![]() The character creation system adds a lot from Wasteland 2 and, like much of the rest of the game, builds on it in greater detail. ![]() Right from the start, Wasteland 3 wastes no time throwing punches at the players. If you’ve been looking for another great RPG to sink your teeth into, then you’re in for one hell of a ride with inXile’s latest chapter in the Wasteland series. It takes everything the studio learned with Wasteland 2 and expands on it even more, creating a believable, wacky, and just out of this world experience. ![]() I’ve spent a good forty hours or more exploring the wasteland of Colorado in Wasteland 3, and so far nothing about the game has let me down. It left the studio with some massive shoes to fill when it came to a sequel, and with Wasteland 3 the team has done just that – building off all of the great things from the first two games and adding to it even more with loads of additional content, story, and unique characters. It’s difficult to believe that anyone could live in such conditions, let alone maintain a society.When Brian Fargo and the team at inXile brought Wasteland back with Wasteland 2 in 2014, they revived one of the most iconic RPG series to ever touch our computers. It’s traversed by means of an upgradable snow car, and the areas with the highest levels of radiation require either a late-game car upgrade to access safely or a lot of medication to treat the resulting radiation poisoning. It doesn’t help that Colorado’s map, while appearing open, is really a warren of corridors gated by different levels of radioactive fallout. You encounter randomized merchants, visit a mine, help out at a bison ranch, rescue a family at a farmstead – all things that point to a wider society and economy, but they don’t feel like they exist apart from the player. In contrast to, say, the tilled fields of Fallout’s Shady Sands or the caravan drives of New Vegas, which are there almost exclusively for world-building detail, Colorado feels empty and lifeless. It’s difficult to view Colorado as anything other than a collection of bizarre locations for the player’s entertainment, rather than a place where people might actually live. Things immediately go wrong, of course: The Ranger convoy sent to Colorado is ambushed and all but wiped out, and the survivors quickly discover that Colorado’s problems run much deeper than a few aristocratic brats. It leaves them weakened and desperate for resources, so they accept an offer for an alliance from the ruler of the seemingly prosperous Colorado in exchange for help capturing his three rebellious children. It picks up shortly after the events of Wasteland 2 (2014), which ended with the Desert Rangers – a paramilitary peacekeeping force led by a copyright-compliant version of Chuck Norris’ Walker, Texas Ranger – nuking their own base in Arizona to destroy a murderous AI. Wasteland 3 is set in an alternate future 2100s, over 100 years after a nuclear war between the United States and USSR reduced the world to rubble. But only at first glance, because on closer inspection, Wasteland 3 is simultaneously deeper and shallower than its ancestors. Turn-based, party-based, and isometric, with a few quality-of-life features and fancy post-processing, at first glance it’s exactly how I imagine a late ‘90s CRPG to look in 2020. While Bethesda’s first-person Fallout 3 (2008) popularized the post-apocalyptic RPG and Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas (2010) married popular form to old-school sensibilities, Wasteland 3 is those old-school sensibilities. The niche InXile Entertainment has carved out for Wasteland 3 makes a lot of sense.
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