Wasteland 2 Interview

inXile Entertainment’s Brian Fargo has once again fielded a handful of questions about Wasteland 2, and this time it was for Craig Stern over at IndieRPGs.com. A couple of questions and their answers to start you off:

First, some background: where did you get the idea for the original Wasteland?

My two favorite things back in the day was Dungeons and Dragons and The Road Warrior. I had just come off the success of Bard’s Tale with that satisfied my D&D scratch so next I wanted to do something in the post apocalyptic setting. I put a great team together on the writing side and used a skills based system that was influenced by an old paper and pen RPG called Mercenaries Spies and Private Eyes. I really like the way skills were used and saw it as a new way to open options up.

…

One of the things that was so revolutionary about the original Wasteland was its almost GURPS-like adherence to skill-based characters and challenges. As a developer myself, I find it very challenging to balance a game with both character creation and more than a handful of distinct skills. Inevitably, some are going to be more useful than others; and if you’re not careful, there’s a real risk of players creating characters ill-suited to navigating most of the game’s scenarios. How do you deal with this? Do you deliberately try to balance the game’s skills, or do you permit imbalance in the name of role-playing?

Part of the solution is that we need to make sure to create the depth so that all the skills do get used and allow success. Obviously some skills are going to be used more than others and I think those are quite obvious. No doubt the Medic skill will be used more often than say Toaster Repair or Rocket Science. However it is a party based game so there will be a natural balancing that comes about unless you give all 4 characters the exact same skills. But that said we also reward people who pick some obscure skills to reward them for the tradeoff. But the reward may not come easy. you may have to discover it.