Wasteland 3 – Permadeath, Difficult Skill Checks, and More Now Live

Wasteland 3’s patch 1.3.3, “Death and Taxes”, is now available and introduces the highly requested Permadeath mode. Available in single-player only, it sees your party members dying if they’re down for too long. No reviving or any of those shenanigans. Difficult Skill Checks are also available to encourage specializing different squad members.

It essentially allows for increasing checks to Skills, Attributes and Perception by +2 up to +10. Along with dialogue choices, it also applies to equipment so you’ll need to be very careful about each squad-mates role. Fortunately, it’s now possible to respec different party members as well. Just head to the Ranger HQ, go to Manage Squad and choose “Retrain.” Of course, any Quirks, Cyborg Tech or Tarjan Machine perks can’t be changed.

Retraining does come with a cost, which is also shared with recruiting new Rangers. While the first two are free, you’ll need to spend $200 for subsequent recruits and respecs, which increases by 1.75x up to $3000. Other features of the patch include new customization options for characters like makeup, tattoos, masks, helmets and so on. Check out the full patch notes here for more details.

UPDATE NOTES:

Additional Crash and Performance Fixes

• We’ve been continually working to improve stability on systems with low amounts of memory (older consoles, primarily) and this update resolves one of our most impactful issues. For those of you experiencing crashes after longer play sessions, we’d love for you to give this update a try and let us know if it resolved your issue. If not, we’d also like to hear from you on the inXile forums so we can continue to make improvements.
• We’ve taken a pass at textures across the game to either reduce or increase texture sizes to create a more consistent memory footprint. This should result in slightly more even performance.
• Additional misc. changes and fixes that should result in overall improved stability.

[PC] Added voice chat options to enable Push to Talk, show microphone input source, manage volume, or disable it entirely. The Push to Talk key can be customized in keyboard bindings.

Gameplay

• Game options now have descriptive text in case our very intelligently named options weren’t clear enough.
• Fixed the Poindexter quirk for Rangers recruited from HQ. They’ll now correctly receive their bonus skill points as intended… NERDS.
• Resolved an issue with the bonus Hit Chance from Leadership not increasing correctly as it’s leveled up.
• We just made the Hoon Homestead always available from the world map regardless of choices and progression. So that better fix it.
• We screwed up the intercom before Vic and now we have unscrewed it.
• Resolved a softlock that could occur while arresting Vic.
• Fixed an issue where you sometimes couldn’t save the game after a combat where you hacked a robot or tamed an animal. How does that even happen? Who knows. Well, someone does, just not me. Making games sounds hard.