Mad Max Wasteland Lore 101

During our trip to its Stockholm offices, Avalanche Studios worked to cultivate a sense of mystery about Mad Max’s Wasteland.

During our trip to its Stockholm offices, Avalanche Studios worked to cultivate a sense of mystery about Mad Max’s Wasteland. For example, if you’re curious about where the Wasteland is on the globe, you may be out of luck. There are clues scattered throughout the canyons, caves, and deserts that point to what this desolate area may have been before the apocalypse hit, but it’s not something that’s spelled out for players. Today, we’re going to tell you as much as we can about the Wasteland itself.

We’ve talked about this before, but it’s important to note that the Wasteland isn’t a featureless expanse of tawny sand dunes or flatlands that extend as far as Max’s eyes can see. Avalanche was wary of that sort of visual monotony from the start. You won’t see trees, lakes, or vegetation, but that doesn’t mean you won’t see things that will make you want to hit the brakes, get out of the Magnum Opus, and take a better look. “That’s been a challenge,” says Emil Kraftling, senior design director. The team has worked to keep it from being a boring desert. “If you go to different wastelands in our world, they don’t look similar.”

The Wasteland is separated into different regions, each of which has a unique story to tell. If you’ve been following our earlier coverage, you know that several of those regions are located in and around a dried-up seabed. The Great White is in the southern part of the Wasteland, and it’s where players will likely spend their first hours.

“There’s a lighthouse that’s Jeet’s stronghold, and there’s an oil rig down there,” says Magnus Nedfors, design director. “They’re typical landmarks that you would see on the sea, but now they are part of the land. Along the northern border of the Great White is the former harbor of a bigger city. Another region used to be a more rural area, where the further you go, the more industrial it becomes. You have an industrial harbor. We want the player to go around and observe ruins and go, ‘Oh, this could have been a this or that.’”

Before laying out the Wasteland, the team had to first imagine what the area may have looked like before the ocean pulled back,“ Kraftling says. “In the beginning of the project we had a fictional map of how it looked before bad things happened. We started out with like, ‘Here’s the road network it looked like this, the harbor goes here,’ and stuff like that. It started out that way.”

“We did a process [of asking], ‘How does the world look? Let’s build it up and then knock it down.’” Fuller says. “It’s the same sort of process that we went through with the exploration. It is one of the exciting exploratory aspects of the game – not just exploring the geography, but exploring the social structure and the power structure and what is it that makes certain enemy types or certain colonials or generals or whatever, where they are. ‘What’s the value of this type of life versus this type of life,’ those questions.