If you want more Fallout in these trying times, have you considered playing Wasteland 3?

GamesRPGWasteland 3If you want more Fallout in these trying times, have you considered playing Wasteland 3?When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: inXile Entertainment)

Wasteland 3

First, let’s rewind a little. The history of every roleplaying game goes back to Dungeons & Dragons eventually, but Wasteland arrives there via a particularly direct route. When D&D came out in 1974, its rules were more toolkit than game—a messy bundle of ideas that had to be house-ruled into shape. Ken St. Andre decided to put together a simpler alternative, designing Tunnels & Trolls to play with his friends, and publishing it in 1975 so other people could play it with their friends. It was the second tabletop RPG to be professionally published.

Michael Stackpole, who would go on to write a towering stack of BattleTech and Star Wars books, worked on Tunnels & Trolls as well. He also took its basic rules, bolted on a skills system, and turned it into a modern-day tabletop RPG called Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes that came to the attention of Brian Fargo, the founder of Interplay.

At this point Interplay had just released the first two games in The Bard’s Tale series with Electronic Arts. Traditional fantasy RPGs, they’d been successful enough that while EA wanted another RPG, the studio had relatively free reign to make it about whatever they wanted. Fargo, a Mad Max lover, wanted to go post-apocalyptic.

Wasteland cast you as Desert Rangers in post-nuclear Arizona, a squad of troubleshooting wanderers who traveled from town to town dealing with problems. It wasn’t a particularly gritty vision of the post-apocalypse, peopled with mutant molerats and cyborgs as it was, but that random mashing together of sci-fi influences made for a nice contrast with the dry military sf of the Desert Rangers themselves.

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There was only one save game, so you’d have to live with any outcome you survived. Given that many players didn’t have hard drives when Wasteland was released in 1988, if you didn’t make a copy of the floppies beforehand you’d never be able to replay the pristine version—your save would straight-up overwrite the world data.

(Image credit: InXile)

Wasteland 2: Nuclear-powered Boogaloo

Electronic Arts planned to make its own sequel to Wasteland in-house, without Interplay, though when it was finally released under the nameFountain of Dreamsit was no longer billed as a Wasteland game. Which is probably for the best, given that our own Richard Cobbett compared it to “a piece of homework started at 5AM on the day it’s due to be handed in, after three weeks of doing anything else.”

When his studio InXile pitched Wasteland 2 on Kickstarter, it raised $2,933,252—more than three times its $900,000 goal. St. Andre, Danforth, and Stackpole returned to work on it, and all that excess Kickstarter money paid for additional hires including members of Obsidian and composer Mark Morgan, who had worked on the Fallout games.

Where the original Wasteland had the menu combat of The Bard’s tale and an overworld view reminiscent of the Ultima games, Wasteland 2 looked and played a little more like the first two Fallouts, complete with isometric view and tactical combat. It kept plenty of nods to its predecessor though, like the fiddly skill system complete with seemingly useless but actually vital abilities like Toaster Repair. It also nodded at the original’s cast, having one of the first game’s pre-generated party members called “Angela Deth” return as an NPC to act as your Wasteland guide.

It also got a bit bloated, attempting to justify that excess budget with excess scope, and a second half set in Los Angeles that’s not as good as its first half, set in the Arizona desert. Still a good game, but held back from being a great one.

Third time’s the charm

Even though Wasteland 3 was another crowdfunding hit—on Fig this time rather than Kickstarter—the scope was kept in check. It’s a meaty RPG but one thatisn’t 100 hours long, which is why it’s the Wasteland game to play if you’ve yet to give the series a chance.

Though you play a squad of Desert Rangers again, this time the setting’s much less arid. Snowy Colorado provides a backdrop for a fish-out-of-water story about outsiders come to clean up local problems and oust corrupt authorities. In some ways it feels more Fallout than ever, giving you a vehicle to cross the overworld map in like the Fallout 3 we might have got if Interplay had kept making them. But it also does things Fallout can’t, thanks to having a pre-apocalypse timeline much closer to our own. That’s most obvious in the questline involving an AI based on Ronald Reagan that’s now worshipped as the God-President.

(Image credit: inXile Entertainment)

Wasteland 3 is the Wasteland game to play today because it’s the culmination of everything good about the Wasteland series, and about the isometric Fallouts. It’s got dynamic combat—unlike Wasteland 2 it has both stealth and called shots, with characters earning “precision strikes” they can unleash to, for instance, target a robot’s AI core and turn it against its allies. It’s got wackiness on the side, like the aforementioned digital Reagan, as well as a love of killer clowns and a set of animal sidekicks to collect, but it’s also got a serious central questline about figuring out which of the competing factions to back. And if you put in all the effort to get the car working in Fallout 2 then were annoyed none of the sequels let you do something similar, well, Wasteland 3 gives you a truck you can upgrade until it’s basically a goddamn tank.

Wasteland 3 is available onSteamandGOG.

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Wasteland 2: Nuclear-powered Boogaloo#

Third time’s the charm#

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Wasteland 2: Nuclear-powered Boogaloo

Third time’s the charm