After watching the fantastic first season of the Fallout television series, I decided to get back into the franchise by digging deep into its roots. And by that, I mean playing Wasteland Remastered. The connection between Wasteland and Fallout is well-documented. If you’re unfamiliar, Brian Fargo—the founder of Interplay and developer of the CRPG series The Bard’s Tale—directed the original 1988 Wasteland. This classic PC title has a similar gameplay style to The Bard’s Tale but was now set in the Southwest US approximately 100 years after global nuclear fallout. This same setting, of course, would be used a decade later for the first Fallout, also published by Interplay, with Brian Fargo serving as executive producer.
Despite the success of the early Fallout titles, Interplay faced bankruptcy and took to public trading in an attempt to save itself. After multiple buyouts and the rights to various IPs being passed to different studios (Fallout itself having gone to Bethesda), it seemed like the franchise had forever moved in a new direction. However, there was still Fallout‘s spiritual predecessor, Wasteland, an IP that Fargo and other creatives from Interplay’s glory days still had access to.
Fargo started a new studio called inXile Entertainment and, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, created a sequel to Wasteland in 2014, one year prior to Bethesda publishing Fallout 4. I provide this timeline and history for a few reasons. You see, going back to the series origins and playing Wasteland is something I’ve done before. Prior to Fallout 4‘s release in 2015, I went on a personal quest to play all things Fallout and Fallout-adjacent. Alongside the full main series, I played Fallout Tactics, the awful Brotherhood of Steel action game on PS2, Fallout Shelter on mobile phones, and the leaked semi-playable versions of Van Buren (which, presumably, would have been Fallout 3). I also learned about Wasteland and got right into it. I loved Wasteland 2, but the original Wasteland has a major learning curve. Fortunately, the 1988 title had been re-released in its original form, set to work with modern PCs and operating systems, as a 25th anniversary title in 2013. In this context, I experienced a challenging, frustrating, esoteric PC game that required quite a bit of walkthrough-referencing to see the game through to completion.
And yet, I enjoyed the game enough that watching a TV show made me want to play it again? Either I’m a glutton for punishment, or … yes. It is that enjoyable.
Lucky me—when I went back to play the game again, I discovered that in 2020, inXile collaborated with Krome Studios on Wasteland Remastered. Krome gave the classic game the same glossy shine they had given to The Bard’s Tale Trilogy in 2018. I wanted to see for myself what had changed, what stayed the same, and if I’d enjoy the remaster more than the original.
In a choice that I fully approve of and that generally fits with the “Remastered” label, the core gameplay and scenario remain unchanged. There weren’t any new quests added, to my knowledge, to connect Wasteland Remastered to the characters and events of the recent sequels. While that may have been interesting, I personally love the faithful recreation of this weird, wonderful, challenging RPG. For those uninitiated to RPGs of the Wizardry and Bard’s Tale variety, these games focus heavily on stat building by utilizing the trappings of complex pen-and-paper RPGs. Wasteland Remastered gives you four default characters at start (Hell Razor, Angela Deth, Snake Vargas, and Thrasher), but you can replace any of these four characters with re-roll custom characters of your choice. An additional three character slots are also available for recruitable characters throughout the game—with the caveat that dismissing a recruitable character is permanent but generally in your favor as endgame recruits tend to outclass a well-leveled early-game recruit—allowing for a seven-person party! That’s a lot to manage, though I find this is part of the fun of the game.
Alongside managing each character’s inventory, level-ups from combat or experience point bonuses from quest completion allow you to slowly but surely increase each character’s main stats (STR, DEX, INT, etc). To top all of that off, Wasteland Remastered has skills. Many, many skills. Arguably, too many, but that’s par for the course with games of this nature. You can level skills through usage (commonly, weapon usage leads to increases in your proficiency), but there are also skills you use on your simple tile-based map for exploration. Climbing lets you reach higher places; swimming lets you move through water with less likelihood of taking damage; lockpick and safe crack can get you into places you’re not meant to be; perception allows you to notice secret stashes or other strange things of note; trap and bomb disarm do exactly what you’d expect them to do. There are other skills that have limited usage, like Toaster Repair that lets you fix the game’s broken toasters to find random items stuck inside them—sometimes, surprisingly good items. Helicopter Pilot, a special skill that takes both high INT and DEX for a character to even learn, has exactly one use, but it’s one that lets you skip the opening section of the game’s final dungeon.
Having a good sense of what to learn, who should learn what, and how high to increase proficiency in these skills is something that can only come with repeat playthroughs or heavy use of walkthroughs. The choice is yours. But I do think it is another fun choice to make in the meta-game of this challenging game!
What I appreciate the most about Wasteland Remastered—in all of its forms, perhaps—is the story. The setting, the lore, the characters: all of the dark and quirky charm we tend to love about Fallout got its start here. For example, as your team enters the post-nuclear wasteland, one of the first areas you come across is the Guardian Citadel. Here you’ll find a sect of reclusive, religious nuts who stockpile weaponry from over a century ago (before the bombs dropped) and who have no plans on sharing it with anyone else. They refer to one another as “Brother” this and “Sister” that. And holy heck, they are tough as nails. While the game allows you to attempt to infiltrate the citadel at any point, it serves as the game’s penultimate dungeon (as it has special keys that you need to traverse the final dungeon). But, whenever you decide to take it on, a thorough run through the citadel reveals so much about these people and their aims. Do they sound familiar to you?
Elsewhere in Wasteland Remastered, you can find two separate locations for a quasi-religious group called the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud. Some of the game’s plot puts this group in central focus, though much of your interactions with them technically fit the category of side quest. In any case, they seem to worship the power of the atom and are not afraid to expose themselves to radiation as part of their religious practice. Again, I ask, does this sound familiar? Ooh! Or how about visiting Las Vegas and having to navigate your position and alliances amongst rival gangs and factions! Did Wasteland‘s spiritual successors glean anything from such a premise?
I hope you’re picking up what I’m putting down. The Fallout franchise is fantastic and certainly more polished than this 1980s title. But the roots are crystal clear, and the paradox between a dark, mutated, harsh environment and the quirky and occasionally cheerful people (and other sentient entities) you meet along the way are what makes this game so interesting.
The presentation of the storytelling itself is actually pretty strange compared to what most of us are used to. The original game would only show brief bits of dialogue in-game. For larger portions of dialogue, the game would simply refer you to one of over 150 paragraphs written in a printed book. For the 2013 “Classic” port, the paragraph text was added as something you could access in-game, with audio narration added. In Wasteland Remastered, the developers went a step further, activating the narrated audio when the paragraph text occurs. Additionally, about 20% of these paragraphs come with a video component, though these are often just HD rendered and layered art with camera panning alongside the narrated audio.
Though one could argue the plot to Wasteland Remastered may not seem grand, its scope is significant. It starts with the players as Desert Rangers, who are asked to patrol a couple nearby locales and see if they can help solve some problems. But one problem leads to another, often bigger, problem, and before you know it, you’re going well beyond your initial job, helping NPCs and recruitable characters survive the wasteland in towns, dungeons, abandoned military bases, and even hacking inside the mind of one or two AIs to see what awaits (hey, didn’t Fallout do that too?). The big, big reveal includes a revelation about how the world a century ago had its pivotal nuclear fallout. It’s not presented in a form as powerful or terrifying as, say, what we saw in season one of the Fallout TV show. But it’s still there, and if you let it hit you, it hits hard.
Now then, let’s talk sound. I mentioned the audio narration before, and I think these recordings are quite effective. More importantly, however, the game has a soundtrack. Yeah, the original 1988 version basically didn’t have a musical score. There are some sound effects and one-off jingles, but there isn’t a credited composer from that era. The 2013 “Classic” update features a single audio track from Fallout composer Mark Morgan for, I believe, the credits roll. Wasteland Remastered has a full soundtrack from Edwin Montgomery. It is heavily atmospheric and sparse on melody: which, for a game like this, is probably for the best. You can read more about my thoughts on the soundtrack in my OST review.
Visually, Wasteland Remastered left plenty of room for improvement. Many of the NPC and enemy portraits were pulled directly from the 2013 update and not given any further upgrades. In harsher words, I could say that “some 1988 pixel art got a dose of an MS Paint upgrade for a little smoothness.” I mentioned the cut scene art earlier, and that was definitely nice. The biggest upgrade is in the map itself. The old pixelated tile map has been scrapped and replaced with 3D renders of every single environment. Without question, this was the primary work of the Remaster, where Krome Studios put much of their effort. The end result? Well … it’s nice, I suppose. But I can imagine a version of this game where the tile-based exploration remains in-place and the graphics are far more impressive. Everything is static, and movement on the map can feel fairly jagged.
I will also say, I feel like there is a missed opportunity with Wasteland Remastered regarding UI and interface. Yes, there is something fun about learning to navigate the menus of old with layers of numerical inputs and a handful of hotkeys for certain functions. But a slick, simple update for the inventory alone would have gone a long way in making this game more enjoyable for newcomers. I can’t imagine it would have been that hard to port the inventory system from Wasteland 2 into this game. Alas, it was not to be.
At the end of the day, no matter how many glossy coats of paint you put on it, this is a game from another time. It feels old, outdated, outmoded. However, within this game is an amazing history lesson or two about game design and excellent storytelling, something that Brian Fargo and his inXile team have been offering up time and again for all of us to enjoy. Does war never change? Wasteland Remastered doesn’t use the trademarked phrase explicitly, but there is certainly something timeless about this game. It may only be valuable to hardcore Fallout fans or gaming history nerds like myself, but the journey is still worth it. Good luck, rangers!
