Greetings all,

As with most companies, we moved to a work-from-home environment some weeks ago, and that’s of course introduced new challenges that many of us throughout the world have been learning to manage. We’ve been excited to see the Wasteland 3 Beta so well received, but the reality is that with these new logistical challenges our release was going to be impacted.

We’re in a great position with both Microsoft and Deep Silver supporting our desire to ensure the game launches in the best possible circumstances, and to add a few extra months to ensure this is a stellar product on day one. With that, Wasteland 3’s new release date is August 28, 2020.

That’s time we’re putting into acting on Beta feedback and suggestions, optimization, polishing and refinements, and making sure we have an awesome co-op experience. We’re pouring our hearts into this game, and the last thing we want is to have anything but an amazing launch for a product we truly believe in.

We appreciate everyone’s excitement and continued support as we put a few more months into ensuring that on launch day Wasteland 3 is the experience you’ve been waiting for.

Thank you and stay safe,

Brian Fargo
Studio Head, inXile entertainment​

Hello everyone!

February and March have been intense, for many reasons. Like many others in the US and around the world, the COVID-19 outbreak has changed how we work in the last few weeks. To help mitigate this unprecedented illness, our developers are all working from home. We have provided infrastructure and hardware support for that to happen, as well as provided more tools and procedures to help facilitate communication. The biggest challenge to us has been the separation. We shockingly like each other in this studio and have found it a little difficult not to be able to hang out during the week. But we also want to keep our developers and their families safe, so this is a small price to pay. The new working from home paradigm seems to be agreeing with people, and development is proceeding from the comfort of our own homes.

Speaking of which, we are seeing more and more of the game come together. On the road to “content complete” many features are getting locked including side quests, systems, and animations. We're getting to the point where the game you'll get to play at release is clearly recognizable through the construction dust.

Side quests are where you really get to meet the World of Darkness in Bloodlines 2, just like the first game. They're also one of the main rewards for stepping off the beaten path and exploring our version of Seattle. Most of our side-quests are written, scripted, and locked down in the game, and we are very excited to share them with you. The narrative design department has been hard at work making sure these side quests feel every bit as integral to the fabric of the game as the main quests.

The game grew in other ways as well. It always was central to our vision to make players feel like a vampire through gameplay. One side of it is to create this freedom in movements that a mere mortal could never experience. This led us to the decision to expand your baseline Thinblood abilities to traversal - you can use Chiropteran Glide, Mentalism Pull for specific objects or Nebulation through vents at any time, regardless of your primary Thinblood Discipline choice. We went through the game, particularly the hubs, and investigated all the ways we could make them even more exciting and seamless for you to use. These powers have been with us for a long time, and we can fully leverage their potential uses throughout all levels for puzzles, rewards, and perhaps some secrets for you to find.

We organized a mocap session in February, focusing on facial and dialogue animations. Our animation team has been polishing things like the feeding animations, combat, Discipline usage, and other vampire mainstays (no devs were hurt in the recording of this mocap session, proof in images).

Thanks for reading and stay safe!
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The crusade is a noble quest, a march to glory, a chance to save the world and do things that matter… right?

Wrong. The crusade is just another war. And Golarion is losing.

At least, this is what the Hellknights think.

Merciless and deadly, clad in black armor, they have come from infernal Cheliax to prove that, when empowered with law and discipline, an army can achieve more than by noble intentions and good will. They have no authority above them other than their order’s regulations and no compassion for anyone, least of all the pathetic failures who can’t even hold the demons at bay.

Paralictor Regill Derenge is one of the strictest and most ruthless Hellknight officers. He doesn’t have hopes—he has goals. He doesn’t have doubts—he has discipline. Every risk he takes is calculated. Every stratagem he devises is the most efficient.

Casualties? Manageable. Compassion? A debilitating luxury. Training? To the fullest extent. Evil? Lawful evil.

Needless to say, all these qualities are rare for a gnome.

Indeed, Regill is far from representative of his people. While other gnomes crave new experiences and sensations to stop the bleaching—a process of physical decolorization and aging, which is considered an affliction—Regill accepts it as a natural state, and doesn’t bother himself to care. Of course, he has too many urgent tasks to spend time indulging excessive curiosity or other weaknesses. He’d rather purge them with morbid rituals of reckoning.

In battle, Regill dashes to the mob of chaotic creatures, smiting them with measured, precise blows. His effectiveness is the result of strict hellknight training, and his control helps him to assess the situation on the battlefield and choose the best course of action.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re his commander or his friend—Regill fights alongside you because he volunteered to do so. While his disfavor has consequences, so too does his esteem. His respect and loyalty are difficult to earn, but, once secured, will pay off a hundredfold.
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Sorry about the delay — Hannah and I weren’t 100% happy with some of the feelings and visuals that we were going to release with the beta, and we’ve been busy fine tuning all those elements. We’re finally catching up! The Steam build has been now updated with these assets and tech that we've worked on since the alpha. We’ve implemented some lovely sprites based on what we’ve been working on with the SitS expansion, and they’ve brought a lot of clarity to the PC and NPCs in the game, especially with positions and limb highlighting/damage. Map visuals adjusted to match, as well as LOS and lighting from the alpha. More notable changes below, as well as additions.

We’re starting the beta with modified versions and connections of some of the first maps in the game from Block 8. We’ll be putting in the start of the game proper shortly, but in the meantime all skills are available for testing. There are two medical stations available, and to test combat and skills the goal is to wipe out all the thugs street-side.

Skills:

All Skills primarily abilities available, more to come through beta:

Biohack: Psi-attack any enemies in visual to distort your image to make it appear as if there are duplicates shimmering around you — they’ll attack one of these at random. If an NPC uses this, the player cannot precise aim any of the targets, and they are all indistinguishable from the real target.

Burglary: Currently you can lockpick doors and chests so you don’t need keycards or to destroy them.

Social: All previous social skills available: i.e. can convince enemies to leave or neutral NPCs to follow.

Chemistry: with vials and chemicals, you can combine to make various types of chemical bombs via the chemistry menu.

Hacking: Can try to hack computers, with various difficulties resulting in more or less passwords you can guess during a hack, each being a new roll for pass/fail. Too many fails lock you out.

Can also build drones with enough drone parts and a given weapon for it to use.

Systems:

Lighting and movement more fluid — lighting is based off any floors given vertex light, instead of tile light. These are (roughly) evenly distributed, update-able in realtime with taking out lights or using flashlights/muzzle flashes, and are more engaging to interact with. This tech was previously the hatch-lines in the alpha, and has been altered to be the main lighting operations. This has been smoothed out with a nice dither instead for better clarity, as the hatches were a bit difficult to read for the main lighting.

Cybernetics: A few charges are available to distribute as you want in limb slots on top right — the PC starts with some cybernetics attached, which can be switched out or modified later, as well as how much power and mental stability they can afford to power them. More details to come.

Virtues: All the stats from these were overhauled from alpha to now be designated by various advantage and disadvantages chosen at character creation and during level-ups. We’ll be finishing up the character and creation screen (and item/action descriptions) in a coming update.
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The Wasteland Backer Beta is now live on Steam! To those of you who backed the game at the Early Bird ($25) or higher tier, you'll have received an invite to claim your Beta key from CrowdOx (be sure to check your spam!). For more information on the Beta, how to play, and how to give us feedback, we highly recommend checking out our last Backer Beta Fig Update.

The Beta offers a look at the first few hours of the Wasteland 3 experience, from the game's opening cinematic, through creating your characters and establishing a base, to your first steps into the deep and reactive narrative of a post-apocalyptic Colorado.

If you're not in the Beta we highly recommend checking out press coverage from around the web, as well as livestreams on Mixer and Twitch. In fact, we're going to be joining Mixer on the official Xbox channel at 1pm PDT later today, March 17! Join our devs as they join a casual stream and answer your questions.

Thank you to all the backers to which this quite literally would not have been possible. Thank you for your patronage and passion, and we look forward to finishing the game and getting it in your hands.
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Attack of the Fanboy
COGconnected
Comics Gaming Magazine
Destructoid
DualShockers
GameSkinny
GameSpew
GamesRadar+
Gaming Trend
PC Gamer
PC Invasion
PCGamesN (Part 2, Part 3)
PlayStation Universe
Pure PlayStation
RPG Site
Screen Rant
Shacknews
TechRaptor
Twinfinite
VG247
Wccftech
Windows Central
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One perhaps controversial point that I want to make at this point has to do with the move away from simulationist design which has become fairly common in modern squad tactics, arguably heralded by the rebooted XCOM series. In a nutshell, games that do this will often treat guns, auxiliary items and physical abilities more like D&D spells than their real-life counterparts. This annoys me to no end when it's applied to games with more "realistic" backdrops, because in addition to throwing believability out the window, it also tends to hamper creative play across the board. Gone are the days of tossing a backup weapon from soldier to soldier when your front man’s gun jams in a tight spot, or rushing over to a fallen enemy to pick up the grenade he dropped – sacrificed for the commodification of tactical manoeuvres.

So where does Broken Lines fall on this scale? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Like Firaxis XCOM, grenades and healing items are not singular objects, but abilities of sorts, which are assigned to your units at the start of a mission and which have a set number of uses, replenish for each battle, and cannot be redistributed or dropped in the field. What’s more disappointing is that there is also no looting of any kind, apart from the aforementioned supply caches. Enemies will not drop their items, and you will find no stashes of weapons or auxiliaries in the maps themselves. The only way to gain new stuff is to buy it from the merchant. Your own weapons can’t be dropped or swapped mid-mission either, and all guns have unlimited ammo.

None of this gels at all with the premise of the story nor with the gameplay itself. You’re supposed to be commandeering a small group of soldiers stranded behind enemy lines, scrounging for survival, yet the resource management, which should have been a major concern, is practically non-existent. At no point will you have to think carefully about rationing supplies in the field (by which I mean actual supplies like grenades or healing items, not food), because they don’t really exist, and there are no overarching worries beyond making sure your soldiers don’t die. The best games manage to weave long-term strategic considerations into the moment-to-moment tactical decision-making; Broken Lines, despite the overall structure providing a perfect slate, doesn’t even try.

The actual combat mechanics fare a lot better in this regard, though they haven’t been spared completely. For one, bullets that miss their target will disappear into the ether when the maximum range of the weapon that fired it is reached. Then there are some downright silly abilities, like “Drunken”, which boosts courage at the expense of accuracy for a short while (to top it off, this is also completely useless).

However, there are a couple of cool systems that make up for it. First is the fact that bullets in Broken Lines are real game objects, which means that each one will travel until it hits something (or gets swallowed by the god of Balance if it travels too far), whether that something is an enemy, an ally, or a piece of scenery. This is good because it makes cover work like it should, which is by actually blocking the path of incoming fire rather than just conveying a flat reduction to enemy accuracy.

Another advantage of this is that it feeds into another cool system, which is stress. The stress mechanic is central to the combat of Broken Lines, and it works like this: in addition to HP, each soldier has a stress bar which fills up when bullets pass near them. When it reaches a threshold, the soldier will panic for a few seconds. A panicking soldier will look for an escape route, and if he finds one he’ll run for it, but most of the time he’ll just cower in place. You won’t be able to issue orders to a panicking soldier until he calms down.

Stressing out your enemies is essential to taking them down, which means that automatic weapons are going to be your new best friends. All weapons in this category fall under the "SMG" type, and in addition to the high rate of fire, they have another trick up their sleeve that make their suppressive capabilities even more powerful. Each weapon type in the game, in addition to its native properties, has a distinct special firing mode, and the special firing mode of the SMG consists simply of rattling off at full blast blanketing a specified area with heavy fire. It’s inaccurate, but guaranteed to cause any enemies within it to panic, and you can direct it at will rather than just have it target the closest enemy. This means that the primary usage of the SMG is to pin down enemies in cover and cut off any escape routes, while the rest of the squad moves in and takes them down from the flanks. This can be combined with camouflage from thick vegetation, as well as elevation bonuses, for some properly devastating manoeuvres. It's nice to see that after years of games that either ignore the potential of this mechanic or else half-ass the implementation, a game has finally been made that gets cover fire right.

So how do missions actually play out? Well, most of the time you’ll pick out a route at the beginning that takes you to the finish point, ideally via any supply caches that may be present, and then advance along it, engaging in the suppress-and-flank dance whenever you encounter groups of hostiles. That’s pretty much it.

And you know what? It’s a lot of fun. There are a few key things that make it work. First of all, there’s the fact that the onus is generally on you to advance while enemies wait for you to approach, meaning that there’s almost never an occasion to pull out the old “line up the firing squad and wait for the enemy to file into a bottleneck like lemmings” trick. The score system also helps here, since if you want to get a perfect score you can’t dawdle. This is thrown into relief during the few missions where you’re tasked with defending yourself against an enemy counterattack or ambush, at which point the game turns into a tower defence of sorts, which isn't nearly as much fun.

Moreover, battles also encourage you to stay mobile as much as possible. A lot of cover is destructible and will be decimated by machine gun volleys within a single turn, and grenades and heavier artillery, should the enemy have it, will wreck your soldiers no matter what sort of cover they're hiding behind, not to mention that enemy soldiers aren’t afraid to move to better positions if you let them.

This all combines to make battles very dynamic affairs. I’ve thought about why I’ve had more fun with this game than it feels like I should, given how basic it is. It boils down, I think, to the simple recipe of a few interlocking systems pulling in the same direction. The game wants to constantly keep you moving and moving around and behind enemies, and every facet of gameplay serves to reinforce this idea. It does this with very little variation throughout, since you'll mostly be fighting the same enemies from beginning to end, and you'll have access to all the weapon types from the get-go. And yet it works. If I might make another return to my XCOM vendetta, there’s a marked contrast here in that the tactical layer of Broken Lines seems to encourage you to explore its workings and get familiar with it, instead of covering a pedestrian foundation with an ever-increasing load of fancy toys.
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Rangers, as we enter this final stretch of development before Wasteland 3’s release, we need your help to make sure that it has been thoroughly battle-tested. Your feedback from the forthcoming Beta will be instrumental in helping us to make sure that Wasteland 3 is as polished, exciting, and fun as you've come to expect.

What do I need to know?
The Wasteland 3 Beta will be going live at 9am PDT, March 17. Those who have backed the game at the Early Bird ($25) or higher tiers will be receiving an email from Crowd Ox that includes a Wasteland 3 Beta key. Once you’ve received your Beta code, it will need to be redeemed through Steam. The game client will then be able to be downloaded after the listed launch time.

Note to our Alpha testers: you will not be sent a Beta key, as you’ll automatically gain access to the Beta as soon as it has gone live. If you run into any issues with updating to the Beta, it may be a good idea to try uninstalling and reinstalling the game.

Please be aware that this is a pre-release look at the first few hours of Wasteland 3. Content and systems will probably change before release (you can help with that, see below!), and you may encounter issues and bugs. Furthermore, the game has not been fully optimized, and you can expect its performance to improve when the game finally launches.

As you encounter issues with the Beta, please don’t hesitate to share your reports directly with our Developers via the feedback site that is linked to from the Beta’s main menu.

In addition to the ‘Report Issues’ option, you are also welcome and encouraged to share general feedback and discuss your experiences in our Beta Discussion forum.

What Are My Orders, General?
We encourage you to check your backer portal through Crowd Ox to ensure your contact information is correct. When the Beta goes live on March 17, we'll be posting on our various social channels reminding everyone that the Beta is live.

Feedback and bug reports can both be submitted via in the in-game Report Issues button you’ll find on the main menu. If you’d like to discuss the Beta with others, head on over to the inXile forums.

Rangers, we want to thank you for your continued support and participation. We cannot stress how important sharing your experiences in-game with us will be. Your feedback from the Alpha has already been instrumental in helping us implement much needed refinements. We know that your suggestions and feedback from this point onward will only help to make Wasteland 3 even more awesome than it’s already shaping up to be.

Thanks again,
The Wasteland 3 Team

FAQ
Q: What content does the Beta include?
A: The Beta provides the first few hours of the game, from character creation into the first few areas of the game. Of note, it does not include the world map (you’ll be automatically warped to each area), and certain areas are kept off-limits that you’d be able to access in the full game. Please also be aware that the intro cinematic is currently in-progress and is not final.
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