Greetings Rangers,
We launched Wasteland 3 just two weeks ago, and if it was a nonstop effort before we launched, it’s definitely been nonstop since. In a lot of ways launching a game is not when work stops, but when it starts, and we got right to work on taking in bug reports, feedback, and working toward making fixes and improvements as quickly as possible. One thing we discovered as bug reports came in is that our testing process had been too focused, and not enough time had been spent playing the game naturally as an end user would. We’re going to have some deep discussions and post-mortems on our processes going forward, but what’s important right now is getting issues addressed.
None of this is intended to minimize the issues, but we want to share more details about what we’re seeing and how we’re working hard to address the most impactful ones. For those of you that have had a poor experience, or outright couldn’t play, we sincerely apologize, and are making fixes and improvements as quickly as possible.
We’ve already released a hotfix and the 1.1.0 patch, and the next one—update 1.1.1—will be out toward the end of next week. Rest assured, as soon as we have a fix for a major issue we’re doing our best to get a patch out. We’ll certainly have more that we want to address after this update, but ensuring major blockers and crashes are resolved is our number one priority.
Some of the most challenging issues have been for our Xbox One and PlayStation 4 players, with general game stability. While we’ve made some improvements with the two patches since launch, we know there’s more to do. In the next update we’ll have a fix for most (not all) of the issues leading to crashes, and they should go much further in helping improve game stability. We know this has been frustrating for many of you, and we’re going to continue devoting time and effort toward it for as long as we need to.
Another annoying bug we’ve been trying to squash has been the co-op “33% loading” issue, where in co-op you may not be able to load into a new map and get stuck at the 1/3 mark. We thought we had this one fixed, but it’s been difficult because we just weren’t able to reproduce it internally more than one or two times. We got desperate enough that we actually put out a bug bounty internally to the first employee that could reproduce it. We also enlisted some of you to help, and worked directly with co-op teams out there to get more in-depth logs using development builds. Thanks to those efforts we’re pretty sure we’ve finally been able to nail this one down.
These obviously aren’t encapsulating all the items we’re working on or that will be in the 1.1.1 update, but we wanted to give you some insight into our focus and process supporting Wasteland 3 and its players into the foreseeable future. Hopefully before too long we’ll be able to start sharing some of our ideas for how we want to add to and expand the experience, but right now we’re focused on ensuring you can enjoy the game as it is.
Keep the bug reports and feedback coming, and we’ll see you in the wasteland.
- Wasteland 3 Dev Team