Funny / Wasteland 3

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy.

• This in-game message should set the tone for what you're in:
  "Look out, there's a big-ass robot ahead! Luckily, it doesn't see you yet. Stay out of its detection range to go unoticed. You can get the first turn in combat by attacking an enemy before it's spotted you. However, we cannot stress enough how badly that robot will fuck you up right now."
• Jarret Dorsey, who has just spent the entirety of his screentime killing Rangers, firing rockets at Rangers to kill them, and ordering other Dorseys to kill them, greets Team November's arrival with an exceptionally chipper "Howdy, hotlanders!"
• Jarret Dorsey is actually the beginning of a bizarre trend in the game, wherein named characters are set up to be bosses, but you never get to fight any of them:
  • Jarret Dorsey is met at the prologue's end atop the Dam and eagerly mentions how much he wants to fight you in melee, to the point that having melee weapons skill gives you a conversation option with him.
    • However, at the end of your conversation, gets his head blown off by Major Prasad; the fight at the top of the dam is with his Dorsey bodyguards instead, while Blood of the Lamb plays.
  • Nelius Dorsey is the dangerous leader of the Dorseys, a Cannibal Clan of monstrous hicks and hunters.
    • If you have Lucia with you, she'll plug him, or he'll kill himself, too full of regrets to shed even more blood in the name of a lost cause.
  • You're told of the leaders of Liberty's Savage Council long before you meet them. You can find notes from their underlings talking about their bosses, and Ironclad Cordite will give you the rundown when you meet him. You further find out about them from the Mechanic in the beginning of the Very Definitely Final Dungeon, Yuma County Speedway. Lecherito, Star-That-Dreams, and Steel-Trap are all dangerous, dangerous men, leading a clown cult, sky-worshipping serial killers, and cyborg slavers, respectively. You are told repeatedly that you must deal with them to get to Liberty, your final goal...
    • And that's true, but "deal with" doesn't have to mean "fight them." In fact, the only time you can fight either Lecherito or Star-That-Dreams personally is if you choose to totally ignore the plot of Yuma County Speedway on both possible routes and simply start shooting up the place.
    • On the Sand in the Tank route, you never fight any of them; Steel-Trap is killed in Dee Sharp's civil war, and Lecherito and Star-That-Dreams kill each other in the Payaso-Godfisher war, both situations Team November ends up creating (so, indirectly, they still get them killed, but not in a battle.)
    • On King Cordite, you do get to fight Steel-Trap in a massive demolition derby, but you still don't fight Lecherito or Star-That-Dreams. Instead, you convince Lecherito to join up with Cordite, and convince the Godfishers to leave in one of three ways: either by killing his favorite wife, Haloed-Moon, and flying her on a kite (at her own command), killing Star-That-Dreams himself and flying him on a kite (Haloed-Moon will lead the Godfishers away, while swearing vengeance), or passing a hard speech check while both are present to convince them that Liberty will get them all killed.
  • Even the Patriarch's most violent son doesn't dodge this treatment. Victory Buchanan is set up as the big, badass boss of the Little Hell that he's made out of Aspen, a sadistic psychopath of a killer. ...And on any conversation path that involves you attacking him, Victory dies, but not in a fight. He either blows himself up with a grenade he drops at his feet, mistakenly thinking it's a smoke grenade, or Team November guns him down without ceremony in the conversation itself.
• This repeated trend makes it almost weirder when named characters do what would be expected in other games, and break out badass on you in a traditional Boss Fight. Faran Brygo, Liberty Buchanan, Angela Deth, and the Patriarch all share this distinction.
• The Busker's song, if you go out of your way to mess with the plot:
  Then before we'd hardly started, we killed the Patriarch on a whim
  Which made it pointless to continue, 'cause the story sorta centered around him
  Yes, our terrible decisions, and random acts of violence broke the game
  For the abruptness of this ending and the briefness of this song, you're to blame
  • For additional Busker-related fun, if you go to the Traveling Buskar in Colorado Springs with companions that are members of the Rangers such as Jodie Bell, and listen to him, they'll actually sing along to it. Jodie has a fun, twangy way... but if you bring Scotchmo, he'll... well, he'll try.
• The servitor bots in Ranger HQ in general are adorably bonkers, if you don't destroy them at the beginning.
  • They cheerfully declare that they will defend "War Roob to last batterby!"
  • If you fix the backlog of issues that's causing them problems, they'll just as cheerfully declare they now possess "more efficient blasting of War Roob's enemies!"
  • The fact that they randomly replace letters with "b", apparently resulting from corruption of their code, makes them sound like they've all either got colds or heavy accents, and given their beepy electronic voices, it's pretty funny.
  • They make a few nonsense noises, and even funnier, explain the meanings of them in plain English. ("'Bee wee oo woooo' means 'By the Commander's will,'" "'Oowanna eeep beep' means 'Existence is painful, please help me.'")
  • Their conversations with Sergei. "Every goddamn day!"
    Servitor Bot: Intruber does not have fur?
    Sergei: Well, I wouldn't want to rule it out...
    Servitor Bot: Then mouse is intruber.
• Junko Maryama, your museum operator, is an endless font of completely misplaced cheer. She treats making her museum and her guided tours like it's the most important thing in the world, totally unaware of the violent and dangerous world she lives in. One pities the poor Ranger who gets stuck being her lackey; almost every time you visit the museum, they'll have a bit of dialogue detailing her latest attempts to improve her museum, and his suffering because of it.
  • Her museum is also pretty funny, given what you know of the Patriarch, and how it eagerly promotes the man while claiming Saul was "too humble" to make this gigantic monument to himself.
  • Later in the game, when you are hunting Synths for Gary Wolfe, the first one is in the museum. If you choose to battle October 11 rather than hack him and kill him instantly, he'll make the museum exhibits rise up and attack. This isn't funny; what is funny is that Baldy, the animatronic eagle tour guide, is not only the only one who isn't attacking you, but will constantly tell you to stop damaging the other exhibits while those animatronics attack you en masse.
• One possible option when talking to the Gippers is "Your god is awesome," which even nets you good Reputation with them!
• During the mission to rescue Ironclad Cordite, if you sneak behind his cell and give him shotgun shells, he'll not only break out to join the fight, but kill one of the guards while declaring "This is for the food." Apparently the Patriarch's prison fare is... subpar.
• If you choose to kill Victory, you get a funny scene no matter how it plays out.
  • If you immediately pick the Attack option, Victory tries to start a boss fight by dropping a smoke grenade at his feet... but in the game's grand tradition, manages to fuck himself over. It wasn't a smoke grenade. Victory blows his own legs off.
  • If you wait to kill him until after you've talked for a bit, and he's making his offer to join the Rangers, you get an even funnier sequence; Team November casually tells him they're going to kill him, and Victory, who thought he had a free pass to be a complete monster because the Patriarch wanted him alive, says his last words — "Wait, what?" — with utter shock as Team November unceremoniously plugs him. Given Victory's clear Joker inspirations, his surprise, and the lack of drama surrounding plugging him, comes off as a bit of a Take That! to Joker Immunity.
• Kind of meta-funny, but if you are either forced to — or simply choose to — fight Liberty, the mere fact that you do fight her is almost funny by itself, given how much this game loves to set up boss fights with named characters and then avert them without warning. Apparently Liberty doesn't obey anyone's rules — not her father's, and not the game's!
• Vic will betray you if you choose to side with his father and he readies his weapon for combat, only for Sergeant Gretski to conk him over the head before the fight starts.
• On the King Cordite route of dealing with Liberty's gang allies, you encounter a member of the Scar Collectors named Beta Master (due to the distinction of having the only working Betamax player in Colorado). Along with being a coward, he's also clearly a pervert of the highest order and not too bright. How do you find this out? When you first approach him, he reacts with extreme fear to Ironclad Cordite's presence and manages to stammer his way through the following conversation.

  Beta Master: Who—? Shit! Cordite! Uh, y-y-you're not still mad at me, are you?
  Ironclad Cordite: (contemptuously) I don't even remember you.
  Beta Master: Oh, well, uh, I asked you a...question last time, and you got mad. I won't ask you again, but...can I ask your friends?
  Ironclad Cordite: I don't give a damn.
  Beta Master: Th-thanks. (He turns to you) Uh, so, hey, you're kinda hot. How'd you like me to take your picture?

  • Why yes, I imagine that would rather make the ruthless and violent slaver plains warlord rather upset! Beta Master compounds this (and further disgusts Cordite and most of your companions) by admitting he stalks Liberty Buchanan to record video footage of her for 'private viewing.' The man does not know when to stop risking his life antagonizing some very dangerous people for reasons that are very much not worth it.
• Young Man Winters from the Steeltown DLC: A man in a bear suit acting like a bear — who is very committed to the bit, to the point you need Animal Whisperer to get him to join you. He communicates entirely in spoken bear noises and helps out in combat by throwing yellow snowballs at enemies. What really sells it is how your companions react to him.

  Ironclad Cordite: There is a man committed to a cause. Even if that cause is stupid.

• The very first sidequest you can get in the Steeltown DLC... is getting a port-a-potty for the refugees camped outside its walls. It's a shitstorm of Toilet Humor, from being able to tell the questgiver "this sounds like a shit job" to the fact that the reward for getting the toilet installed and cleaned — which takes Chemical Neutralizers, a status-healing recovery item — is that Team November can then use the toilet themselves in a glorious aversion of Nobody Poops, granting a minor status effect that provides multiple small bonuses.
  • There's one more brief burst of Toilet Humor later in the DLC. When Team November infiltrates the Ghost's base, a high Perception will allow them to find Blue's secret semi-sentient toilet, Secret Head. The entire conversation is funny, but in particular the way Secret Head says it provides "companionship" — Team November can ask "C...companionship?" Reminder, this is the team that can fuck a goat in Little Vegas, and even they are deeply concerned about what Secret Head means. Thankfully it's not actually that weird — Blue just likes to talk while he's on the can and provided Secret Head knowledge of a lot of books to talk about.
• One possible option for handling the Dorseys holed up in Josiah's clothing shop is to point out that they're in a clothing shop, and could just put on some civilian clothing and walk right out of town. If you convince both them and Josiah to stand down, they'll do exactly that... However, not only do they have the fashion sense you'd expect from blood-crazed psychos, one of them will leave without taking off their highly-conspicuous horned raiding mask. Masters of subterfuge and deception.

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