Wasteland 3 (2020)
Wasteland 3 is a 2020 role-playing (rpg) video game made by inXile Entertainment.
You are the last of Team November, a Ranger squad sent from the Arizona desert into the frozen ruins of Colorado, where nobody has heard of the Desert Rangers and your reputation starts at nothing. inXile widens the scope: warring factions, a strongman called the Patriarch offering an uneasy deal, a vehicle to haul your squad through the snow, and choices that redraw whole regions rather than single rooms. Turn-based tactics run the fights, dark comedy runs the dialogue, and betrayal stays on the table. The Colorado wasteland rewards cunning, punishes trust, and keeps score.
Quick answers
What is Wasteland 3 about?
You are the last of Team November, a Ranger squad sent from the Arizona desert into the frozen ruins of Colorado, where nobody has heard of the Desert Rangers and your reputation starts at nothing. inXile widens the scope: warring factions, a strongman called the Patriarch offering an uneasy deal, a vehicle to haul your squad through the snow, and choices that redraw whole regions rather than single rooms. Turn-based tactics run the fights, dark comedy runs the dialogue, and betrayal stays on the table. The Colorado wasteland rewards cunning, punishes trust, and keeps score.
When was Wasteland 3 released?
Wasteland 3 was released on 27 August 2020.
Who made Wasteland 3?
Wasteland 3 was made by inXile Entertainment.
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Explore Wasteland 3 guides
Wasteland 3 in our writing
- Companion guide: The CRPG: The Complete Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games
- Companion guide: The CRPG Renaissance: How Kickstarter Brought the Genre Back from the Dead
- Companion guide: Post-Apocalyptic RPGs: From Wasteland to Fallout and Every Ruin Between
- Companion guide: After the End
A few thoughts on Wasteland 3
Fallout: New Vegas is the closest cousin, another RPG built on picking sides between ugly factions. For the printed version of a frozen collapse, Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven and Cormac McCarthy's The Road both sit in this cold. Deltron 3030 still fits for a ruined-future soundtrack with teeth.
Wasteland road stories ruled by a warlord who calls the shots
Wasteland 3's Patriarch offers Team November a deal no Ranger should trust, and the whole frozen Colorado wasteland answers to him anyway. Mad Max: Fury Road runs on the same warlord logic, a wasteland kept in line by one ruthless figure. The Scorch Trials and Shatter Me trap their people under similarly absolute authorities, and Old Man's War folds recruits into a hierarchy just as unforgiving.
Quiet, bleak stories about the survivors left to rebuild
Wasteland 3 measures its world in warring factions and burned-out towns, the wreckage left after something bigger already happened. Station Eleven follows survivors doing exactly that, rebuilding culture out of a pandemic's ruins. Lord of the Flies and the Boy in the Striped Pyjamas both track what innocence costs in a broken system, and Project Hail Mary strands its own lone survivor with the same stakes.
Music for driving through a ruined, hostile world
Wasteland 3 hands you a vehicle and a squad and sends you into snow-buried ruins full of people who want what little you have. The Fat of the Land and Deltron 3030 both sound like that same hostile drive. Blade Runner's score supplies the cold dystopian atmosphere, Black Holes and Revelations matches the scale of a world destroyed, and Living With War keeps the anger aimed at a real enemy.