Wasteland 2 Kickstarter Project Update #6, $1.53 Million and Counting

Brian Fargo has penned yet another update for the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter drive, where he mentions some of the team’s intentions in case the $2 million milestone get reached, which include a more social experience and robust mod tools.  I don’t know how this one is going to go over:

We just made our next major milestone, thanks to you all, which means more content plus a Mac and Linux version. And the number continues to grow, and that means a better product for all as we can hire more writers and scripters to add even more depth of consequence to the world, add more music and sound to set the atmosphere, and make the world larger to explore. Let’s keep the number increasing and really knock it out of the ballpark. I have been having a blast reading the messages of excitement from the RPG players who feel neglected over the years.

The most common question now is what happens when we hit 2 million and above. First and foremost we hang our hat on the density of the experience the gamers get with a great RPG, and these monies continue to insure that happens. At 2 million we will increase the staff to make the game more social so that it can become a more shared experience. We like the concepts of dropping notes into the world for your friends who are playing the game, or perhaps we may allow you to send an item their way from Ranger center to help them out. We are fleshing out the ideas but intend to increase the social aspects of the game without diverting it from being an old school RPG and without hurting the balance.

We have received many questions about multi-player, and my feeling is that we do not think it would be the right decision for such a heavy narrative RPG. Even in an open sandbox world there are sequences and clues that need to happen in order for things to flow and make sense. This is not an MMO where we create instances of one-off events and scenarios, but it is a deep fluid world in which your actions do matter later. I don’t want a game where my buddy triggered an event I didn’t know and causes a repercussion for me, and at the same time I don’t want to see every little event that my buddy sees to insure I didn’t miss it. Multi-player is a design issue and not a technical one in this case. However, we will introduce social elements like I hinted at above so there can be a communal type experience.

More important than multi-player I would prefer to have a robust set of tools so the community can create mods and make the Wasteland world bigger than any one company ever could. Rest assured we are spending our efforts to determine at what tier we can have a team work on this. But keep in mind that making Wasteland 2 a deep RPG experience is mission critical, so even if we make the mod tools they are likely to come out after our ship date.

We wanted to have a little fun and make another comical video so I hope you enjoy it. The next video I put up will also be more informative as I will answer some of the more common questions from the forums. We are still deciding on the tech, and we don’t know what the final budget is, so it can be difficult to have answers for everything right now.

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I get more excited about the game every day.

Brian Fargo

And as promised, Brian and the team also have put up a new (humorous) video:

Addendum: InXile has responded to the mostly negative feedback to note they will clarify and possibly remove this idea in a follow-up post on their own forums.

Everyone remain calm….

There has been a lot of panic that any kind of element of sharing will ruin the classic old school RPG. I think some people are overreacting to the word “social” which I can kind of understand. But here is the bottom line. We will post a description of our thoughts in the forums and if YOU the fans still don’t want it then we will not fight the majority. We can now get back to our normal shouting.