Wasteland 2

Wasteland 2 features a semi-overhead view with a rotatable camera. It is a turn-based and party-based role-playing game with tactical combat. The player's party has room for seven characters, including the four player-designed characters and up to three non-player characters (NPCs). The player characters are highly customizable and the player's choice of statistics, skills, and appearance gives them an individualized personality. The non-player characters in the party each have their own personality, motivations, opinions, and agendas.

The game is set in an alternate history timeline, in which a nuclear war between the United States and Soviet Union took place in 1998 in relation to an impact event involving a cluster of meteors that sparked a global nuclear war. On the day of the cataclysm, a company of U.S. Army Engineers were in the desolate southwestern desert constructing bridges in an area with a number of small survivalist communities and a newly constructed federal death row prison with light industrial facilities. The soldiers sought shelter in the prison, expelled the inmates, and invited nearby survivalists to join them shortly thereafter. Years later, together they formed "the Desert Rangers, in the great tradition of the Texas and Arizona Rangers", to help other survivors in the desert and beyond it.

The game begins fifteen years after the events of the original Wasteland (which was set in 2087), with the Rangers now occupying the former Guardian Citadel, which had formerly housed deranged technology-worshipping monks (the Guardians), but is now fully under Ranger control after the monks had been wiped out by the Rangers. The experienced ranger Ace is found dead by locals with signs of violence on his body. This greatly troubles General Vargas, the leader of the Desert Rangers. General Vargas, just a few days prior, sent Ace out to investigate a strange radio signal that speaks of "man and machine becoming one" while threatening to attack and wipe out the Desert Rangers. Controlling a squad of newly recruited rangers, the player is tasked with finding out who killed Ace and why they did it, and try to complete Ace's original mission.

In 2003, inXile Entertainment, founded by Wasteland's producer and co-designer, Brian Fargo, acquired the rights to Wasteland from Electronic Arts, which had let the rights lapse and handed them to Fargo after a discussion with him. In June 2007, Fargo stated: "I am indeed looking into bringing back the game that spawned the Fallout series. Stay tuned..." In November 2007, Fallout fan website Duck and Cover reported on possible concept art images from Wasteland 2 displayed in the main header of the inXile Entertainment website.

On February 16, 2012, inXile announced their plans to have a crowd funded production of a new Wasteland game, inspired by Double Fine's recent success of using Kickstarter to fund Double Fine Adventure; it was one of a number of games to be funded in the video game crowdfunding boom that followed the success of Double Fine Adventure. Project director Brian Fargo has reassembled key team members from the original Wasteland: Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole, Ken St. Andre and Liz Danforth, as well as the early Fallout games' designer Jason Anderson (Anderson, however, left the company in December 2010). The composer Mark Morgan, who created the soundtracks for Fallout and Fallout 2, was also hired to compose music for the game.

Wasteland 2 received generally positive reviews from critics. The game holds an aggregate score of 80.70% on GameRankings based on 32 reviews and a score of 81/100 on Metacritic based on 54 reviews. The game generated a revenue of $1.5 million in its first 4 days of release, and sold roughly 350,000 copies by May 2015. In September 2016, Fargo stated that inXile had earned $12 million from sales of the game.

Leif Johnson of IGN praised its story writing and branching storyline impacted by the player's choices. Daniel Starkey of GameSpot lauded its environmental graphics and tactical gameplay. Alasdair Duncan of Destructoid wrote that it "delivers exactly what was expected". Richard Cobbett of Eurogamer stated, "it's very clearly made with love to be true to the original game while still learning from the games that followed."