Wasteland 3 Patch v1.3.3 “Death & Taxes” Now Live

Thanks to the latest patch for inXile Entertainment’s post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 3, you can now play through the game with permadeath enabled. This aptly-subtitled “Death & Taxes” patch also introduces some extra-difficult skill checks, a respec option, a bunch of new customization options, and a host of miscellaneous improvements.

Here are some highlights:

Highlights

Permadeath

• Permanent Death (aka Permadeath) is here to challenge your sanity. This is an optional mode that can only be enabled when starting a new game.
• If enabled, your squad members will be permanently killed if their Downed timer during combat expires. Once they’re dead, they’re dead forever. How death normally works.
• Permadeath is a single player-only mode.

Difficult Skill Checks

• Difficult Skill Checks is here to challenge your squad-building prowess. This is an optional mode that can only be enabled when starting a new game.
• If enabled when starting a new game, all Skill, Attribute, and Perception checks are increased by +2 over their base value (up to a max of 10). This applies to in-world interactions, conversations, and equipment requirements.
• We recommend this only for veteran players who want an extra challenge that puts their squad optimization to the test.

Retraining

• You can now respec your squad members to reallocate their Attributes, Skills, and Perks!
• While at Ranger HQ, a new “Retrain” option is available in the Manage Squad screen, which refunds all points to be spent again. This excludes unique gameplay bonuses such as Cyborg Tech and the Tarjan Machine perks, and any Quirks chosen at character creation.
• Retraining characters has a cost which is shared with Recruiting new Rangers.

Recruitment Cost

• Recruiting at Ranger HQ now incurs a cost that is shared with Retraining.
• The cost is waived for the first two Rangers recruited from Ranger HQ.
• The Recruitment/Retrain cost starts at $200 and increases 1.75x (rounded to the nearest $50) with each use, up to a maximum of $3000.

New Character Customization Options

• Since you’ll need to start a new game to turn on permadeath and difficult skill checks, we have 23 new character customization options to use including helmets, masks, makeup, scars, and tattoos are available.
• Multiple helmets were designed alongside renowned post-apocalyptic costume designers for this update. Check inXile-entertainment.com for photos and info.

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.