inXile announces Wasteland 3 - and it's got multiplayer

inXile has announced Wasteland 3.

The party-based post-apocalyptic role-playing game sequel is set for launch on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One at the same time as PC, Mac and Linux.

inXile said to expect vehicles, environmental dangers and a revamped, more fluid action system.

But the headline new feature is story-driven synchronous or asynchronous multiplayer. You also get to improve your Ranger Base.

Wasteland 3 is set in frozen Colorado. There's a revamped dialog tree system from the writers of Torment: Tides of Numenera, inXile's in-development fantasy RPG.

You start the game as the sole survivor of Team November, a Ranger squad. In Colorado, no-one has ever heard of the Desert Rangers, so you have to build your reputation from scratch.

In multiplayer, you and a friend both control your own squad of Rangers. While the core of Wasteland 3 is a single-player experience, if you play with a friend while both online, you can share missions. But you can also split up and cover more ground.

Once a game is started, you can play Wasteland while your friend is offline and do missions without them. But your decisions have consequence, so you can destroy what your friend has worked to accomplish while they're not around.

As for the vehicles, your ranger uses an upgradeable vehicle for travel. You can use it to store goods, explore and survive. You can even use it as cover in combat.

inXile said core parts of the team, such as writers and artists, are wrapping up on Torment right now, and are rolling directly into Wasteland 3 pre-production.

As with previous inXile games, Wasteland 3 will be crowdfunded. But it's ditching Kickstarter in favour of Fig, the program set up by video game developers including Double Fine's Tim Schafer that lets people not just back projects, but invest in them. (inXile's Brian Fargo is on the Fig advisory board.)

The Wasteland 3 Fig campaign launches next week, 5th October, with a funding target of $2.75m. Of that, $2.25m is the maximum inXile will take for equity. The minimum investment is $1000, but if you want to simply back the project you can do so at a much smaller amount.

Prototype images are below.