Wasteland 2 VG247 Interview

The folks at VG247 have chatted with inXile CEO Brian Fargo about the upcoming (a matter of days, now) Wasteland 2 beta. The interview is pretty dense and well worth a read, but if you don’t trust my word I suppose a sampling could convince you:

VG247: Because this is a critical time as you say and useful obviously, is there anything you’re going to be looking at particularly during the beta, Like specific metrics or traits?

Fargo: (There’s so many different fronts to look at. I think the more important thing to me which is not as tangible is that people feel that philosophically and design-wise we are creating what they were expecting to see. We laid out in a lot of detail in our vision document, which we put up early on in the process, and said, ‘˜this is what we think defines a good role-playing game and what we think Wasteland is about from a tone perspective.’

(I think to see if they think this is capturing what their expectations were, that’s what’s most important to me, because everything else like adjusting AI, changing UI, balancing, that’s more straightforward stuff. For me, it’s that element I’m looking towards the most, and the thing is we have this in some people’s hands who are sort of hardcore players and critics I say ‘˜critics’ in that hey have discerning eyes and then we have people like Chris Avellone who, while he wrote some of it, hasn’t really seen it for a year. He hasn’t played it.

(So we’ve been putting it into people’s hands saying, ‘˜okay, what do you think?’ The response has been super, and we’d love to add more choice, more reactivity and subtlety, which is what we plan to do. This is a new process to me because I would never put something this early into the public, you know, I’m sort of used to getting things out much further along, but fortunately having gone through this up to date, the positives far outweigh the negatives.)

…

VG247: That overworld map sounds brutal. It really does with dehydration, being jumped by raiders and without any sign-posting to let you know where the harder encounters are. It’s sort of your own fault if you die when wandering around and that to me sounds pretty hardcore. It’s a bit like Demon’s Souls where if you’e dying a lot you’re probably not ready for an area yet. Does that difficulty scale at all?

Fargo: (There’s two parts to dying in the game which really strikes to the difficulty level. First of all, you can die in the first five seconds of gameplay. You start off at a funeral scene, and if you want to pick the shovel up and start digging up the grave of the guy who just got buried in front of the other Desert Rangers, you’re dead.)

VG247: [laughs] Jesus.

Fargo: (But you get a warning, and you pretty much blame yourself for that. There are lot of things where the signs were there, you acted inappropriately, and it’s not like it just says .ame over.’ You’re in a combat that you could theoretically win if you had higher-level characters, but it’s not going to happen, so there are areas like that. I like that. Have you ever read a book where you’re 50 or 100 pages in and they kill a major character, and you’re like ‘˜wow,’ and then the rest of the book is a little more tense?)

VG247: Because suddenly everyone’s fair game?

Fargo: (Yeah, there’s this feeling that anyone could die at any time, like Game of Thrones does a brilliant job of that. I like the fact that if you do stupid things it will result in death, and that it keeps the tension high for other areas. So that’s part number one. Number two is, we do make it clear where you’re supposed to go, in that we want to make objectives clear because for me, that just makes good sense for players.

(However, if you want to go wandering off the beaten path and find other things, fantastic. But again, you have to blame yourself if you want to go off into the desert. You might find another area, you might find a map full of robots. If you can fight them, win it and get some upgraded weapons it’s going to make some of those early maps easier, but it comes back again to the users making the choices themselves. I always try to focus on, ‘˜it’s okay if people die as long as they’re blaming themselves,’ for the most part.)