Wasteland 2 Interview

The guys over at Ripten have an expansive and very interesting interview with inXile CEO Brian Fargo, with the topic of conversation being that of Wasteland 2 and “abysmal” publisher treatment.  A taste:

MF: There have been a lot of questions, and people are very interested, are we going to see any Fallout influence bleed back into the world of Wasteland 2?

BF: I got a similar question another way, when we put things into the game, it’s hard to say who inspired what. There are Wasteland things in Fallout. If I put something into Wasteland 2, am I taking for Fallout or am I taking from Wasteland? From a copyright perspective, we’re not going to take anything from Fallout that isn’t ours. That’s owned by Bethesda, so we need to be clear on that, but there are overarching elements. The way the religions work and some of the combat, there are going to be some similarities because one is the heritage and the other shares it.

MF: Do you think people who have never played Wasteland are expecting the game to be more like Fallout?

BF: The games are very similar. I think the things that drew people to Wasteland and Fallout are the similarities. It’s not like the top-down graphics are what grabbed people with Wasteland. There was this open sandbox world and we weren’t preaching to you as to how to behave, in terms of a morality perspective. The (correct) thing to do was never clear, and sometimes, there weren’t clear, correct things. There was also a lot of cause and effect and a lot of subtlety; layers and layers of gameplay in a post-apocalyptic world, with an interesting combat system.

Both of those games have the exact same things going for them. Really, it was the worlds that drew people in, without so much concern about (that one was top-down) and (this one is isometric.) Well, we’re probably more likely to be going with isometric, because, graphically, it looks more interesting. It’s all the things that the two games have in common that are going to be in Wasteland 2, except for the party system. Wasteland was more of a party-based game. You start off with your four main rangers, and you swapped NPCs in and out based on what particularly skills they had. All the things that people loved about those two games? Wasteland 2 will have all of those elements.

(…)

MF: Why don’t we hear more about it.?

BF: Because they are afraid to talk, because they’ll never get another contract if they do. That’s why. You cannot believe. it’s awful. It’s really bad. You should try to dig in and get some stories out there. Look at the most recent one with those poor guys at Obsidian. They did Fallout: New Vegas, the ship date got moved up and, who does the QA on a project? The publisher is always in charge of QA. When a project goes out buggy, it’s not the developer. The developer never says, (I refuse to fix the bug,) or, (I don’t know how.) They never do that. It’s the publisher that does the QA, so if a product goes out buggy, it’s not the developer’s fault. So, (Fallout: New Vegas) goes out buggy and they didn’t do the QA, their ship date got moved up and they missed their metacritic rating by one point. Did they get a bonus? No. Do you think that’s fair? I tried to get some of my publisher friends, who I used to make a lot of money for, to donate. Do you think they donated? No. Their employees did.