image courtesy of Microsoft and InXile entertainment

    Wasteland 3 begins by taking everything from you. The character pair you've just selected (or created from scratch) fights an unwinnable battle against overwhelming opposition. Music flares; your comrades are cut down by a hail of gunfire. The remnants of your squadron face a massacre, and those that live are left to bleed out in the freezing Colorado wasteland. After fighting off your would-be killers by the skin of your teeth, your commander gives you her final order: find the mysterious Patriarch, convince him to hand over his resources that he's promised you, save the Desert Rangers. Her organs then spill out of a wound in her side (a graphic detail the game is sure to provide you), and she slumps over dead. You are alone in a vast, uncaring, and frozen hellscape. You then walk a few steps and meet Major Tomcat, a cat in a cowboy hat with a Ranger badge. If your animal handling is high enough, you can recruit him with a David Bowie reference. If not, you can give him cigarettes.

    The game is rife with this tonal whiplash, serving to undercut nearly every moment of sincerity with a joke, either flagrantly (as with Major Tomcat), or more subtly with a collectable or environmental detail that takes a hard-right turn into the slapstick. On my journey through Wasteland 3, I found this constant punch-pulling to greatly diminish the overall experience and narrative. Certainly, video games have an obnoxious fascination with the "funpocalypse" (a term coined in marketing for Sunset Overdrive and recently explored in titles like Far Cry: New Dawn and Rage 2), and these high-concept sandboxes have a right to exist, but it is because the writing in Wasteland 3 so frequently scratches the surface of profound world building, interesting character interaction, or deep moral quandary that the comic relief feels more like a lack of confidence rather than a failure of craft. The game feels too scared to leave the player with something to chew on, something that might re-contextualize the familiar for deeper reflection, to allow for some of the bigger moments to land with the weight they deserve. Like an anxious party host, Wasteland 3 will constantly push you to the next tonal point.

    This problem is only amplified by the beginning message from the developers:

    InXile is not passing the buck here -- I don't believe that their intent with this message is to wiggle out of criticism or placate those that have deluded themselves into thinking their gaming experiences must be (or even are) absent of politics. In fact, I had hoped it was the opposite: that a project had become more relevant and timely between inception and release than originally intended. One of art's greatest strengths is it's malleability of its context to the times. Some stories become more powerful, some lose relevance, some alter meaning entirely in the public consciousness. Wasteland 3 unfortunately does the second -- the tone is too skewed to make for effective satire, though it grazes greatness too often to simply be written off as banal screwball comedy. Instead it occupies the space somewhere inbetween, in a desert of sincerity, saying nothing despite constant offerings of vaguely political class conflicts. 

    What of the player's role in all of this? Wasteland 3 is an RPG, after all. Unfortunately, the game's approach to the party system means that your squadron feels more like a vague collection of archetypes rather than a crew of well fleshed out characters. The real stars of the show are the "companion" characters who are not desert rangers but rather members of various factions with their own interests, goals, and ideologies. These characters will even occasionally chime in to conversations without player input, and NPCs will acknowledge their presence if there is a relationship or ideological conflict at play. These are not consistent enough to provide a real sense of person hood though, as Wasteland 3's skill system means that any character within a certain range of your controlled character is able to participate in skill checks. While this is convenient, the lack of friction from the game means that conversations and checks often feel like digging around in a toolbox and selecting the right head for a screwdriver rather than a simulation of a conversation or a role being played. Every conversation in Wasteland 3 feels more or less the same, regardless of your party composition or who you are directly controlling. Show your proverbial ID that states you have put the points in to access this conversation tree, continue down this path. 

    There is a point a few hours into Wasteland 3 where you are given a task by the local sheriff to investigate a local casino in town called "Little Vegas". The sheriff believes that the proprietor of the casino, Faran Brygo (an anagram of Bryan Fargo, lead writer), is involved with a recent raid of Denver by a rival gang, and sent one of her trusted lieutenants to investigate. He hasn't returned. You've probably seen the casino already if you're the type of player to walk around and take a space in. It is impossible to miss: standing taller than any building in this area of downtown Denver, a glowing beacon of neon, sex, and money towering above the shanties that make up the nearby market, and the makeshift camps where refugees from the various raider gangs sleep in the icy streets. 

    You make your way into the casino/nightclub hybrid and earn an audience with Faran Brygo himself. It's at this point the pink-haired gangster pulls a familiar act -- the evasive yet threatening mafioso happy to evade your questions and counter with vague yet polite threats. Exhaust enough of his dialogue options, and even he will admit that Little Vegas is nothing more than a sham, a relic of a bygone era. He "knows that any attempt to recapture the past is doomed to failure, but [he] had to try". Initially, I thought to myself that this was an interesting, if a little derivative, piece of commentary from the writers and I was eager to pull the thread to see where it went. Common ground in apocalyptic fiction is humanity's obsession with resurrecting the past, and I was eager to see where Wasteland 3's writers took this, especially considering this gaudy casino's placement. One look at Wasteland 3's Denver tells you that class disparity was very much on the mind of the writing team. I continued to scour the casino, looking for leverage to twist Brygo's arm into giving me the information I needed. I headed upstairs where sex workers offered their services to see if I could glean any information. At the end of this hallway, I came to the final room labelled "Joker" (all the sex workers were given card suit pseudonyms), and inside was a goat with a bucket around it's neck labelled "$5" and a paper bag with a crude depiction of a woman's face was lying in the corner of the room. I could feel the anxious host Wasteland 3 growing sweaty, nervously tugging its collar like a Rodney Dangerfield character. "Sorry about all that sins of the past capitalism nonsense pal, anyway, isn't it funny you can fuck the goat?"