Wasteland 3 makes a few improvements to the gameplay of the previous title. There is better skill and weapon balance, attributes are now balanced so any character without a high intelligence score is no longer worthless, and the traits that you can choose at character creation are no longer as overpowered or useless as they were in the directors cut version of Wasteland 2. They removed some of the more Tabletop style RPG features like percentage failures for doing things like lockpicking or different attribute ratings coming together to effect stats but it wasn't really handled in an interesting way in the previous game and just simplifying it was for the best. There are combat abilities that characters can learn that can chain together well, some skills might do bonus damage to bleeding, stunned, or otherwise status effect characters.
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491