On October 5, developer InXile Entertainment will put Wasteland 3 up on crowdfunding site Fig, seeking $2.75 million. A party-based role-playing game, complete with a renewed focus on complex story reactivity and strategic combat, Wasteland 3 will launch simultaneously on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC if it’s funded.
In addition to evolving on Wasteland 2’s turn-base combat and encounter design by including vehicles, environmental dangers, and a more fluid action system, Wasteland 3 lets you play through the campaign with a friend; each of you controlling your own squad of rangers. Wasteland 3 will still offer an offline single-player experience, but if you play online with a friend, you can share missions and join up for key story moments, or split up to 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,” InXile adds. “Be aware, however, that the actions you take while your friend is off-line are not without consequence!”
Set in frozen Colorado, Wasteland 3 will offer up difficult moral choices and a story from the writers of Torment: Tides of Numenera:
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 other far reaching decisions that have a marked impact on the shape of your world.
Other highlights in Wasteland 3 include a complex dialog tree and a camera that pans in closer to show who you’re talking to.
Although the Fig goal is $2.75 million, the development budget for Wasteland 3 is around $7 million. InXile will be using a portion of the $12 million earned from Wasteland 2 to help fund the sequel. The developer is also looking for a publishing partner.
More details will be revealed next week when the Fig campaign goes live.
[Source: InXile Entertainment, Kotaku, Polygon]
