Wasteland 2

Lore & Background

The world of Wasteland 2 is a sun-scorched America where the federal government has long since fractured into warring factions. The Desert Rangers, a paramilitary organization descended from the U.S. Army with a formal chain of command and code of conduct, operate in the irradiated stretches between the remnants of the old nation. Water is the ultimate currency, and those who control it control everything else. The central conflict pits the Rangers against the Red Scorpions and the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, who vie for dominance in the post-collapse world. The player's squad must navigate a landscape of irradiated wastelands, fortified settlements, and the twisted politics of the post-collapse world to break these factions' stranglehold and restore some measure of freedom to the people. The tone is deliberately gritty and moralistic, echoing the original Wasteland's blend of dark humor and existential stakes. Characters speak in clipped, world-weary dialogue, and every major decision carries weight—there is no single 'correct' path, only consequences that ripple through the settlements the Rangers pass through.

In Their Own Story

The dust hadn't settled in three days. Ranger Vasquez wiped grit from her visor and watched the Water Merchants' convoy disappear over the ridge, their armored trucks kicking up plumes of ochre that hung in the still air like smoke. Behind her, the rest of the squad stood in the skeletal remains of what had once been a gas station, the rusted pumps jutting from the cracked asphalt like broken fingers. "They'll be back by nightfall," said the new kid, barely twenty, his voice flat with the particular exhaustion of someone who'd grown up in the irradiated zones. "What do we do?"

Vasquez checked the water gauge on her pack. Three liters. Enough for two days if they rationed. She looked at the kid, then at the horizon where the Merchants' water towers caught the low sun and threw long shadows across the dead fields. "We do what we've always done," she said, and started walking. "We take it back."

Reader's Guide

The lineage begins in 1988 at Interplay, where a small team led by Brian Fargo and others built the original Wasteland as a spiritual successor to their earlier title, Free Will. The game's isometric perspective, turn-based tactical combat, and skill-based character progression would become a direct template for Black Isle Studios' Fallout series, developed under Interplay's umbrella in the mid-1990s. When Interplay's financial troubles forced the Wasteland IP into limbo, Fargo departed and founded inXile Entertainment. For over two decades the sequel sat in development purgatory. The turning point came in 2012, when inXile launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund Wasteland 2. The campaign exceeded its goal, validating the crowdfunding model for a major title and giving inXile the resources to build its proprietary Torus engine from the ground up. Feargus Urquhart, known for his work on the Baldur's Gate series, was brought in as game director. The creative challenge was twofold: honor the 1988 original's tone and mechanics while delivering a modern-scale RPG. The team committed to isometric, turn-based combat as a deliberate design anchor, rejecting the real-time action trend that had swept the genre. The Torus engine had to support large open zones, dynamic lighting, and the squad-based combat system within the constraints of a mid-sized studio. The ripple effect extended beyond the Wasteland franchise. Wasteland 2's successful crowdfunding demonstrated that a dedicated community could sustain a franchise that major publishers had shelved, encouraging subsequent Kickstarter-funded RPGs and reshaping how smaller studios approached development financing. InXile leveraged the momentum to develop Wasteland 3 and other titles, while the design DNA of the original Wasteland continued to echo in every post-apocalyptic RPG that followed.

Did You Know?

• The original Wasteland (1988) was developed at Interplay and its isometric, turn-based, skill-driven design is widely cited as a direct influence on the Fallout series created by Black Isle Studios, also under Interplay.
• Wasteland 2 was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2012, one of the most high-profile video game crowdfunding efforts at the time, and helped establish the model for community-funded sequels.
• The game was built on the Unity engine, a versatile and widely-used development platform that allowed inXile to focus on the isometric perspective and turn-based combat system the team wanted to preserve from the origina
• There was a 26-year gap between the release of the first Wasteland in 1988 and Wasteland 2 in 2014, making it one of the longest waits for a sequel in the genre.