Following an announcement last week, InXile Entertainment has launched the Fig campaign for Wasteland 3. The game is seeking $2.75 million in funding and at press time has already gathered nearly half of its goal.
The RPG followup to Wasteland 2 is aiming for a simultaneous release across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac, and Linux in Q4 2019.
Get the Fig campaign pitch details, video, and first gameplay trailer below.
Fig Campaign Pitch
Gameplay Trailer
What is Wasteland 3?
From the creators of Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera comes Wasteland 3! Following the critically acclaimed releases of 2014’s Wasteland 2 and 2015’s Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut, fans have been clamoring for a direct sequel. Now we can bring it to you, with your help!
- A party-based role-playing game, with a renewed focus on our trademark complex story reactivity and strategic combat.
- By including vehicles, environmental dangers, and a revamped, more fluid action system, we are evolving on Wasteland 2‘s deep tactical turn-based combat and unique encounter design.
- Play by yourself or with a friend in story-driven synchronous or asynchronous multiplayer. Choices open up (or close off) mission opportunities, areas to explore, story arcs, and lots of other content.
- Your Ranger Base is a core part of the experience. As you help the local people and establish a reputation in Colorado, quests and narrative will force you to make decisions on how to lead.
- The game will be set in the savage lands of frozen Colorado, where survival is difficult and a happy outcome is never guaranteed. Players will face difficult moral choices and make sacrifices that will change the game world.
- Wasteland 3 will feature a deep and engaging story utilizing a newly-revamped dialog tree system from the celebrated writers of Torment: Tides of Numenera.
- Simultaneously releasing to Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Explore a New Frozen Wasteland
You push yourself from the ground. Biting wind claws at your eyes, your throat.
Every inch of your body hurts, but you are alive. Your squadmates are not. They lie motionless, frozen beneath the bloody snow. You will join them if you don’t get out of this storm.
A light flickers in the howling dark, over a distant hill. Wincing, you set off towards it.
You start the game as the sole survivor of Team November, a Ranger squad dispatched to the icy Colorado wastes. This is a land of buried secrets, lost technology, fearsome lunatics, and deadly factions. No one here has ever heard of the Desert Rangers. Your reputation is yours to build from scratch, and your choices may save this land or doom it. With a renewed focus on macro-reactivity, you’ll be picking between warring factions, deciding whether locations are destroyed or saved, and making other far reaching decisions that have a marked impact on the shape of your world.
Bring a Friend
or the first time in the history of the Wasteland franchise, you will be able to take a friend with you on your journey into the post-apocalyptic wastes! Wasteland 3 opens up the possibility to play through the campaign with a friend. Both of you will control your own squad of Rangers.
The core of Wasteland 3 will still be a rich single-player experience. If you play with a friend while both online together, you’ll be able to share many missions, and join up to hit key story beats, but you can also split up and cover more ground. Once a game is started, you can play Wasteland 3 while your friend is offline, and do a lot of missions without them. Be aware, however, that the actions you take while your friend is offline are not without consequence!
By making the decision to include multiplayer early in the development process, we will be able to design a game that is true to the core principles of the Wasteland franchise and our studio. Wasteland 3 can be played as an offline, single-player game, and will be built from the ground up with a focus on story and reactivity that makes no sacrifices for the multiplayer experience. At the same time, co-op players will enjoy working together to change Wasteland 3’s highly reactive world… or finding ways to destroy what their friend has worked to accomplish.
Expanding on Wasteland 2 Designs
Our strategic turn-based combat is core to the Wasteland experience. Wasteland 2’s rangers could use cover, flank their enemies, and attack from rooftops with deadly precision and horrific status effects. Wasteland 3 will build and polish this existing system while adding a new feature: team-focused abilities. Your rangers will have an arsenal of combat skills with special tactical effects, usually focused around weakening the enemy while protecting their own squads.
Another big change this time around will be the addition of vehicles. Your ranger will use your vehicle for travel, storing essential goods, exploration, and survival. Gear up your vehicle well enough, and you’ll be able to use it for movable cover in combat, or – if you’ve installed a turret – deal with fools crazy enough to tangle with the Desert Rangers.
Finally, the Ranger Base is a key location in all the Wasteland games, and Wasteland 3 will be no different. This time the experience will be much more involved, as you are establishing a brand new Ranger base to survive and even thrive in the hostile snowscapes of Colorado. Rather than the base being primarily a place to pick up new missions and replacement squadmates, we’re expanding it so that it is a full base of operations that is a part of the narrative and world reactivity. The Ranger Base will not be a place you have to micro-manage in great detail, but it will be a key location with significant narrative opportunities. Based on your decisions, events will open up and the base will evolve over the course of the game.
A Brand New Atmoshperic Experience
Looking around at the rich possibilities of our setting, it struck us how often we return to the desolate dry desert and ruined cities. We still think that’s a great core setting, but the world after mankind can encompass many different settings, from overgrown wilderness thriving on former cities (something we explored more in Wasteland 2) to the remnants of mankind trying to survive in a hostile, frozen landscape. More than anything, a solitary building or town amidst an unblemished field of snow emphasizes an overwhelming sense of isolation that is key to the post-apocalyptic story. It is this rarely found setting and aesthetic that we want to explore in Wasteland 3.
But this does not mean Wasteland 3 is abandoning its roots. The Rangers are still a part of the world, and the struggles and challenges you will face are all too familiar: negotiating supply lines, assisting threatened communities, and of course, dispensing that classic wasteland justice. But aesthetically as well, our goal is to go back to our history with the original Wasteland and the stories and movies that inspired it, such as the Mad Max or the Road films, and our focus is to have a look and feel that recalls those experiences. This means a renewed focus on intelligent use of color palettes, as well as a world where a vehicle or a person’s outfit tells a functional story of their place in the world.
As part of our improved presentation, we’re updating the way dialog is built and presented. Wasteland 3 will feature an intricate dialog system based on Torment: Tides of Numenera’s branching system. Players will choose lines of dialogue that lead them through branching conversations. Choosing certain skills for your character may open up completely new and unique branches. And last but not least, in key conversations the camera will pan in to show a closer shot of the person you’re talking to.
We are bringing the team behind Wasteland 2, Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut and Torment: Tides of Numenera back together to make Wasteland 3. Core parts of the team such as writers and artists are wrapping up their work on Torment right now, and we are rolling them directly into Wasteland 3’s pre-production. Wasteland 3 will be utilizing the most advanced version of the Unity game engine yet, allowing us to take advantage of technology and experience we’ve developed on our previous titles, which lets us push our content and visual fidelity to new levels.
We’re very fortunate to have concept artist Andrée Wallin of Wasteland 2 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens once again on hand to help us establish the look of this game, providing key art pieces that will be used for inspiration and reference throughout the game’s development.
Additionally, we’ve been working closely with Christopher and Nic Bischoff of Brotherhood Games, the team behind the widely celebrated STASIS, Cayne and the upcoming Beautiful Desolation. In fact, they’re responsible for the beautiful prototype screenshots and video you’ve seen so far!