The recently released Wasteland 3 has a total of 4 difficulty options at the start. Each of these difficulty options continues to gradually increase the game’s difficulty. Higher difficulties also tend to have certain damage modifiers that let you take more damage from enemies. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to go through an overview of what different difficulty options do in WL3 before making your decision. In this Wasteland 3 guide, we’ll walk you through all the difficulty settings in the game to help you make an informed decision.
Wasteland 3 Difficulty Settings
There are a total of 4 different difficulty settings in Wasteland 3. While it’s always recommended to do your research before choosing your desired difficulty setting at the start of the campaign, you can always change it should you find the game too difficult or easy – it’s entirely your call! Aside from this, you can also toggle friendly-fire on or off since it can quickly become a nuisance for some players.
- Rookie – It’s the easiest difficulty during which you won’t have to worry about enemies. If you wish to enjoy the story without worrying about getting shot from every possible angle, this is the right difficulty for you. If you haven’t ever played an XCOM or similar title, this is the one you should consider going with.
- Seasoned – This is the game’s normal difficulty mode. If you want a balanced mode without too much focus on either story or hard enemies, this is the one you should pick.
- Ranger – This is the difficulty setting where you’ll start noticing that enemies hit quite hard and aren’t to be taken lightly. Another thing that you need to keep in mind is that the friendly fire is toggled in this mode.
- Supreme Jerk – This is the hardest WL3 difficulty out there. Apart from the friendly fire being active, enemies will hit like a truck. Under no circumstance, we’d recommend choosing this during your first playthrough.
That’s all we’ve got in our Wasteland 3 difficulty settings guide. If you are interested in learning more about the game then you can check out our guide on skill books. If you are facing issues running the game on PC then you can check out our errors guide. Feel free to check out our detailed Wasteland 3 wiki for more help on the game.
The jump from easy to normal is quite the thing. I’m a skilled and experienced TBRPG player, but depending on the game I don’t like to have to pull out all the stops to win (XCom is an exception) I’d rather play around with different silly strategies than be forced to use the optimal ones. The jump bothers me not just because I want a “casual challenge” difficulty, but because of the *way* the difficulty increases. On normal mode I was surprised to find the enemies consistently having drastically more health (easily 5x), dealing just as much damage (or more) starting fights with charged abilities, and seizing the initiative for devastating 1st turns against my grouped up and exposed party.
Adapting to this situation wasn’t exactly hard, but it wasn’t fun either. On NORMAL difficulty I rarely get to win a fight through just being tougher/ more badass than the enemy. I have to dump bullets, rockets or turrets in most cases. But then I tried an easy mode go and it’s just…. you could actively try to lose and still win somehow.