Wasteland 2 - Preview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is back with another preview of Wasteland 2. The topic this time is how the game will acknowledge gender discrimination.

If all goes according to plan, Wasteland 2 will be one of the most reactive, choice-driven games to grace PCs since man first rubbed two sticks together and invented the keyboard. Everything from juicy bits of dialogue to party members to entire locations can vanish or appear in an instant, all thanks to your actions. And wastelands, well, they tend to be pretty nasty places, radiation-scorched cesspits of violence, prejudice, and, er, waste. So naturally, some characters are going to hate you for simply being, well, you. inXile’s hinted at the system in Kickstarter updates, but I found myself exceedingly curious about how it’ll all actually come together. Here’s what the developer told me.

I adore Fallout 3, but even I’ll admit that it was hardly water-tight. If you poked at it enough, you’d eventually find holes: glitches, uninteresting characters, some sloppy quests, and so on. But there was one area where Bethesda’s Fallout revival fell flat on its face that I honestly didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me. And truth be told, that fact makes me feel a bit ashamed.

"We want to be true to the individual characters, and not try to apply some sort of global morality."

So I was quite pleased to hear that Wasteland 2 will pay close attention to precisely that. Party composition and your various characters’ identities will be under frequent scrutiny by wastelanders’ mistrusting glares, a holdover from the real world turned up to 11 by the fact that this setting isn’t particularly kind to those who hand out free hugs with reckless abandon. Or anyone really, for that matter.