Wasteland 2 Interviews and Forum Activity

PC Powerplay offers an article-style interview with Brian Fargo about Wasteland 2 and Kickstarter that reads as if it took place several months ago and offers nothing new.

Of more interest, design director Chris Keenan commented on the player characters’ appearance and portraits in Wasteland 2 on the official forums.

We’ve been playing around with character customization already as we’re building the core system for model creation. We started with a bunch of customizable slots on the character and found that in an isometric/top down view, most of the details get lost very easily. One element that helps us quite a bit is the character portraits. You’ll be able to select from many portraits and also import your own. We will have enough slots to give enough choice in gameplay, but not as many as you’d find in a fantasy based game, like WoW. Does a leather strip around your wrist really help you survive the wastelands better? Probably not.

I’ve been following the armor discussion as well. I tend to agree that having everyone look like space rangers at the end of games can be a bit distracting. We are looking into designing into the world some additional paths beyond simply “bulky is always better”. There are some interesting groups in the world working on different technologies. It is possible to get strong but thin materials.

And Brian Fargo talked with the RPGCodex about Wasteland 2’s development schedule, as well as about the feedback to their released pre-alpha screenshot.

“The best production process is pretty fluid”, Brian Fargo told us via email, “so I hate to commit to exactly how things roll out but I can tell you that 90% of the writing/design will happen by October. Scripting will start in about a month from now on the levels that are done. I plan to have all levels in and scripted by April thus leaving another 6 months for iteration and play test. The only reason we have the ability to have an accelerated production schedule is that the tools and user generated assets offer us a huge head start over the old ways of doing things. In addition, I am not having to make milestones to prove we are making progress which shaves another 25%. But I have been offered a fantastic and unique opportunity to make something special with Wasteland so I will not let the game go [if] it isn’t ready and I will have lots of beta testers to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

(…)

He also commented on the issues some people had with the look of the early screenshot. “[W]e have much more to do,” Fargo explained, “so they should not get too wound up about early screens. I put it out at the request of the backers so we could listen to the input. Adjusting palettes takes about 1 minute and things do look more toy like without the effects. It will all be good. This new way of development is a learning process for us all.”