Wasteland 3 Character Build Guide: Which Attributes and Skills Should You Pick?

Wasteland 3 is finally here, and the long-running RPG franchise is a hit - with a PC Metacritic rating of a whopping 86%.

As is perhaps to be expected, the titular wasteland is an unforgiving place, which means having the right team, equipment, and skills is incredibly important.

It also means you'll want each of your team to be able to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses.

Here's a guide to building out your first party.

Wasteland 3 Character Build Guide

At the outset, you'll build two characters or settle for premade options. If you're opting for a custom character (which you really should, despite them being somewhat of a "blank slate" personality-wise), you'll need to be mindful of skills and attributes.

These are two different concepts, and learning the difference is fundamental to getting through Wasteland 3's meaty campaign. Here's a quick primer:

Skills: These are learnable traits, such as healing ability or how well your character wields their weapon of choice.

Attributes: These are essentially passive stats, so they'll help determine how strong or smart your character is.

You'll get 14 attribute points at the start of your journey, and building a specialised character is a must. Even if you end up with a slow, unlucky, unaware Ranger that's really charismatic, you'll be able to boost those attributes throughout the course of the game.

Here's a super quick primer to each attribute:

• Coordination: This essentially determines the amount of action points you have to spend in each turn, making it incredibly important.
• Luck: This can help you punch through enemy armour plating a little easier, as well as "lucky actions" throughout the course of your game.
• Awareness: This increases your hit chance and accuracy, as well as spot traps and loot.
• Strength: Increased health is the order of the day here.
• Speed: This allows you to get a little closer by travelling further each turn, making it ideal for melee characters. Then there's the increased evasion, too.
• Intelligence: This increases your chance at critical hits.
• Charisma: This attribute buffs your experience boosts, as well as the special move charge speed.

When it comes to skills, there's no "hard and fast" rule for how to spec your character, but we'd advise against making an all-rounder since you can set up each party member to be a specialist in something.

Skills fall into combat, general, exploration and social categories.

• Combat: Be sure to set up a couple of melee characters, lest you run out of ammo and have to kill enemies with bad breath and foul language.
• General: Ranging from recruiting animals to do your bidding, to "Sneaky Sh*t" which helps you disable alarms and prepare ambushes.
• Exploration: These range from repairs, survival, lockpicking and "Nerd Stuff", which is essentially hacking and extra dialogue options.
• Social: These skills (like the delightful "Kiss Ass") can increase conversation options, which can in turn open up new quests or talk your way out of trouble.