Wasteland 2 Post-funding Update #44: Current Release Plans

While the inXile team won’t yet commit to a release date for Wasteland 2, they’ve at least given us a rough idea of their current development plans in the latest Kickstarter update. In short, the studio will lock down all the gameplay systems and content in the next three months, and subsequently focus on bug-fixing:

As we’ve said before we wanted to use the beta period to evaluate our release window. To outline our current plan: we will have the team working to lock down every aspect of the game within three months such that we are only addressing bugs. On the systems side of the game, over those three months you will see a number of iteration passes on combat which covers things like crouched stance, ambush mechanics, weapon jamming, special attacks, further UI enhancements, and a few surprises. On the skills we need to make several more passes on making them more useful or better message how they are working. We are adding AI to the remaining enemy types and adding the appropriate animations. Art wise we are wrapping up the LA maps and adding additional combat animations and particle effects to give the game more flavor. And most importantly we are continuing our iteration passes on choice and consequence, providing new options that come from the results of your actions.

We know better than to give an exact date at this point because in addition to pushing the game in the ways we’d planned, we’re going to continue to incorporate player comments that make sense for us to address. But we are in the final stretch, and are thankful our backers have consistently agreed we should take the time we need. Our current three month plan will create a significantly better game as we are in an important development phase with each week taking huge steps to improve the game. As we progress through this plan we’ll of course keep posting updates to let all our backers know how the game’s progressing. But do be aware the end of this three month plan does not represent the finish line, at that point there will still be work to do before we can release the game.

OSX owners will be happy to know that Wasteland 2 will be available for their platform at the same time as we’re putting the beta update out. We’re making progress on the Linux version and it will follow sometime after.

The update also includes a couple of outrageously high-resolution screenshots (here and here), although Wasteland 2’s assets aren’t exactly the kind that benefit from really high resolutions. On a more positive note, the UI seems to scale well and has clearly received a few improvements since I last tried the title.