Wasteland 3 has been announced. InXile Entertainment will be posting a crowd-funding page on Fig on October 5th for the next game in the series. (Brain Fargo, head of InXile, also sits on the Fig advisory board.) The game is being made for PC, Xbox One, and PS4 and this time, the studio aims to include cooperative multiplayer at launch. According to the press release, Wasteland 3 will feature vehicle travel in the frozen post-apocalypse of Colorado.
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Play by yourself or with a friend in story-driven synchronous or asynchronous multiplayer. Choices open up (or close off) mission opportunities, areas to explore, story arcs, and tons of other content.[/quote]
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The core of Wasteland 3 will still be a rich single-player experience. If you play with a friend while both online together, you’ll be able to share many missions, and join up to hit key story beats, but you can also split up and cover more ground. Once a game is started, you can play Wasteland 3 while your friend is offline, and do a lot of missions without them. Be aware, however, that the actions you take while your friend is off-line are not without consequence!
By making the decision to include multiplayer early on in the process, we will be able to design a game that is true to the core principles of the Wasteland franchise and our studio. Wasteland 3 can be played as an offline, single-player game, and is built from the ground up with a focus on story and reactivity that makes no sacrifices to the multiplayer experience. At the same time, co-op players will enjoy working together to change Wasteland 3’s highly reactive world… or finding ways to destroy what their friend has worked to accomplish.[/quote]
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As part of our improved presentation, we’re updating the way dialog is built and presented. Wasteland 3 will feature a complex dialogue based on the ideology behind Torment: Tides of Numenera’s branching system. Players will choose lines of dialogue that lead them through branching conversations. Choosing certain skills for your character may spell the different between success or catastrophe. And last but not least, in key conversations the camera will pan in to show a closer shot of person you’re talking to.[/quote]
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Additionally, we’ve been working closely with Christopher and Nic Bischoff of Brotherhood Games, the team behind the widely celebrated STASIS and Cayne isometric adventure games.[/quote]
Oh man, this really kinda excites me. I love Chris’s posts here.
I still kinda wish these companies could wind up on solid enough ground to continue on without needing to continuously return to the crowdfunding spigot. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I trust Fargo well enough, but you’d think they’d seen enough success. . .
Ah well. This is still cool, and yes, I still need to finish the game myself. It was really fun, while I was playing it, though!!
As someone who backed Torment, i must admit to not being thrilled with this news.
Even though i liked wasteland 2, i don’t think i can back, or buy, wasteland 3, until they actually finish the game I already bought from them.
I feel like we’re dealing with Comcept again who got funding for Mighty No. 9 and then started a kickstarter for a brand new game, Red Ash, before finishing Mighty No. 9.
People sure have some weird ideas about crowdfunding. And about how videogames are made, for that matter.
Crowdfunding isn’t (just) a desperation move for when you can’t afford to make something any other way. It’s a good way for companies to outsource financial risk, establish a known base of enthusiasts, interact directly with their playerbase when making the game, keep their own IP rather than signing everything over to a big publisher, and so on. So there are good reasons to do it even if they could fund the entire thing out of their pocket. But also, they probably -are- (and definitely are, in this case) funding some of it out of their pockets in any case because videogames cost a lot of money, even mid-tier ones, and people tend to balk at projects asking for the kind of money they actually cost to make.
Similarly, if a developer is big enough to work on multiple games at once (and InXile is), they almost certainly are because different staff are needed at different points in a game and it keeps the income rolling in even when a game is taking a while (like Torment). (It also spreads out the risk and potential reward.) If that developer uses crowdfunding, then they’re going to crowdfund games before they’ve finished all their other games. That’s just a given.
I’ll of course support it at the lowest tier that gets me early access.
But.
As a $1k kickstarter there is NO FING WAY I’m going to back that big on whatever this new Fig service is, even if that means that I miss out on reprising my (very tiny) role.
Yeah this was my experience as well. It did not help that when I played, the second half of the game (the LA stuff) was much less fleshed out than the first half of the game. I have never revisited it.
To be fair, Torment ran a successful crowd-funding campaign a good 18 months before Wasteland 2 shipped. There’s a decent chunk of Torment playable to backers, which is better than last time.
Still, considering they also have Bards Tale IV in the works, multiple internal teams and a fully-fledged satellite studio in New Orleans I wonder if they’re stretching the studio bandwidth a little thin.
I thought WL2 was an amazing game, and was downright flabbergasted that such an oldschool type CRPG was produced in the modern era. It had its issues, but I loved it.
They explained their process earlier, when people asked why they were kickstarting Torment when WL2 wasn’t out yet. The answer is simple-- they need to start preproduction so everybody at the company continues to work and they don’t have to fire anybody.
Today, Torment is at the same stage as WL2 when that post was written. The same reasoning applies.
