Wasteland 2 Interview

Strategy Informer has doled out the latest interview with inXile Entertainment’s Brian Fargo, quizzing the veteran video game entrepreneur about Wasteland 2, its open world nature, his take on role-playing games, and more. A couple of questions and their answers:

Strategy Informer: What makes a good role-playing game for you?

Brian Fargo: Choice and consequence has always been the most important thing for me, and that it has some meaning. It can’t be the magician’s trick where no matter what you choose you always end up in the exact same place; people see that quite quickly and then get let down that their choices don’t mean anything. For us it’s only a question of, ‘˜How deep can we go?’ You can’t take every single situation to its natural ridiculous conclusion because there are an infinite number of scenarios that could come out of any one thing, but we need to dive as deep as possible.

The other thing is that I’ve always been a big believer that the journey is the reward rather than just the conclusion. I want to have moral decisions where there is a trade off in a way that you really have to rack your brain as to whether that was the right decision or not; and then you see how those things play out.

One of the things we’re experimenting with in Wasteland 2, which I haven’t seen much of before, is thinking, ‘˜What does it mean for the game to end?’ I don’t mean like you die and it’s over. I mean something where the game finishes, it becomes something else and the credits roll. So we’ve been experimenting with having there be different end points depending on what you want to do.

I’m OK with there being one early ending where someone might miss another 40 hours of content and the game ends because they chose to take a particular path. We made it clear what would happen if you went down that particular line; and guess what? That’s the path you went down. The beauty of a role-playing game of course is that you get to replay it and try different things. To me, that is the fun part. I jokingly describe them as the non-heroic endings.

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Strategy Informer: Games like Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment were legendary for their depth and replayability. How will WL2 match up to that?

Brian Fargo: Wasteland 2 will be the most replayable role-playing game I’ve ever made in my life. I’ve never put this much subtlety and detail into a role-playing game. There’s lots of content many people won’t ever see and we’re ok with that. The game is so intricate that I think there’s no way you could see everything in the game no matter how many times you played it.

With Torment, the goal is to make it the deepest most reactive conversation game which has ever been done. There’s so much there with the different NPCs in your party and the different alignments. So that’s very reactive in another kind of way. They’re very different games.