The strange journey of the "Five-Way Traveler".
Bullets whizzed through the swamp, accompanied by wizarding spells and lightning; and the moment consciousness was restored, I found myself transformed into a pig.
To be precise, it is the "Pigman", an image commonly found in Western games. Compared to the regular pink square man in the MC, my face is somewhat ugly at the moment, more like the look in "Amnesia": a rugged pig's head sewn on the chubby man.
And something even more important: Well, the tree next to me was talking about people, and it thought my pig couldn't understand people. I began to try to identify the wilderness around me: rotting corpses, rubble and garbage, cowboy hats, spurs, and police badges, and everything was chaotic.
A weird supernatural world. Everyone else, however, claims that this is the "West."
But the most urgent thing is to explain to a talking tree that even though I am a pig, I can also talk
1
Wild West is the first game from WolfEye Studios. At the top of the Steam store page, the developer tried to make it clear that he was inextricably linked to Arkane, the developer of the Shame series— and indeed its co-founder had been the creative director of Shame and Predator.
However, unlike the action genres of the two, Wild West is generally an RPG. On its Steam Store page, with labels such as "Role Playing," "Immersive Simulation," "Stealth," and "Rich Story," it seems difficult to define the specific type of game. And over the course of nearly twenty hours of play, I prefer to say that if Shame were made into an equidistant," Fallout 2-style CRPG, that would be what Wild West would want to look like.
In the game, the player's journey is made up of five very different stories. On the first morning you wake up, you are a farmwife, your son is killed by cannibals, and your husband is missing. Once a bounty hunter, you dug up your own dusty line from the ground of the farm and began your first return after washing your hands in the golden basin: reliving the gun, shooting, learning to sneak in the grass and use bunkers, and embark on a journey of revenge.
And you'll soon learn that this westworld, which seems to be Lovecraft's, is far more dangerous than the historical West in Red Dead Redemption or the romanticized journey of "Water Everywhere.".
Any CRPG enthusiast will understand most of the gameplay of Wild West within the first ten minutes: from buckets and cabinets to grave piles, almost all containers can be "searched", and players can also try interactions (such as stealing) near each character, and the corresponding interactions will trigger rewards and punishments, and your reputation will affect the perception of you by everyone in the world.
If you've also played Divine Realm: Original Sin, you'll be able to understand the environment and combat even more quickly: oil barrels, campfires, oil lamps, and chemicals can all be broken or ignited in a variety of ways, currents can turn into deadly traps that energize when they encounter stagnant water, and tornadoes can sweep all creatures into the sky — the special difference is that Wild West is a real-time overhead-angle shooter.
Environmental objects can be interacted with
In the American comic-style cartoon rendering style, the player's perspective can be zoomed in to the pseudo-over-the-shoulder perspective, so as to discover some enemies that cannot be observed from the overhead view. The style of the action bar will directly remind you of "Shame", combining guns, knives and a limited number of special abilities to choose between stealth assassination or frontal combat to complete your goals.
Some shots that "can pretend to be over-the-shoulder perspective"
During the initial bounty hunter journey, players will gradually guide them through the fantasy-mixed Westworld, while completing one mission objective after another, including chasing the crime bounty, recruiting companions in the bar, and mastering different guns and prop skills to defeat more powerful enemies.
Everything is familiar, wrestling with outlaws, shopping for supplies in towns, and traversing open maps full of dungeons, ghost towns, and ruins to the end of the mission.
Bounty missions are an important source of income in the game
And when everything is done, your life will be evaluated by a list, and then you will be reborn in another body with a "bang".
"Another body" refers to the beginning of the next journey in a completely different social identity or even a different species: the strange pig people who have been transformed from humans by witches, the indigenous hunters who try to defend their homeland and "national spirit" from demons, and even werewolves and witches. And the protagonist of the previous journey can be recruited as a companion in the subsequent journey, and what connects your fate is a mark on the body - like the stars on the previous JOJO or the birthmark in "Cloud Atlas".
2
In addition to the old Fallout-style operation combined with the Shame-style battle flow design, the first thing that Wild West tries to show players is a special narrative experience.
In the words of the developers themselves, this supernatural West is a "dynamic world." "Dynamics" are first embodied in the player's choices in each journey, which inevitably affect the situation faced by the latter story.
The game world is strung together by small scenes on a large map
For example, during the bounty hunter's journey, if I were to reclaim a village or town that was on the verge of ruin and population loss from the gangs, after a certain period of time, the residents would return here to rebuild the settlement, from ruins to strongholds where they could supply equipment and medicines.
And if I don't choose to be a good person, but a socio-social personality bastard who completely abandons his reputation – and does something like slaughtering the village, then I will leave the next protagonist with a mess and a grave.
What you do will also be evident in newspapers and telegraph newsletters. Similarly, although the abilities and gains from the previous journey do not carry over to the next journey, you can recruit the previous protagonist into the team as NPCs and still enjoy the benefits of your previous journey.
"Dynamic" is not only reflected in the different journeys. When you kill the leader of a gang and miss the minions, then the loyal subordinates will seek revenge on you for a while afterwards. Correspondingly, do more good things (such as rescuing the kidnapped), and the person you help will suddenly appear in your critical moments like in the movie to save you, staged a "last minute rescue".
There's also the "dynamics" of the environment — including corpses attracting vultures, tornadoes and lightning randomly causing trouble for you while walking, and so on.
Probably due to scripting problems, such a dynamic can lead to quite a few random accidents. It's very common for a vulture to fly over in a chaotic battle scene and block a bullet that you've carefully aimed. In real-time combat, it is not so controllable, and there is also friendly damage in normal and above difficulty, and players are often confused by various random situations at the beginning.
There are even some outrageous situations that are completely unexpected - during the last part of the journey, I plan to rescue the pigman protagonist, who has already lived a stable life, who is kidnapped by the gang members for racial reasons, and when I untie him, I will inexplicably be hostile to the whole village (in theory, only the gang will turn against me).
After reading the file several times in a row, I found out the problem:
This pig man's past life was my own (or rather, my past life was this pig man). And at the end of the journey, I had a shotgun in my hand.
The moment I untied, the AI-controlled Pigman would rise up and point his gun at the oppressor (shotgun!). ）。 This Mr. Pigman — who once had a human brain, but is now in the hands of AI — would hit the surrounding crowd as soon as he fired a shot.
Just this pig man friend, have you heard of chickens in Brook Town?
It's hard to say that this is a random process bug, or "part of the fun of the game under the design of the degree of freedom". In Wild West, you'll encounter countless similar problems and misfire. Prudent CRPG players rely on diligent saves to discover and solve problems, and players will also find multiple solutions to a problem.
3
On the other hand, outside of narrative and simulated content, the RPG part of the game is actually relatively simple in design.
First of all, the numerical design and character development system are shallow, and most battles do not provide intuitive gains for the player (except for a little ammo and other supplies). On the contrary, being knocked out by an unexpected monster on the way to a mission is a very humiliating thing (not to mention losing your life), whether it is medicine, ammunition or the lives of your companions.
From the whiteboard equipment at the beginning to the orange suit, the only difference is only in the numerical value: the five-star weapon is only more damaged than the initial weapon, and even the naming is very lazy to use "Silver XX", "Gold XX" and "Legendary XX".
During the journey of the last protagonist, my misdeeds led to the death of the two protagonists who were supposed to have joined the party (no companion in the game can be resurrected after death), and I inherited a great legacy - but believe that a god suit feels similar to a whiteboard weapon.
At least in normal difficulty, the numerical pressure of the game's levels is not large, even if the whole process is passed by frontal combat, it is not difficult to prepare enough supplies in advance, and it makes the loot collection seem insignificant.
From this point of view, because the drive for collection and cultivation is not strong, the design goal of Wild West is close to a linear narrative game (although you are completely free to decide what you want to do).
Rather than cultivation-combat, the core content of the game is to encourage players to achieve their goals in different ways, such as the classic stealth, stun the enemy, and then bury or hide the corpse, and even use superpowers to stealth and then bypass the guards.
In addition to designing a set of weapon-based skill trees common to five characters, each character has different supernatural abilities based on identity and race.
shock wave!
Like witches can flash or even reverse bullets (though, you'll still have to rely on mortals' conventional hot and cold weapons to fight), Pigmen can strengthen their skin to withstand more damage and unleash poison gas to create AOEs, and hunters can summon animal companions and even unleash "stealth enchantments".
And when aiming to roll over, players can also enter the "bullet time" that consumes the focus bar, compared to the one shot you shoot after the bunker, the designer obviously encourages the player to try different combat styles. You need to observe the environment naturally, using explosions, burning, props, and "escape" to cope with different level situations. When dealing with characters, choose humanity or rely solely on murder to achieve their own ends (more like Shame).
Although limited to the development cost, the game has a lot of level material reuse, such as most village and town house "apartment type" is almost the same, but in the plot related places there is no lack of exquisite small design, such as a haunted house all doors and windows are sealed by stones, after a heavy search I climbed the ceiling, found that through the rope from the chimney to the center of the hall.
Of course, the premise is that you have to have a rope – although the items of the rope are classified as "garbage", this is the time to come in handy.
Compared to the small variety of gameplay items, the text clues in the map are abundant. There are a lot of logs that don't make any difference between the icon and the book title, and when you open it, you find that the text content is different. Thanks to excellent localization, players can gain insight into the worldview and story background of the Wild West.
My only pig-man friend who can speak human language and localization tester (but unfortunately, being able to speak comes at the cost of rhyming when he speaks)
4
In short, Wild West tries to bring a unique CRPG experience through a large number of unscripted narratives and "free choices" under a few fixed frameworks.
And its variable process presents a rather chaotic western world (somehow adapted to its supernatural background): except that the main plot is not running there, you have no idea what strange things will happen on the journey - almost any NPC may die in an accident, and the events encountered after each reading are different, which seems to be used to confirm that there is really no script behind it.
In the whole dynamic world, not all decisions are very important, some affect the life and death of NPCs, and more things are just a piece of tofu in the daily news, but players do feel that their actions are affecting the world.
In the game, I often think very naturally: If I had done something or not done before, would the result be different now? Or, can you achieve the mission goals in a simpler or more ingenious way?
Daily tips
This open-ended choice is reflected in the pluralism of the plot line (moral choice) and in the pluralism of ways to achieve the goal. In this regard, despite the cost (and perhaps development experience) of the game's content, it's somewhat monolithic, rough, and clunky in content, but wild westerly, clearly trying to try to bring players such an interesting experience in the game — which is the core fun of CRPG's most traditional tradition.