Wasteland (computer Game)

''Wasteland'' is a role-playing video game developed by Interplay Productions and published by Electronic Arts in 1988. The first installment of the '' Wasteland'' series, it is set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic America destroyed by a nuclear holocaust generations before. Developers originally made the game for the Apple II and it was porting, ported to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. It was re-released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in 2013 via Steam and GOG.com, and in 2014 via Desura. A remastered version titled ''Wasteland Remastered'' was released on February 25, 2020, in honor of the original game's 30th anniversary.

Critically acclaimed and commercially successful, ''Wasteland'' was intended to be followed by two separate sequels in the 1990s, but Electronic Arts dropped claims of ''Fountain of Dreams'' being a sequel and Interplay's '' Meantime'' was canceled. The game's general setting and concept inspired Interplay's 1997 role-playing video game ''Fallout'' and the ''Fallout'' series. Decades later, inXile Entertainment, founded by the game's director Brian Fargo, released two proper sequels: ''Wasteland 2'' (2014) and ''Wasteland 3'' (2020).

Gameplay

''Wasteland''s game mechanics are based on those used in tabletop role-playing games, such as ''Tunnels & Trolls'' and ''Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes'' created by ''Wasteland'' designers Ken St. Andre and Michael Stackpole. Characters in ''Wasteland'' have seven attributesstrength, intelligence, luck, speed, agility, dexterity, and charismathat allow the characters to use different skills and weapons. Experience is gained through combat and skill usage to level up, or promote, characters. The player's party begins with four members and can grow to as many as seven by recruiting citizens and wasteland creatures. Unlike other computer role-playing games of the time, these non-player characters might at times refuse to follow the player's commands, such as when the player orders the character to give up an item or perform an action. The game is noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level. The prose appearing in the game's combat screens, such as phrases saying an enemy is "reduced to a thin red paste" and "explodes like a blood sausage", prompted an unofficial PG-13 sticker on the game packaging in the U.S.

''Wasteland'' was one of the first games featuring a persistent world, where changes to the game's open world were stored and kept. Returning to an area later in the game, the player would find it in the state the player left it, rather than being reset, as was common for games of the time. Since hard drives were still rare in home computers in 1988, this meant the original game disk had to be copied first.

Another feature of the game was the inclusion of a printed collection of paragraphs that the player would read at the appropriate times. These paragraphs described encounters, conversations and contained clues. Because disk space was at a premium, it saved on resources to have most of the game's story printed out in a separate manual rather than stored within the game's code itself. The paragraph books also served as a rudimentary form of copy protection; someone playing a copied version of the game would miss out on story elements and clues necessary to progress. The paragraphs included an unrelated story line about a mission to Mars intended to mislead those who read the paragraphs when not instructed to, and a false set of passwords that would trip up cheaters.

Plot

In 2087, generations after the devastation of a global nuclear war in 1998, a remnant force of the United States Army called the Desert Rangers operates in the Southwestern United States, acting as peacekeepers to protect fellow survivors and their descendants. A team of Desert Rangers is assigned to investigate a series of disturbances in nearby areas. Throughout the game, the rangers explore the remaining enclaves of human civilization, including a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.

As the group's investigation deepens, the rangers discover evidence of a larger menace threatening to exterminate what is left of humankind. A pre-war artificial intelligence operating from a surviving military facility, Base Cochise, is constructing armies of killer machines and cybernetically modified humans to attack human settlements with the help of Irwin Finster, the deranged former commander of the base. Finster has gone so far as to transform himself into a cyborg

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