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If you prefer newer games, or at least nothing "older" in sensibility than the Baldur's Gate or original Fallout games, then I'd recommend starting with Wasteland 2.
Either way, I'd definitely recommend reading some of the starting tip guides available here on Steam to help give you a better understanding/start-up going into the games.
Wasteland 2 is a VERY different game from Wasteland 1, in terms of game mechanics. It's more tile based strategy and tactics, like XCOM. And Wasteland 3 is a streamlined and somewhat quicker version of Wasteland 2. The story get's carried over from one game to the next, but not in such a way that you's HAVE to play them in canonical order to understand what to do.
Rangers fight robots in a dystopian future is a pretty pervasive theme throughout all three. There's also a lot of "adult" jokes and stuff that refers to the 1980s and 90s, and the plot does start with W1 and progress through time, linearly, into 2 and then 3. If you really care about story, you might want to read about it, but there's no reason you can't play Wasteland 3 without having played W1 and W2.
I'll tell you a story. Sorry, but it's kinda LONG. In the 1980s, my older brother had this game called Zork on his computer, (which was a Commodore 64 I think, I'm wicked old, and he's like 10 years older than me). So this game, Zork, is a text based adventure game where you type in stuff like "get ye flask" and it says "you now have a flask" etc. My brother, being well read in English Literature, believes in the "Chekov's gun" theory of play writing. That is, the idea that every minor detail that get's mentioned in a story must have a designed purpose for being there, or else it should be weeded out of the writing because it would be a distraction from the actual story if it's not totally necessary. Chekov, the playwritght once said that "If your main character picks up a gun in the first act, somebody should be shooting it by the end of the play, or else it's superfluous and should just not be there in the first place" or something to that effect.
So my brother is playing Zork, and in this game you wander around this fantasy landscape around this old house and you collect treasures that you then put in a trophy case in the house, as if retrieving the owner's lost trinkets from the various people and creatures that stole them. When you get to the house in the early part of the game, you find a brown paper bag containing something described only as a "lunch". The lunch is not a valuable gold or jeweled item, so it has no place in the trophy case, and there doesn't seem to be anything to do with the lunch, so it seems out of place or superfluous in the Chekov sense. So my brother decides "well, the purpose of a lunch is for it to be eaten, so maybe if I try to eat it I'll find whatever treasure it leads me to, somehow." so he eats the lunch, and then nothing.
Like FIFTY game playing HOURS later, he winds up in a maze in an underground cave and in this maze there's a cyclops with a giant ruby (which definitely goes in the trophy case). The cyclops cannot be beaten in combat and is described as being ravenously hungry. The ONLY ITEM in the ENTIRE game that you can trade to the cyclops to get the ruby from him is that damn lunch, which my brother ate as soon as he found it, thinking it was necessary to the story to eat the lunch to find out what it does. I mean, it's food, so it's there for you to eat it, right? What else could it possibly do in the game? That was where my brother rage quit Zork.
That was the kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ design typical of 1980s games for you, in a nutshell. And remember, this was a time BEFORE most computers had a mouse. You played Wasteland with just a keyboard in the old days.
Wasteland 1 has far too many skills that you have the option of taking ranks in which end up being a totally worthless waste of skill points, time, and thought on the player's part, ultimately. There are behind-the-DM-screen pseudo-dice-roll calculations that require high levels of Ability Scores you probably thought were totally unrelated. The stat that modifies your roll to hit chance in melee, if you're using Brawling as your attack mode (which you absolutely should), is Luck, for example. Also there are other melee skills ( Knife Fighting and Pugilism), both of which are vastly inferior to Brawling, not that you'd ever guess that from reading the descriptions. Clip Pistol, the skill that you use to shoot the crappy guns they start you off with is so sub-par that it should be avoided altogether and you should just sell the guns, and the ammo they give you and just use Brawling to hit critters with the crowbars they give everybody. They start every Ranger with a mirror. Having a mirror turns out to be completely unnecessary and only slightly AIDS you in one part of the early game, then you never need it again. It's as if the devs wanted you to THINK you might need this crap but then decided to just NOT use it ever again, thus making your decision to carry a mirror around a bad one, ultimately.
So Wasteland 1 isn't a game you explore, it's a game you read up spoilers about and then do that stuff to win it.
Modern games suck exactly because you don't have to put any thought into them. Might as well play the original sims where you didn't accomplish anything, but they kept you clicking non-stop so you thought you were having a good time.
OP, as someone who's never played the original, I can tell you that the game is very confusing without a guide: from the basics of how to use the character's skills, IQ or DEX to accomplish tasks that needs to be learned when starting, to some of the puzzles or ways to progress in the game, to some essential items needing to be found by performing a random perception check on altars or tables in bases, a guide was essential for me to finish the game. If you chose to go without a guide, expect alot of head aches and failure before you find the solution. Personally, for me, it's not the 80s anymore and I don't have the time to bash my head on some vague moon logic game puzzles that were designed in the dawn of computer game design just to progress in a game.
I may not have a medal give you, but I do have an award, so it's yours.
I agree. Too many modern games treat players like they are idiots. There's a difference between a casual, relaxing game where you shouldn't need to think about anything and a deep RPG where you SHOULD have to think about EVERYTHING. But many developers try to make RPG's too casual. It's sad. It's the same for many other genres also.
P.S. Why do people have to be jerks? Honestly, what is with them? Everybody, please be polite and kind to your fellow man.
And that's just the inefficient combat skills that are to be avoided. There are also a bunch of non combat skills you will basically never need, but you don't know that going in, so you could spend like 60+ hours of game play time waiting for that Forgery/Bureaucracy skill to come in handy and it NEVER will. They should have either A) added in some skill checks that might get you something for using those skills or B) taken the skills themselves out of the game since they NEVER EVER get you anything. They're just a skill point sink for gullible idiots.