Wasteland 2 Interview

There’s an interview with inXile’s Chris Keenan at GamingBolt, focusing on their upcoming (slated for October, if the development remains on track) post-apocalyptic turn-based RPG Wasteland 2. Here’s a snippet:

Ravi Sinha: Speaking on Fallout 3 and on Western RPGs in general what are your thoughts on their evolution in the past two decades?

Chris Keenan: The first thing that comes to mind is that as technology continued to get better and better, developers were able to make the world larger in scale and look more amazing. Many of the games took on a more epic feel to them. Consoles were continuing to make their rise and teams began to adapt their designs for consoles first, PC second. Simply due to the inputs, it requires different designs of your core features. Graphical fidelity improved, production value improved and size increased.

This requires a massive team to do correctly. Personally, I feel like many of them traded size and visuals for depth though. When you’re spending so much time and money creating content, it’s hard to say (you know, if the player makes decisions A,B and C, they don’t get to play this other area.it’s been destroyed before they got there).

That’s a powerfully reactive moment but hard to justify when building that area cost you 3 million dollars and 6 months of production time. We are focusing on bringing back that serious depth as one of our top priorities.

Ravi Sinha: Has there been a major evolution in player choice since the original Fallout came out or are we still on the cusp of brilliance?

Chris Keenan: Fallout was a great example of a game that had a major impact on how game designers look at creating interesting choice for players. It doesn’t always have to be black and white. Our world is filled with grey areas. People’s intentions don’t always bring the result or action they want and it shouldn’t be that way in all games.

There is always room for improvement in evolving this type of moral decision element. I’m not sure that there is a (cusp of brilliance) era but instead moments of brilliance that happen along the way. As long as we keep evolving the genre, I feel like we’re doing our jobs.