The co-op gameplay in Wasteland 3 appears to be currently all but nonfunctional for some players. The post-apocalyptic RPG released only a few days ago but has already been reviewed quite well by a number of publications, Screen Rant included. At the time of this writing, it has a very respectable 86 on Metacritic.
When players think about post-apocalyptic RPGs, they likely think of the Fallout franchise first and foremost. But Fallout wouldn’t exist without the original Wasteland, which first released in 1988 and gave developer Interplay inspiration for the first Fallout game almost 10 years later. While Fallout is now a renowned and prolific video game franchise, Wasteland has been all but forgotten. The series was dormant for decades until a crowdfunded sequel revived it in 2014. A third game in the series was announced in 2016, and finally launched to a warm reception on August 28th of this year.
But it hasn’t been smooth sailing for Wasteland 3. While the game’s singleplayer has been getting raves, Polygon claims that the game’s co-op multiplayer mode is a broken mess. Writer Cass Marshall claims that they were unable to connect with their partner on two of the first three days they tried. Even once they got the game to work, they returned to HQ after five hours of play to find that they’d lost all of their progress and had to revert to an earlier save. This was an unfortunately frequent occurrence throughout Marshall’s experience. Wasteland 3‘s community page on Steam shows that this isn’t an isolated issue, with the developer tracking reports of co-op players getting stuck on loading scenes and having their progress randomly reset.
Polygon did praise the game as a whole, pointing out that when one sets aside the bugs, there’s a lot to love about Wasteland 3. Furthermore, it must be pointed out that this is the first Wasteland game to introduce multiplayer in any form, and the transition into co-op must have been a very difficult one for developer inXile Entertainment. The developer is hard at work addressing these issues, keeping a running list of bugs that afflict both singleplayer and multiplayer, which is certainly a good sign. Time will tell how well these efforts pay off, but given the quality of the base game, there’s reason to be optimistic.
Early post-launch bugs are a sad fact of life for many video games. Unfortunately, given the often stressful environment at game developers and the sheer complexity of making a multiplayer game, bugs like the ones in Wasteland 3 are likely to become even more common at the start of the next generation. While more time, patience, and care pre-launch is ultimately the best solution for this sort of problem, it’s still heartening to see developers like inXile respond so quickly to such major issues. A lot of people have been enjoying Wasteland 3 since its release, and hopefully a lot more will get to have fun with it once inXile fixes those bugs.
Wasteland 3 is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
