Into that old dark room
Where you left your sins and all of your friends
Staring back the old man's lies as he watched you drown"
The Dead South - Gunslinger's Glory
Just before discovering that Microsoft has bestowed its kiss of creative death on both Obsidian and InXile, roughly halving our chances at interesting big-budget RPGs for the foreseeable future, I had already preordered InXile's Wasteland 3. My take on Wasteland 2 a couple of years ago was that it fell on the wrong side of the line between telling a joke and being a joke, sacrificing any effort at immersion by countless sardonic stage whispers and pop culture references and losing narrative steam by its second half. Their later Torment: Tides of Numenera cohered much better, with excellent writing and noncombat playstyle integration, but also an insufficiently developed or tested combat system, over-reliance on telepathy as a cop-out for character interactions, and an overly sanitized moral landscape by which it fell short of its namesake's legacy.
So, for better or worse, I'm installing Wasteland 3 on release day. After dying a couple of times in the very tutorial, realizing I wanted to tweak my characters and re-rolling, I decided to chronicle this, much as I did my run through Arcanum's early levels. Think of it as a "Let's Play" except without having to listen to some smarmy YouTube superstar wheeze his way through feigned drama and the day's trending Reddit humor.
Let there be ranging.
Level 0
Seriously? You had to slap an "events depicted herein are fictitious" disclaimer on a damn video game? Yeah, the giant robots were a slight giveaway, but thanks for clearing that up, I guess.
Our tale begins in Colorado. Actually, no, our tale begins at character selection. I'll be running this on difficulty 2/4, normal damage (I hate it when the computer cheats) but with friendly fire enabled.
Nice intro cinematic, but the stat system already provides my first gripe: they slapped an experience bonus on Charisma. In practical terms, no stat should come with an EXP bonus, as leveling up tends to over-ride other considerations. Thematically, Intelligence would be the obvious choice if you're going to do it at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they also removed the "smart ass" persuasion option, meaning that in dialogues I'll now likely be limited to roleplaying either a brainless thug or a brainless schmoozer. Mass appeal all the way: logic is evil, social manipulation is good.
But oh well, I suppose I should choke down this upswell of bile at the thought of playing a social butterfly and for once make my main character a leader instead of the antisocial nerd lurking in shadow at the back of the convoy. For Wasteland 2 I'd specialized in fists and heavy weapons so this time... let's do pistols and "weird science" - I assume I'll stumble across a dual requirement laser pistol somewhere in postapocalyptic Colorado.
For my second in command, since this game's stat system seems to discourage light melee (no stealth/invisibility; health, armor requirements and melee damage all increase off strength) I might as well hit up another archetype I don't cotton to under normal conditions: a backstabbing rogue.
Level 1
InXile must've read my complaints about T:ToN lacking "visceral immediacy" because Wasteland 3's tutorial looks immediately visceral. Literally. Wall to wall corpses with their viscera ripped out. Including my heroic female leader with a non-Anglophone name. Apocalypse cowboys are so multicultural.
Why, howdy thar, easily-hated bloodthirsty male redneck villain! Guessing these "Dorsey" mooks were specifically designed to give me some human victims I won't feel guilty for butchering.
Tutorial fight doubles as ironic musical interlude. Wolfman approves.
Also impressed by being given two separate options to put my mortally wounded superior out of her misery. Beats clutching at the sky bellowing "do not want"
Ah, well. Onwards and upwards, just me, aaand my Shaaa-dow...
Huh. I feared my animal whispering skill would prove as useless as in Wasteland 2 but they included it in the tutorial: free pussy.
Level 2
Can't say I'm a fan of the infinite inventory space. As much of a chore as it can be, inventory management is intrinsic to the adventuring lifestyle. If you want to make it less of a chore, decrease redundancy and trash loot, don't eliminate selection.
Welcome to Colorado Springs, where hope springs occasionally, which still beats the spread a century and more after a nuclear war. Ruled by Saul The Patriarch, a man of mighty muscles and mightier public relations, beset by no less than several rebellions, three of them by his children, which he hires you to quell (addendum: none of which action takes place before level 11.) For now, the town was attacked by religious fanatics screaming about a deluge of blood, the Dorseys. Hop to it.
Voice acting a bit uneven. Saul's spot-on, as are most of the lengthier NPC dialogues, but the bit players wouldn't pass muster in a high school drama club. Are these the AAA-quality bells and whistles you bought by selling your souls to Microsoft?
Slight plot hole: apparently the Patriarch's crew has to rely on oil imports for energy, but has no problem keeping your electronics-riddled military base perpetualy active, along with its horde of (admittedly funny) servitor bots? Plus open-air gas heaters? And no-one in postapocalyptic Colorado builds homes underground for insulation?
The boss' female offspring has "more brains and cunning than both her brothers put together" - pander much?
Also, with a title like The Patriarch, is there any chance he won't turn out to be a horrendously sadistic monster per feminist dogma?
Let me take a wild stab at the politically correct ending here: the female will turn out to be the reasonable one. She'll be guilty of some nominal misdeeds but they'll be justified by juxtaposition with the greater evil of all the men around her. After uncovering her brothers' and father's crimes (including some explicitly sexual, because of course) you'll side with her, replacing the nefarious old guard manocentric maleocracy with a glorious new femtastic future.
Level 3
Alright, so the usual RPG setup: story mission chain plus side quests, and I've got a base of operations to fix up. Filled out my roster with the premade NPC Devlin for equipment modding and eventually computers, plus my own custom dwarf sniper Pokey for mechanics and lockpicking. Wish I could predict better, but without knowing whether I'll get any extra skill points, I'm just guessing at how many skills I can max out. (20 levels X 3 points / 28 points to max = just over 2 skills per character, INT and other bonuses notwithstanding; call it 3)
Let the refugees stay and set loose the shit-shroom-farming dudebro from his prison cell. Not because I think it's a good idea... just funny.
Onwards to the city hub. A saintly mother grieving for her bumbling son, a saintly female refugee with a backstory about attempted rape looking to be reunited with her mother, a wife browbeating her husband for his recklessness (in defending their livelihood) a hearthless supercilious male magistrate contrasted to a hypercompetent, overworked and gruff but well-intentioned female sheriff and her equally saintly female assistant, plus a budding young Annie Oakley impersonator named The Light (introduced as "a prodigy" - of course) ... shit, this whole game's going to reiterate "man bad, woman good" from start to finish like Deadfire isn't it? Or, having thrice recited the fundamentalist mantra of female supremacy and chastised our sinful male flesh, can we now move on to more interesting characters?
At least the doctor and mechanic weren't written as bumbling, sadistic or heartless morons to contrast with some idealized female standing next to them, but then of course they're working under the Native American moral umbrella, provisionally exonerated of their masculine genetic infirmity by being born of a superior race.
Anyway, got my marching orders from the She-riff, so that quest advancement gets me to:
Level 4
Damnit, why are the camera angles and zoom so limited? You can barely see one side of one building at a time. Keep having to flip the map on and off to get my bearings.
Just realized Major Tomcat must be a legitimzed cheat from my preorder package (thrice my hit points and does more damage than me) so out he goes along with all the golden guns. For the love of fuck you idiots, you don't need to bribe me with undeserved victories to buy your games; provide interesting content!
A stray mutt off the streets of Colorado Springs is good enough for me, thanks.
I'm'a call'im Patches.
The Museum of Blatantly Revisionist History's pretty funny, but its "he was a man" chorus does sort of support my suspicion that The Patriarch exists solely to be deposed as genetically inferior to female perfection. Oh, and Marshal Lupinsky has to moderate his language in the presence of a young lady like Lucia the prodigy gun nut. So there. Take that, Patriarchy!
Save a shop from robbers, heal some patients, turn on a microwave (to earn your Stouffer's product placement) - good clean monetizable fun. Looks like this is one of those games that love to shower you with freebie consumables like Baldur's Gate 2 and its endless wands of everything. I've accumulated a baker's dozen of medipacks before encountering any real fights. First couple of scrapes in the garden seem easy. Patches got a kill! Good boy. Then I stepped on a land mine because an event trigger wrested control of the interface from me but my group kept running. Bad programmer. Bad! No Stouffer's for you!
Reload.
Aaaaaand of course the Dorsey attackers were let into town by a treacherous male named Isaac Reed who calls our heroine Lucia "baby" because we all know how stupid and evil men are. Especially men who want women. Men who want women are always treacherous mass murderers. We all know "baby" is really guy-code for "I want to sneak bloodthirsty cultists into town to butcher your family" 'cause that's how men roll. Baby.
I'm tempted to keep Lucia "Smith&Wesson" on my roster just to observe the ramping up of her feminist contrivances, but so help me, I cannot put up with a Mary Sue today. Sorry, dear readers. You'll have to suffer her presence yourselves if you want more of her antics. Oh, but of course she "will seek justice" on her own for the deaths of her family.
Good luck with that.
No, really, I don't doubt she will by divine edict make more headway than I do in chasing the Dorseys and she'll pop up again as a shining heroine at some point, sure as Wesley Crusher kept teleporting back to the Enterprise on vacation.
Until then, fuck off, oh little light of mine.
Level 5
Surprisingly involved plot recap song from the traveling busker. This feature really should crop up more regularly in long campaigns or series, hearing your past deeds made folklore recounted more or less faithfully (preferably less; funnier that way)
Aaaaand of course the former museum curator, unjustly fired for asking uncomfortable questions about The Patriarch's history, is a chipper young non-European female. Guess that doesn't bode well for me applying as a game writer after pointing out all this uncomfortable chauvinistic propaganda. How 'bout it, InXile? Got a spot on your writing team? Will work for Microsoft Kibble(TM)
She-riff Daisy sends me off to deal with yet another villain at the local nightclub. (Yes, we get it, the kingpin Faran Brygo, Brian Fargo, quite droll... moving on.) I'm also supposed to save a - a male! Shock and amazement! Men deserve to be rescued? At least we're explicitly and repeatedly told he's a "family man" (just like the mama's boy you rescue from the pillory) just so we know how he earned the right to live, him and his heathen Y-chromosome.
My base has been remodeled in my absence, removing some possible interactions... would've been nice to know that would happen before I set out or recruited the NPCs triggering each change. At least the parody of a radio drama seems quaint. Nice touch with the Museum of Quest Completion too, in the same vein as the busker, and the security / personnel logs make for good, low-key flavoring. Reminds me of Dead State.
The obligatory nightclub / brothel mission plays out by rote almost until the end. Lots of purportedly edgy, demonstrably dull double entendres and ridicule of men (and only men) for impotence, drunkenness, vanity, perversion, drug addiction, etc. At least the follow-up fight in the machine shop is lightened up by the very "Mac" Mactavish - whoever wrote this guy balanced out the karma for at least three other bad dialogues.
Burned out car indeed... pure gold.
Tha Gangsta's Guide ta Dick-shun answers the other question of where dese mooks is gettin' deys aksents a century after the cultures in question ceased to exist. I was going to give InXile shit over that, but... alright. Close enough for jazz.
Was not expecting a big faction alignment decision so early in the game, but the fight capping the nightclub run makes me feel like the action's finally starting.
The Irvs mission... nice voicing, less pre-judgmental male/female dynamic, delightful weirdness if a bit on the "magic" side of SciFi / Fantasy, fully solvable via sneaking / skill checks in several steps.
Nice work.
Level 6
Awwww, She-riff Daisy don't like me no' mo', for offin' her mook. Boy, you just don't expect your actions to have consequences in these games, do you? I just now decided to look at the reputation window. Apparently the downtrodden refugees now like me and the hard-ass Marshals dislike me. Did I stumble into nice guy status despite my worst efforts? Mostly I think I pissed off the Marshals for capturing prisoners myself instead of handing them over to their custody, but that was a strategic decision, not a moral one. I just didn't want them destroying potentially useful evidence.
Merc leader named Wolfe wants me to rob a bot. Well now, I can't refuse a fellow Wolfe, can I? Nice little bit of puzzle solving here, having you compare several haystacks' hay content - solvable by straightforward logic without appealing to specialized knowledge, and able to be brute-forced in a pinch. Now, if the android in question had simply spoken to me in a reasonable, calm manner and presented objective evidence as to its harmlessness, I might have let it go. However, since
A) They're all electronic plague rats spreading omnicidal computer code regardless of their intentions
and
B) It tried to emotionally manipulate me using a childish voice and innocent babbling
- then off with its head! Vengeance for Rose!
Now I've got a hit list of three more blades to runner. Sweeeet. Sweet like tears in rain. Turtle on its back, you beta-tested bitches, let's hear it.
Level 7
Time to schmooze some fatcats. Shadow, Pokey, Patches, me droogs, let us to the Moor of Broads. Let us hoist shoulders with the rubby toities, as the kids say.
I'm noticing an unexpected sea-change in gender relations after the introduction, away from the initial pattern of repetitive male bashing. After you clear the first main quest step or two, the chatter around town now includes one convo where it's the man who wanted to have a meaningful conversation about a newspaper story, but his female companion only reads the funnies.
Daisy gets mad at you for killing her male underling (in direct contrast to, say, the pirate queen from Deadfire who immediately washed her hands of Benweth) and she herself is obliquely criticized for her harsh policing by another woman.
That being your prison warden who praises you for sparing Lucia's misguided admirer Isaac and his rebellious teenage friends to give them a future chance at redemption.
Gideon Reyes wants you to stop the inflow of refugees but he has a damn good reason (mass starvation) instead of being painted as merely a mean old man.
Miriam Knox asks you to save her husband, surprisingly without taking the opportunity to call him a worthless loser.
The necking teens are both into it instead of the girl rebuffing and demeaning the boy as would be expected.
Weird.
Anyway, who the hell designed this overland map?
You set off between cities in your very own triple decker tank with hot flashing turrets. Too bad that's all you can look at. Camera angles in town were bad enough, but a fully locked camera? Granted it looks good with the animations, but what is this game's obsession with limiting your view? Overland you've got no scrolling, no turning, no zooming, it's like something out of the '90s.
(Oh, but yes, you can totally splatter that deer.) (She's a squirrel-squashin', deer-smackin' drivin' machine! Canyoneeeeroooo? Caaaannyoneeroooooo!)
A familiar choice between two quests early on. Don't want to get into more hot water with the Marshals this early in the game (and they sound like they're carrying better loot) so I guess I'll rescue the Arapaho caravan.
Whoa... major noncombat skill integration.
I am grudgingly impressed.
Less impressed by the cartoonish "bomb thrall" character model, but still, this is great stuff for the tactically inclined among us.
Level 8
I'd forgotten how much experience lockpicking gives in Wasteland. Pokey the pint-size pickin' sniper's already outleveling me.
Hitting the Clown Museum. Heh. Alright, killer Mexican clowns combined with talk of turning away refugees might answer the perceived need for that disclaimer at the start, given the previous exactly-four-years' news. Quaint little ballerina puzzle though, again mixing skill checks with common sense.
Picked up a "phase blaster" and other energy weapons, finally (besides the ferret launcher - Sluggy Freelance fans?) so maybe I can start inflicting some pain.
The Canyonero seems overpowered, but maybe it's an early-game crutch and won't scale well.
The big top fight on the other hand proved exceedingly difficult. This location was probably higher level and I was meant to skip it, only killing the ten rats I was told to, like a good little terrier.
It did however bring up some weaknesses in the combat system:
1) Enemies don't take their current position into consideration before dropping smoke, meaning they'll pop a defensive cloud then immediately run out of it.
2) The AI also appears to prioritize targets by hit chance, so ironically my squishtastic Shadow drops less often than the others... because nobody bothers targeting her at 37% evasion.
3) Turrets are so overpowered that I really shouldn't be allowed to deploy more than one at a time.
4) Avoiding detection ranges is meaningless for encounters with scripted dialogue intros. Only trial and error will tell where you can and can't sneak.
5) Clown cars are less amusing when they're the size of a house. Why not shrink the enemy Canyonero down to 6.5 tons instead of 65? It wouldn't break your minimal immersion any more than the party-buffing creepy dolls, cyborg chickens or insta-heal hot dogs.
Random encounter: I've never been a Grand Theft Auto fan, yet somehow in a turn-based RPG, running mooks over with the Canyonero feels... perfect. For its rarity, bulldozing becomes a perfect counterpoint to the usual tangled web of lines of fire.
Level 9
The Bizarre's outer reaches exacerbate this game's weirdest detail yet: you can bind a pause button, but currently it won't do anything. Wasteland 3 is missing a pause feature at launch. It will not pause, ever, either willingly, or during inventory management or character advancement or while escaped to the menu or even during combat (meaning patrols will continue pathing into you while the seconds tick away in turn-based combat) and among other things this makes the already rudimentary sneaking system useless for positioning my little rogue for ambushes, trying to unsheathe and click on a moving homonculus.
No pause button. This is a bush-league flaw. Not to mention shooting through walls at corners, no tooltip descriptions of status effects on enemies, quickslots swapping back and forth of their own accord, etc. Again, is this the oh-so-shiny polish you supposedly bought by selling your souls to the evil empire, InXile?
Heh. Amend my previous observation to "killer Mexican cannibal clowns" - disclaimer! DisclaimerDisclaimerDisclaimeerrrrr! (please don't sue us)
Also, surprisingly, the cannibal interlude plays out over the radio between two voices, one male the other female. He brings home the long pig, she chops it up and fries it in a pan. No feminist moral high ground. Weird.
The Children of the Cabbage encounter deserves special mention.
After clearing a greenhouse of some mutant... somethings, you discover it planted with creepy dolls in a literal cabbage patch. Just another goofy, immersion-breaking digression, right? Then you find the log and audiotape of the farmer's mental decline, his quiet, heartbroken consternation with his stillborn crop. In seconds, the drama switch flips to find yourself in the shoes of this pathetic old coot consumed from within by his lunacy.
Pathos can be cheap. Pick an automatic trigger (breakups and bereavement being perennial favorites) afflicting an accepted sympathetic figure (children, women, housepets, crying indians) preferably accompanied by wistful strings and you're in business.
Making you feel for the ludicrous, the losers, the abrasive, the unlovable, on the other hand is a more impressive feat. One wonders if the farmer found his puppet Celephais in the end.
Speaking of cheap pathos, the Payaso dentist's crew killed Patches 😢 🎻mostly because there's no way to control tamed animals, so they'll likely run in and die in the first fight that requires you to hold position. At least Shadow got a badass hook on a stick out of it.
Luckily in Colorado it's cold... and there are wolves. So Patches 2 is a go.
Level 10
Gotta find some more recruits. For the past several levels I've been stuck with Kwon the starter mook and... Lucia if I wanted to. Don't want to.
Min-maxed like it's spring weather. My group's hardly combat-optimized, these fights with the Payasos are getting harder and 5/6 party size may not remain viable much longer, even with these stupidly overpowered turret consumables and outleveling everything.
Fights are still decent, if on the easy side. Choke points, armor debuffs and focused fire, cutting line of sight, exploding barrels, exploding... pigs. Yeah, let's talk about the exploding pigs. Exploding mooks are a staple of video games, but as noted in the case of Divnity:Original Sin, also a frequent critical fail in the aesthetic / narrative/ immersion department. The hot hogs here are one example of a halfway believable in-universe justification.
They're fielded by a faction that worships bad jokes - who also fuck the pigs, just in case you were curious on that point. We live to inform here at the Werwolfe's Den. (So yeah, killer Mexican cannibal pig-fucking clowns - please don't sue us!)
They're not super pigs, or magic pigs or superintelligent mutant pigs, but just pigs trained as one would train any animal, and in fact animal bombs have been designed in real life more times than you'd think. Pig bombs aren't half as insane as bat bombs.
You actually run across some Payasos training the pigs. Turns out they only captured the pig farm and aren't raising them for this purpose, addressing the economic angle of wasted effort.
They drop bacon. I don't know why, but that just makes them so much more believable, doesn't it?
Damnit, they killed Patches 2!
Exploding Pigs 1 : Wolf 0
- or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll - *BLAOW!*
Or as The Provost might say "si vit porkum, para blowum"
Level 11
Made it into the Bizarre ("it's like C.H.U.D. in real life" - also a mall) and my stalwart heroes are about to speak to the fat man in charge. I wonder if he'd like to join up? My team could use an... obstacle. In any case, what will the future bring?
Will the refugee situation be treated sanely or as a moral absolute?
Will fights continue to be suspiciously easy or will I be given more cause to use up my consumables?
Will Shadow go full Matrix with her dodges?
Will my investment in EXP bonuses pay off?
Will Pokey discover a sniper slingshot and one-shot a boss named Goliath at some point?
Will Patches 3.0 fare better than his predecessors?
Will Lucia the shining one return to put more men in their place?
Will The Patriarch, ummm, archive his patter... or something?
I dunno, I'm spitballing here. I don't even know how much longer this campaign will run or whether I'll keep on with the play-by-play, but so far I'm having fun.
Until next time, rangers.
__________________________________________
P.S.
Though the game did show some promise initially, ultimately it did not live up to its potential. Not the worst thing on the market, but mediocre still.
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