Wasteland 2

[WayAbvPar]

I must be the only gamer active in the 1980s to have never played Wasteland. Post-apocalyptic worlds never really interested me. I played the original Fallout and Fallout 3 mostly because everyone was so excited about them, but the setting just gets boring. Still, I will probably check this out, especially if he hits the $15-$20 price point he mentioned, and it is on Steam.

[Lantyssa]

The original is worth all the hype.  It was my favorite of that era of game.

[WayAbvPar]

I was always wary after reading The Turtle In The Tower from the Shadowrun short story anthology that was out a few million years ago. Most of the stories were decent, but that one SUCKED. When I found out KSA also wrote Wasteland I was very suspicious.

[Furiously]

The original is worth all the hype.  It was my favorite of that era of game.

It was revolutionary and awesome.

[Falconeer]

The "Vision document" is out.
It's a google docuemnt of 9 pages, but worth the time if you are into this thing.

Here's the an Overview:

Game Overview

Wasteland 2 reintroduces the concept of party driven adventuring, a style of game-play untapped for
many years. Having a party of characters will re-introduce game-play dynamics rarely seen in today's
RPGs.

As a team of Desert Rangers, it is your job to restore order in this lawless post-apocalyptic landscape.
How you do it is up to you. Interact with hundreds of characters across the world, shaping your own
destiny. Who you choose for your team will add dimension to your party interactions, opening new
possibilities for you to explore. Will the wastes remember you and your team as diplomatic defenders of
justice? As a group of intimidating, brutish thugs? Or somewhere in between? The choice is yours.

The harsh reality of the wastes is that diplomacy and intimidation will only take you so far. With gangs,
cultists and bizarre creatures at every turn, some problems often can only be settled at the end of a gun.
As you and your team gain experience, it is up to you to shape your team’s skills and abilities, building
the perfect fighting force.

Also out is the art for the cover, totally inspired to the first chapter.

[Amaron]

I hope they go with the kind of wasteland that cover art implies.     Nature reclaiming ruins and what not.

[Falconeer]

Project Update #18, but most importantly FIRST SCREENSHOT!



(Higher resolution here)

Project Update #18: Early Screen Shot and Website News
Posted by inXile entertainment Like

It has been just over a month since my last update and we have been making progress on many fronts. The designers are all working at full steam and generating a wonderfully diverse set of ideas that are well written, nuanced, original, and sometimes creepy. There will be no lack of originality and deep game play in Wasteland 2. The team has risen to the challenge of making a rich world that will capture a post apocalyptic atmosphere and provide a unique experience for each player that dives in.

We are nearly complete with our backer web site which will consolidate our backer database with Kickstarter and PayPal and eventually allow backers to upgrade their tiers or more easily change such things as shipping information. A soft launch is imminent and then we will roll it out for all.

We also have our first pass at a Wasteland 2 screen shot to share that is running inside the Unity engine. The process up till now has been in getting up to speed with Unity but also much discussion about look and feel. Our environment art director Koy Vanoteghem has written a nice piece below on our approach and process.

Releasing a screen shot this early in the process is a new concept for me as we typically want to hone in every element before we show it. But based on the requests and our desire for fan input, we are doing so to solicit feedback on the basic look. Please keep in mind that we have not put in the particle effects and post-processing which will have a dramatic effect on the scene, and this represents just one of the various environments for Wasteland 2 so expect to see other quite different locales. Also, this particular camera angle is on the low end of a range that the player can adjust upwards to a much more top-down view, for those who prefer that style during game play.

I am frequently on twitter sharing my thoughts, soliciting opinions on various subjects and highlighting interesting projects and technology. You can follow me at @brianfargo if you want to stay tuned into such things.

Again I thank you for allowing us to create this game the way it was meant to me made. We’re going to make you all proud.

Brian Fargo
http://i.imgur.com/CULnS.jpg

See the full size image on our Facebook page at Facebook/Ranger.HQ

In our effort to establish the appropriate look and feel for the re-launch of the Wasteland franchise, we sifted through a variety of media types available on the market for inspiration. Among all of the similarly natured games, CG film shorts, and various documentaries, it became increasingly clear that the modern day conception of a post-apocalyptic world has diversified.

Of course, the desert-oriented wasteland devoid of life was still there. But a newer and more compelling version which highlighted nature's reclamation of vacated places took hold of our attention. This new conception gives us the opportunity to generate a variety of environment types while staying true to the narrative. It also allows the location and geology to dictate the flora and fauna, as well as the manner and state of decay. >From the dry deserts and icy mountaintops of Arizona to the coastal conditions of LA and larger southern California region, each region generates its own flavor. You saw a bit of this in our early concept pieces we had commissioned. Because the early part of the game, where our development is currently focused, takes place in Arizona, this first screen shot depicts (surprise) a desert scene.

As we moved into prototyping game-play scenarios and in-game environments, we wanted to keep in mind the long-term strategies we had been talking about in the press. With our small team structure and the expectation of a significant integration of contractor and fan/backer based assets, we wanted to consider the efforts that would be involved in synthesizing those contributions into a consistent style and theme. The Unity engine has this wonderfully integrated asset store, full of props, environment sets, FX and tools, and it seemed the perfect proving grounds for our first pass at this new approach of game environment creation.

Certainly, purchased or prefabricated assets are nothing new; a variety of sites are out there selling "game-ready" props, and like most developers, we are familiar with that opportunity. But Unity's Asset Store had a few distinct advantages that we found appealing. The store, being accessible from within the editor itself, along with the purchase, downloading and importing of those packages, made this surprisingly painless. Packages containing not only the models and textures, but also materials, particle attachments, and animations were ready to use and then modify immediately upon purchase. And so our goal was to purchase a variety of packages, modify them to suit our stylistic needs, and put together a scene by combining them with assets and textures generated in-house.

The big+ exception to all of this is of course characters, which we are developing primarily in house. RPGs have always generated strong relationships between the player and the characters they craft and breathe life into as the game progresses. And to this end, we will be working to create characters that can be read cleanly with our camera angles. Strong silhouettes and bold colors in costuming and accessories, and their animations and poses working with a camera angle (that is still being tested), seemed a tall order for this approach, and so in this shot a few examples of that effort are present.

We will continue to develop the style and look of the game, undoubtedly that is something that will evolve as we move forward and branch out with other environment types. As we become more familiar with our new found friend Unity, and the technologies that are available to us for lighting, shadowing, and material set-up/execution, we hope you'll enjoy seeing it evolve along with us.

Koy Vanoteghem

[Amaron]

That's better than I expected.  I hope they have enough cash to finish it at that quality.

[Surlyboi]

Is that a fucking Scorpitron? I think it is! 

[Falconeer]

We are pleased to announce that Colin McComb has come aboard to help write and design for Wasteland. You might have heard of a few of his other projects like Torment and Fallout 2. Be sure to check out his books. Amongst our many goals is to have this game be one of the best written RPGs created.

[Ingmar]

He was pretty involved with Torment (from the D&D side of things, I think Chris Avellone was much more responsible for the actual writing?) but my understanding is his role on Fallout 2 was pretty minor. I'd personally peg his work on the pnp Planescape stuff as most important. He also wrote the Birthright setting though, so nobody is perfect. 

[Amaron]

As much as Chris Avellone seems like a good fit I actually think he's pretty horrible at sandbox writing.   For the people that like his stuff he's great but he's horrid at presenting anything outside that specific subset.

[Falconeer]

[Zetor]

Necro!111

Have a first look video (edit: fixed URL, vimeo got shut down after 190k views). Has 10 or so mins of gameplay and a lot of dev commentary. Quite a few systems seem missing and wonky (like punctuation in the description text box), but that's to be expected. :p

e: and here is the accompanying Kickstarter update.


Looks like 2013 may be the year of the retro-RPG. Or it may be the year of shattered dreams, who knows?  

[HaemishM]

Oh man, that looks good. 

[Trippy]

Oh god, this is going to be so awesome.

[Zetor]

Yeah... in a moment of weakness, I actually dropped $25 on a preorder. I look forward to blasting various things into ground round.

[Falconeer]

This is a couple of weeks old news but I really feel like sharing it cause it is so sexy. So, the game has been delayed, but I dare to say I am happy with it as they are making an extra effort to put in it even more 'reactivity' than originally planned. The article is wroth reading, if you care about this game and if you care about RPGs where what you do and when you do it has consequences in the game world.

You know how Witcher 2 received 427 Nobel Peace Prizes for its billion-headed hydra of a second act? Think that, but in many, many, many more locations.

(...)

“We have so many sequences,” added inXile president Matt Findley. “About half the game, most people will never see. We’re not afraid at all to create content that’s off the critical path or can be closed off permanently.”

(...)

“On the biggest level,” Fargo continued, “there will be areas that will be completely different. Gone, destroyed. There’s not one just like it to make up for it. It’s just gone.”
"And we show the reactivity,” Keenan said. “If you go to one area, you start to hear radio calls from the other. They’re getting taken over, and if you try to veer back, you see the destruction from that, and they’re in a completely different state. For instance, if you’re too late to a call, maybe robots took it out. If you go there, you’re gonna see carnage. Piles of dead bodies. No robots left to kill because they’ve moved on.”

"“We over-funded,” Fargo boasted, beaming. “I don’t make any money from this. Me, I want to make a game that people talk about the way they do Fallout and Wasteland, 10 or 20 years from now. I’m only focused on that and what I have to do to make sure it hits all the points I know work for the game.”

He then fast-balled further examples. What if, for instance, you disobey Ranger orders to the point of becoming a liability? You become a pariah. Your own organization turns on you, hunts you. The entire game changes. And then, of course, there’s the extra-colossal, radiation-mutated elephant in the room: you can kill anyone, anytime. And sometimes – for example, if a party member won’t stop selling your stuff for booze money – you might have to. Remember: you can shoot or kill anybody in the whole game,” Fargo interjected. “That in itself [is huge]. If someone joins your party, you can kick them out, kill them, whatever you want. There’s whole sequences you’re not gonna see later because you offed the guy. We just deal with it. There’s no replacement – no NPC that joins you and acts just like him functionally. He’s out. You’re just not gonna see it.”

(...)

“It’s not real reactivity unless we do that stuff. Otherwise it’s just a magician’s trick. You’re getting the same thing. It’s not that. It’s a virtual impossibility for two people to have the exact same experience of the game.”

[Sky]

Nice! 

[Signe]

Another game I'll have to play a LOT just to see what will happen next!

[Quinton]

I was really skeptical about these guys being able to deliver on the promise, but backed them anyway.  I'm starting to think that I will not regret that decision.

[Furiously]

http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/art-print well fuck me.....
 Only 499 left now.

[Falconeer]

That price is ridiculous if you ask me. It started from 500$ and they got a lot of flak for that, so now it is "only" 320$. Oh, well..

[Ingmar]

I was about to say that it didn't strike me as that expensive for a 'fine art' type print, but then I realized it is awfully small.

[Trippy]

Yeah.

[Falconeer]

This is less expensive and makes more sense, so it inevitably looks a million times better in a frame on your wall if that's what you were planning to do with that print. I have it and I wouldn't trade it for 10 of those fine prints.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Wasteland-Commodore-64-C64-EA-Apocalyptic-RPG-/161047771861?pt=Video_Games_Games&hash=item257f31fad5

[lamaros]

As far as I'm concerned they're still all talk with how great it will, the rps preview didn't strike me with massive confidence.

Would love to be proven wrong.

[Ard]

Yeah, I'm with you there lamaros.  I want this to be a good game, but that interview really threw off more red flags than good feelings for me.  I just don't have any faith in inxile to deliver a decent game, but I'm still feeling burned by Hunted.

[Xilren's Twin]

Yeah, I'm with you there lamaros.  I want this to be a good game, but that interview really threw off more red flags than good feelings for me.  I just don't have any faith in inxile to deliver a decent game, but I'm still feeling burned by Hunted.

Even though i didn't back the kickstarter, i remain mostly optimistic simply b/c in many ways, the bar is set very low.  If all they delivered was a more modern version of wasterland with a new main plot, i'll be happy.  It doesnt have to be robot Jesus, but these kinds of games just aren't getting made anymore so really ANY half decent working game would be considered a success.

[satael]

Yeah, I'm with you there lamaros.  I want this to be a good game, but that interview really threw off more red flags than good feelings for me.  I just don't have any faith in inxile to deliver a decent game, but I'm still feeling burned by Hunted.

Even though i didn't back the kickstarter, i remain mostly optimistic simply b/c in many ways, the bar is set very low.  If all they delivered was a more modern version of wasterland with a new main plot, i'll be happy.  It doesnt have to be robot Jesus, but these kinds of games just aren't getting made anymore so really ANY half decent working game would be considered a success.

Check the new Realms of Arkania to see how you can fuck up that really badly (it's a remake of the 1992 game and they managed to release a bug-infested pile of crap that still doesn't have an english manual)

[Falconeer]

20 minutes new walkthrough video.

[shiznitz]

20 minutes new walkthrough video.

Looks great. Better interface and movement system than Jagged Alliance reboot.

[Falconeer]

Hello Rangers,

Chris here to announce that our re-release of Wasteland 1 - The Original Classic has gone Gold and has been submitted to GOG.com and Steam for platform approval. If somehow you’re unfamiliar with Wasteland: this critically acclaimed post-apocalyptic role-playing game was first published in 1988, and broke new ground as one of the first cRPGs to have an open, reactive world with persistent consequences to your actions.


All our backers – whether through Wasteland 2’s Kickstarter, as a late backer through Paypal, or if you got Wasteland 2 through your Torment pledge – will be getting a copy of Wasteland 1 for free.

      

[Strazos]

Oh, nice.

My only question is how rough will this be at this point - I never played it, and the closest analogue I can think of is Fallout.

[Falconeer]

Well, Wasteland is super super super super grindy. You don't even know...