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But best title ever!
Now that the Kickstarter campaign has ended the press coverage for Wasteland 2 has understandably slowed down, but there's still a new interview with producer Chris Keenan on Forbes. Snippet ahead:<blockquote>A lot of people are calling the Wasteland 2 team a “dream team” and are pretty excited to see at least some of the old Black Isle team getting back together. Can you tell me a little bit about who is on this project and what they’ll be doing? How did you get everyone involved?
As a grown man, I haven’t been ‘giddy’ in a while but being able to work with this team literally makes me giddy. Brian was able to get almost all of the original team back for the sequel. Mike Stackpole is on board and will be doing design and writing much of the story elements, Alan Pavlish is going to design a few areas and consult throughout the process, Liz Danforth will be doing the same. Early on, we also got Mark Morgan signed up as our composer…he is famous for setting the musical score on Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape Torment and many other great moody RPG’s from the past. Of course, Brian is leading the project every step of the way. On top of reviving the old team, we enlisted the help of Andree Wallin who has done some amazing concept art for us. Finally, RPG designer extraordinaire Chris Avellone from Obsidian has joined on to help with the project. It’s an amazing list of people to help revive a genre they had such a huge hand in starting.
(...)
Do you think the nature and mechanics of storytelling in games has changed in the years spanning Wasteland and your current project? How can games convey that “literary nature of the world” in ways that other mediums, or perhaps even older games, cannot?
I definitely think it has and it could be due to a few things. First, the technology is getting better. With games now, we can get a ton more detail into the world that we had to describe in text before to convey these elements. That’s certainly not a bad thing. It has pushed the limits on how developers can get across the information they want to. I think we as developers also want to keep progressing the nature of storytelling in the medium. This has always been a challenge due to the non-linear nature of games. Obviously in movies it’s a single cohesive story. It will be the same for every person that watches it. Games allow people to infuse their personality into the world and play the way they would like. It certainly makes it more difficult to get across the beats of the narrative in a way that makes sense. Since we’re doing an old-school RPG, we aren’t going to shy away from descriptive world text in Wasteland 2. We get to pay homage to the old days when developers had to come up with creative ways to immerse their fans due to technology constraints.</blockquote>
As a grown man, I haven’t been ‘giddy’ in a while but being able to work with this team literally makes me giddy. Brian was able to get almost all of the original team back for the sequel. Mike Stackpole is on board and will be doing design and writing much of the story elements, Alan Pavlish is going to design a few areas and consult throughout the process, Liz Danforth will be doing the same. Early on, we also got Mark Morgan signed up as our composer…he is famous for setting the musical score on Fallout 1 and 2, Planescape Torment and many other great moody RPG’s from the past. Of course, Brian is leading the project every step of the way. On top of reviving the old team, we enlisted the help of Andree Wallin who has done some amazing concept art for us. Finally, RPG designer extraordinaire Chris Avellone from Obsidian has joined on to help with the project. It’s an amazing list of people to help revive a genre they had such a huge hand in starting.
(...)
Do you think the nature and mechanics of storytelling in games has changed in the years spanning Wasteland and your current project? How can games convey that “literary nature of the world” in ways that other mediums, or perhaps even older games, cannot?
I definitely think it has and it could be due to a few things. First, the technology is getting better. With games now, we can get a ton more detail into the world that we had to describe in text before to convey these elements. That’s certainly not a bad thing. It has pushed the limits on how developers can get across the information they want to. I think we as developers also want to keep progressing the nature of storytelling in the medium. This has always been a challenge due to the non-linear nature of games. Obviously in movies it’s a single cohesive story. It will be the same for every person that watches it. Games allow people to infuse their personality into the world and play the way they would like. It certainly makes it more difficult to get across the beats of the narrative in a way that makes sense. Since we’re doing an old-school RPG, we aren’t going to shy away from descriptive world text in Wasteland 2. We get to pay homage to the old days when developers had to come up with creative ways to immerse their fans due to technology constraints.</blockquote>
