Wasteland 3 update 1.3.3 revealed, brings permadeath & respeccing this month

Update: This article originally stated that the Wasteland 3 update 1.3.3 patch would arrive next month. However, PR from inXile reached out and advised us that the patch is scheduled to arrive sometime in March.

Wasteland 3 is getting a new patch this month. The upcoming update will include a number of fixes, as well as new features to help users enhance and change up their experience.

inXile shared news of the upcoming patch, lovingly titled “Deaths & Taxes” in a blog post on its website earlier today. The post starts out by addressing much of the community’s response to “story mode”, a much easier variant of the game that took a lot of the challenge out of it so players could focus on the game’s narrative.

With update 1.3.3, though, Wasteland 3 will receive a number of features that players can activate to make their entire experience much more difficult, including a permadeath mode, and difficult skill checks. Here’s a quick breakdown of what permadeath mode includes:

Instead of becoming Incapacitated when life runs out, party members permanently DIE. This is really going to bum someone out who didn’t read the fine print.

When a party member dies, they will dump their equipment to the local party’s shared inventory. Though they may not still be with you in your journey, at least you've robbed their corpse of their worldly belongings.

Once a party member shuffles off their mortal coil, their Party Portrait is removed from the HUD and other game interfaces, and they can no longer be selected or used. This is because they are dead.

Lest you thought that you would be able to commune with the dead via the Party Screen back at HQ, you cannot. Much as necromancers would have you believe otherwise, you cannot add the dead back into your party.

God forbid, if all Rangers in your party are killed permanently at any one time, you will earn a non-negotiable, do-not-pass-go, Game Over death screen. This is because the light of life has been extinguished from the party and the forces of evil have triumphed. Unless you were the forces of evil, in which case perhaps the forces of light and good prevailed when they killed you.

Difficult skill checks will also make it much harder for players that want an extra taste of mud and blood in their mouths. When enabled, this feature will increase all skill checks in the game by +2, making any jack-of-all-trade characters obsolete.

Probably one of the most request features in any RPG ever, respeccing is finally coming to Wasteland 3. According to the patch notes, you can only respec at Ranger HQ, and you’ll only be able to do it twice for each Ranger before you have to start dishing out money to make it happen.

“No one teaches for free,” inXile writes in the post. “So, expect to shell out some in-game coin to be able to do so [respec].”

We’ll keep an eye out for the full patch notes when they drop later this month, for now, check out the rest of our Wasteland 3 coverage right here on Shacknews.