Soldatmesteren
First time out of the vault
That wasn't so hard now was it?
Anyway, I can understand what your point about it is. If you don't have a clear idea of why your characters would want to be in the rangers then it doesn't hold much attachment to you and you feel a loss of interest in pursuing what Vargas asks of you. In Fallout it was clear what the protagonist might want and feel and why (s)he would want to hunt for the waterchip. But Wasteland follows a different design philosophy regarding protagonists (I actually prefer the Fallout one) where they don't want to force you into a position you don't want to be in. Basically, it is up to the player to decide why his/her characters want to join up with the Rangers.
Why they're there? One of my characters was the wife of a farmer who's marriage had gone sour when they found out she was barren and they slowly drifted apart. One day raiders came to the farm and in the heated argument with her husband he said that he was not going to allow them to take the only thing he had left in the world and she just knew that he no longer considered her worth a damn. He didn't care about her. So when the raiders gunned him down after he took out one with his shotgun they raided the place and left her standing over his body. With nowhere to go and with nothing to own she tagged along with caravans and traveled aimlessly until finally she ended up at Ranger Citadel. While she no longer cared for her husband she had seen first hand what could come of raiders so she enlisted in the hopes of finding meaning with her life now that childbearing was no longer an option.
That's why she joined. The bio on the 2nd character creation screen page is there IMO for writing up a brief backstory to act as an incentive for their actions in the game. Each of my characters joined for different reasons.
Ace isn't really important to you. He can be, but he doesn't have to be. Maybe your group starts to really believe in what they're doing after a few missions and 'then' want to investigate what happened to Ace. Maybe they just wanted to do it for Angela. Maybe they wanted to do it just out of curiosity for the Synths. Maybe they wanted to do it solely to rise in ranks and gain favor with Vargas.
So the starting mission then. It depends completely on how you perceive your group of Rangers. My view on my current squad is that they all joined up because of various reasons, one for finding meaning, one for being a target of a caravan company, one for wanting to explore the world of tech and one because he simply likes to kill people but he wants to be in the right side when he does kill them. They just finished training and attended Ace's funeral only because Vargas had mentioned to them that he wanted to talk to them later. After the funeral they are given their first proper mission. Why would they want to go through with it? Well June does it because of a lack of better things to do. Yaheen does it because she hopes to find something high tech (and boy does she). My shotgun character (I'm bad at remembering his name...) does it out of persuasion from the rest of the group and Metal Man does it because he hopes to find something to beat to death. (Sadly, he used Hard Ass on the raiders and the Rangers got a free pass so he sullenly leaves the raiders alone at the behest of the rest of the group).
Too much wall of text...
Erm, my point is that Fallout has a narrative structure that influences your character directly as to why you want to go through with things because you have a singular character to play around with. It's narrative is therefor a bit limiting as it directly tells you that you have to care about the vault because you came from it which is fine for what it is aiming to do.
In Wasteland you have 4 created characters and 3 recruitable characters which means that too much narrative restriction can severely cripple the roleplaying elements of your characters. It's open so that you can have more freedom in how you want each of your characters to behave. It's more ambiguous with it's reasons as to why you want to even care about the Rangers because otherwise it might ruin your roleplaying ideas and your backstories for your characters.
TOO LONG : DIDN'T READ
In a way:
Fallout asks of you to play 'their' character.
Wasteland asks of you to play 'your' character.
If that makes any sense...
It's a game where you won't be able to relate to anything if you don't create a reason for why you would want to relate to it. Maybe it's easier for me who have played Wasteland 1 as I understand where they're coming from and someone completely new to Wasteland might not know (before they create their party) what the Rangers truly are and why they are an incentive for any character to join.
So a few reasons to relate to the Rangers:
* They are the law, in a sense, of the wastes.
* They are protecting communities from raiders, cults, wildlife and other problems.
* They care about the distribution of food and water to not just a vault, but the entire known region of Arizona.
* They are in a way a military family, and a lot of people have lost all the family they have.
* They offer protection, education, knowledge, training, firearms, ammunition, food, water, medicine and healing to those who join.
I'm not going to say that you are wrong in how you feel about the Rangers or it's narrative structure. I just hope that I might have shed a different light on it.
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As a quick question on the side to others, if one of my rangers die I will recruit one of the ones sitting near the gate at Ranger Citadel right? What happens 'if' 4 rangers die (over the course of 10 hours and I recruit 1 of those three sitting there each time I return), will I be out of options then?
Good read.
I liked the idea about having Angela Deth in your party for a long time, and getting attached to her, and that way getting into the whole Ace thing.
"In a way:
Fallout asks of you to play 'their' character.
Wasteland asks of you to play 'your' character.
If that makes any sense..."
Maybe I understand it wrong. But I feel the opposit.
In Fallout I can play my character, and do what I want. Yes you are from the "movie script" attached to the vault. But I feel that is just a given that you want to protect your home and it's future. Wether you just do it for yourself or the community in the vault
In Wasteland 2 I feel like I am a long for the ride I have to follow the "movie script"
The point where I snapped in Wasteland 2, and realised I did not like any of it. Is at the prison, and there is a barricade of sorts, with some Red Skorpions guarding it.
I was just moving my party along and these Red Skorpions just started attacking me for no reason. I think one of them says "Rangers, shoot them" How did he know we were rangers? Did he read he script?
What if we just happened to a group of Red Skorpions coming to say; "hey look, we look just like those rangers, maybe we could make some covert operation,"
It comes off as some laughable B movie, where characters in the movie know things that only the viewer would know.
In contrast to this
In Fallout 2, you discover the secret Enclave military base Navarro. You walk up to the entrance, saying hello to this secret organization and their secret base. They dont just say "The protagonist, shoot him/her"
Instead they say; Civilians walked into the base, someone please escort them out of here!
If you keep doing this they will eventually shoot you. They act more like real people.
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, this community can be sometimes hostile, but if you stick around for some time people will be a lot more friendly and you would be surprised how diverse the opinions here can be. Hell, there can be no doubt about the fact that a lot of the forum users love fallout, but you will find all sorts of opinions about, best example, New Reno many like the quests and town, but feel that it doesnt fit Fallout, and thus criticize it for it.