Obsidian 20th Anniversary Documentary | Part 4

2023/07/31 in gaming, videos

I’m playing Jagged Alliance 3

2023/07/31 in gaming

And I like it a lot so far. I’m surprised how hard it is. I don’t remember 2 being this tough. I’m only playing on normal and some fights I found almost unwinnable without losses at first. It’s definitely harder than XCOM 2, because there are no “superpowers”. The only thing so far I noticed that makes a huge difference, is if a weapon is fully modded. So collecting as many parts as possible plus a really good mechanic are a must. At some point I noticed that my age old tactic from JA2 is still solid: only fight at night. Slap those night vision googles on everyone and never fight during daytime. Unless the game forces this somehow.

The weather conditions are even more elaborate now, because there aren’t just day/night cycles. Fog, dust storms, rain… All those can be factors. The only thing that’s better than fighting at night, is fighting at night when there’s also some fog. :D

The only big thing I’m really missing, is the ability to just buy/order stuff on the laptop. Money now mostly serves as a means to pay the mercs and while there are some shops in some sectors, they are very rare and even then they only offer 3-4 static items, bad luck if there’s nothing amongst them, that is of interest to the player. I don’t understand this decision and can only make sense of it by thinking that this too was supposed to make the game harder. It takes quite some time to find good weapons and especially in the beginning it’s easy to run out of ammo.

Getting rid of burst modes is important without the means of just ordering more ammo, it can only be crafted in specific sectors. So a lot of the contract time for the mercs is just moving around to reach critical spots. It keeps the game really dynamic and there are more unexpected turns than there were in JA2. I’m far from finishing the campaign, but so far it seems a lot less straight forward and more complex. That’s really great.

Another improvement is, that there are way more side missions now. Pretty much every town has a character with a minor problem, or even a big one. Even enemy strongholds have optional sub-tasks, which make attacking them more interesting than simply running into the sector, the player can invest time in weakening them before the actual attack. Given how hard those fights can be, it makes a lot of sense to do all of those first. This is a situation in which the difficulty pays off. These outposts also have a real function in this world, they raise smaller squads and send them to attack the neighboring towns. So it even makes sense strategically to attack them, just to stop the threat they pose.

I’m maybe 25% through the campaign at this point, unless something unforeseen happens that prolongs it somehow and I’m happy to say that I didn’t really encounter any bugs. This game is really solid so far on my PC. There are obviously a ton of systems in this game and nothing would be less surprising if this was riddled with bugs, but it really isn’t. That’s just great.

The next new feature I haven’t mentioned yet is scouting, mercs can collect information about sectors that are close by and the gathered intel can be really valuable. They really thought about what would make sense in this situation and built the whole game around that. I’m really into it.

In the last decade or so, many movies/games etc. have had an almost excessive amount of references to older/previous stuff and I think the mentions of Arulco or the miracle drug made from the Metavira tree sap are appropriate (I just hope the Santiago woman is not a relative of the villain from JA1 :D). Oh and the menu screen shows the active squad, just like the XCOM 2 menu showed player created soldiers. That’s nice.

I just wanted to mention this game briefly, because it is too good to be ignored and I haven’t seen many people talk about it. Not that I would necessarily notice this and I haven’t been searching for fans of this game either, I just really hope this does well. There are not many games in this very specific niche, especially not at this level of polish. I’m definitely going to finish this.

So far in my game Biff died because I failed to find him in time. Sorry man! Too much stuff going on to just send the squad only after you. Many other tasks don’t seem to be time sensitive though. Really glad about that. :D The first mine was depleted really quickly, I hope not all mines deplete like this, if so, the whole game time is limited, of course, because all the mercs would leave without pay and this would make for a miserable end. In that case it could use an avatar timer, so the player is informed about this ticking clock. Wouldn’t be fun for me to be surprised by this.

So in conclusion, best tactics still are: only attacking at night, night vision googles, rooftops, prone (why don’t more games have this) and an extremely powerful and NEW attack type is setting up machine guns. They have a cone in front of them and the mercs just keep shooting as long as they have ammo. I have been in at least one situation that had so many enemies that this was the only thing I could do in order to survive. Throwing explosives and mortar strikes weren’t enough (not that one would have enough of those anyway). The inventory space is also quite restrictive (I’m constantly forced to throw things away or strip them down for parts), but this much isn’t new I think.

Really hoping I’m not the only one who likes this game, it really deserves as much attention as XCOM managed to gather. At least.

Oh yeah, the lines some mercs drop can be slightly annoying, but at least in my case it’s even less about what they are actually saying and more about the fact that they only have one catch phrase for every situation. So you’ll hear the same stuff A LOT. But I understand that voice acting is really expensive and whatnot and that they can’t give every merc hours of dialog. I can live with that. I probably should read this once more before posting, but I won’t. btw: it’s not just Biff who died in my game, also the guy from the station in the north was gone (probably dead) when I finally got there. Sorry! Also Basil got killed immediately (alongside his whole ranger team) by the army when I attacked to retake the village, there was no way in hell I could have gotten over there in time to save him. Now the whole sector has no characters left one could talk to. :D