Wasteland 2: Game of the Year Edition Interview

Shacknews has published an interview with inXile’s project lead Chris Keenan on Wasteland 2: Game of the Year Edition, the enhanced edition of the game that’s meant to be released on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 later this Summer. During the course of the interview Keenan explains what convinced inXile to pursue console ports, and what that entails for both the console and PC versions. Here’s a couple of relevant excerpts:

Shacknews: Wasteland 2 received much critical acclaim last year, even earning our #10 spot in Shacknews’ Game of the Year awards. Was critical and fanatical response to the game the reason why inXile decided to bring the game to consoles?

Chris Keenan: It certainly was a major reason why we chose to work on console versions. After the game was released, we were consistently getting messages from people who had heard about the game and had friends playing it, but either don’t have a gaming PC or only play games on consoles. Since the game was developed using the Unity engine, we decided to spend some time exploring what it would take to do a proper console version. The engine handled much of the under the hood tech needs and we felt we could make some solid changes to the UI and controls to make a great experience.

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SN: In your announcement, you said Wasteland 2 has been ported over to Unity 5 for the console version. What improvements should we expect from the game because of this?

CK: We’ve got a pretty nice list of new additions for the GOTY console version. First off, Unity 5 allows us to use a new shader called Physically Based Rendering. The short description is that it helps to simulate real world lighting situations better than the previous art pipelines. In order to use it properly, we’re going back over all environments and adjusting the materials of the objects to work properly. At the same time, we’re improving the meshes and textures so all scenes are getting a nice facelift. We’re also redoing all humanoid character models in the game. Combined, these two elements have a massive impact on the visual quality.

As for gameplay systems, we’re adding a precision strike system (similar to aimed shots), quirks and perks, cleaning up enemy AI, additional crafting of each combat zone, visible armor and a UI overhaul to support controller inputs. Adding all of this new content requires a full balance pass as well, so we’ve taken player feedback into consideration and will be making those adjustments along the way. As you can see, it’s not simply a quick console port.

SN: Will PC owners be able to receive the improvements you’re making to the Game of the Year Edition of Wasteland 2? For example, the Perks and Quirks feature and Precision Strike?

CK: Yes. All new improvements will be in the GOTY PC version. We’ll have more news in the future on what that means for those who already own a PC/Mac/Linux copy of the game.