

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. Wasteland was one of the first games featuring a persistent world, where changes to the game world were stored and kept. 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. The game is noted for its high and unforgiving difficulty level. 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 player's party begins with four members and can grow to as many as seven by recruiting citizens and wasteland creatures. Experience is gained through combat and skill usage to level up, or promote, characters. Characters in Wasteland have seven attributes–strength, intelligence, luck, speed, agility, dexterity, and charisma–that allow the characters to use different skills and weapons. Wasteland 's game mechanics are based on those used in tabletop role-playing games, such as Tunnels and Trolls and Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes created by Wasteland designers Ken St. Decades later, inXile Entertainment released two proper sequels: Wasteland 2 (2014) and Wasteland 3 (2020).Ī screenshot of an encounter with mutated "Drools" in the DOS version The game's general setting and concept became the basis for Interplay's 1997 role-playing video game Fallout and the Fallout series. A remastered version titled Wasteland Remastered was released on February 25, 2020, in honor of the original game's 30th anniversary.Ĭritically 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. It was re-released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux in 2013 via Steam and GOG.com, and in 2014 via Desura. Developers originally made the game for the Apple II and it was ported to the Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. The game is set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic America destroyed by a nuclear holocaust generations before. Wasteland is an open world role-playing video game developed by Interplay and published by Electronic Arts in 1988.
