Wasteland 2 Interview

Your daily dose of Wasteland 2 information continues with a new Q&A with inXile CEO Brian Fargo on GamesIndustry.biz, though if you’ve been following any and all news about the crowd-funded RPG sequel up until now, you’ll find that most of the questions and their answers have been covered previously. Still, there’s no harm in refreshing our enthusiasm:

Q: What platforms are you targeting? Might this change depending on the level of funding?

Brian Fargo: This is a PC RPG first and foremost so our decisions about interface, graphics, and players will all derive from that starting point. That said, we look to be achieving our goal of $1.5 million, which means we can add Mac and Linux, which is perfectly fine since those are fairly straightforward conversions and won’t affect the lead format nor should those experiences suffer.

Tablet is a consideration due to its size and interface, but we just have not decided conclusively on this. We are unlikely to support console for fear it would not be a good enough experience and take away any of our mindshare from what is primarily a PC experience. There are other variables like distance from the screen that affects the conversion to console that developers have to consider.

Q: At $1 million, your budget is a small fraction of the cost of typical console or PC game development. What corners will you cut to be able to bring the game in at this price? Will the game be a much shorter experience, or the graphics less detailed, in order to keep costs down?

Brian Fargo: We have a series of advantages in making this game for a reasonable budget. One large cost with making games these days are all of the cinematics that publishers spend on games, with costs that hit as much as $1.6 million per minute. Not only are they expensive, but they can cut down the options a player has in gameplay depending on design. We are also having a tremendous amount of pre-production done, such that all variables are nailed down at the start so that no cycles are wasted by designing on the fly.

We also save 20% plus in not having to prove to a publisher we know what we are doing or prepping for endless tradeshows. This sounds like a small thing, but developers have to halt production countless times for these things. Additionally, we will job out much of the art to keep our fixed overhead low. Wasteland 2 will be as big or bigger than Wasteland 1.