Your Rangers move through the empty town, creeping past barricades made of desert junk and old car parts. “Hell Razor” takes point with their old army pistol, on the lookout for hostiles. Suddenly, a mutant bunny leaps out to attack! The Ranger team swiftly takes it down, using up some of their precious ammo…but then a pack of desert lizards come charging in, forcing them to run! Such is life in the Wasteland…
The Wasteland franchise, starting with Wasteland 1 in 1988, has long left its mark on the RPG genre; it established the core post-apocalyptic video game setting that titles like Fallout would take and run with, while introducing gamers to the concept of an open persistent world where NPCs had their own agendas, threats could be addressed with non-violent skills and actions had lasting consequences. With the third title in the franchise, Wasteland 3, coming out in May of 2020, now’s a good time to look back at the history of Wasteland and the legacy it left for the video game industry.
Wasteland 1: Roving Desert Rangers
Wasteland 1, by modern standards, is very retro – not just for its 1980s graphics, but for a style of gameplay and interface that hearken back to classic text-based adventures like Zork or Oregon Trail. The heroes of the game, a party of Desert Rangers, journey through a Colorado ravaged by nuclear armageddon, fighting off mutant creatures, trading with settlements and foiling the plots of tyrannical cyborgs.
You interact with this open world using keyboard commands, choosing listed options in turn-based combat and typing out sentences to interact with the NPCs around you. Behind these seemingly crude controls lay an unprecedented number of gameplay innovations; using unique party member skills, players could solve problems outside of combat by picking locks, hacking computers or smooth-talking locals. NPCs had their own agenda beyond manning stores or helping you in combat, and party members would even refuse to follow player commands if it went against their self-interest. These features, combined with permanent changes to game maps based on player actions, pioneered the idea of a living world, a virtual nuclear wasteland that existed for its own sake, not the players.
After the release of Wasteland 1, fans eagerly awaited a new sequel for over a decade; some, while waiting, wound up making their own games that built on the persistent worlds and non-violent problem solving introduced by Wasteland. The most notable spiritual successor, the Fallout Franchise, took the post-apocalyptic stylings of Wasteland and combined it with a satirical 1950s Raygun aesthetic, letting a single character bring change to the darkly comic post-apocalyptic landscape with a mix of combat and non-combat skills.
Wasteland 2 and 3: Back to Post-Apocalypse Colorado
A true Wasteland sequel finally came out in 2014 after a wildly successful Kickstarter. Wasteland 2, made by the developers of the original Wasteland, continued the story of the Desert Rangers and their quest to rebuild civilization, combining the classic roleplaying and text-based narration of the first game while adding a more tactical turn-based combat system akin to titles like X-COM and Shadowrun Returns.
The latest Wasteland game, Wasteland 3, entered development after raising over $2.75 Million on Fig. Set for a May 2020 release, Wasteland 3 will take the Rangers out of their scorched desert habitat and into the wintery terrain of the Rocky Mountains to confront a cult of drug-crazed renegades. According to inExile Entertainment, Wasteland 3 will build on the gameplay introduced in Wasteland 2, re-balancing the turn-based combat system while adding in two-player co-op and a vehicle party members can use for both transport and combat. For all these changes, Wasteland 3 looks to retain the essential element that made the first game a hit back in 1988: commitment to simulating a living world in which each character has their own story and problems can be solved – or made worse – in the most unexpected ways.
Next: Read Our Exclusive Wasteland 3 Preview
Wasteland 3 releases on May 19, 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
