Stuurminator

The writing and characterization of mercenaries could be quite silly or goofy in Jagged Alliance 1 and Deadly Games, but Jagged Alliance 2 chased out a lot of the most silly or outlandish characters. The writing in Jagged Alliance 3 seems to have swung back towards the silliness of JA1/DG again. Was this a deliberate choice? If so, why? If not, could you hypothesize as to what caused these changes in tone?

I think I've seen this in streamer footage.

Poor Dimitri. He fought for his family. He fought bravely for his country. I don't think Dimitri had any interest in becoming a mercenary. He was probably only invested in liberating Alruco.

I can't know for sure, but I suspect that voice line only plays after shooting an enemy in the groin (and possibly killing them?). If so, that would mean that mercs (male or female) only castrate their opponents when you order them to do so.

Maybe I lack subtlety (actually, scratch that "maybe"), but this isn't too much for me, assuming the enemies are appropriating Grand Chien's tribal history for effect. Your employer says the Legion are poorly trained bullies, so it would make sense for them to use extreme outfits in order to look more intimidating.

To expand on my point, I think part of the problem is that this is clearly a passion project. The game is being made by a relatively small team (compared to AAA games, at least) of what are probably longtime JA fans motivated by their love of the games and think they know how to do it justice. Unfortunately, writing is one of those things that everyone thinks they're good at, but relatively few people actually are. I'm sure that if I were (somehow) writing for this game, I'd write up what I think are perfect interpretations of these characters, but many others would think are pale imitations. I suspect the devs are in a similar situation and either don't realize their writing is flawed or just can't bear to turn that creative control over to someone else. This isn't a problem you can fix just by throwing more money at it. Sorry for the double post, but you lose your ability to edit posts almost immediately on this forum.

I remember Igor being one of the goofier characters in JA2. Even then, they leaned on his alcoholism a bit too hard. That's just a minor detail, though, as I agree with your point that the writing in this game looks inferior to JA2. Characters are too stereotyped or are too different from their depictions in earlier games. I don't agree that this was due to the budget. I think the game's writers are just not on the same level as JA2's, but the developers do not recognize this. Ian Currie is not a magic bullet to prevent this, either; he also created JA1 and DG, but many of the mercenaries in those games (mostly the ones that didn't make the cut for JA2) were also stereotyped and one-dimensional in the same way they are in JA3. For all I know, Ian Currie may be the reason, or part of the reason, the writing is what it is.

It's weird how there's this "dark and gritty" JA2 floating around that I've never played. The JA2 I played was full of smartasses and lunatics with goofy accents battling soldiers dressed in Christmas colours in order to depose a cartoon villain of queen. How do I access this "dark and gritty" mode? Is it an option in 1.13's INI settings? God knows most of them are designed to suck all the fun out of the game.

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, so if you are, please excuse me. In short, I don't think the designs we have can be attributed to multiplayer. I don't think all of them fit, but I don't think the ones I dislike are cheap or rushed out the door - I just don't think they match the characters. Budget, in my mind, was not the problem there.

Lynx traveled to Africa to finish off an endangered species. Buzz followed him there to kill him. You encounter them in a wilderness sector where they're sniping at each other from opposite sides of the map. You can trust me, my uncle works for Haemimont. 🤫

Can you explain what your thought process is here? Do you think the developers said "We need to free up money for multiplayer, so we're going to design, model, and render bad designs instead of good ones"?

In the streamer footage I saw, mercenaries would start up little conversations when out of battle, or even in the real-time portions of battle. Steroid and Grizzly had conversations, as did Grizzly and Fox.

You could increase agility by dodging melee attacks, but this was obviously not a very reliable way of doing it. I want to say that being missed by ranged attacks could also increase it, but I only ever observed that once while playing 1.13 (which might have changed how that worked) and once heard a story of drunk Larry losing agility after a near miss by a ranged attack. I've also seen evidence of agility being increased by moving about in enemies' sight, while not in stealth, but that again may only be 1.13.

JA3 takes place two years after JA2. I suppose the devs just figure they didn't improve much in that time.

This is one of your worst takes yet, and I don't say that lightly. Pre-order exclusives are a cancer on the industry. Didn't you want a price break?

According to his AIM profile in JA2, he has experience with car bombs. He's not just any biker, he was (according to his AIM profile in DG) the leader of the "largest biker gang on the continent". He was mixed up in some pretty serious stuff!

You're right, but not for the reasons you think. Remember, every nakedly obvious shill you've seen thought they were just as clever as you.

From what I've seen from streamer footage, your AIM account gets upgraded to a "gold account" at some point, allowing you to recruit Gold-level mercenaries. In the case of the streamer I watched, the email implied that Kalyna (one of his recruits) gave him a good review, but I don't know what the exact mechanism is.

I wouldn't call it the same art style. It's the same presentation - a static 3D render of the speaker with text alongside - but JA's character design is more realistic. Viktor Vran's character designs are obviously fantastical, while both of the characters in your JA screenshots are wearing clothes that people actually wear in real life.

I don't think anyone at Haemimont said "Let's write and design our returning cast out of character!" I think they tried to do the characters justice and just missed the mark in some places. Capturing the voice of someone else's character is harder than it looks.

Evolve or die, as they say. Jagged Alliance 2 wasn't a straight rework of Jagged Alliance 1, and they were four years apart. It's been six times that gap since Jagged Alliance 3 came out. You have to experiment to improve, and not all experiments are successful. I know I won't like everything in JA3, but I'll approach it with an open mind.

It could be a unique or modified weapon. We've seen some of that in streamer gameplay footage.

I hope for your sake this is a troll thread.

A lot of people will tell you Phoenix Point is complete trash because they played it on release (when it was complete trash). I tried it again shortly before it came to Steam, just under a year since its release, and it wasn't bad, but I'm not sure if I'd say it was good. It suffers from a common problem: the battles start to get repetitive after a while. Jagged Alliance avoids this by having a large number of handcrafted maps and its gear progression system, but in Phoenix Point, you'll hit a point where one haven defense or alien colony attack feels the same as any other. This isn't helped by how frequent the battles are. The timescale is compressed in a weird way. You'll get research projects that will be completed in, say, three days, which will make you feel like you're making good progress until you realize you'll have a dozen battles in those three days. Hard West isn't very tactically deep (by JA standards, anyway). Most battles are more of a puzzle than a tactical simulation. It's fun, though, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

JA1 and DG (which didn't even take strength into account) handled this by controlling the number of items you could "stack" in one inventory slot. You could carry five magazines in one vest slot, for instance, but only one M16. I haven't noticed whether JA3 does this as well.