Wasteland 2 Community Feedback Interview

RPG Codex is offering a a third interview centered around Wasteland 2, after one with inXile’s CEO Brian Fargo and one with designer Michael A. Stackpole. This time Brian Fargo chimes in to reply on some community feedback-focused questions:

How do you strike a balance between a professional design vision and the desires of a diverse audience? Do you believe that the nature of this project will have a significant impact on the game’s development process?

BF: Every project that I have managed has started with a vision document that calls out the important things we must deliver on. In conjunction with those call outs I make the team deliver examples of such things. If we say great characters with interesting dialogue then I want to see a sample. If we think gorgeous character portraits are important then I want an artist to show me one. It is one thing to promise a feature, but another to deliver. So instead of my relying on my instincts or team meetings I am able to solicit the feedback from the fans to make sure we nail what is important. The process now is very similar but actually better than ever since I don’t have to be flying in the dark. We are not going to try and satisfy EVERY desire of EVERY fan, or it would be a mess. My instincts for this game have been pretty much in line with what I have seen, but there have been new ideas or priorities that were not intuitive to me and I was thankful for having the input that has been supplied. And there will be an extra step soon where I post the vision document based on all these things, but I have not had a second to type something up that communicates well. I don’t think there will be any big surprises on it… we all know what we want to see here.

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One of the many hot topics on the forum right now is that of quest compasses. Many games that adopt this practice neglect alternative methods of informing the player where to go. If you were to include navigational aids as an option, would you ensure that adequate directions are provided by other means to make it feasible to play without them?

BF: I guess my take on this is that we should design the game 100% in a way that no compass would be needed. It seems cheap to rely on a compass because we forgot to give enough clues. Now MAYBE at the end we throw out the concept of allowing it as an option for players who are a little lazy…MAYBE. This is the kind of broad stroke idea that I would want to throw out to the players I care most about to solicit feedback from.