Video Gamers Podcast - Wasteland 3 - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

Gaming Rangers Michael, Josh and Paul are heading to the wastelands and deep diving Wasteland 3 in this week's awesome gaming episode. Picked by Legendary supporter Redletter we tackled this cRPG with gusto and we’ve got our full gaming deep dive complete and ready to share with the world. Check out the awesome episode to see our thoughts and whether it’s worth your time and money. Check out the eBlitz App and find fellow awesome gamers to play and group with: Apple Link - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/eblitz/id1562995363  Google Play Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gg.eblitz.eblitzapp  Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Dr. Catatonic, Blackstar (DQ), Glapsuidir, Phelps, Michele B, Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we start today's episode, we want to give a huge thank you to our new supporter that we're very passionate about called Eblitz. Nothing kills online gaming for me more than random toxic teammates. Well, the Eblitz app is the perfect solution for gamers of all levels. It's free and completely free to use. Create your profile, mark your favorite games and platforms, and start swiping through profiles to build your buddy network. This really is the perfect solution for games where teamwork is vital, like Overwatch or Rust. Download today for free using a link in the episode description. Shazam! Hello everyone! Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are a team of three dads who are lifelong gamers, and we love to talk casually about video games.

Every other Monday we do a deep dive where we discuss a single game for a full episode, and today we will be deep diving Wasteland 3. You guys know the drill, but make sure to toss us a follow rate us five stars and leave a written review if you use apple podcasts you can also help support our show financially while unlocking perks like gaining access to our bonus squad cast episodes on patreon just visit multiplayer squad.com to sign up i am your host Paul, and I am joined by my two fellow Arizona Rangers. I can't believe we actually played a game that starts out in our home state of Arizona. Coming up first, the man who has 10 out of 10 lockpicking skills. And I know this for a fact

because he has practiced lockpicking in real life. I've seen him do it on Discord. It's Josh. This is very true. Let's be honest. Lock picking is one of the most useful skills that you can have in a game. And I thought, why not have that skill in real life? So I actually can pick a decent amount of locks. Yeah. Even back in the day, sometimes when we would record, you would have your little lockout in your tool and you'd show me and Todd and break in. Not nearly as hard as you would think it is. Shockingly easy with some practice.

Oh, very nice. And then also joining us, he has 10 out of 10 weapon modding. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but I do know for a fact he loves the PC modding maybe this is a bit of a stretch but i do know for a fact he loves the pc modding community i think he also had something like 200 mods installed for his pc version of skyrim it's michael yes it was 147 mods uh i'll send you i'll send you all my build and that was for the vr version too which means it was really hard to get to work right um i have never seen uh sophia walk through walls before until that point which by the way she's a mod as well second companion um but yeah thank you thank you i appreciate the the modding introduction and uh 140 mods 147 yeah you might have an

addiction to mods michael i love like i have not played fallout yet. And I've modded it for about, I think, 168 hours of modding. Not a true story. Very nice. Well, guys, we're deep diving Wasteland 3. I feel like we've been talking about this one for a little while. Michael, do you want to tell the people why it is that we're covering Wasteland 3 today? Yes, we're covering this because our community is awesome. Specifically one person in this community.

Well, there's many awesome people in the community, but one person decided to go on Patreon and say, you know what, I'm going to go Legendary status. And when you go Legendary, you never go back. That's true, actually, because your name shows up in gold in our Discord forever. But also, if you support us at Legendary status, you get to pick a game for us to play whether we love it or hate it we're playing that game and this person's

name is red letter actually a friend of ours also i don't know in person i believe you guys both do but red letter said hey play some wasteland three and i'm like what's wasteland three and he's like well it's the sequel to wasteland one and wasteland two I'm like, what's Wasteland 3? And he's like, well, it's the sequel to Wasteland 1 and Wasteland 2. You know this because it's called Wasteland 3. And so we're playing it for Red Letter. Thank you, Red Letter. We are so excited to talk about this. And I apologize if one of us,

probably Josh, doesn't like it. Wait, am I the guy that doesn't like games? You're the grumpy old troll. Well, yeah, but am I like the guy that doesn't like games? You're the grumpy old troll. Well, yeah, but am I like the guy that's like, man, Josh isn't going to like this? Is that the reputation I have? I bet you've murdered more games than any of us, I think. Really?

Paul literally called me out one time for never murdering a game, and I still don't think I'm going to. But see, as you're settling in as a host of this show, you're getting more comfortable. So I feel like in the beginning you were like, I just don't want to have any strong opinions about anything. And then we have basically raked you over the coals enough that you're like, okay, wait a minute. It's fine if I hate this game, and it's fine if I tell you you're stupid for liking it.

Yeah, the hardest day of my life was when I had to try and defend Elite Dangerous. And that was a strong opinion, apparently, for this show. Man, that was so much fun. I really enjoyed that. No, it was not. I still can't believe the disparity between you two in particular on Elite Dangerous. Oh, goodness. Well, yes, thank you so much, Red Letter.

Red Letter is a legendary supporter of ours. We do also owe a couple of shout-outs. So anytime someone signs up on Patreon, we always give you guys a shout-out on the show. And in this case, we do have two. So you guys know this is my favorite thing to do on the show. But we've got to give a shout-out to NightWizard63, who signed up with Epic status. And also we've got PapaThunderfist, who has been a supporter for a little while on Rare status. He bumped it up to Epic just this morning.

So thank you so much to both NightWizard63 and PapaThunderfist. We really do appreciate the support. Woo-hoo! I wish I had a party popper right now, but it hurt everyone's ears in their cars. Hit those air horns, Paul. The air horns. Give me the air horns.

We're going to slowly turn into every morning radio show where it's just all sound effects. Recycle radio rock. Papa Thunderfist is a gamer after my own heart. Like I said, we just had a nice conversation about some roguelike card games. Night Wizard has been a member of the community for a long time. Just honestly, one of my favorite people in the community as well.

And then let's not forget about Epic supporter Yoda, because he's been Epic for a long time now. And Yoda is one of the first people to always tell everybody good morning. I actually really look forward to that. As goofy as it is, because he just pops in, he says good morning, and then I think he's off to work. But it's just really one of those things where when I start my morning routine, seeing Yoda hop in there and say good morning to everybody is a highlight. Yeah, I've never talked to Yoda because he gets up way before I do.

Yeah. I always see those good mornings a little bit too late. But yeah. But thank you all for the support. It keeps this show going. So everybody else that's listening is thankful as well. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I do want to say one thing before we jump into the deep dive. We will give you guys spoiler warnings before we talk about any major spoilers in Wasteland 3. Now, we do have to set the stage. We're going to have to talk a little bit about the structure of the game, some of the early companions, things of that nature. So there will be some mild spoilers, but I don't think it'll negatively impact you going through the game. However, later in the

episode, we will give a major spoiler warning where we're going to talk about choices we made, end game content, funny side missions, anything that we want to open up and talk about. So you can listen here without worrying and we'll make sure to give you that warning when the time comes that's true we're going to let you know before we tell you the preacher is the werewolf yes sorry oh goodness all right well you know what guys it's the start of our turn we got all of our action points ready let's move into position and deep dive wasteland 3 okay we always start off by reading a description of the game here is a summary that i pared down

from metacritic in wasteland 3 you take command of a squad of desert rangers law men and women in a post-nuclear world trying to rebuild society from the ashes. More than a century after the bombs fell, you're fighting a losing battle to keep Arizona alive. Then the self-proclaimed patriarch of Colorado radios promising aid if you'll do a job that only he can entrust to an outsider, rescue his land from his three bloodthirsty children decide who to trust build a reputation for yourself by making decisions that will impact the story and decide to be colorado's savior or its worst nightmare all right now one thing i did not know

about wasteland until playing wasteland 3 are the ties that it has to the fallout series oh yeah so quite a bit yeah for people out there they may not know just like i didn't is that um back in the day interplay entertainment they've developed the very first wasteland game all the way back in 1988 uh when josh was only a young adult he was in his mid-20s i was adult yet. Somehow. I actually did play the original game. Oh, the first one? I remember playing the original Wasteland. My brother and I played that game together, and I thought it was absolutely phenomenal. Josh was only 28, but his beard was already 47.

True. And the original Wasteland, it looks like Zelda 1 or Zelda 2 on NES. It's got that style graphics. So they made that all the way back in 88. And then they just sat on the IP. They did nothing at all with Wasteland. Time goes on. And then Interplay decided to make a spiritual successor called Fallout. And they did that in 1997. And of course, they kept making Fallout games. And finally, Interplay sold the rights of Wasteland in 2003. And then InXile Entertainment finally made Wasteland 2 in 2014. And then they made Wasteland

3 in 2020 through crowdfunding. Now, this was the first Wasteland game that I played. Josh, you mentioned playing the first one when it first released. Did you also play Wasteland 2? I did. So Wasteland 3, I had not played until Red Letter picked this game for us. And it's one of those games where I've always had it on my wishlist or in the back of my mind going like, man, I love the Wasteland series. I need to remember that Wasteland 3 exists. But yeah, I played one and two and loved both of them. So when Red Letter said, hey, I picked a game. What is it? And I said, what is it? He said, Wasteland 3. I actually got really excited. There was a very animated conversation that I had with him where I was like, yes, dude, thank you. I've been wanting to play this game and see what it's

all about. And oh, man, is it going to to, to the memories I had of one and two? What about you, Michael? Was this your first wasteland game? Like me? It sounds like it was. Uh, no, I played it when it was called fallout new Vegas. No, I'm kidding. I, I was also very excited. Um, I had never played a wasteland game, but I did about a year ago. I watched like an-long YouTube video about the Fallout series, and it started with Wasteland. It basically went through the whole history of how this is a spiritual successor. This kind of started the whole road, all those things that I was like, interesting. I had never heard of it. And so when Red Letter picked Wasteland 3, I didn't have the elation that Josh had, but I was very excited.

Yeah. that josh had but i was very excited yeah well you know michael you are the assigned mr plot of the multiplayer gaming podcast i have for dr plot yeah do you want to go ahead and kind of just set the stage for us tell us a little bit about how wasteland 3 opens from a story perspective i can sure do that we're rangers from the greatest state in the union that doesn't exist anymore, the state of Arizona. And, okay, I'm not going to keep that voice going for the whole time. Sure. So sometime between the Clinton administration and the Bush administration in this fictitious world, a global nuclear war happens in 1998. And in this world, it's about 100 years later.

And basically, the world is what you think it would be. It's just a mess. There's robot AI everywhere, kind of zombies. There's a bunch of cannibals. Bad things are happening, right? The thing is there's an entire government collapse, but somehow we still have a military, and in this game, our characters are part of a military or a militia.

I guess you could say probably more or a militia i guess you could say probably more over a militia and essentially we are called the arizona rangers now what happens is arizona's not doing so hot because it's hot in arizona and we're gross here yeah so we're like cotton michael yeah we can't farm like we can't we had oranges but we built highways over the orange groves and that happened so we're far from florida well anyways this man called the patriarch in colorado's like hey listen y'all my kids are missing i need some help you come up here i'll help you you come find my kids i will help you uh we'll talk about his kids later in the spoiler section but they're not really kids anymore um anyways long story short we're on our way up there to colorado help out the patriarch uh who's

basically just i don't know if this is spoil spoiler territory or not, basically, he's a guy who got himself into power because he probably organized a whole bunch of people. And you know how it is, he who has the biggest stick controls a lot of things, and the patriarch, well, literally sits on a throne of nuclear weapons. So he's got a big stick. Anyway, so we're on our way up there. These guys called the Dorseys attack us, kill everybody, including our commander, except for myself and my partner in the game. And that's kind of based on how you start the game and you start your characters out. Um, and then you kind of go into the character creation.

You pick your two Rangers that you're going with. Our commanding officer dies, not spoiler territory yet, because this happens in the first six minutes of the game. We get to Colorado Springs. We set up and we go in and we're like, hey, we're going to help the patriarch. We're going to find his kids. And then just like so many games that we've reviewed here, things are not as they seem. Perhaps we don't know.

And that's the whole thing is we're going after these three kids, but we're trying to decide who trusts in our decisions make a difference. That's a decent one, right? That was a good start. Yeah. I feel good about that one. I'm going to give myself six stars out of 10 on that one. Perfect.

Yeah, right off the bat, right? They kind of just give you like your major storyline missions. It's find this kid, find this kid, and find this kid. And along the way, you're going to just have a whole bunch of side stories and stuff that kind of fills in the world and all the gaps. I think he pretty much hit all the main points. Anything you would add on to that, Josh? The game does a pretty good job of instantly making you a little suspicious of the patriarch and people around you and stuff like that. Your initial conversation,

this happens within the first 15 minutes of the game, with the patriarch is he basically says, listen, I think my kids are trying to overthrow me. They're all missing. I have a general idea of where they are, but I need your help. And if you help me, then I'll help Arizona. I'll give them oil and food and stuff like that. So you obviously have an incentive to go help the patriarch. But right away, it's kind of like, is this guy good? Is he bad? Do I want to help him? Maybe I want to help his kids. Maybe I don't want to help anybody. Should I just blow up this whole town? And this is one of those games where the choice is yours. You can kind of play it how you want. Yeah. And there's a lot of branching stories along the way. There are almost hidden alternate endings based on different

decisions you make. It definitely lives up to the bill as far as RPG storytelling. And then, Josh, from a gameplay perspective, what genre would you classify this as? What's the gameplay like? This is 100% a CRPG, which stands for Computer Role Playing Game. It's very akin to Divinity Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate, Path of Exile, some of those type games. It's an isometric viewpoint. You have a party. You move them around the world. You go out. You talk to a lot of different characters. There's lots of different dialogue options. You have conversations, you explore cities and the wilderness and stuff like that. You're going to fight. And fighting in this game is turn-based combat. And like a lot of other games, you have a certain number of action points that your characters can take. Shooting a gun takes a certain amount of action

points. Moving takes a certain amount. Throwing a grenade takes some. Healing somebody takes some. So you use your action points to kind of do what your characters want to do in combat. You get quests. You get side quests. There's the overarching plot that we kind of touched on already. And you have a ton of choice. This is another thing that Wasteland does akin to a lot of the other games that I mentioned is if you want to help the patriarch, by all means, be his right-hand man. Go help him out. Round up his kids. Bring them back. If you want to help his kids and you think, you know what? I see why his kid left. Maybe I side with that, and I like their idea. Do that. If you want to just kill everybody in town and say, hey,

rangers are in town, people. I'm killing everybody. You can do that too. And guess what? You're not going to actually wreck the game. Like choice matters in this game. But yeah, that's basically gameplay in a nutshell. If you've ever played a CRPG, a turn-based combat RPG, this falls right into that vein i love that you uh have uh spoon fed me what crpg is because i've been asking a lot of questions about that lately like i've heard you guys say metroid but listen guys i just play video games like i don't know what any exact hey michael i'm gonna blow your mind there's this thing called google where if you type in what is a crpg it will actually give you a full definition, examples, like a full rundown.

It's pretty cool technology. I only live in an alternate universe where Hot Tub Time Machine says that Lugol is actually the Google. Oh, nice. It does get a little confusing when you start looking at JRPG versus CRPG. And even over time, those words have changed. Computer RPG used to just be as opposed to tabletop RPG, but it's very similar. So you can kind of imagine you got a lot of the similar skills you would have in a Dungeons and Dragons kind of game, creating your character, different skills. We're going to get into all those details, of course. And the only thing I would add on to

that is that you will run a squad of six people. So over the course of the game, you can recruit other people into the Rangers. You're going to find people in this world that are going to ask to join your team because they've been impacted by the events in the story and uh you can also fight with animals as well we'll get into that in in a few minutes as well one of the most important parts of any rpg and this is definitely the case for wasteland 3 as well are the different point systems now you have your attributes which you will put points into their basic stats that you would imagine kind of for any RPG. In Wasteland, they break them down into coordination, luck, awareness, strength, speed, intelligence, and charisma. Even though they have different names, it's all very run-of-the-mill stats. They're going to increase

your chance to crit, or they're going to increase how heavy of armor you can wear, you know, things of that nature. But I think where Wasteland 3 really stands out are the skills. There are a total of 22 skills that you can pick from, and this is going to give you different abilities that you can do in the world of Wasteland or give you new lines of dialogue that are otherwise locked off to you. So when you guys looked at all the skills based on the time that you've spent playing this game, are there any in particular that stuck out that you either enjoyed

or that you thought are really vital? Oh, go ahead, Michael. I was just going to say, I'll give you a behind the curtain. I started out by playing the two nerds. And so I had like nerd stuff as one of my skills. And then I had, what was the other one they had? I can't remember. And they literally call it nerd stuff. Yeah, it's called nerd stuff. one of my skills. And then I had, um, what was the other one they had?

I can't remember. They literally call it nerd stuff. Yeah. It's called nerd stuff. Michael's not just saying that. No, I say things like that, but in this case,

it's actually is nerd stuff. And, um, uh, instantly I put basically every one of my characters was maxed out on automatic weapons and big guns. Guys, those are the most important ones in this game.

Oh, very nice. So you put some into like the strict gunfighting, putting a lot of points into those early. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of strength when it came to the attributes, because it gave you health and I didn't want to die.

And it's tough to have like armor that you can't equip. So there's always a little bit of attempt to just put points into strength. Anyway. Yeah, it was. It was weird that a lot of the, a lot of the armor you couldn't put on unless you had a strength rating, which was kind of strange. And so you kind of had to do that a lot. And so that was important as well. What about you, Josh? Would you like to pump those points into?

See, I'm the opposite, man. I can't stand when I'm talking to somebody and I see an option that tells me, hey, if your speech level was a certain amount, you could do this option, but it's not high enough. So guess what? You can't. Or if there's a door where it's like, hey, you need a lockpicking skill of six. And I'm like, well, dang it, I'm only a three. What's behind that door? So I have learned that I generally will go for the skills that I think are going to open up more options in a game versus like the fighting part. So for me, um, you know, this game has animal whisper. Well, instantly I'm like, I know I want pets. So I'm going animal whisper. Uh, Michael mentioned nerd stuff. There's another one called weird science where it's like, you know what? Okay. Like machine guns are fun,

but you know, what's even more more fun a shrink ray or a microwave gun or some of these really out there weapons so i definitely went with the uh weird science skill and then there was a couple where it was called for family friendly it's called sneaky stuff but they call it something much more in your face and i'm like i gotta be able to sneak around that's fun to do in games and then there was two other ones where these actually caught me off guard, where it's basically, they call it hard ass and kiss ass. And I thought like, what are these skills? I want both of those. And so those are the skills that I genuinely focused on for the most part to the point where we have chatted offline. there's a sniper that you get

and i'm sure we'll talk about that but my sniper had a max of like four sniper skills and she was the worst character in my party because i never actually leveled up her ability to shoot her sniper rifle oh you left it too low i know yeah so i really did focus on the non-combat skills probably to my own detriment in this game. Yeah, it's funny because I can say that what Josh is saying actually is important. Because you really want to diversify your party is the biggest thing. Can we talk about that? Is that okay?

Mm-hmm. But it's so important that because you will go through different members of your party in the game, it's almost required that sometimes... In your party, you have 6 people. 4 people are rangers, 2 are randos. And that's just the way it is. 2 are random people who offer and you can't have more than 2 random people. And then there's the 4 people that are just rangers who you can just grab from your base, whatever you want to do, so on and so forth. But when you lose someone... I had someone who

had a 10 on lockpicking like Josh had, I lost this person. And I'm like, I have a max lockpick of two now. I can't get into any door. And so that was also important. But yeah, the combat... My sniper was incredible, by the way. Paul, sorry. I just talked right over what you were going to say.

You go ahead and talk now. No, you're good. I'm really hoping that Paul touches on the toaster repair skill. No, I'm not going to say that. It's on my list. Yes. Now, first of all, I think you touched on something really important there, Michael, which is you need to diversify your skills. Don't create every character with max first aid and max assault rifles or automatic weapons. That's not going to give you a very fun playthrough.

And so in my game, I had my one dude, Yuri he i put every point into lock picking until he was 10 out of 10 and i had another character that i put a bunch of points into leadership and that way you're kind of diversifying your options if you have two people that are maxed out on the same skill you're really just limiting your options in the game but yeah so, so Animal Whisperer. Let's talk about that for a second, all right? The game has a lot of animals. They hit you with Mr. Tomcat. I think is his name. Major Tomcat. Yeah, Major Tomcat right off the bat. And if you have any points in Animal Whisperer, you can basically tame that animal and they will follow you. Now, you do not get to do their action,

but at the beginning of every turn, they will do their own thing. They will run off and fight people. And in my playthrough, I did put animal whisperer points on three characters. And dude, I ran around with a freaking bear in my party. I had the bear too. It was the best. Dude, the bear was amazing.

It would frenzy and scare everything away. Yeah. Give me that cyborg chicken, man. The cyborg chicken was great. The cyborg chicken. Razorbacks, stags. Yeah, the stags was great too. Waste wolves.

Yeah. There's some cool creatures. Animal Whisperer I thought was very cool. Yeah, the Animal Whisperer was very beneficial because it was like having an extra person in your party. And some of the things you fight are more susceptible to taking melee damage or melee if you're paul um and and some are more susceptible to like weapons fire and so it's really funny because you see sometimes like your barrel going to hit something and it barely takes any damage and then you'll see like

i was fighting this giant scorpion at one point and my bear swiped it took like a third of its health and i'm like my entire party shot all It took, like, a third of its health. And I'm like, my entire party shot, all of our action points took a third of its health. The bear just walks up and goes, and, like, it's really, really helpful. Well, yeah, it's a freaking bear, Michael. It doesn't get any better than that. That is true. Cyborg chicken, maybe.

Just my comedic value alone. Now, Josh did mention toaster repair guys. What, what, what does this even mean? I put no points into it at first. And the only time I did any Googling was how do I make any money in this game?

Because I never had enough cash to actually spend until very late in the game. And I read online, put points into toaster repair and that's one of the best ways to make money so randomly you run across literally toasters and you repair it and it gives you like a gold coin or some kind of item that you can sell why toaster repair is there like something here that i'm missing it just seems so random toasters are great man i did that toast you get that you unlock the perk where you get the toast when you start repairing toasters and

then the toast it's like the toast with the most man they fall a piece of toast fully heals your character and gives you bonus action points it's like the greatest thing ever i paid toast this makes no sense it's magical toast it's it's super toast why not toast i can understand like like a scavenging ability and you maybe like scavenge parts out of a computer the the game's humor we're going to get into a little bit later but toaster repair is clearly just for the lols because it doesn't really make any logical sense uh but let's go ahead and move on and talk a little bit about weapons you know josh mentioned a little bit here this game has a lot of different

weapon types uh the one thing that does make it very different from another crpg like divinity original sin 2 is that you do not have any spells the game is almost entirely focused on throwable items and physical weapons. So this game has assault rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, pistols, snipers, heavy machine guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers, blunt weapons, bladed weapons, brawling weapons, and laser weapons. Also, guys, every weapon has its own different ammo type this is kind of a wild list but you have nine millimeter 762 bbs 45s 556 spikes 38 bolts shotgun shells flamethrower fuel 50 energy cells saw blades rockets tactical nukes and no i'm not kidding frozen ferrets oh i was hoping you mentioned the frozen ferrets you know yep common ammo like frozen ferrets so were there

any weapons in particular that you guys really liked or disliked in this game uh yes i had two weapons that i made sure i was joking earlier when I said big guns and automatic weapons, but I also wasn't joking because big guns was a lot of like your rocket launchers and flamethrowers. I loved having one character rocking around with a rocket launcher because I had toaster repair skills, so I could afford like the hundred and fourteen credits at cost every time you shot a rocket launcher because it was expensive. Rockets are expensive in this game, but and you can only fire a rocket every two turns because it takes one turn to shoot the rocket and a whole turn to reload it and but it was really nice because flamethrowers and rocket launchers did aoe damage which was really helpful and so i had fun with that and then the other

thing that i really loved was having Marshall Kwan rolling around with the.50 cal because that thing just mowed people down. Very nice. Yeah, the heavy weapons were kind of fun. The only thing I didn't like about them, and maybe this is just from the way I built out my character, the hit accuracy was always so low that he would fire like six bullets and only three of them would hit, but the ones that would hit would do a lot of damage. But sometimes you'd have really bad luck

and they would miss all but one bullet. And that always really bugged me. I always liked having weapons where my chance to hit was more in that 85 to 95%. I know for me, I relied very heavily on snipers. I had two characters outfitted for snipers. And by the end game, you would have where you could one shot any of the smaller mobs. By the very end, even some of the more strong bosses, you could take out huge chunks with snipers. And I always enjoyed rolling with those. that's if you remember to put sniper points in them on into your sniper oh see that's that's i kind of missed that part with my sniper dude i love the idea that like josh's sniper is good enough to fire other snipers but they look at a better sniper and they're like i don't know how it works like i can't i can't handle this

what is this thing in my hand it's too. I went with a completely balanced loadout. I had my one AR character. I had one big guns character. I had one weird science character that was shooting microwave guns and ion bolters and stuff like that. And frozen parrots. I had two melee guys. And then I had a shotgun person, like a small arms shotgun person, because the shotguns actually have a spread. You can hit a lot of people at the same time.

So I really kind of tried to cover the board. The frozen ferret launcher is hilarious. There's a lot of really funny guns in this game. It's not just ARs and pistols and stuff. You get some really wacky weapons in this game which are actually a lot of fun it's funny when josh mentions that because you really again like we talked about earlier you want a very diverse loadout like i i talk about the big guns and the rocket launchers but my loadout was literally almost exactly like his i had lucia who had a pistol and that pistol

was like a sniper rifle you just had to be really close but if you shot someone with that pistol and you were close they were down and then i had banshee who had the sniper rifle she was my homegirl loved her so much she also had an animal whisperer backed out but then i had you know a couple automatic weapons and then the rocket launcher and the flamethrower and then a shotgun and it just it makes a lot of sense because you've got a whole bunch of different ways to do it the one thing i didn't delve into enough that i wish i had was a melee person but my bear did that yeah yeah the animals cover that a little bit for you now how did you guys feel about the whole ammo system like it's it's kind of easy to run out

of ammo and not realize i don't know about you guys i was sometimes in combat and i would go to fire with someone and they would say your gun's not loaded and i'd be like well i know i've got the system set to auto reloadreload after combat ends. And then I'd realize, oh, I have 17 ammo types, and I just ran out of 9mm. And now all of a sudden, I have to switch guns or something like that. The ammo, I thought, was a neat idea. I almost found it to be a little too high-maintenance, where it was more annoying than providing benefit. I'm with you on that. I get it. There's a certain realism. You're shooting automatic weapons and these weapons, flamethrowers that use flamethrower

fuel and stuff like that. So I get it. It was unfortunate in combat when your character would need to reload because that used action points. I found that I actually ran out of ammo a good bit because some of the bigger guns, like the machine guns or the ion blasters and stuff, would just churn through ammo to the point where I'm now out of ammo. And I got to switch weapons and make sure that that character had a backup weapon on them or something like that. It's one of those systems where it's like, I get on the one hand, it adds a layer. But on the other hand, it's kind of inconvenient at the same point. So is it worth the trade-off on that or not? It's tough. I'm with Michael. I found myself spending a lot of money on rockets because I had a guy that used

a rocket launcher. So instead of buying armor upgrades or some of these other things, I would always just tap out the rocket supply, which would tap out my money. I never fired a single rocket. It's the one. It's so much fun. I did not put points into any characters for explosives and I never had high enough explosives to access rockets. So I was focused way more where I would have one or two brawlers, one or two snipers,

one or two close to mid range. And that's how I rolled. So I've actually never fired a rocket. Yeah. Every single time that I finish a group of missions, the game is set up to where as you roam around and you go do things, you're going to different regions. You know when you're done with that region on the map. You know when it's time to go back to Colorado Springs. And every time I did that, I literally went to my doctor, and I went to my arms dealer, and I spent 100% of my money refilling my meds and ammo every single time. So to Josh's point, it was kind of like, oh, I have to go do this to make sure I'm good. So I didn't find the ammo super annoying.

But at the same point, it was kind of like, oh, if I forget to do this, I have to... And it happened one time. I was on my way to Denver, and i realized that i had money on me which means i didn't have full ammo and i had to drive my cart all my truck all the way back to colorado springs and arm up so yeah kind of annoying not terrible but yeah yeah and uh speaking of those med kits i think they were 40 bucks each like they were they were expensive you healed a lot in this game yeah you need a lot of heals and at least for the ammo the one thing that's kind of nice is it has a crafting system where you're constantly just looting scrap and you just convert scrap into ammo so instead of selling scrap i was

always using that to fund my ammo and then kind of uh you know moving on from there well guys we're at that halfway mark. Let's take a short break and hear from one of our sponsors. Are you crushing your bills? Defeating your monthly payments? Sounds like you're at the top of your financial game. Rise to it with the BMO Eclipse Rise Visa Card. The credit card that rewards your good financial habits. Earn points for paying your credit card bill in full and on time every month.

Level up from bill payer to reward slayer. Terms and conditions apply. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at Eblitz. Okay, you all know how much we talk about trying to remove toxicity from gaming and how we want gamers to be able to come together to share their love of playing video games well eblitz takes that to another level their app helps you find fellow gamers that love the games you love want to find non-toxic friendly people to play minecraft with how about a killer squad in apex that's friendly and supports each other? Want to get your Rocket League skills on my level? Find a friend on eBlitz you can practice with anytime. No more hoping you get lucky and match with a decent teammate. Take your fate into your

own hands and check out the eBlitz app. The eBlitz app makes signup simple. Just enter your email address, your favorite games, and things you like, and it will do the rest. Once registered, simply start swiping to match with other gamers who share similar interests as you, be it games, platform of choice, country, etc., and message them all in the same place. Never play alone again and create new gaming friends in seconds. Download today for free, and yes, it's completely free to use off the app store and Google Play store. The link will be in the episode description. All right, we are back from our break. Let's talk a little bit about the companions. So, you know, we've thrown out a couple of the names. Maybe you've heard Banshee

or Lucia. You know, were there any companions in this game that you ran across? By the way, Michael never recruited Jody Bell. You and I were talking the littlest bit about this game, and I mentioned how Jody was one of my snipers. And you're like, I don't know who you're talking about. And for me, that was the very first companion that I got. So you can actually miss out on entire companions where I went back and looked to see when you recruit her. And I could tell that, Michael, you just didn't have points in those certain skills. So you were not able to intervene and save her.

But let's just talk a little bit about some of our favorite companions that you guys ran across. Yeah. So Jodi Bell died in my story. I never had a chance to save her. In fact, it happened later on too where i talked to another character and they're like you didn't save all my kids because everything's related in this game but as far as companions go three really stuck out for me one was lucia

um because she was really annoying every time you tried to make a decision that was against like the patriarch she was like i'm gonna leave if you do this. And I was like, dang it, stop saying that. You got a really good gun. Then there was Banshee, because Banshee starts out with a decent sniper skill and decent animal whisperer. And so I just maxed those out, and she was like a one-shot wonder. And then, of course, you got my homeboy, Marshall Kwan, who is the master of the.50 cal.

And also, he was my one guy that I had first aid in. But he also was unique, because he was my one guy that i had first aid in but um he also was unique because he was one that you can start off with and he basically is already a ranger or was he a marshal i forget what he's a marshal in the city yeah he's a city marshal and so he's a lawman like me and so i'm like okay half the decisions i make in this are going to probably affect him in the same way that i'm trying to go being kind of a lawful good character because you do find out early on that the companions will leave you if you make a decision that they don't like and so i'm like marshall kwan's my guy uh he's gonna come with me and uh you know that that worked out so those are the three that i really liked a lot and i know that

josh had some very different ones and so did you paul so y'all talk about those guys, including your slavers and cannibals, you scum. Oh, see, it's funny because in this game, you can start off, you start off with your two default characters, and then you can recruit more like just generic NPC type party members from your ranger headquarter. And in the beginning of the game, that's basically what I did. And I just built out a whole team. And so it was actually only a couple times in the game where I actually accepted one of the plot NPCs like Lucia or something like that. And so I did have Lucia in my party. She was the one that I tried to go just revolver with her, but then realized that shotguns are way better. Marshall Kwan, I ditched fairly early on.

Yes, I did not like him. He was boring. And I'm like, dude, I need more spice in this party, man. And you're just a normal AR type guy. Such good voice acting. Dude, Kwan killed the voice acting. He was my favorite one. I never had jody bell um i did have um ironclad ironclad cordite

because i'm like oh well this guy's like a warlord and this guy's evil so yes join my party mr iron clad there goes your lawful good it's out the window yeah well of course you didn't expect otherwise yeah that's a good point and so you know i just i had uh ironclad and lucia were the only two like plot level npcs that i had in my party the other seriously yeah the other four were just my characters that i built in the beginning and just kept with me the whole time so i looked up all the companions that you can find in this game and i had all of them but one there was one person that you can recruit at the bazaar that i did not get but i i had the others. Lucia, even though she is a little bit

of a goody two-shoes and she doesn't like you to do anything that even is perceived as anti-patriarch, she added a lot to the story because she lived there. And you would run into bosses and she would say, oh, I know this person, and she would talk about them. Or you would rescue a character, and she would say, oh, that's my dad, or that's my uncle, or I know who these remains are, because that's one of my family members. So I loved running with her, even though she kind of sucked from a combat perspective. Oh, I loved her at combat. Yeah. See, for me, she wasn't very good until toward the end. But I also do have to mention my boy Fishlips.

Dude, Fishlips, I initially did not want to run with. He's this like... Why not? Why didn't you want to run with him, Paul? He might be a cannibal, okay? You might meet him, and right off the bat, he says he's a cannibal. He's got like, uh what are they what do you call it like uh uh gauges he's got like gauges and piercings everywhere he's heavily

tatted up and initially i was like i don't know that i want to run with this guy because he seems a little bit like a psychopath but i put him in my party just for the fun of it dude he ran around with a saw sword which is exactly what you think it sounds like it's as long as a broadsword with like a i don't know what kind of saw it's called like some kind of like circular rotary saw at the end and dude he would just run around the field like a madman and bash people over the head and he was so powerful doing melee combat i loved fish lips that dude ruled i have to add about lucia because you mentioned this she's such a part of the plot um i kept her my party because she is like there's there's like three factions in this game one of them is the dorses we talked

about earlier who the ones that like sank our convoy at the very beginning cinematic of the game your convoy sinks into a lake the dors doors can blow it up lucia is like the most attached person to the doors he's from an animosity standpoint and so when you actually go take down that gang like you have to have her at her party i really wonder what josh's playthrough would look like without lucia because it's i'm not going to spoiler territory actually so i won't do that but that's a big it's a big deal like it weird. That's why I kept her along as well. Yeah, it would definitely be very different. All right, now we've kind of talked about

laying out the structure of the game and all the different mechanics. Did you guys find the actual combat to be fun? Because I know turn-based tactical combat is kind of high risk, high reward for a lot of people. You tend to either really love it or really hate it. Did you guys actually find the combat fun? It depends on what you're comparing it to. One comp for this game is Divinity Original Sin 2. And if you're comparing it to that,

then I would say no, the combat is not nearly as in-depth as that game. Is it fun? Yes. I think I played on a harder difficulty level for the combat because I enjoy the tactical combat and I really wanted to put it through its paces. It's one of those things where one thing I do like in the game is that you might just find an abandoned building. I went into one. There was a bunch of radioactive frogs in there that absolutely wrecked me. I got obliterated by these frogs. And then I went, okay, time to... Let's think about the strategy on this. Let me group my characters the right way. Let me play this the right way. And while it was a very

tough fight, I wound up winning. And that's the part that I really enjoy with any kind of game like this. It's like, if you just bash your head against it, you're probably going to lose. If you play smart, use positioning, use the right abilities and right weapons at the right time, it really does matter. And so Wasteland 3 definitely leans into that, to where there is that strategy component. So the smarter you play it, the better you're going to do at combat. I found it to be okay. It wasn't bad.

It wasn't great, in my opinion. It was serviceable for what the game was, but it is nothing like Divinity Original Sin 2, where I legitimately loved every moment of combat in that game. Whereas Wasteland 3, it was like, I don't hate it, but I don't love it. So comparing it to Divinity Original Sin 2, i think one of the things that that game provides that wasteland does not are combining abilities that provide synergy and build off each other like in divinity you might cause damage to a character and now they bleed and now there's a red pool of blood on the ground and now you can use another character that can use that blood as part of a spell or i can put down a water barrel and shoot

it. Now all the enemies are wet. Now I can hit it with some kind of electric ability and electrocute all the enemies in the water. Now in Wasteland, you can shoot an explosive barrel on occasion. That's it. Yeah, it blows up. But that's really all it is. Otherwise, everyone's just shooting with individual guns or hitting with individual weapons. I agree with you josh i don't think the combat was bad but there is nothing special about the combat in this game it's very run-of-the-mill tactical physical weapon rpg mechanics yeah i think your party makeup and the weapons that you choose to use in the builds that you have, like I said, I ran, I rolled with two melee guys, a big explosives guy, like a big weird

science guy. And so I think it was those aspects that made combat more fun for me because of the way I built my party. If you, if you just went all ARs and pistols and shotgun, I think it would be honestly kind of boring at that point, you know? And so I think it's kind of like, how do you approach it? How did you build your party? Is that going to raise the bar or lower the bar a little bit? I don't know. What about you, Michael? What do you think? I found, first of all, 100% what you said. I did the same thing where at first, I would just try to barrel into something. About a third of the way through the game, I started getting smarter and saying, saying hey i need to get lucia positioned a little bit closer before they see me

because she's got a handgun banshee's gonna stay way far back got a shotgun or going up there but i did find that about halfway through the game i got kind of tired of the combat in all honesty which i don't know if this is a spoiler or not, but like most games, the last like three hours of this game is a hundred percent combat and almost no story until the very end. And I was just like trying to muscle through it and be like, can I just get more story? But you know me, I'm a story person.

I will say though, PSA real quick, because I did start this game twice. I got four hours in this game on the PlayStation. Yeah, you did. I have to tell you, do not play this game on console.

Do not do don't don't do it you will hate it the combat is impossible you shouldn't play a c rpg a computer rpg on a console michael i don't want to i didn't know what that doesn't mean console rpg that's what michael thought it meant right um but well it's funny because we you know i picked it up on the pc and i didn't realize that you know playstation has their free stuff every once in a while i've had ps plus for years i got it for free at some point it was already on there and i'm like cool i can do this from my couch instead of saving my office i will say that the combat do not play it on console that's the only time i'll bring this up i know it's not part of our show doc but don't do it

play on the pc all right well i know that we're kind of quickly running out of time here, but let's talk a little bit about the humor. Do you guys want to bring up, like, let's all bring up one thing each that we really thought was funny that we liked. Michael's raising his hand. You can go first, buddy. What'd you like? The music in this game is so incredible because it's ironically funny. Okay. I'll cover it. I'll cover my favorite moment in the spoiler territory with the music. But it's like you're going in and you're doing a fight. And all of a sudden, this ridiculous version of Battle Hymn of the Republic comes on while you're blasting away at. I want to spoil it so bad.

I want to spoil it so bad. I can't do it. But you're blasting away at i want to spoil it so bad i want to spoil it so bad i can't do it but you're blasting away at things and you're like hold on am i hearing everybody wang chung tonight right now because yes everybody have fun tonight and like a western version is on there and i don't know if it's supposed to be funny but i was dying and it was my favorite thing about this game hands down and also there's a version of land of confusion that's a very slow like methodical version it's on my iphone now i listen to it every day it's i'm glad you mentioned that michael because there was a moment where i was in a big fight

and america the beautiful is just blaring in the background as i'm launching rockets and laser beams and my guy's running up with his dentist toothpick weapon that he had you know and america the beautiful is just blasting in the background and i'm literally sitting in my chair dying going like okay you know this game gets some things very very right and this is one of them so yeah uh for me it's the side quest there is an absolute plethora of side quests and again we kind of split duties a little bit i focused a little bit more on combat and side quests i know you guys went for like plot and end game and stuff like that but there's some bananas side quests in this game um one you fight santa claus in his elf workshop you sure do um which was absolutely

bananas because i was like there's no way like you get a radio call and it's like hey we're getting some distress calls they're saying santa claus is going on a rampage and i'm like what the heck and then i show up and it's legitimately santa claus and his elves he's making drugs yeah it's a drug lab do you smell cookies yeah you gotta distract santa yeah did you did you did you confront him or did you just start oh i just started blasting oh no i uh i'd send him to go smell to the kitchen because i said i smell cookies and then i broke into his drug lab where the elves were packing up and brewing all the drugs and then that's when he caught me and then all heck broke loose after that

you gotta feed the elves he He was keeping them hostage. It's just, this is a lot of what this game is. And it's hard to cover all that in a show. But this game's sense of humor is absolutely phenomenal. What about you, Paul? What was one of your favorite moments? Oh, boy. I tried to go with something that you can do a lot in this game. And anytime you see a pile of snow, the game gives you an option to pee on it and then you can loot the snow pile and now in your inventory you have a yellow snowball which you are free to throw on anyone you want they will react and you might give them a debuff like give them the stink

that they now run around with and uh yellow snowballs, I thought, were a very funny addition to this game that do not really impact combat. It's just there for the humor. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, this is where we're going to get into major spoiler territory. I'll go ahead and give you a little warning here how far forward you'll want to fast forward. To avoid spoilers, jump ahead eight minutes and 14 seconds,

but let's go ahead and open up all things. Any side missions, any end game reveals. What do you guys want to talk about? You fight a robotic Ronald Reagan while you're listening to battle him of the Republic. And it is hilarious. Wait,

wait, wait, wait. What's what's Ronald Reagan's title, Michael? Oh, the, Oh, what is it again? It's the God the God is the God president Ronald president. Yeah, like so and the gippers. Yeah, the gippers and his and his followers all the ones that are female are all named Nancy something that their

job is Nancy doctor. Yes, Nancy. So they're all Nancy Reagan's everywhere everywhere i could not stop laughing through that and there's a lot of questions that there's a lot of things you can do there like that's a part of the story where you go in three different directions you either help robots you help the gippers which is the followers of the god president ronald reagan or you help neither and they both hate you well i won't have a choice where i help the robots and you have to fight a giant robot ronald reagan with laser beams coming out of his eyeballs while battle him of the republic is playing it was the greatest one of the greatest moments of any video you ever had my life it's it really is man that that area of the game we talked about this you

know we haven't mentioned it on the episode, but this game starts off a little slow. The first probably couple hours, you're not getting it, it's not jiving. And then it really starts to click. Like once you get to what they call like the overworld, that for me is where the game really started to gel. And that's where you get to, I think it's Denver, right? Isn't that where the Gippers are and stuff like that? And so that's when this game really just flung the doors open completely. And I started going like, oh my goodness, what is this game at that point? And a hundred percent. I mean, there's statues of Ronald Reagan. One is sentient. It shoots gigantic laser beams out of his eyeballs. It talks to you. You can go help the robot commune, which I decided I wanted to do. I instantly showed up. I had a guy that

was very good at hacking things and there was a greeter robot. And one of the options was hack his memory banks. And so I tried instantly. I went, okay, yeah, I'm going to hack this guy. And I got caught. And he was like, what are you doing? Why are you trying to hack me? And I was like, oh my goodness. And then it's funny because in that if you follow that quest line every bad thing that you even attempt they're gonna bring back and they bring it up if to decide if they're gonna ally with you and i thought that was so cool that the game is keeping track of the fact that it's like well when you showed up the very first thing you did was try to hack the greeter robot and i was like like, oh, I'm sorry about that.

I didn't know you were watching. Yeah, exactly. And then one of the best parts is if you help the robot commune, which I decided I wanted to do, your reward is a party pal robot, which is a giant traveling disco ball that I was like, what is this thing? This thing's going to suck. Because if you help one of the other factions, you get some amazing rocket launcher. But the party pal was the best thing ever. Anytime combat starts, he starts doing these disco lights and everything, getting everybody amped up. And then he just sits there and shoots healing darts at your people and stuff. So I was like, this is great.

I have to say, since we're talking about denver real quick um because i know i know paul's probably got something funny to say too but like the only thing that took me out of the whole denver story is that the commune for the robots is in the denver airport okay anybody that's been to denver the denver airport is like 70 miles away from denver it's awful i just had to say that i don't know why i had to say that there's this game definitely has some liberties with how far apart things are because in this game you can drive from yuma to denver in about 30 seconds so i think they just do it for the sake of making it easy yeah i know i just had to bring it up what about you paul uh you know i i think

just kind of jumping straight to end game the game does put you in a position where you finally have to make a choice whether or not you're going to support the patriarch or work against him and the whole game is kind of leading up to that moment you find out some details about the patriarch of course he's not all good he's a tyrannical dictator of the area. He's holding people hostage in prisons below his palace. He's not the worst dude in the world, but he's not great. And in my playthrough, it seemed very obvious to me that you're supposed to bring him down. I don't know if you guys felt the same way or not. And my team, basically half of the people said,

I'm not going to support you while doing this. And so I had multiple people who either I had to arrest and hold hostage while I work against the patriarch, our boy Kwan Kwan says, I'm not going to do it. I'm not fighting the patriarch. and to be honest with you i would go fight with the marshals to defend the patriarch and then my only option was kill kwan or stick him in prison and also lucia said i'm not gonna do this and she pulls out a gun to shoot me and then angela brings out her gun and shoots her

instead so the game puts you in a position where you're going to lose like half of your party members. And I felt like that's what the game wanted. But I don't know that it really made any sense because the patriarch wasn't like a real hero. It seemed kind of silly to me that we were going to lose our own squad members lives over this. And it was such a bummer then to lose out on some of my favorite party members i you know my favorite thing to do is is disagree with josh but i'm going to disagree with you paul um i think that it was very easy to determine which party members were going to go with you based on the dialogue that you had with them beforehand like

my party i built up knowing that if i was going to go against the Patriarch, I was only losing Marshall Kwan, and I lost him. But I wonder what changed because I didn't have to arrest him or kill him. I just said, stay here. And he was like, okay, I'm not helping you, which is really strange, which means we must have made some different decision there. But I think that it wasn't like the quarry where when we did the review on the quarry, we know that a lot of it was so luck-based i feel like this game actually told you if you took the time to talk to your characters who was going to be on your side and who wasn't that being said i do agree with you though that it was a bummer to lose people because marshall kwan was my homeboy that's all i mean it's clear who supports the patriarch but to me it didn't make sense that certain characters were so loyal to the patriarch

because he's clearly not all good or bad and none of your options in this game are all good or bad this game tries to live in the moral gray and so it was kind of weird that all of a sudden like characters are drawing lines in the sand and then you were losing so many important skills so for me it was like well now i have no character that has any points and sneaky stuff and now i'm just kind of stuck where i can't use this at all or i couldn't use certain weapons so i wasn't i wasn't too crazy about that the end to me didn't feel terribly satisfying it kind of felt like they just wanted you to feel the loss of half your team how are we going to force it well

we're going to force it through this decision not not half your team. You don't lose that many people, but you lose some no matter what. So I don't know. Ultimately, I found the middle of the game to be the most fun. The ending I didn't find terribly satisfying. Anything else you guys want to talk about by way of spoiler content here? No. I mean, there's a lot to this game. and like i said between the the missions and the choices that you can make this game has a ton of different endings your choices really do matter and they matter even in the side quests and some of the smaller dialogue options and stuff the game actually does a good job of remembering that so if if that's up your alley then i think this game fits with that really really well um but yeah spoiler, spoiler-wise, that's probably it. I don't want

to spoil too much, but there's some funny moments in some of the overall plot stuff that I think we had to cover. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, we gave a few of our thoughts about the game. Josh, you've got some community reviews to read for us. I do indeed. So as we always do, we always try to give some different viewpoints on the games that we cover. We go to Steam for that. I pull some of the reviews from there. I always try to find a couple of good ones, a couple of negative reviews, just to give you a balanced viewpoint on this. So this first one comes in as recommended.

The person has 150 hours on record, so they've played this game quite a bit. And it says, etc this escape into a world that feels like it could be reality any day now gives you the fantasy that you have any chance of surviving such an end plus it has references and jokes about the world you grew up in before your baby boomer parents set it on a path to the hellish landscape it is today and you get to fix toasters for cool prizes very nice so that one really the reason i pulled that one is because this game is i am the middle age dad um you know as as are you two fine gentlemen that you know i loved the forgotten realms game fallout 2 balder's gate planescape torment these are all games that are in the similar vein so if you were a fan of those you'll probably be a fan of this game as well. All right, so this next one comes in not recommended 0.8 hours on record.

Oh, dang, that's not much time at all. So they made a quick decision on this one. And it says, remember how great Wasteland 2 was? Remember the gritty, serious atmosphere with humorous flavors? Remember how strategic combat was? Well, tough luck. This is a completely

different game. This abomination looks like Fortnite. It went from gritty and occasional humor to wacky offbeat laughs in a gritty setting. Combat? Prepare for the ultimate inconsolitis. Gone are the amazing tactics from Wasteland 2. Now you have the simple interface and simple tactics, all for the almighty console. Go play pillars of eternity to or divinity or wasteland to, or even Baldur's gate. This game is nothing like wasteland to seriously. Is this even the same development team?

What in the world happened? I was crowdfunded. That's what happened. If this game was crowdfunded, actually the second one was also. Yeah. You know, there's one thing in there that even even though I did not play Wasteland 2, I

will say that the game seems to start off very gritty. And there's not a whole lot of humor. The very beginning, all of your fellow rangers are dying left and right. People are getting blown up. People are held hostage. The Dorseys are psychopathic killers. And I felt like that set the mood for me where I was like, oh, this is a pretty gritty world. And then all of a sudden,

you've got pigs running out of rooms, exploding, and frozen ferret ammunition. It felt to me like it starts gritty, and then it kind of hits you out of nowhere. Oh, there's actually a little bit of Far Cry style over the top humor and the game does try to do both and i don't know that it really accomplished either terribly well there are parts that are very gritty and hardcore there are parts that are incredibly funny but it does feel a little incongruous i thought when you play the game definitely a tale of like three different ideas or something because you're right yeah the humor really ramps up in the you play the game, definitely a tale of like three different ideas or something, because you're right. The humor really ramps up in the middle of the game.

But you're right. It's nonexistent for like the first part of it. You know, it is a little jarring, I guess, is the best way to put that. All right. This next one, 54 hours on record, not recommended. And it says, having played Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3 back to back, I gotta say, I like this one a lot less. Wasteland 2 was kind of buggy and rough, but has that nostalgic charm that takes me back to the days of Baldur's Gate and Fallout 1 and 2. Wasteland 3 just tries to be all X-Com-y and Divinity-like, but without any of that polish.

The majority of the characters are cringy and one-dimensional, sucking but without any of that polish. The majority of the characters are cringey and one-dimensional, sucking any immersion out of the experience. With the exception of Colorado Springs and the near-final area where you deal with liberty, most of the other locations feel more like little dungeon crawls filled with a bunch of quirky post-apocalyptic things, like killer clowns, robots, cyborgs, cannibals, or whatnot. It just doesn't have the sprawling scope that old rpgs had the world does feel pretty small i agree 100 that's why i picked this one honestly is it is one of the faults that this is not a fully fleshed out massive world like a lot of rpgs that you're

probably used to have yeah it's like when you get to vic for instance the middle of the two children of the patriarch that you go to you see him for a total of about five minutes and he's bonkers but that's it so the one dimensional thing that that reviewer said it's so true it's like hey we're going to get this guy and it's like well he's clearly bad and bonkers so i should probably kill him and then that's it you never talk about him again it's done yeah one other thing as well talking a little bit about like the size of the world the game does have random encounters when you're in the overworld and it's the same map over and over and over that you play and it's like oh yeah i've seen this 25 times before and i don't know it's it

feels like for an rpg it's pretty limited in scope compared to what and it's not fair to compare things to dos 2 and pillars of eternity like these are games that are enormous and they're very stand apart wasteland 3 just feels very rpg light in that regard compared to those other sprawling ones which is surprising from a 30 plus hour rpg yeah it's it's just segmented as well which is weird in a lot of rpgs you can seamlessly kind of go from one area to the other or if you're in an area it's a huge area to kind of just wander around and explore before you go to like the world map and then go to another huge area in in wasteland three it's it's the opposite it's like you have these smaller areas where you're

in a town or you're in Denver or an airport or side mission with this big sprawling overworld map that you drive your truck around. But there's not a lot that happens there in that part. And so it's just a little backwards. Yeah. So all right, this last one comes in as recommended. They have 50 hours on record and it says, Start slow, but gets very engaging and intense. Great combat and RPG elements. The world is very atmosphere rich and dark and making moral choices is often very difficult.

I still wonder if I made the right ones. So, and Paul, you touched on this. This game lives in the world of gray. There's very seldom is there a right and wrong decision. And sometimes even if you think there is and you go, well, I'm going to make the right decision. It turns out that that wasn't actually the right decision. Yeah. You know?

And so this game does that a lot to where it is very just in that middle gray area to where it's hard to know if you're making the right decisions and is one way really like a big swing or not. And that's probably the best compliment I can give the game. I do appreciate that they put you in difficult situations and you have to make a choice. You're going to live with your consequences. And if you're really into this game, you're really going to love multiple playthroughs because you're going to get to make different decisions and see how it plays out. All right, fellas. Well, that's what the community thought. Now it's time to take a guess at what we think the overall rating on Wasteland 3 is.

This is from the Steam Reviews all-time ratings on a scale of 0 to 100. And I think, Paul, you won last time if i remember did i i'm pretty sure yeah you're right i did win last time so i get to go first you guess first all right you know this is a hard one to come at because i have no idea how well regarded wasteland 2 was compared to this i don't know if most people think this was a step forward or a step back. I have a feeling most people probably liked it. I'm thinking it's going to be in the very high 80% range. I'm going to say 89% is my guess. All right. 89% for Paul. Michael? You know, this is probably the hardest one I've had so far like normally i have some kind of an idea you know normally it's like oh we've heard things about people saying it's glitchy i have no idea what people think about this game so i'm gonna throw a dart at 82

just because i think i i think that i was maybe moved a little bit by some of the reviews that that josh just read about people not liking this much as wasteland 2 and so i think that paul is a bit too optimistic so i'm that paul is a bit too optimistic so i'm going to 82 all right well i wrote my guess down before i checked the scores and it just so happens that i actually hit this one right on the head so unless one of you stole my guess then i knew that i was going to get this one i guessed 84 i thought i thought you know what this game's fine there's there's enough to. There's some things that I could see people not liking. So I figured it was going to be very middle of the pack score-wise,

which in my mind put it somewhere in the low to mid 80s. And I just guessed 84, which it exactly is 84 all-time reviews. So, touche. I don't like this genre of RPG where it's the turn-based tactical. So for me, I'm thinking maybe I'm just missing something that other people would have. So I gave it a little bit of a 5% boost for that. But 84, honestly, is probably about where this game deserves to be. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with that. All right. Well, that means I am your new champion. And my first decree as champion is that I get to introduce this next segment. So hit that music, Paul.

No, Party Bot. Party Bot, hit that music. Oh, yeah. Oh, nice. Hey, Angela Death. If you were a Transformer, you'd be Optimus. Fine. Good old Angela. good old angela that was great i just i didn't realize until like the very last time i talked to her it's like oh angel of death angela death angela i'm really dense yeah yeah nice little play on words there did you also notice names like liberty and victory the throne the throne of nukes that the patriarchs sat on that kill i saw it i was like he's literally sitting on a throne of like missiles well it was like the iron throne from game of thrones

with rockets and swords yeah all right so this segment is called make love marry or murder uh this is where we are going to rate the game individually we we read some of what the community thinks what the overall score is but this is where we're going to rate the game individually. We read some of what the community thinks, what the overall score is. But this is where we're going to tell you what we actually think about this game. A merry means you should absolutely play this. It is worth your money. Listen to this podcast and then go play this game because we think you're going to love it. Make love is, hey, probably worth it.

It's a lot of fun. I definitely don't regret playing it. And then murder is steer clear. This is not worth your money or your time. Take a recommendation and just look somewhere else. I'll go first on this one, since you guys think I'm always negative on everything. It's not a murder for me. This is a make love.

It's not a great make love. It's not a bad make love. It's a very middle of the path make love for me. When I first started playing this game, I kind of went, man, I don't know if this game's going to work for me. It seemed a little low budget. It seemed a little weird. And then it picks up in the middle of the game. And then the end is, you know, it's okay. But I was left with just that this is a fun RPG for what it is. I didn't ever mind playing it. I'm not sure I ever really looked forward to playing it.

Like a whole lot got really excited about it. Um, so it's, it's just a, like a, a normal make love for me. I think it's plenty fun to play, but I don't think it's super memorable either.

I think that's totally fair. What, what are you thinking, Michael? I hated playing this game twice. when i started on the playstation five and i played through four hours and it was awful because the combat was just so hard to figure out and then i had to do it again on the pc i had to start over and do it again and i hated the first four hours and then i found myself looking forward to playing it after that for

some reason i think i think once you got to spoiler territory, which I won't mention since we've already gotten past that, there are some funny and fun things that happen. That being said, I don't love this game. I'm not marrying it. I think it's fine. It's a fine game. I'm making love to this game. It's totally worth...

I mean, what does this game cost? Like $20? $10? $12? Something like that? $40. $40? Okay, whatever. It's worth $40. It retails for $40.

This game's been out for a long time. You can get it for much, much cheaper. Yeah, I think my playthrough was like 31.3 hours, something like that. And about 25 hours of that I had a great time with. And I think that's totally worth it. And it's fine. It's a fun CRPG. I look forward to playing it. It's very casual. That's what I liked about it. It's not something super intense. You don't have to put a lot of heart into it, but you get to enjoy a good story.

I'm making love to this game. Yeah, I'm going to agree. It's not bad enough to murder. It's nowhere near marriage material in my opinion this game does not hold a candle to any of the fallouts i get that they're both post-apocalyptic they kind of come from the same roots this game is perfectly meh which i really hate like i always joke with you guys like i would rather really love a game or really hate a game to record the podcast this game has fun moments it has boring moments i think the combat is lacking i think the story is decent i will agree with michael the first couple hours i think are pretty horrific and then the game kind of hits its stride and it's pretty

darn good in the middle and then at the end it kind of loses that steam again, in my opinion. Yeah, I kind of feel rather blech. Especially compared to other CRPGs, this is one of the worst, in my opinion. Now, it is a genre that I love in general, but my goodness, do you have better options? If you have played all of the major RPGs and you're really hurting for another one, then this game is perfectly fine to pick up. But don't expect it to blow your moldy socks off, which, by the way, you do loot a lot of those in this game as well. The only thing that really sets Wasteland 3 apart is its setting. I don't want to say atmosphere, but basically it's setting. If you want to play an RPG with rocket launchers, flamethrowers, laser microwave guns, and absurdity...

Frozen ferrets. Yeah, and you want to launch frozen ferrets at bad guys, this game does that in spades. Most RPGs are fantasy-based or something like that. So if it's like you want that, but you really want a different flavor, then Wasteland 3 fits that bill perfectly. It's not a phenomenal game in any sense, and it's not a terrible game in any sense.

It's very middle of the road in that regard as far as the actual gameplay goes. Yeah, like I said, it's fine. Yeah. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. It's true, though. Yeah.

All right, well, let's see where this fine game winds up on our amazing leaderboard all right so taking a look at our leaderboard guys if anyone here is new to the show our leaderboard is where as a consensus we have to agree where to place this game, as opposed to all the other games that we've done a deep dive episode on. So looking at our list, which by the way, you can see at multiplayerpodcast.com, it's right there on the main page, we have done a total of 76 deep dives. And taking a look here, we've got some stuff in the top 10 like apex legends and satisfactory towards the middle

of the pack we've got killing floor 2 at 37 we've got keep talking and nobody explodes at 42 down in the 60s we've got some stuff like human fall flat minecraft dungeons and then towards the bottom we've got stuff like hood outlaws and legends i don't know about you guys when i look at this uh i'm kind of looking where do the games transition from oh yeah i recommend that to yeah i'm not so sure anymore and so for me that's right where this game falls which i think is like really darn close to death loop and tiny tiny tina's wonderland that's exactly what i was thinking no lie i was legitimately staring down death loop and being like i think it's right right next to death loop for me that's what i was thinking yeah it's like in the very late same yeah and i have i have not

played death loop but i was like you know what this feels a lot like tiny tina's wonderland it was fine the game was fine it's fine and so it's like i'm like that's exactly where it goes that's hilarious um would you put it above or below death loop do you guys are you are you thinking a few away from that i would put it below death loop but i think i would put it above tiny tinas i am honestly 100 with you that this is the fastest consensus that we've ever had because, yeah, it's number 49. Done. Okay. We're all calibrating to each other. I mean, I think that says a lot about Wasteland 3.

It's fine. It's, you know, it's fun. It's not bad. If you can get it for cheap, it probably makes it even better. Yeah. And if you're just hungry for a different setting in a CRPG, if you're a fan of that genre and you just want something different then it's fine i

feel like this would be a very good game for like okay i am going to travel overseas maybe i'm flying to japan and i'm going to be flying for about 20 hours but like you know what i don't want something i'm like i gotta really pay a lot of attention to, maybe I'm playing on a steam deck or something. The perfect game for this keeps fine. I probably play DOS two again personally, but I hear you. It's a good,

it's a good point. If you want something new, it might be worth checking out. But if you have other RPGs, you haven't tried, there's just a lot to pick from. That's going to do it a lot better. Yeah.

All right. Well then we will lock it in in this will be number 49 on our leaderboard and uh i think that basically wraps everything up here for this episode we do want to say thank you to eblitz for sponsoring the episode as a reminder please visit multiplayer squad.com to see our patreon page where you can support the show and get those bonus episodes. Also, if you want to start playing our next deep dive game, you can get started on Broforce. We will deep dive that game two weeks from today. Ironically, there is a little bit of overlap as far as the viewpoint of America and how America functions in the world. There's a little bit of overlap there. And we do want to say thank you to everybody for listening.

We love you all. And until next time, happy gaming. You got to say it first, Michael. I was waiting you down. Is this a game of chicken? I was like, I always go next. Okay, final comment. Go look up YouTube Wasteland 3 full soundtrack with radio songs and timestamps

and just have a blast with some awesome music because the music in this game is probably a 94, even though the game is only an 84. All right. Cheers, all. All right. See you, everybody.