Last week, we announced Into the Wasteland - an expansion for Fallout: Wasteland Warfare allowing players to head out and explore the wilds of the Wasteland. The Wasteland may look scorched, dead and barren but look closely and it is full with an ever-present, always-beating pulse of life which continues regardless of your presence.
We caught up with James Sheahan (designer of Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and the Fallout: Wasteland Warfare RPG expansion) to provide some more details.
Into the Wasteland is comprised of two key components: Generating the wasteland that will be explored and giving natural behaviors to its inhabitants. First, let’s look at the Wasteland Scenarios section which describes how to generate and populate areas of the Wasteland, plus set your objectives.
Cards are drawn to determine the size and shape of the battlefield, the environment, and your purpose. The size and shape of the battlefields are often smaller than the usual 3x3 and not square. The environment influences what lives there, what types of terrain are likely, and what sort of items may be found there. For example, you are more likely to meet Feral Ghouls or Raiders in a town, Robots or Brotherhood of Steel in a military area, and Mirelurks in a swamp. Each environment card suggests what types of terrain may litter the landscape, and what different types of Items are more likely in some areas and less likely in others.
Your purpose gives you an objective to complete and also influences other factors in the set-up to match. You may be simply aiming to pass through the area, or maybe to scavenge items from the area, or scout the area, or find your missing comrades, or find a specific item in the area, and so on. Of course, you can choose a specific purpose as your reason for venturing into the Wasteland too.
Some of the inhabitants in the area are known when you start; whereas, some are unknown and only get revealed when you are close enough to see them (or they get close enough to you as they constantly move around).
The inhabitants in a Wasteland area use the AI system, but whilst they are unaware of you (or some of the other inhabitants), they follow special instructions to give them a ‘natural behavior’ instead. For examples, they may be travelling, grazing, roaming, gathering, protecting, hunting, etc. If an inhabitant becomes aware of you (or something else), they may exit their natural behavior and use their usual AI card to respond (and may then resume their natural behaviour later). For example, two travelling Super Mutants move across the area but, if they notice the player (or are attacked by them), they may decide to attack the player before then resuming their journey. Inhabitants whose natural behavior is protecting remain fairly stationary and will only attack if something comes too close to what they are protecting. Gathering inhabitants collect Searchables but will pause to attack anyone who tries to muscle in on their action. Some inhabitants will interact with each other too.
Also, Into the Wasteland provides Unit and AI cards for some new creatures with which to populate your Wasteland Scenarios, such as the Radstag, Brahmin and Bloodbug. Plus, for the incredibly brave, there are some legendary creatures too such as the Nukalurk Queen, Deathskull Radscorpion, or Swan. Legendary Units are not only very tough indeed but they use several Unit cards in succession as their tactics, abilities and behaviour changes as you fight them. For a tough (but comparatively easier encounter), you can choose to fight legendary creatures one stage (Unit card) at a time too. (Note that the new creatures are just cards for now so, for example, there is no Bloodbug model at present. For legendary creatures, the existing models are used.)
Finally, Into the Wasteland includes a small map-based campaign where you work your way across sections of a map playing a Wasteland Scenario at each point. It is a race against time to save your abducted comrades – the faster you reach them, the better your advantage will be in the final rescue; but then the less time you will have to gather items on the way to aid you in their rescue. A choose-your-own-path style series of numbered sections keeps the details of the scenarios secret until you need them. (Our future plans include creating a large campaign where you travel all over a map, discovering it as you go, and following a story – very similar to how Fallout videogames are played – but that’s in the future.)
Into the Wasteland is due for release this Friday, 13th November. Until then, happy wandering in the Wasteland.
Into the Wasteland is primarily aimed at players playing solo and/or cop-operatively. However, players playing versus other players can also use the Wasteland Scenarios with inhabitants as a setting for their scenarios.
Note: Due to the current COVID-19 situation, Into the Wasteland will be released as a digital product containing print-and-play cards.