Wasteland, the venerable post-apocalyptic series of RPGs by inXile Entertainment, launched its third installment this week and it may be the best one yet. These are some tips for starting out in Wasteland 3.
You Don’t Have to Settle
When starting character creation in Wasteland 3 you’ll be presented with a number of paired characters to select from, but you can actually just create your own custom pairs as well!
Spread Your Skills Around
This is probably one of the more important tips for the game when building your characters. Wasteland 3 will use the squad member with the highest skill for the game’s various skillchecks, so you don’t need multiple characters with lockpicking or hacking. This can also apply to gun usage, though to a lesser extent. Characters use ammo from the same pool, so it’s not necessarily wrong to have squad mates sharing ammo, but it’s an important caveat to note.
You Can Bring a Friend
Wasteland 3 supports full two player co-op and you can set it up how you like, too. You can elect to control as many or as few squad mates as you want, so you can potentially have less to worry about in combat and allow a better skilled friend to control most of the squad mates. Co-op saves can be continued in single player or with other friends, too. So you’re not necessarily tied down if your regular co-op sessions fall apart for whatever reason. One thing to note is that players in co-op do share an inventory. On the flip side, you can also split apart and do different activities in co-op, which means you can collect rewards from mutually exclusive quest lines.
Be Quirky
Quirks are an optional selection you can make for your characters that offer a positive benefit in exchange for a penalty of some sort. Some of these options are more useful than others, but one in particular stands out amongst the rest. Waste Roamer, a Quirk that gives you +100% resistance to a bunch of status effects, comes with a steep -15% EXP penalty so you may ignore it at first. However, you can soften this penalty a bunch by simply selecting the Bookworm background (+10% EXP) for your characters. Then you’re only looking at a 5% EXP penalty that you can easily offset with a couple points in Intelligence.
Sure, you’re missing out on the bonus EXP if you take Bookworm without Waste Roamer, but being immune to Frozen, Burning, Shocked, Poisoned, and Bleeding is bound to come in pretty handy! Worthy tradeoff if you ask me.
Use Leftover AP
When you’ve run out of AP to attack, you don’t necessarily need to spend it to move to another position. You can use a Final Action to do things like hunker down to boost your evasion per extra AP spent, Prepare to bank leftover AP for the next turn or Ambush, which works like Overwatch in XCOM and allows your squad member to attack a target that enters attack range during the next turn.
Got any of your own tips for starting out in Wasteland 3? Share ‘em in the comments below!
