Wasteland Kickstarter Project Interview

The RPG Codex offers the first part of an interview with inXile Entertainment CEO Brian Fargo about the as-yet-unnamed crowd-funded Wasteland project.  Here’s a little something to start you off:

– Being pessimistic for a moment; if the crowd funding approach fails to take off, but you instead attract the attention of a publisher and hammer out a deal, do you feel that the resulting version of Wasteland 2 would differ in terms of style? How do you think crowd funding will affect the type of game produced?

RPG Codex being pessimistic.. cmon.. never. I guess one has to ask the question if the game would have been a sales success if there wasn’t enough fan support to fund it. Many RPG players love and respect Wasteland yet many Fallout players don’t realize its roots. If the Fallout community truly knew then it would probably will be a successful funding. However, if we took your pessimistic scenario I think it would be a mistake to take this game in another direction other than what we have been discussing with the fans. The fans have made it clear that they want a certain kind of game and if publisher X popped up and said “Good news we are going Wasteland and its going to be an FPS”, they would be incurring quite a wrath. Keeping it closer to the original game just seems right.

– Reading your tweets and social media correspondence, it sounds like you will be creatively involved in the project. To what extent will this be? Will we see you as creative director?

I am almost always involved in the creative aspects of the projects. My role in games is often very strong in the front and back end of production. At the start I make sure we have the right team and stay true to the tenets of why the game should exist. Once everyone starts clicking on the sensibilities then the game takes a life of its own and I give it the room to fly. A good example of this was when we were making the first Fallout and Steve Jackson objected HEAVILY to the opening scene of the guy being shot in the back of the head with the soft music playing. I called him up and said “if you don’t like that then you haven’t seen anything yet” so we parted ways to use GURPS and I told the guys to use a different game system. A good producer will step up in the key moments and make sure the vision stays true. I will be heavily involved in this project from every step of the way to art design, writing, audio, story arc, etc. But my favorite moments in production are when the team come up with brilliant ideas that I had nothing to do with because that means the game has achieved that magical tipping point of gameplay production.