WorstUsernameEver
But best title ever!
InXile CEO Brian Fargo has been doing some kind of PR tour recently, giving out interviews for various websites, focusing mostly on Wasteland 2 and Kickstarter in general. Nothing new, but I'm sure they'll still be worth a read for some.
GameFront:<blockquote>Games have the potential to address serious issues. BioShock addressed libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, while Spec Ops: The Line painted video game violence in a completely different light from normal, run-of-the-mill first person shooters. Is Wasteland 2 going to approach any difficult, or even political, topics?
The main purpose of Wasteland 2 is not to tackle the big questions. It’s primarily a game about having wild and dangerous adventures in a post-apocalyptic world, and, in the tradition of the first game, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Having said that, post-apocalyptic worlds have always been great venues for satire of the contemporary world, and we can’t resist taking broad potshots at our society’s obsessions and foibles as we create the various towns and people our rangers meet along the way.
The residents of the wasteland are rebuilding society from scratch, and because they don’t know much about the past, they’re pretty much making it up as they go along. Just about every form of society is being tried out, from theocracy to meritocracy to dictatorship to democracy to the-one-with-the-biggest-gun wins. What could be more fun than poking every one of those systems with a sharp stick?</blockquote>GamesIndustry:<blockquote>The Kickstarter method is preferable, according to Fargo. "Our game certainly has less risk because it's being pre-ordered," Fargo notes. "I specifically make the game for that audience, and then I let the chips fall where they may. I think people that like roleplaying games are going to love it. Some people say, 'How do you make it for the younger generation,' and I don't think about that. I'm just going to make something that's smart and intelligent, nuanced, and the audience will figure it out."
The ideal situation for Fargo, assuming Wasteland II and Torment do well, is to continue to do RPGs that are interesting. "I don't want to be in a situation where we finish Wasteland II and I have to hurry up and get Wasteland III out the door. I don't ever want to be in that situation," Fargo said. "You do a sequel when you have the right idea." In other words, do a sequel because you want to, not because you have to.</blockquote>EDGE:<blockquote>And so finally, on March 13, 2012, Fargo cut out the middlemen and went directly to the thousands of fans who’d spent more than two decades asking for a game that publishers didn’t seem interested in. Turning to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, Fargo and his team at inXile gambled that they could source the million dollars needed to fund Wasteland 2 by appealing to the players rather than the suits – with Fargo even offering up $100,000 of his own cash if the pool only made it to $900,000. In the end, the Kickstarter closed at three times that amount, raking in $2,933,252 in 30 days. “Ironically, I am fortunate that no publisher picked the game up,” he says, “since [it’s now] being created with the right sensibilities in mind.”
Those sensibilities will look pleasantly familiar to gamers au fait with Interplay’s back catalogue, because Wasteland 2 shares the same key ingredients as its RPG cousins from the ’90s, namely a rich universe and a deep script. And although he makes a point of playing most new games on release, Fargo regrets that this style of game-making appears to have fallen out of fashion in many current-generation RPGs.
“One sees less of this style of game [because] the newer RPGs use large cinematic pieces or spoken dialogue at every turn,” he says. “In our case, we craft these games up to the last minute… [That’s not easy] if you already have 20 million dollars’ [worth] of prerendered cutscenes.”</blockquote>GamesRadar:<blockquote>Delivering on promises is important to Fargo. With crowd-funding schemes like Kickstarter, players fund projects based on what they expect them to deliver. Deviate from that, and you risk angering the people who are bankrolling you. But what happens when you get into a Mass Effect 3 situation, where players expectations aren't met because the team wants to deliver choice - a vital component of RPGs. "Part of the problem there, as I understand it, is that they promoted the fact that your decisions could effect the ending," he says.
"So, you’re if you’re making a strong claim like that then you have to follow through with it. The general feeling is that they didn’t follow through with it other than you being able to choose a few different colours. I think that if you’ve committed to a principle then you need to deliver on that. However, if you as an author decided that you wanted to have an ending that goes one way or the other then that’s your prerogative. It all comes down to how you’ve communicated about what you’re going to do. So if I say that I’m going to do multiplayer, and it isn’t in the final game, then I don’t get to just say “Hey, I’m an artist. I don’t believe in multiplayer” because people might have bought your game on the understanding that there would be multiplayer."</blockquote>PC Games N (focuses on Torment):<blockquote>PCGN: When you reboot these old IPs, fans often have diametrically opposed ideas about what they want the game to be. Is it a problem making sure most of your backers are satisified?
BF: Ahh, no problem at all. None! Well yeah, I mean, it’s sort of a yes and a no. You’re right, not only are you trying to build a product, you’re trying to build a product that’s often based upon their memory of what it was, and not even what it actually was. We all get fonder of things as time passes, so I recognise that we are competing with people’s memories of those games also. Not what they actually were.
The reason I have confidence is because our communication is much tighter than it’s ever been before. Back in the days when we worked on Wasteland or Fallout of Planescape: Torment, we would work on these games in a vaccum and then hope we nailed it. We’d realease it and keep our fingers crossed. Kickstarter is anything but that, we’re in this constant communication, showing them things and reacting and modifying and dialling it in. We have our own sensibilities too, we know what pillars we’re going to hit and those aren’t going to change, but they know what those are and we know what those are. It allows us a greater confidence that we’re delivering against a vision.
The other part of it is that we have an amazing writing staff on this team. It’s unbelievable, you know, we’ve got Colin McComb, Pat Rothfuss, Chris Avellone. It’s an amazing team of writers, so if anybody can do it it’s these guys.
PCGN: Chris Avellone is a sort of strange, human stretch goal for this campaign. What happens if you don't hit the target to hire him? Does he just go away? [At the time of the interview, the $3.5 million stretch goal target to hire Avellone had not yet been reached]
BF: Well look, if we come up a dollar short am I not gonna do it? Of course not. We have to put the stretch goals down. There is an increased cost of bringing him aboard though, we have to take his time from Obsidian, that costs a lot, and then we have to create whatever it is that he builds. It’s fine that it comes from his mind, but now we’ve got to possibly do more work and art and so on, so it’s not just pure writing. But yeah, if obviously we’re right there, we’re not going to get ridiculous about it.</blockquote>
GameFront:<blockquote>Games have the potential to address serious issues. BioShock addressed libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, while Spec Ops: The Line painted video game violence in a completely different light from normal, run-of-the-mill first person shooters. Is Wasteland 2 going to approach any difficult, or even political, topics?
The main purpose of Wasteland 2 is not to tackle the big questions. It’s primarily a game about having wild and dangerous adventures in a post-apocalyptic world, and, in the tradition of the first game, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Having said that, post-apocalyptic worlds have always been great venues for satire of the contemporary world, and we can’t resist taking broad potshots at our society’s obsessions and foibles as we create the various towns and people our rangers meet along the way.
The residents of the wasteland are rebuilding society from scratch, and because they don’t know much about the past, they’re pretty much making it up as they go along. Just about every form of society is being tried out, from theocracy to meritocracy to dictatorship to democracy to the-one-with-the-biggest-gun wins. What could be more fun than poking every one of those systems with a sharp stick?</blockquote>GamesIndustry:<blockquote>The Kickstarter method is preferable, according to Fargo. "Our game certainly has less risk because it's being pre-ordered," Fargo notes. "I specifically make the game for that audience, and then I let the chips fall where they may. I think people that like roleplaying games are going to love it. Some people say, 'How do you make it for the younger generation,' and I don't think about that. I'm just going to make something that's smart and intelligent, nuanced, and the audience will figure it out."
The ideal situation for Fargo, assuming Wasteland II and Torment do well, is to continue to do RPGs that are interesting. "I don't want to be in a situation where we finish Wasteland II and I have to hurry up and get Wasteland III out the door. I don't ever want to be in that situation," Fargo said. "You do a sequel when you have the right idea." In other words, do a sequel because you want to, not because you have to.</blockquote>EDGE:<blockquote>And so finally, on March 13, 2012, Fargo cut out the middlemen and went directly to the thousands of fans who’d spent more than two decades asking for a game that publishers didn’t seem interested in. Turning to the crowdfunding website Kickstarter, Fargo and his team at inXile gambled that they could source the million dollars needed to fund Wasteland 2 by appealing to the players rather than the suits – with Fargo even offering up $100,000 of his own cash if the pool only made it to $900,000. In the end, the Kickstarter closed at three times that amount, raking in $2,933,252 in 30 days. “Ironically, I am fortunate that no publisher picked the game up,” he says, “since [it’s now] being created with the right sensibilities in mind.”
Those sensibilities will look pleasantly familiar to gamers au fait with Interplay’s back catalogue, because Wasteland 2 shares the same key ingredients as its RPG cousins from the ’90s, namely a rich universe and a deep script. And although he makes a point of playing most new games on release, Fargo regrets that this style of game-making appears to have fallen out of fashion in many current-generation RPGs.
“One sees less of this style of game [because] the newer RPGs use large cinematic pieces or spoken dialogue at every turn,” he says. “In our case, we craft these games up to the last minute… [That’s not easy] if you already have 20 million dollars’ [worth] of prerendered cutscenes.”</blockquote>GamesRadar:<blockquote>Delivering on promises is important to Fargo. With crowd-funding schemes like Kickstarter, players fund projects based on what they expect them to deliver. Deviate from that, and you risk angering the people who are bankrolling you. But what happens when you get into a Mass Effect 3 situation, where players expectations aren't met because the team wants to deliver choice - a vital component of RPGs. "Part of the problem there, as I understand it, is that they promoted the fact that your decisions could effect the ending," he says.
"So, you’re if you’re making a strong claim like that then you have to follow through with it. The general feeling is that they didn’t follow through with it other than you being able to choose a few different colours. I think that if you’ve committed to a principle then you need to deliver on that. However, if you as an author decided that you wanted to have an ending that goes one way or the other then that’s your prerogative. It all comes down to how you’ve communicated about what you’re going to do. So if I say that I’m going to do multiplayer, and it isn’t in the final game, then I don’t get to just say “Hey, I’m an artist. I don’t believe in multiplayer” because people might have bought your game on the understanding that there would be multiplayer."</blockquote>PC Games N (focuses on Torment):<blockquote>PCGN: When you reboot these old IPs, fans often have diametrically opposed ideas about what they want the game to be. Is it a problem making sure most of your backers are satisified?
BF: Ahh, no problem at all. None! Well yeah, I mean, it’s sort of a yes and a no. You’re right, not only are you trying to build a product, you’re trying to build a product that’s often based upon their memory of what it was, and not even what it actually was. We all get fonder of things as time passes, so I recognise that we are competing with people’s memories of those games also. Not what they actually were.
The reason I have confidence is because our communication is much tighter than it’s ever been before. Back in the days when we worked on Wasteland or Fallout of Planescape: Torment, we would work on these games in a vaccum and then hope we nailed it. We’d realease it and keep our fingers crossed. Kickstarter is anything but that, we’re in this constant communication, showing them things and reacting and modifying and dialling it in. We have our own sensibilities too, we know what pillars we’re going to hit and those aren’t going to change, but they know what those are and we know what those are. It allows us a greater confidence that we’re delivering against a vision.
The other part of it is that we have an amazing writing staff on this team. It’s unbelievable, you know, we’ve got Colin McComb, Pat Rothfuss, Chris Avellone. It’s an amazing team of writers, so if anybody can do it it’s these guys.
PCGN: Chris Avellone is a sort of strange, human stretch goal for this campaign. What happens if you don't hit the target to hire him? Does he just go away? [At the time of the interview, the $3.5 million stretch goal target to hire Avellone had not yet been reached]
BF: Well look, if we come up a dollar short am I not gonna do it? Of course not. We have to put the stretch goals down. There is an increased cost of bringing him aboard though, we have to take his time from Obsidian, that costs a lot, and then we have to create whatever it is that he builds. It’s fine that it comes from his mind, but now we’ve got to possibly do more work and art and so on, so it’s not just pure writing. But yeah, if obviously we’re right there, we’re not going to get ridiculous about it.</blockquote>
