Brian Fargo Interview

EDGE has a brief article-style retrospective interview with Brian Fargo, which seems to bookend his career with the development of Fallout and Wasteland 2 respectively. While I’m not sure I agree with that choice, and most readers will be aware of most of the info in the article, it’s not a bad read by any means:

Those sensibilities will look pleasantly familiar to gamers au fait with Interplay’s back catalogue, because Wasteland 2 shares the same key ingredients as its RPG cousins from the ’90s, namely a rich universe and a deep script. And although he makes a point of playing most new games on release, Fargo regrets that this style of game-making appears to have fallen out of fashion in many current-generation RPGs.

(One sees less of this style of game [because] the newer RPGs use large cinematic pieces or spoken dialogue at every turn,) he says. (In our case, we craft these games up to the last minute. [That’s not easy] if you already have 20 million dollars’ [worth] of prerendered cutscenes.)

Gratifyingly, the game’s 60,000 backers seem to share his point of view a relief for all involved. (You never really know the true interest until people vote with their wallets,) Fargo says.

Spurred on by the Kickstarter success, Fargo and inXile began to expand on the idea of getting fans involved in the project by asking them to contribute not just money but talent to Wasteland 2’s production. By building Wasteland 2 in Unity, Fargo’s team members have access to models from the online Unity Store, meaning they can effectively outsource chunks of the game’s development to 3D artists from around the world. After an influx of emails asking how modellers could get involved with the game, inXile set up a series of contests, tasking fans with designing, say, a water tower or gun turret. If the studio liked the results, it would buy them for Wasteland 2.

(Our experiment with Unity was based on the sheer number of people who were sending us assets for free, or asking how they could be involved in some way,) says Fargo. (This was not a strategy that we counted on to make the game, but it certainly is going to make the visual density higher than it would have been otherwise.)