Wasteland 2 Interview

Wasteland 2 producer Chris Keenan recently spoke with Forbes about the success of their Kickstarter campaign, what they’re calling a “dream team” of designers, the differences we should expect from the sequel vs. the original, and more.  The usual snip:

A lot of people are calling the Wasteland 2 team a (dream team) and are pretty excited to see at least some of the old Black Isle team getting back together. Can you tell me a little bit about who is on this project and what they’ll be doing? How did you get everyone involved?

As a grown man, I haven’t been .iddy’ in a while but being able to work with this team literally makes me giddy. Brian was able to get almost all of the original team back for the sequel. Mike Stackpole is on board and will be doing design and writing much of the story elements, Alan Pavlish is going to design a few areas and consult throughout the process, Liz Danforth will be doing the same. Early on, we also got Mark Morgan signed up as our composer.he is famous for setting the musical score on Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape Torment and many other great moody RPG’s from the past. Of course, Brian is leading the project every step of the way. On top of reviving the old team, we enlisted the help of Andree Wallin who has done some amazing concept art for us. Finally, RPG designer extraordinaire Chris Avellone from Obsidian has joined on to help with the project. It’s an amazing list of people to help revive a genre they had such a huge hand in starting.

How will this game be different from its predecessor? With all the changes in technology between now and the first Wasteland, will it be a challenge to keep the spirit of the first game alive?

That’s been a hot topic around the design round table. We’ve stated many times that we want to make this an old school RPG and we are sticking to that. That said, there are many elements from the original Wasteland that we can improve upon now. All combat was purely text based in the original. We will be keeping the great descriptive and colorful text but also adding more visual payoff to the combat. With the party based nature of the game, combat can be a bit slow. We want to make sure that it’s as strategic as the original without dragging each encounter to a halt. One element that we loved about the first was the literary nature of the world. Almost every square you stepped on had an amazing description of what was going on around you that made the environment larger than the art. We definitely want to keep the charm of the original Wasteland alive in the new one.