By Evie Moriarty, Lead Game Designer
Photo by Fatima Martín Pérez

Wasteland Warfare has had a long and at times complex development history. It was always really a sandbox game – a collection of lots of options that you could assemble in whatever way you wanted to make the game yours. Depending on what you choose to include, it could be a versus battle game, a solo exploration game, or even a full-blown roleplaying game. This versatility was part of its strength, but it was also a huge weakness.

The sheer variety of gameplay experiences made development and writing for it an enormous challenge. Everything needed to be used in countless ways and to fit together with everything else in whatever combinations people fancied. Even more complicated, the game was never really designed with this in mind; it was something that accrued organically over time. This meant the game became progressively more unwieldy as time went on. That slowed us down in the studio and limited the amount of content we could put out for you all.

The sheer complexity of the game was extremely intimidating for new players. Slowly discovering there’s a curated collection of options is fantastic for a game, but arriving on the scene to discover an array of possibilities with no way to determine where to start is something else. We had huge amounts of feedback that this needed to change, that people needed a clear, distinct place to start, without sacrificing the comprehensive experience experienced players love. We wanted to build a miniatures game that fits your lifestyle, not a lifestyle miniatures game.

The solution for us was to focus on one key part of the game that we feel distinguishes it from most other games: the solo and cooperative experience. By envisioning this as a solo first game, we can curate a lot of the experience more carefully. 

We still have rules for versus games in the book, but we keep them to one side so newer players don’t have to worry about them, instead focusing on making the best possible solo experience. Of course, we have another game that focuses on the versus player experience: Fallout: Factions. We firmly believe that if you want a tense, competitive experience that is easy to learn and fun to play, then Factions is the product you should look at. It’s designed from the ground up to do that, and does it exceptionally well. Some people had wondered if we would put solo rules into Factions or expand the campaign system to allow for exploration. The answer is that, to do that, would be to make it something it wasn’t. Factions is a fantastic versus game where you control a crew of models, and we should let it shine in that space.

But that leaves a big swathe of exciting Fallout miniatures action that isn’t covered: solo play, cooperative gaming, exploration of the Wasteland, ongoing campaigns with characters that change and grow, customisable equipment, and negotiating relationships with other factions out in the wastes. The new edition of Wasteland Warfare is our answer for where to go for this experience. We’ve honed it to make it that experience to its bones, cut a few things that were confusing the experience, and sharpened the rest to focus on this core gameplay.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll explore the changes, the mechanics, and much more. Stay tuned!