Wasteland 3 developer diary deep dives on character creation

(Image credit: InXile)

Wasteland 3 is shaping up nicely ahead of its August 28 release. In a new dev diary, lead designer David Rogers details character creation, as well as some changes to the way turn-based combat works. It all looks very promising.

For starters, building your post-apocalyptic entourage can be as simple or as complex as you like. There's a new Character Duos feature that lets you start the game with a number of pre-made builds that not only compliment each other, but have bespoke interaction and dialogue. If that's not of interest, never fear: you can still deliberate for hours over your own custom builds, though greater effort has been made to have the consequences of your decisions more explicit from the get go.

Perks are in: they're called 'quirks' in Wasteland 3. Each perk comes with a "super powerful penalty," and two examples shown bear that out: 'Doomsday Prepper', grants a 35 percent resistance to status effects but prevents that character from reading Skill Books, while 'Death Wish' grants extra action points but prevents the character from using any kind of armor.

Meanwhile, combat looks more exciting than before, mostly because the enemy's turn takes place all at once, meaning fights happen at a faster clip. The whole video is below. For more on Wasteland 3, here's everything we know.

Shaun Prescott
Australian Editor

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.

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