- And You Thought It Would Fail: The previous game became somewhat infamous for its development cycle, crunch time and amount of bugs that still persisted over dozens of patches and a re-release. On top of that, the crowdfunding was moved to Fig, which is co-owned by Brian Fargo, leading to people simply taking development of Wasteland 3 to be nothing more than a scam that will drag-out for years. And let's not forget about the terribly cheesy advertising campaign during the crowdfunding phase, making everything look even worse. Then the game not only kept its planned schelude without issues, but addressed all the complaints players had to Wasteland 2, while improving engine, gameplay, graphics and quests, taking everyone by surprise.
- Anti-Climax Boss:
- Liberty Buchanan is fought in a cramped room with a handful of enemies. Since you and your team are running end game equipment at this point and have figured out the best way to exploit the game's mechanics, she's a cake walk. And that's assuming you don't just talk her down.
- Sort of, though it's in keeping with the traditions of Fallout, this series' Spiritual Successor. If you choose to side with the Patriarch, you can make your way through the last level to confront Angela Deth while she's gearing up to fight the Patriarch... and manage to talk her down. Game over, you win.
- Awesome Music: Certain climactic fights in the game are punctuated with actual songs that play throughout various combats, often covers of hymns. Of particular note:
- The game's Signature Scene is set to a frantic battle on top of a dam while a slow cover of "Blood of the Lamb" plays.
- An incredibly intense, minor key version of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" occurs at the end of a dungeon to free or possibly kill Ironclad Cordite.
- A pumping cover of "Down by the River to Pray", which occurs when killing Isaac Reed for betraying Colorado or during the battle against Iridium and Deuterium during the Holy Detonation DLC.
- Similarly, the cover of Joe Hill's "Power in a Union", which plays during the Battle of Steeltown DLC during two pivotal battles.
- Really, anything arranged by Joe Hill for this game.
- A wonderful low-key melancholic acoustic arrangement of Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight", which plays at the Cannibal Jamboree.
- The cover for Land of Confusion, which plays after you defeat Liberty and start making your way back to Ranger HQ.
- For an original song, the busker in downtown Colorado will sing a very slow, melancholy oral tradition about the history of the Desert Rangers, including the plots of the first two games.
- Catharsis Factor: Getting the Golden Ending where all the bad guys are punished while Colorado and Arizona both get saved is next-to-impossible if you don't take the proper steps, but goddamn is it satisfying.
- Difficulty Spike: Both DLC locations can suffer from this due to Level Scaling, depending on how updated your gear from the main story is when you handle them. Since DLC enemies only scale to your level, not your actual stats, this can lead to starving workers and mutant enemies with several thousand HP that can One-Hit Kill your characters in a single round.
- Disappointing Last Level: Mostly a problem with Liberty Buchanan and the final area, Yuma County Speedway. While getting Valor involves dealing with the absurdities and fun of the Reagan-worshipping Gippers, and retrieving Victory involves saving hostages between massive firefights, Liberty's area is just a straight up slog of back-to-back fights with little in the way of story meat. Given that Pizepi, a recurring character from 2, and Vic himself are both companions who can join at Aspen (you know, when the game is almost finished), it seems like there may have been more intended to do between capturing him and then going after Liberty that was cut.
- Draco in Leather Pants: In and out of universe. Many consider the Patriarch to be, at worst, a benevolent dictator who did nothing wrong and simply made difficult choices for the good of his people and all of Colorado. Others argue that this ignores the fact that he willingly gave up his people to the Godfishers to be used as slaves and human sacrifices and the entire reason the Dorseys became what they are is because they argued for democracy and he sent Percival Wesson to intimidate them into silence. Even when it escalated into a slaughter- and in his defense, he did NOT order that attack- his only response was to tell Wesson to make sure there would be no witnesses. The issue seems to be that he has good intentions, but his pride and atrocities weigh against seeing him as a hero for many. This is further utilized during the November Reigns ending if you give him a trial; the citizenry find his actions intolerable, but also find he did it for Colorado's greater good. They end up choosing to imprison him for the rest of his life, roughly three years given his nerve damage, rather than execute him outright.
- Fridge Brilliance: One of the Nancys mentions that when God-President Reagan was supposed to be administering justice, he vaporized a tree. According to the real Reagan, what causes 80 percent of air pollution?
- Friendly Fandoms: With Fallout, with many fans viewing this game as a worthy successor to the older, isometric view-based Fallout games, and particularly in light of Fallout 76 being widely regarded as a disappointment. Fittingly, this brings it full circle as the first ''Fallout'' game was a Spiritual Successor to the first Wasteland.
- Game-Breaker:
- Crossing over with Good Bad Bugs, the rank 7 Barter perk allows a random piece of junk to be sold for 50 times its price with a 5 percent chance to trigger. One of the junk items you can find by the dozens is scrap which sells for 1 dollar. However, selling the scrap all at once means that if the perk triggers it makes every single piece of scrap worth 50 times its value. Add to that the fact that scrap can also be bought back at 1 dollar and it means that a patient enough player can amass hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few minutes. This was so exploitable it was later patched out.
- Just like in Wasteland 2, shotguns can be absurdly good in the late game. The Jackhammer with a scope, a choke to widen the cone and the perk to increase damage by 25 percent for every enemy caught in the cone means a shotgunner can clear an entire mob provided they’re close enough to one another.
- Submachine Guns are monsters late game. With maxed out Coordination combined with Stormernote and Trigger Happynote perks you can get up to five attacks in a single round, while most firearm types struggle to get two. Add Recklessnote perk on top of it, and a PDW-01 or Ripper submachine guns, and your gunner can destroy entire rooms. This is especially to contrast Wasteland 2, where submachine guns were mostly useless, even after the Director's Cut overhaul of combat mechanics and weapon classes already buffed them significantly.
- While Wasteland 2's exploit of entire squad firing together an opening salvo (and thus obliterating whatever they were shooting at) and then still having all their Action Points in first round no longer works, the "shoot first" trick still works and still can provide a hefty advantage. Namely, use your slowest Ranger to initiate combat. This way, the person that would normally have their move at the dead-end of the queque will instead be the first to fight. Nowhere near as powerful as original exploit, but this still can significantly affect party composiotion and combat efficiency in general.
- The Kodiak APC can render many battles on the Colorado map into mere speed bumps. Literally by just running over the enemies. This can one-shot most foes you encounter, and even the dreaded Scorpitrons can't take much abuse from the Kodiak's mighty treads.
- Jerkass Woobie: Even at his most villainous, its hard not to feel a little bad for the Patriarch, especially if you side against him and end up killing all his kids.
- Like You Would Really Do It: Surprising nobody, Angela Deth is alive and well after her offscreen helicopter crash in Wasteland 2. If you face her in the dramatic final shootout here, however, all bets are off.
- Moment of Awesome:
- The opening battle against the Dorseys on the dam, set to "Blood of The Lamb", is widely regarded as the game's Signature Scene.
- Siding with the Gippers against the Godfishers in Denver leads to a final showdown wherein the player assists in the defense of the "Western White House" with a little help from the God President himself...
Reagan: It's bedtime for bad guys!
- Nightmare Retardant: The game really beats you over the head with how evil and insane Victory is. And in our world, he would definitely fit this description. However, by the time you get to him your group has likely already encountered Los Payasos, the Hard-Heads, the God-Fishers, the Cowboy Cannibals, and the Dorseys. His villainy doesn't really stand out as much more horrific than any of them. In fact, in his own ending, the Payasos prove to be the bigger, scarier monster, and kill him. If anything, it might just be that Vic is being terrible to people he grew up with, which is a weirdly personal kind of horror.
- Sequel Difficulty Drop:
- The Early Game Hell of previous entry is significantly lessened. Ammo and supplies are more common in the starting areas, most early combat encounters have enemies at a disadvantage such as low ground or being placed near explosives, and the revamped Ranger recruitment mechanics allows players to respec or replace custom characters with bad stat allocations.
- Although somewhat less realistic, there is a LOT more cover in this game and fewer battles that take place in big open spaces, giving more options and more use for short-range or melee combatants.
- Signature Scene: The firefight with the Dorseys on the dam while "Blood of the Lamb" plays.
- Slow-Paced Beginning: It's a good thing the game starts with the epic ambush and subsequent fight for revenge/escape. After that sequence, the player is tasked with arresting three different people outside the city of Colorado Springs, and it can be several HOURS before the group even leaves Colorado Springs to explore any of the larger map of Colorado, much less pursue the main objectives.
- Squick: Clarence, the corpse Victory "puppeteers" during your conversation with him at the end of Aspen. Being part of a talking head conversation the corpse is given a disturbing amount of detail and when Vic turns its head so the two can look at each other you can hear squelching. Then his head falls off.
- Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Wasteland 2 was battling against the legendary status of the original game. Sadly, for the most part, it failed miserably: continously postponed release date, awful communication with playtesters, being riddled with bugs on release and generally speaking, and the worst of all, being just bland, with various elements feeling either shallow or needlessly complicated. With such background, Wasteland 3 is a rare case of the developer eating the humble pie, addressing all the issues players had with their game, expanding on the game mechanics that were lackluster and improving both gameplay and quest design in variety of ways. Ironically, the fact that it followed Wasteland 2 was one of its biggest advantages; it had the exact opposite starting point from its predecessor.
- Tear Jerker: Trudy is an old man's only friend, and he asks you to find her. Trudy the dog turns out to have been killed by robots and there's nothing you can do to save her.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: There's a distinct lack of decent factions in the game; the most heroic characters you can encounter are a totalitarian dictator, or a hopelessly naive fool who wants to destroy what little stability Colorado has. One of the few areas where the game has clearly backtracked compared to Wasteland 2 is that in 2, there were almost always a way to overcome the differences between groups and bring them together; in 3, most of the solutions to your problems involve violence. A Golden Ending is possible, but it's so hard to get to that only 1~2% of players ever reach it.
- Unexpected Character: Hobo king Scotchmo, who joined Team Echo in the last game, appears in November's mess hall shortly after you drive out into the wastes for the first time. Even he's surprised — he's under the impression that he's still in Arizona. Once again, despite being stumbling drunk and utterly baffled by most of what's going on, he's a Drunken Master of the shotgun and safecracking.
- Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- Angela Deth. Her plan to depose the Patriarch, assuming you don't do things just right, leaves Colorado in chaos and leads to Arizona either not receiving as much help as they could or being outright abandoned. It doesn’t help that her reason for doing it is because she believes the Patriarch is a tyrant - which is admittedly true. However, she doesn’t hesitate to trick Team November into busting out Ironclad Cordite, who is just as bad if not worse, and unleashing him on Kansas after he helps her; the same exact thing she condemns Patriarch for. All in all it makes her comes across as a Hypocrite with extreme Moral Myopia at worst or Good Is Dumb at best. Not to mention, her plan involves abandoning the people of Arizona which she's actually sworn to defend (which she acknowledges but doesn't seem concerned about) and the wholesale murder of many fellow Rangers by their own comrades. The best ending is actually taking Angela's idea (usurp the Patriarch and bring back Democracy to Colorado) and modifying it extensively without her involvement, only furthering the idea that her method for saving Colorado is far from the best.
- October-11, a synth that in fact is a human child's mind in an adult human looking synth body and seems only to want to survive. However, there's two problems: first, in a straight-up baffling design decision (or flaw) his synth body makes his voice that of a child's despite appearing as an adult, and second, October-11's definition of "survival" is deranged: he's been taught to murder any humans the moment they begin to suspect that he's a synth, claiming "pre-emptive self-defense". This means any human he encounters that perceives a fully grown man with a 5-year old's voice as odd (meaning all of them) is in mortal danger, and October-11 makes clear that he has both murdered before to keep his cover from being blown and that he will not consider changing his ways. Moreover, when you suggest taking him into custody even for his own safety, October-11 freaks out, claiming that he'll kill you, your friends, your whole base the moment your back is turned. However sad his story is, October-11 really leaves you no moral recourse other than putting him out of his misery.
