Wasteland 3 Interview

We’ve been careful to make Wasteland 3 welcoming for new players to ramp into. We have a lot of nuances and ways we keep it relevant for fans of the previous games, but we don’t require anyone to have played Wasteland 1 or 2 to enjoy the sequel. We catch them up on what’s already happened, but we don’t assume knowledge of anything.

One of the big changes in Wasteland 3 that helps with this is that the Desert Rangers are heading from the Arizona desert to frigid Colorado. The Rangers are new in town, no one knows who they are, and they’re having to learn the lay of the land and the factions and politics at the same time that players are as well. This parallel discovery process helps to provide a nice onramp and smooth entry into the series for players who don’t know anything at all about the franchise.

Moving the game to Colorado was exciting for a few reasons. The most obvious is that most post-apocalyptic games, Wasteland included, have been set in the arid desert. Moving the setting to someplace that’s equally as bleak, but on the opposite end of the spectrum was really intriguing to us. People might not be dying of thirst anymore, but they sure are dying of exposure to sub-freezing temperatures. This one shift single-handedly gave us a fantastic new colour palette and range of environments to work with, changed character motivations, enabled us to introduce new conflicts, and basically unshackled us to be able to tell fresh stories.

Wasteland 3’s nuclear winter offers a dramatic change in setting from Wasteland 2’s desert – and from the start we drew a lot of inspiration from Colorado’s current landscape and society. For example, once we knew that the game was officially going to be set in Colorado, we were able to look at the cities, main highways, and geography to create the underlying canvas that we then painted post-apocalyptic colors onto.

We were also inspired by the whole prepper movement and the groups of people who are actively planning for catastrophic events to upend our current way of life. What happens when doomsday preppers are right? What happens when a major calamity occurs and some people are ready while others aren’t? If the people who prepped are the people who survive, then it stands to reason that their lifestyle and way of looking at the world would seed the social DNA of a post-collapse world. What would that then look like after a few generations? We tried to follow this thread of questions down the rabbit hole and have a lot of fun playing with it when designing the game’s factions, characters, and overall society.

It has been incredibly difficult, to be perfectly honest. The addition of multiplayer has had loads of ramifications in every corner of the game, affecting balance, performance, UI, and the list goes on. That said, we love co-op and feel that this feature will offer players a really fresh way to play the game and experience the Wasteland universe.

The biggest challenge in adding co-op has been around party splitting. It’s always been a mainstay of the Wasteland games to be able to split your party and send half over here, another bunch over there, in order to be tactical about your decisions and setup. However, co-op multiplayer takes that sort of party splitting to a whole new level in terms of implementation challenge. I’m not just talking about combat either... What happens when two players are carrying on concurrent conversations? When do we choose to pull them out of those and how much power do we give to the game host? There are tons and tons of big and small design decisions like these that we’ve had to account for in order to add another player to a world as big and interactive as this.

Quite simply, crowdfunding is the reason why we’re here. It’s the reason why Wasteland 3 is being made, and ultimately why we’ve found success in joining the Xbox Game Studios. If not for the fans and players who contributed their own money to crowdfund this game, the Wasteland franchise wouldn’t be what it is today – so we’re incredibly thankful to our backers and are always on the lookout for ways to incorporate their ideas and feedback into our development process!

Who knows, maybe one day - but we’re not having any of those discussions right now. We’re pouring all of our effort and focus into making the game as great as possible and getting it into players’ hands as soon as we can.

Personally, I always get the most enjoyment when players surprise me by doing something unexpected in the games I’ve made. Whenever I see it happen, I always feel thrilled because we succeeded at giving that player the agency to do something unique according to their own choices. In those moments, players become a sort of creative partner to us, delighting us with their actions in the same way that I hope our creations delight them.

At its core, I strive to make game development about empowering players to author their own experiences through the choices that they make while playing. With Wasteland 3, for example, we’ve tried hard to develop the game with interconnected systems and an extremely flexible narrative structure, so that each player can experience the game in their own way. Choice-and-consequence is everywhere, with an extremely high level of world reactivity based on your choices as a player. Things you do early in the game can still be affecting your experience 30, 40, 50 hours later – and I can’t wait to be surprised by all of the unexpected ways in which players will choose to experience Wasteland 3!

Oh, there are a lot, but mentioning them here would kind of spoil their Easter-egginess, wouldn’t it? We make sure to have a lot of fun with this sort of thing and have gone to surprising lengths to include as many references and Easter eggs as possible to both [profile game="3106" title="Wasteland 2"] and the original. For example, I’ve probably read the paragraph book from Wasteland at least a dozen times, just scouring it end-to-end for any possible interesting tidbit to draw inspiration from.

We’ve even snuck some fun references into our promotional videos – such as Wasteland’s E3 2019 Trailer that had a faintly visible message from Wasteland carved into a wooden desk: “The launch code is MORTAR.” That one may have been too subtle, though, as I never spotted anyone publicly connecting the dots. Regardless, if you’re a fan of either earlier game, definitely keep your eyes peeled for throwback references and Easter eggs in Wasteland 3 – they are all over the place!

There’s honestly way too much advice than I can provide here. The type of games that inXile builds are extremely dense, large, and interconnected. If developers aren’t careful, they can easily spiral into something that is difficult to test, polish, and balance. The greatest advice that I can give other developers is to honestly respect the difficulty of making games of this type. Don’t just dive into development with a grand vision or epic story and hope that the details will fall into place. Keep the game’s scope under tight control, stay ruthlessly focused on the player experience and edit out anything that doesn’t improve it, get the game to be playable as early as possible and have the team playtest frequently, and expose as much of the game’s mechanics to design as possible to keep your iterative loop fast and frictionless. Everything comes down to how much you’re able to iterate on the actual player experience, and for a dev team to be able to do that right takes a lot of care and forethought.

My creative muscles don’t like to rest… So if I wasn’t making videogames, I would probably still be designing a board game, running a D&D campaign, or writing a book. I’m fortunate enough to love what I do, so if I couldn’t do this sort of thing professionally, I would continue to do so as a hobby.