Wasteland 2 Previews and Interviews
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inXile's recent press tour sowed some seeds we're reaping right now that a bevy of articles concerning Wasteland 2 have been released. As usual, we've rounded up what we could find for your reading convenience.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has an interview with Fargo:
RPS: You also mentioned that you were still tweaking the messaging, and I'm curious about the design philosophy in terms of making it obvious what the player can do versus their having to figure it out themselves and maybe missing huge things if they don't. There's an optional bit early on where there's a kid drowning in a lake, but you can only save him by getting a strong character to knock down a totem pole for him to cling onto. Nothing in the game tells you that, and there's only a short window you can do it in, but clearly you feel great if you do figure it out. Er I hope I don't sound like the guy at a Simpsons convention saying (in episode EF17 Comic Book Guy says that.)
Brian Fargo: No, no, I know that bit, actually that's my map, so I know exactly what you mean. That's little Ralphie Parker. There are several ways to knock that pole over, actually. You can brute force it, you can use an explosive, several ways. In a way, that kind of sums up the game. There are all of these events like that, and it's OK if you figure them out or you don't. You're really carving your own path.
There's all this content that you're not going to see, or by virtue of your decision or lack of decision you're cutting things off constantly, but you'll feel it when you're playing it through. You'll probably say no to someone who wants to join your party, then you'll keep wondering (what would have happened?) Or you say yes and they get into a scene or solve a problem for you, and you think (what if they weren't there with me, how would that have played out?) You will logically figure out that this thing is constantly adjusting based on your decisions.
I was thinking when you were talking about design philosophy is that we try to make things behave correctly as much as we can, and that's what we pour our hearts into. That's all we've been doing for the last seven months. I'll give you another example. There was the film I was watching recently, and the guy got into a car accident, right. And then in the next scene, he's talking to his wife. Doesn't mention the accident. Well. it kind of ruins the moment for me, because no human being on Earth would not mention to their wife that they just got in a car accident.
The thing about it is, when you're writing a film, that's not a reality. He didn't really get in a car accident. You could see how a writer, in their mind, might make a stupid mistake like that, because it didn't really happen, so there's not a natural human emotion that goes on. That stuff really bothers me. My wife, I drive her crazy because I'm (that makes no sense!) when we're watching a film, she's going (shut up and just enjoy it, quit pointing all this stuff out), and I'm (but it wouldn't happen in that order, how could that person have known that!) Drives her nuts.
By the way, it's not to say we'll never make a mistake like that, but we try really, really hard not to. So that's why we keep trying that (what if they do that, what if he's there), always throwing things at it. Even our users will help remind us of things. Here's one from the other side, where we had all the story of your Rangers and this and that, then somebody said (where are the other Rangers?) And we were like, (oh yeah!) Now we had to do another pass of other Rangers you could hear on the radio or see if they'd been somewhere already. All of these things in the world so that you didn't feel like you were the only one, but it was a very obvious problem where we'd been so laser-focused on your experience that we forgot about building out the fact that there were more of them out there. So we did that. That's the kind of stuff you need all this iteration on these games for. You need massive, massive iteration time.
Eurogamer goes for the article-style approach:
If you're making a game that only exists because people have funded its development, then that development must be transparent. This was an alien way of working for inXile, which had for the large part made games for publishers as a work for hire studio. The publisher would dictate how the developer would communicate to gamers, restricting appearances to PR events, game shows and slick videos. With Wasteland 2, inXile was, for the first time, exposed.
"Finally development is a spectator sport," Fargo says. "People were watching every decision we made. There are some things you can throw out to the crowd, like the user interface, and they'll give you feedback. When we said we were using the Unity engine, a lot of people said, 'are you kidding me? That's only used for browser and mobile games.' I said, 'well, hold on a second. There's more to it here.' We had to make decisions. Some were popular. Some were unpopular."
The DNA of the company had to be adjusted to cope with putting parts of the game into the wild much earlier than the developers were used to, and then to seek feedback at every step of the way, listening objectively, all the while trying to stay true to the vision document. It was tough, Fargo admits.
And, of course, alongside all of that, inXile experienced the traditional rigours of game development: heated debate over features, assets and, crucially, size and scope. Deciding on the scope, Fargo says, was the hardest thing about Wasteland 2's development. And it caused more than a few kerfuffles.
Wasteland 2 was initially supposed to come out in October 2013. In fact, its Kickstarter page still lists the month as the game's delivery date. That, obviously, didn't happen. It was never likely to, because it was a month plucked from thin air, really, before inXile even knew the Kickstarter would be funded, let alone how much money it would have to make the game.
But there was a more meaningful delay that had to do with the size and scope of the game. As it stands, Wasteland 2 will launch with two major areas: Arizona, the area playable for much of Early Access; and Los Angeles. But there was a time when Wasteland 2 was much smaller. Then Fargo put his foot down.
"What a lot of people don't know is we put in twice as much money into this game than we raised from Kickstarter," Fargo says. "We doubled it. I didn't want to come up with a game on Kickstarter and have people go, yeah, he did it. Yeah, he checked every box. Nice. That would have been a defeat for me. I pushed hard, and there were lots of arguments internally. Let's just do Arizona, Brian. It's still a 25 hour game. Nobody's going to complain. I said no. I want to be a poster child for what you could do. So the game became more ambitious than it probably had to be." Fargo says what he often says about Wasteland 2: it has more words than The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. It's big.
Destructoid takes the same approach:
"With Chris Avellone, Colin McComb, Nathan Long, Michael Stackpole, we take writing very seriously," Fargo said. There are over 500,000 lines of written dialog. "We feel it adds so much to the game and I feel it needs to be taken seriously. We have more words in this game than the Lord of the Rings trilogy."
"For Wasteland 2, I like to call it a narrative sandbox game," Fargo said. "We've written all of these different threads based upon what you've done in the narrative. You can make any choice spin off in any different way. On top of that, you can shoot anyone you encounter."
"I think the elements of 'old-school' [lots of choice and variables] are timeless. All this cause and effect gameplay, the subtlety of detail, the nuance of the humor -- good cause and effect is the hallmark of any game. By virtue of the design, when you do something, it turns something else off. I had a very famous game designer in my office a month ago, and he said 'why would you do that, create all that stuff that most people won't encounter?' and I said that's the charm of what it is."
Fargo was adamant about allowing players to have total freedom in how they express themselves in Wasteland 2. This mandate is apparent even in the beginning moments. After watching the burial of a fallen Desert Ranger during the opening cinematic, players can choose to desecrate the grave once gameplay starts. Even after warnings from General Vargas, a returning character from the original game, players can choose to proceed with violating the grave. All ally NPC characters in the area will open fire on your squad, ending the game before it even properly begins. While most players will never see this scenario, the developers felt it was important to have so players can choose to express themselves in anyway they see fit.
"I think about a sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto as the ultimate sandbox, you can go pump weights, get tattoos, you can jack an airplane. You can do whatever you want, but it doesn't really affect the narrative structure, the missions are exactly the same. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's a different kind of thing."
PC Gamer went hands-on:
Building a world where you can do anything means Fargo's team has to account for the unaccountable, just like Larian had to when making Divinity: Original Sin. You can kill anyone in Wasteland 2, which means inXile has to have an effect for your every cause. The kicker is that your consequences may not be apparent for hours of play time. (My cause events and my effected events are often very far apart hours apart,) Fargo tells me. (You can't just kick in a door and have a combat and figure out which result you like better and do it a different way. It's sometimes going to be hours later before you know what's happening.(
That sounds cool in theory, but I worry that the abundance of options will quickly become overwhelming, especially without a sense of how decisions will play out. Divinity worked around this issue by being flexible with auto and quick saves, but Wasteland's save options aren't as dynamic, and I'm not dying to replay four hours to undo a bad conversation choice.
That said, the game itself feels good, even though it's incomplete. The Unity engine handles combat and movement well, and the dialogue system combines traditional dialogue trees with keyword triggers, which lets you type in specific conversation points that might not be apparent based on your dialogue options. That system rewards experimentation: if you played the first Wasteland, you should ask General Vargas at the beginning about his old nickname, (Snake.) It's small moments like this and the countless story beats you may not even see, according to Fargo that the team is working on now, and why the game has been delayed slightly until September.
While Kotaku pushes the "proper Fallout 3 angle" (but seems to imply the original two Fallouts didn't have karma, which isn't actually true):
One of the most controversial features in Fallout 3 was its "karma" system, a moral code that told players whether their actions were good or bad at any given moment. Out of instinct, I usually chose to be a good guy. But when I ran into this stranded prisoner, my character was beleaguered and low on supplies. I felt tempted to do something I normally wouldn't. The game raised an interesting moral dilemma, then: what do "good" and "evil" even mean if nobody is around to judge you?
It raised the dilemma. But it didn't actually ask the question. Because once I took her supplies, my karma rating slid down a notch towards evil. Not wanting to mess up my ranking, I reloaded and made the other choice the one the game was telling me was the "right" choice. Fallout 3 showed me its potential to provoke legitimate ethical quandaries, and then it stepped on its own toes by turning it into a simple black-and-white issue.
Fargo cut me off when I was describing all the issues at play with the Fallout 3 prisoner because he knew where I was going. Morality systems are nothing new. Fallout 3 wasn't the first game to implement one, and it won't be the last. But the presence of "karma" was especially disappointing because it was such a betrayal of the game's heritage. The original Fallouts didn't have a disembodied set of morals that ranked your every action. They just had choices and consequences. If you killed one character or befriended them, that played out independently of anything in the game telling you that you'd made a solid choice. This is something Fargo is eager to bring back into the mainstream of RPGs.
Finally, VG247 has a video preview of the title:
