Wasteland 3

"Well, I got my wish, I was the best, the only problem is

I'm laying on the cold cement with a bullet in my head"

 

The Dead South - Gunslinger's Glory

 

 

Long story short: it's... decent, but not worth the price of admission. (And yes, spoilers do follow.)

 

Working title: "Wasteland 3 the third" because I had initially intended to continue my play-by-play to the end, but in all honesty this game in its current form is worth neither the money nor the time. In *all* all honesty it's also far from the worst cRPG I've played, but "less of a shit-show than it could've been" can hardly count as anything but damning praise, especially for a company claiming industry seniority and big ticket ambitions.

 

Let's start with the feminist angle before moving to more relevant concerns. For all the plot makes a big deal of schlepping from dusty Arizona to frozen Colorado, it makes its true home in Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST wonderland where everything bad is men's fault, no woman is ever wrong except by being forced into sin by a man, where men are born with a karmic debt requiring them to justify their existence and men who express sexual interest in women are losers, rapists, sadists, traitors and mass murderers. To be fair, the pattern is nowhere near as absolute as it was in Deadfire, in that Wasteland 3 does at least include several standalone examples of negatively characterized female minibosses. Nevertheless, aside from one three-line background convo in town about newspaper comics and a running gag about the lovably batty hotel owner calling your HQ with nonsensical concerns, you'll never find any man written into a position of moral or intellectual superiority over a woman. In contrast, you can't take even a few steps without running into a "man bad, woman good" juxtaposition. Leaving aside the more casual male-bashing, some of the more awkwardly shoehorned examples stand out:

- there's Santa's workshop, presided over by an evil man in a Santa suit who's turned it into a drug manufactory. Standard comedic reversal, except (purely by accident) the poor oppressed "elf" who tipped you off just happens to be female.

- or the group of cowboy cannibals who ask you to bring back some of their deserters for dessert. I only got as far as the first, a woman who ran away to avoid an arranged marriage to the chief. Perfectly workable postapocalyptic cannibal angle with a ten gallon twist... but they just had to spin it into a feminist rant

- or the two women, Kym Hie and Yoon Hie, who ran up a monstrous debt gambling, skipped town and had you, the law, murder nine of their pursuers, yet are still painted as innocent, put-upon victims in contrast to the boorish, sputtering, caveman-voiced male pursuing them

- or the bloodthirsty backwoods religious fundamentalist villains you meet in the tutorial, the Dorseys, gutting their victims and letting them bleed to death while they dance in their blood, best described as "hicks with dicks" since every single one you meet just happens to be male - juxtaposed with your companion "The Light" the Mary Sue whose family they kill

- or that the few sympathtic males tend to have their survival justified by being mama's boys or "family men" or "my place is with my daughter"

- or Victory Buchanan, a campy sadist and one of your villains to be deposed. It turns out the man's army was built entirely upon the abilities of a woman named "The Gift"... because of course... and she turns out benign and even helpful, her grand works having only been twisted and perverted by the man who crippled her... while her family (which he's implied to have murdered) consisted of a mother and a sister... and she's also rescued one of your fellow rangers from his clutches... a female ranger...

 

and are you picking up on the SUBTLE SUBTEXT here?

 

- or the machine commune, the one place you'd think they'd give the "man bad, woman good" crap a rest, being all clunky retro-futuristic tinkertoys, except for the cheerful and helpful young robot VICI who declares itself female and emancipates itself from an oppressive and callous dad-bot Vivisecto... to the tune of a female vocalist version of Genesis' lyric "too many men making too many problems" - do they need to lay the gratuitous man-bashing on any thicker or ARE YOU CATCHING THE VERY SUBTLE SUBTEXT HERE?!?

 

Best not even get into the main plot, which revolves around you overthrowing "The Patriarch" with the help of a rebellious female ranger from the previous games, presumably someone the fanbase already idolizes. Though the Patriarch's three children are described as main threats, the two males are routinely derided as "human garbage" and not as smart as he thinks he is or "Tweedle-Dumb" a.k.a. "that psycho sonovabitch" while their tyrannical sister is constantly described in terms of her superhuman leadership qualities.

Again, not nearly as fanatically anti-male as Deadfire (you can still get a good ending by siding with Saul; bad endings include both a male and female option) but there's no escaping the "man bad, woman good" juxtapositions or the constant push toward the canonical path of siding with a woman against "he was a man" Saul Buchanan "The Patriarch" hint-hint-hint.

 

*** 

 

But alright. Enough of that. How does Wasteland 3 stack up in terms of gameplay?

Poorly.

For one thing, it's rather easy. Investing no points in barter, I still wound up with a pile of cash by the end. You have no inventory limits in either slots or weight, no action point costs for swapping equipment, no time limits so you can always return to base to heal up for free instead of using your gigantic free pile of looted consumables, can farm exp by running around aimlessly to get ambushed, and if you ever need to let a drug crash debuff wear off you can just minimize for lunch. On 2/4 "wastelander" difficulty I was able to run a very squishy team with token weapon skills with no problems, dying only when I suicidally charged in.

 

The few more interesting fights can be cheesed, as in the case of the Scorpitron, an optional boss with its multiple deadly attacks per round, tactical nuke launch and horde of allies.

You want anticlimactic? Endgame encounter neutralized via a $66, first-act consumable.

 

I'm trying very hard to make allowance for InXile finishing the project under COVID-19 lockdown, so let's assume the largely empty overland map might get populated by more as-yet unfinished encounters at some point. I also won't complain about the obvious uneven use of animated NPCs in dialogues - to tell the truth I would've been perfectly happy with static portraits, text and occasional voiceovers in the spirit of Pillars of Eternity. Further bells and whistles are nice but a waste of money.

 

I'll also concede a welcome absence of major bugs. No crashes (one crash) or lock-ups, no quests stuck in unfinishable states, no disappearing items, none of the bullshit we've come to expect from half-finished releases.

 

Minor bugs on the other hand: WTF is this? Blocked by what?

Yup, this here's a AAA-ambitious, Microsoft-bankrolled tactical RPG extravaganza alright.

For an encore, it also bugged out to my melee after she already took a swing at it.

As a matter of fact, line of sight problems abound, from inability to see through open doors to opaque walls becoming permeable to gunfire, especially near corners.
Characters occasionally become unable to interact for a round, forcing you to waste their remaining AP, and there are several problems with items being officially "equipped" or not, like a rocket launcher's speed debuff being negatively applied as a buff, stalled animations, quickslot items unslotting themselves or items switching from one hand to the other of their own accord, etc.

Don't get me started on the lack of a pause button or the straightjacketed camera angles. And, given given most of these issues seem like they should've been perfectly testable from social isolation, I'm not particularly inclined to excuse them all.

In the same vein, for a game relying so heavily on shooting from behind cover, this is a constant problem:

 

I shotted that screen while playing Wasteland 2 years ago yet never got around to complaining about it. You can take cover behind scenery, yet it was almost impossible to discern before a fight what would or would not officially count as cover... even in the case of obvious choices like sandbags. Sandbags! - which have been stacked for a couple of centuries by infantry as cover and are even arranged such in this very image. (Place sure as hell doesn't need flood protection.)

Wasteland 3 has been a great deal more consistent, yet still:

Look, ma, no cover! Either full or partial! Come on, you went to the trouble of staging wild west saloon gunfights. Dodging behind the bar (or in this case maybe a welcome desk?) is a staple of such scenes, all the more galling as this is supposed to count as your hard-earned flanking position.

It's not all bad.

The setting is a lot grittier than the company's previous blunted, softened take on Tides of Numenera, with plenty of unavoidable bad outcomes and opportunities to make evil choices.

Love the expanded use of leftover action points and saving up "strike" attacks between fights for a rainy day.

Noncombat skills like Mechanics and Lockpicking do see routine use in setting up positioning or depriving enemies of turret support, a lesson InXile learned well from Tides of Numenera. On the minus side, most fights resolve to pulling enemies into ambushes at a choke point, and support abilities beyond plain-Jane healing are tied into either grenades or weapons fire, severely limiting your role options. Justified to some extent because gun-smoking cowboysgirls and "head 'em off at the pass" tie into Wasteland's central space western aesthetic, but it does get old.

 

Wasteland 3 does also improve on its predecessor's lack of weapon / status effect functionality (at last energy weapons seem to actually work this time around) though compared to contemporary tactical RPGs it still plays very much like a "point and click" game.

Your tank support was also quite well handled; I was pleasantly surprised to see it fully incorporated into the final mission instead of left by the roadside as an extraneous gimmick.

On the plus side again, sound design deserves special mention. Though background music seems deliberately omitted in favor of ambient noise, what's there is expertly done, from wind and engine vroom-vroom to warning klaxons to the various ironic song covers of everything from Wang Chung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. I dare you not to chuckle a bit at the "Santa's Brew" jingle. Sound crew? Laudable work.

On the other hand, voice acting, with the exception of a few central players, tends to tank. Though played off as campy, deliberate faux amateur theater, this rapidly reveals itself a double bluff for intern-quality filler - which serves as a nice segue into Wasteland 3's main problem: terrible pacing played off as intentional levity. In both storytelling complexity and gameplay, the campaign peaks somewhere around The Bizarre or Denver (depending on your pattern of leveling) then gradually fizzles to a pointless repetitive chore until the admittedly enjoyable finale. Though less of a joke than Wasteland 2, it still clings too desperately to the worst facets of '80s/'90s game culture, when the sheer thrill of flickering pixels and pop culture references made us all too willing to overlook a lack of narrative or interactive quality for the joy of mashing buttons.

 

Take the Dorseys, who fill the entire introduction but then vanish inexplicably until you randomly stumble upon their cabin in the woods and wipe them out in two fights with barely a paragraph of context.

 

Or the major factions like the Gippers / Godfishers or Payasos / Monster Army treated as episodic encounters; run through their zone once and you'll have no reason to return. In fact, the entire faction reputation system seems aborted a single trimester in, having no discernable effect beyond access to some trivial shops in the wilderness.

 

Combat encounters also lack escalation. Instead of being gradually introduced to the monster classes or enemy factions, ramping up to epic showdowns, you instead fight repetitive groups of the same enemies whenever you meet a particular faction.

Or take the "companion" NPCs, of which you'll need two, exactly two of which are available in the first act, with six others appearing much too late for you to fit their skillsets into your group - two in fact are only available from the end of what would logically be your penultimate major mission onwards... what the hell is the point?

 

Skill checks are quite steep, forcing you to min-max early on, but given that you're fed skill books for your tenth out of ten skill levels, you can easily max each character's primary noncombat skill by mid-game then spend the rest of the campaign clicking through guaranteed irrelevant interactions. Worst of both worlds.

 

By the same token, after fleshing out each character's core attributes you'll likely find yourself stacking your Luck into end-game, meaning you rely more instead of less on the randomizer as you go. Especially as lucky dodges seem to work even after enemies' sky-high ToHit bonuses obviate normal dodging, and lucky crits can be truly massive - for my sniper it made a difference anywhere from 300 to 7000 damage, and no I did not add an extra zero. Works for your enemies too. It doesn't seem to matter how much armor and health you stack, a lucky crit will one-shot your team's tank.

Even in the final speedway zone, you're still being introduced to bit player minibosses, picking up scrap and fighting the same-sized packs of the same enemies you've been hacking apart all game long, except with higher stats.

 

Throughout it all, the farcical atmosphere discourages you from taking too deep an interest. Although the dramedy occasionally hits its mark (e.g. Flab or the Children of the Cabbage scene) it comes across as more of a cop-out for failing to adequately structure the campaign or manage dramatic tension. Feels like some jackass clapping you on the shoulder constantly telling you to relax, you stupid piece of shit, and not think about it too hard. Which is a pity, because the basic story of an aging, devoted yet morally compromised monarch securing his land's future against the aggression of his own offspring amidst the disintegration of human civilization is memorable (yes, yes, King Lear) and would've made a welcome addition to cRPGs' repertoire if more thoughtfully handled. The factions are a lot more memorable and distinct from each other when compared to other games' elves and goblins or space elves and space goblins. Too bad they never develop or interact beyond their introductions.

 

This brings us back to the "man bad, woman good" propaganda. While InXile showed heavy tendencies in Tides of Numenera (plus, much of your main quest consisted of rescuing innocent women from a father's folly) these remained muted. I doubt ramping up the anti-male bigotry here serves as more than a cynical bid for uncritical praise. In my final summation of Deadfire's version of such stupidity I said "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig." Wasteland 3 is a passable game which, instead of admitting its limitations and playing its strengths, over-reaches for blockbuster status then tries to cover up its threadbare nature by facetious pandering and adolescent feigned nonchalance.

 

And that... is that. Although tempted to bemoan Obsidian and InXile's purchase by Microsoft (a condemnation to lowest-common-denominator pablum) both companies have demonstrated by their last releases that their best years were already behind them. Look elsewhere for RPGs.