My Experiences with Wasteland 2: Director's Cut On Linux

The game begins with a surprisingly well-done live action cutscene. This cutscene introduces the players to The Desert Rangers, and gives the story of Wasteland in a way that makes you care about the people in the world, and the people you get your quests from at Ranger Command. The people you are introduced to are not gods or superheroes. They are not legends of the past. They are not perfect. They are flawed humans, in a flawed world, trying to do the best they can to help preserve the sanity and safety of the old world from those who would use the apocalypse to embrace chaos and senseless violence-- and you are one of them.

Following the cutscene, your squad of four is dropped into the game world. Your squad were members of the audience that the speech in the cutscene was directed to. You are given your orders, and set loose on the Wasteland.

Traveling throughout the Wasteland is handled via the World Map, shown below. Your squad is represented by the badge of the Desert Rangers, and throughout the Wasteland you will find towns, villages, oases, ruins, caves, hidden caches of weapons and ammo, and much more. At any time you might be beset upon by a roaming band of Raiders or wild animals. How well your squad is positioned for these encounters, or whether you can skip them entirely, is determined by one of your squadmate's having a high Outdoors skill.

I won't say the game is gorgeous, it has the looks of something a few years older than it is, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. inXile made a choice; they chose to focus upon the world crafted by their story, and by the gameplay that their combat and skill systems evoke. Whether the game is Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, FTL: Faster Than Light, or an Enhanced Edition of an older game... I will take solid gameplay and an engaging story over the latest in flashy graphics.

The Problems:

Immediately following character creation, and the ending of the cutscene, I was stuck. The game tried to begin the opening conversation with General Vargas, but nothing was displayed in the text box, and the game appeared to be frozen. Thankfully, I was able to kill the game's process. It took several hours of poking around on forums, reading through crash reports for other users and more, before I nailed down the problem. It's a bug in Unity, the game engine behind Wasteland 2, as confirmed by inXile.

Linux imposes a limit to the number of files a singular process can have open at any given time. If they try to open more, they are denied. Windows has no such limit-- you are free to open as many files as your computer can handle. Thankfully, on Linux, this limit is configurable by editing /etc/security/limits.conf with your preferred text editor.

At the bottom of a file are two lines, one that begins with "soft nofile", and one that says "hard nofile." On my system, Fedora 23, this was set to be about 4000. I changed my two lines to read:

soft nofile 8192
hard nofile 16384

and the game proceeded just fine thereafter. A developer for inXile noted that a modern computer could very likely handle 16 million files, or more, open at once, so do not edit those lines in fear.

I also experienced the occasional deadlock during gameplay. These were not common nor consistent- taking place randomly in the game world, though usually only after several hours of gameplay. No immediate fix was found, though truthfully I was not bothered by these enough to be looking too hard for a fix.

The Verdict:

If you are someone who enjoys Sci-Fi games, such as Fallout 3 & 4, or tactical games, like XCOM and the original Fallouts, then I cannot recommend this game enough. My impression from playing Fallout 4 was that Bethesda should pull the next game back a bit -- re-embrace the roots of Fallout 1&2-- and Wasteland 2 perfectly exemplifies those roots.

Wasteland 2: Director's Cut was developed by inXile Entertainment and is available on Steam and GOG for $39.99.

A note for readers: I was originally going to follow this review up by reviewing Divinity Original Sin: Enhanced Edition. Unfortunately, DOS:EE requires OpenGL 4.2, thus making it unavailable to the Intel and RadeonSI drivers, and running Fedora makes Catalyst unavailable to me. Hopefully RadeonSI/Intel quickly pick up a few more OpenGL extensions as there is a game coming out in February that I am immensely looking forward to playing and reviewing.