Much like the release of 2014’s Wasteland 2, inXile Entertainment’s Wasteland 3 will again be made via crowdfunding. Wasteland 3 is the sequel to Wasteland 2, which revived a long dead Wasteland that was released for the PC all the way back in 1988. The studio’s goal for the game is to send the Desert Ranger protagonists to a frozen Colorado, with new vehicles and a new way of playing the cooperative multiplayer.
The NPCs in Colorado have no idea who you are, so you have free reign on how you want the Desert Rangers to behave themselves and the reputation that follows them. Do you want them to be kind, helpful Desert Rangers? Or do you want the Desert Rangers to be mean and nasty? That’s up to you.
The multiplayer in Wasteland 3 is similar in that you team up with a friend and command your own squad of rangers. However, your games are also linked when you aren’t together. So while one friend is away, the other can complete missions and completely change where the game is taking place when both are playing together, according to Alice O’Connor of RockPaperShotgun.
Wasteland 3‘s crowdfunding begins October 5 on Fig, a crowdfunding site that functions mostly for games. It has an advisory board of developers including inXile Entertainment’s CEO Brian Fargo. While the site allows people to invest into the games with their own money, there are ways in which players can get back money. inXile Entertainment is seeking $2.75 million.
While Fig is being used, they are also using a Kickstarter campaign and Fargo hopes that the donations on Fig will help counterbalance when the Kickstarter fatigues:
You can imagine that it gets difficult to get people’s attention with pure rewards-based funding when they haven’t had the chance to play the last game they backed, or they haven’t backed one in a couple of years.
Since the release of Wasteland 3 is based on how much money fans of series donate to inXile Entertainment, there won’t be a tentative release schedule until all of the money needed has been obtained.