Wasteland 3 update will make the swearing parrot more sweary

A party of Rangers accompanied by their cats

(Image credit: InXile Entertainment)

In the lead-up to Wasteland 3 expansion The Battle of Steeltown, due on June 3, InXile Entertainment is outlining its next free update, patch 1.4.0. Part of the focus is an upgrade of the animal companion system, and that means Polly the swearing parrot will get an even fouler mouth. Beak? Whatever.

Polly is getting a Demoralize ability to make use of those swears, and all your animal companions will now have a kennel to return to. If you dismiss them they'll head back to the kennel, making it easier to recruit them again. Type limits are going away as well, meaning that instead of just having one of each animal you can have multiple goats, or cats, or chickens, with icons and health bars noting which of your party members has which pet incorporated in their character portraits.

On the subject of companions, bugs that meant human and robotic followers could sometimes vanish mid-game are finally being fixed, which is great. I realized Provost had gone missing deep into my own playthrough and didn't want to reload an hours-old save just to bring him back.

Head over to InXile's feature preview to hear the parrot in action. There's a separate preview of the crafting system that'll be part of patch 1.4.0 as well, letting you turn scrap into gear including new weapons like the W.A.S.P. gun, which is a gun that fires wasps instead of bullets. With that and my party full of cats, the wasteland will be even wilder when I return.

Here are the best Wasteland 3 character builds.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.