Wasteland 3 – Vehicular Combat Interview

InXile Entertainment’s upcoming post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 3 will let you pilot and customize your own armored vehicle. This tank-like truck the developers call the Kodiak will act as mobile cover and provide some additional firepower during combat. And if you’d like to know how it’s integrated into the game, you should check out this GameInformer interview with inXile’s Tim Campbell.

A couple of sample questions:

On bringing the Kodiak into main story missions:

“A lot of the story involves characters going into locations where it wouldn’t make sense to have a vehicle along with you. We didn’t want to force roads through levels so the vehicle can go with you every time, so finding a balance where you can use the vehicle sometimes was one of the difficult things that we worked through. There are some story missions that involve your vehicle, maybe at the start, or at the end, or at a key point in the middle. The Kodiak is involved all the way up to the end fight of the game.”

On overpowering the Kodiak for side missions:

“The random encounters use the vehicle almost 100 percent of the time. Not exactly 100, but the bulk of the time your vehicle is with you in combat. That allowed us to have an overpowered vehicle some of the time, and we could balance up the enemies to compensate, so you’d have a big high-octane set of fights. Other times, when we knew that the vehicle wasn’t going to be with you, we could tilt the balance a different way to give you a different sort of challenge. The feeling of being in the field without your vehicles is very different because you lose your most powerful tool.”