Wasteland 3 released a Dev Diary today, and it really displays how much control the player has over the experience. Clocking in around eight and a half minutes, the game’s lead designer, David Rogers, starts with the character creator. Quirks are how you differentiate your experience. They give your apocalyptic survivor a little flavor by giving them an advantage with a catch. The Pyromancer quirk applies extra elemental damage, but also gains a chance to set themselves on fire with each grenade. Depending on your quirk, you could be incredibly destructive and an extra crispy corpse with no moves.
Prepare Handel’s Messiah here, because inXile has solved a gripe of mine for a while with the info under the attributes. Instead of guessing what adding an extra point to strength does, they clearly show a list of info under the attribute to show the impact. Rogers mentions the strength stat as impacting what armor you can wear and how far you can throw a grenade among other things. They don’t want you to look back on thirty hours of play and regret your build.
READ MORE: Preview: Wasteland 3 – Some of the Best Tactical Combat Available
Each build is important, because your team of characters really functions as one. A team full of average Joes and Josephines shouldn’t be the goal. You need specialists to serve distinct roles on your missions. You could make a speedy character with the Death Wish perk to quickly strike the enemy at the beginning, and a good healer to revive them at the end. Since you don’t want everyone using the same ammo and run out during a fight, it’s practical planning too. They do have pre-made character duos with stories and extra banter if you want something to jump into the game.
Combat is on foot and in a vehicle. Wasteland 3 drops the initiative system and bunches all your moves and all enemy moves into one turn. Players can use their unique abilities to help them feel like they can save the day. Also new is the Kodiak vehicle which brings a lot of firepower and customization. You can add rad protection, armor, or select from different gun mounts, including one which shoots goats.
If you’ve made it this far, you are the person who will love this last fact. The game trusts the player to make their own decisions. You can choose to do things to hurt yourself if you want. You can kill every merchant which makes it extremely difficult to buy ammo. You can sign treaties or wipe a group out. There’s a lot of choices to make, and the consequences could be tough. That freedom is awesome.
The trailer goes into a little more detail, and its worth a watch. Wasteland 3 is releasing August 28th, and you can check out Jeremy’s preview here or our interview with inXile about the game here.
