Wasteland 2 Beta receives major pre-release update

All Supaflies and Megamaggots must perish.

Those of you in the Wasteland 2 Beta may have noticed a 5GB update showing up on Steam. This is likely to be the last substantial update/patch to the Beta version of the game before the official launch later in August.

Update: Actually, a post on their Kickstarter page suggests an early September release is now more likely.

To say it changes a few things would be something of an understatement. The Wasteland 2 tumblr that keeps a full, detailed track of these things has an absolutely gigantic changelog on on it. I’m not going to reproduce absolutely everything from that, but if you wish to read it it’s over here.

As with all of these updates, it will completely invalidate and break former Wasteland 2 saved games.

For the purposes of this news post, I’ll stick to the “highlights” version of the update:

• Now featuring: local area map
• Full dropset pass (from enemies/crates/vendors/rewards/NPCs)
• Lots of new optimizations to memory and load times
• Large balance pass to weapons with better feedback on weapons stats
• Large balance pass to enemies
• Huge amount of UI improvements (both functionality and visually)
• Tons of new audio (all levels have new ambient audio, new sounds for weapons, player events)

Steam should start downloading the update automatically, or at least say it has an “update queued” for you. If not, try restarting the client and see if that helps it show up. You can read the IncGamers Beta impressions of Wasteland 2 (from a couple of updates ago,) here.