I'm getting to the point now where I call bs whenever a game is released without controller support. I've played about 30-40 hours of this game so far and my ears--my teeth are starting to get irritated by the click of my mouse. Mice, despite how good of aiming devices they are in shooters, were not meant for gaming. This has a pretty standard RPG interface. You don't have so many skills or abilities you couldn't map to a controller or easily shift to with a d-pad. Despite having to position your characters on a grid, which would be easy to do on a controller, this is probably less complicated than Final Fantasy. For decades have I been finding items in my inventory with a controller. The game often times feels poorly streamlined for a mouse and you find yourself clicking ALOT. Like, click on character with safe-cracking skill, click on safe-cracking skill, click on safe.
Secondly. The game is unexpectedly great. I guess the writing and environment is immersive because I haven't been getting pulled out of it getting bored some other throwback crpgs. It feels like Knights of the Old Republic mixed with Fallout 3. Sadly, I've never finished Fallout 1 and 2--tried directly before I broke down and purchased this. I figured Fallout 1 and 2 might just be too old for me to dig into. The systems of how you click on things and interact with the worlds I guess hadn't really been standardized back then, so it felt really weird and the interface too frustrating. Upon purchasing Wastelands 2, I realized that stuff was immediately gone, aside from later in the game discovering the overhead camera and lack of mini-map not features, but very much problems. Give me a 3rd-person over-the-shoulder camera any day. Only with perhaps the added freedom of a tactical camera (and this games tactics don't excuse not being able to find essential areas of a map because you didn't know you could click there. That's why I've given up on some old adventure games. L.A. Noire style games will hopefully replace them.
I almost thought to give the lacking camera and map system a pass, but it happened not once more, but numerous times where I flat out missed that I could go a certain direction, missing the entire prison where the Red Skorpian Gang was. Sometimes I would just go around exploring and see what turned up, but I'd end up doing parts of side-quests before people asked me to do them and missing the fact that I could interact with an object to resolve a conflict or save someone....and that's what I call b.s.
To summarize since this isn't a review so much as a rant, this is a great game with a lot of what feels like unnecessary clicking that is basically what I could imagine the original Fallout games felt like when they were new. After a few hours I was feeling like I was playing Knights of the Old Republic and I don't think that was unintentional. Good writing, interesting choices alongside combat that can often get annoying, terrible camera and map system, but somehow it goes away being okay. I'm staying so impressed so far and makes me wonder how much better the game could have been with a slightly larger budget and more modern gameplay advancements.