Wasteland 2 - New Interview Roundup

I managed to roundup a few more interviews for Wasteland 2 this week. So lets get started shall we, and be ready to read a huge wall of text.

Strategy Informer has the first interview with Director and inXile founder Brian Fargo.

Strategy Informer: Last December you delayed Wasteland by a year, how has that extra 12 months been put to work on the game?

Brian Fargo: Well, you know it's funny. When people say to me “how about the game being late?” I always think, let's talk about being late for a second here. Because if you think about it, if you're a publisher, you would never give a release date before you started, right? Maybe after you hit alpha, but never before then. With Kickstarter, though, you give it up front. That's already odd. On top of that you're saying “we're going to give you a date for a game that we have no idea how big it is yet, because we don't know how much money we'll get”. So when triple the money we planned came in, we wanted the game to be even bigger, which made that initial date make even less sense than before. So yes, we're late, but what are you going to do? With that extra funding we don't want to make the same game we planned and just pocket that extra money, I don't want that, I want to do something big and ambitious. As long as you have the finance to get you there, which we had, you should try something special. So I didn't worry about that extra year, I knew we were going to create something twice as big and crazy as what we had originally. At the end of the day, when everybody gets this game I know I'll never hear about that delay again. No-one will say “oh yeah, it was brilliant but remember that delay?” That's not going to come up.

The second interview is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun who talk with Brian Fargo about NPCs, DLC , and Save-Scumming.

RPS: You’re basically finished now?

Brian Fargo: We’re in the final stretch. We’re gonna give an update tomorrow or the next day, which is pretty darn representative of the Arizona section of the game. That goes out to all the beta testers. All we’re really doing at this point – because we have very few critical error bugs remaining – is adding more polish. We make changes all the way to the last second, so it’s adding particle effects, adding more variants of things going on, messaging things better, typos, lots of little things. That’s all going to happen over the next four to five weeks. You can play the whole game start to finish, everything’s in there now, we’re just in the final stretch.

RPS: You were saying about how many bugs the community had identified for you – is that stuff removing the need for QA?

Brian Fargo: Oh, we have quite a big QA team, we have a whole group in Poland that’s helping us to do QA. Remember, on the LA map side, that isn’t in the public yet, so we’ve had to throw a bunch of bodies at that. Even on the Arizona side of it, we still have it, because we can say “we need you to play through the game and shoot everyone,” because that’s a different play experience. Most people who play it are trying to play in a more normal fashion, so we’ll dictate that QA play it in certain ways. Plus there’s ourselves, a small team internally, but there’s a lot externally. We do regression tracking and all that, there’s a whole science to keeping it bug-free.

The third interview is from Ausgamers. and they talk with Chris Avellone.

AusGamers: Who do you think is the target audience of Wasteland 2? Is it for fans of the original game from 1988, or are you trying to attract Fallout fans, or a whole new audience?

Avellone: Wasteland came out so long ago that I think a lot of our backers probably didn’t have the opportunity to play it. What I think they bought into was the idea of an underdog developer trying to make a concept be realised. Also I think it appealed to a lot of the PC audience who wanted to get an ‘old’ isometric style RPG, and to see more games like that. I also think that (director/producer) Brian Fargo was really good at building up a lot of energy and interest in the game. He’s done that for so many years, he’s a really good talker and speaker. I’m not sure how many people have played the original Wasteland, I think people just appreciate that a new RPG is seeing the light of day through Kickstarter.

And for last I have another interview from USGamer with Chris Avellone who talks about cut features, and publisher interference. He also talks about Wasteland 2.