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Wasteland 3 will offer its players “true consequences” in its determinant role-playing mechanics, to “remind people why they fell in love with post-apocalyptic RPGs.”
In an interview with GameSpot, InExile Entertainment director Brian Fargo explained how the experience of Wasteland 3 will be “special.” The world, a barren and frigid wilderness populated by vicious survivalists, is described like a character in and of itself, which will notice the player’s actions and weigh them up. However, the developer didn’t want to leave the player in the dark about whether choosing red or blue socks will have an outcome in the future which totally eradicates a settlement, for example.
“We wanted to make sure that we were constantly challenging ourselves to telegraph when the player was doing things that were making things happen, or doing things that would not happen,” he said. “Too often in these roleplaying games, you don’t appreciate the depth unless you play it again, and not many people get a chance to play big games twice.” As a result of this conscious and continual signalling, Fargo believes that Wasteland 3 does a “better job” at implementing effective choice and consequence.
“We think that true consequence, meaningful consequence, is what makes these worlds super immersive,” he added, and said that this is an expressed element of Wasteland 3, with the paperboy calling out the latest headlines to show how the story and the world is progressing based upon player choices. He said that these courses of action might manifest “10 hours later, 20 hours later” in the game, and that no one person on the team knows all of the possible avenues that the game could take.
“We really, we’re always twisting ourselves up to constantly get it where we hope the player will be like, ‘I can’t believe they thought of that,’ or ‘[I can’t believe] the game reacted to that,” concluded Fargo.
Wasteland 3 comes to Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on August 28.
