Wasteland 2 Interview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is offering an interview with Brian Fargo that mostly focuses on the recent announcement of a possible collaboration between inXile and Obsidian for the upcoming Kickstarted-funded Wasteland 2, with Chris Avellone helping with design and the company offering their own tools to speed up the development. Here’s an excerpt:

RPS: Have you been kicking around ideas yet, or is that still a little way off?

Fargo: Just a little bit. Next week is when we’ll be kicking around ideas. We have to work out the business details first before they want to let Chris run around in our offices. Next week that will certainly be the case. We’ve talked a little bit about it but no great amount of detail yet. Chris has just been dying to announce it, so this is great.

RPS: Do you think it’s going to work naturally or might there be a clash, in that Wasteland is about player agency and freedom, while the game he’s most revered for, Planescape, is very much a fixed, set narrative?

Fargo: No, they won’t clash at all. What Chris brings is this wonderful density to his levels. So he’ll be involved with the overall, but he’ll also be given some sections in particular that he’ll be able to put his stamp on. It’s sort of like in science fiction novels where multiple authors get involved and do their own parts, all with their own style.

RPS: Who’s going to handle the story element? Are you going to do that in-house or are you going to pool it like those science fiction authors where it’s a completely collaborative thing?

Fargo: It’s going to be a little bit myself and Mike Stackpole making the world sense come together. So we’l be helping to coordinate the overarching story of it all, but the individual parts, that’s where we have different people, whether it’s Chris Avellone, or Liz Danforth, who are working on their areas.

Creatively, when you work on a product like this, you say (listen, we need this prison yard and just make sure at the end they walk out with an Uzi, OK, I don’t care what happens in there but just make sure they get an uzi at the end for the next part.) They say (great) and we turn them loose.

The most important that this adds, and what our players continue to want and ask for from us, is scope and scale. That’s what this is about. Every time the numbers go up, the game just gets a little bit bigger and a little more dense, and this helps ensure that.