight is very very uh dim the highlight and these areas have things like secrets and chests and tunnels and resources to collect in these areas and you end up basically taking an eye exam again and again on these on these locations instead of engaging with them mechanic so the limiting factor to whether or not I find this Quest and free these prisoners from this tunnel is whether or not I physically meet the player not my characters who I invest attributes in or the decisions of the things I crafted me the player needs to have an eyesight check to see if I noticed the tunnel in that location the locations are fixed and they don't change per game which means next time I play I just know it's there and I just click on it but the first time I play I might miss it because of that and I just found that whole system to be insane to me if you have the Highlight why doesn't the Highlight highlight in such a way that I can actually see it the things highlight but the highlight's so dim that you still miss it most of the time and it just seemed like a very bizarre mechanic I really dislike that and that same system exists for traps in the combat field where you can highlight traps but if you just don't highlight them or you didn't notice it or it Blends in with the grass and The Traps are often the color of the grass kind of deal you step on them and the pathing doesn't warn you the the map doesn't warn you it's just it was just so weirdly punishing in so many ways and so bizarre and disorienting for me to be pulled out of the game to be like all right filthy what's your personal eyesight like as opposed to how do your characters perceive the world um I found that extremely off-putting my final score for war tails is a B I think it's a fine single player RPG with a fairly weak combat system and a UI that really needs some more work done on it that's not bad necessarily but it gets much worse if you force the comparison between this and a combat turn-based game a combat-oriented turn-based game so I think comparisons to games like battle brothers actually does this title a real disservice because there's lots of fun things to be doing in this game that are not the combat and I think the combat is not done well at all so to focus the comparison on a highlight of another game that's the weak point of this game I think is a undue disservice to this game however I think this game has a lot of work that could be done on it to make it better I think the combination of the UI elements as well as the gameplay elements such as the where's waddle kind of stuff is a fairly unpleasant experience from time to time for the player it could just be these pain points could be easily removed with a small number of changes and patches to do that and I really hope they do do that because there's some potential here there's a lot of fun systems in this game it is a Indie RPG and Indie open World RPG but there's some really cool stuff in there there's some stuff that makes the game fun to play that I wanted to come back to and engage with I liked the team building I liked the uh the mercenary stuff of it I like the decision making I just didn't like what I spent most of my time on as the player and that was the Fatal flaw for me and that's why I give it a b

Channel: FilthyRobot Games

Views: 16,119

Keywords: FilthyRobot, Gaming

Id: d7rOzZf6JnE

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023