What? I loved Wasteland, but I don’t agree with that at all.
I would be happy to see a proper Wasteland sequel. (Just so we’re clear, Interplay -did- make a Wasteland sequel when they had the opportunity - Fountain of Dreams. By most accounts it sucked. Or at least was nowhere near as good.) I’m not sure I trust Brian Fargo to deliver it, and not because he “had his chance and didn’t”, but because, well…look at what he did with the Bard’s Tale license. I don’t know how much of that was influenced by publishers, etc, and to be fair I did like the game they produced…but it was certainly not the sort of Bard’s Tale followup I would back on Kickstarter. Still, I’d wait for the pitch before I judged.
You have that backwards. The upgrades for Dragon Wars were actually from my suggestions for upgrades to Bard’s Tale III, and were in turn influenced by my experience on Wasteland. About the only thing that made it into BTIII was the automapping (and that was a backdoor sneak) - the rest got held for Dragon Wars since we knew we were leaving EA by that time. Bill (now Rebecca - no don’t ask, I don’t know) Heineman was also much inspired by Wasteland and adapted what he could onto the simpler Bard’s Tale engine (it was certainly easier to develop).
Fallout for the longest time was simply the GURPs game with no theme until they finally decided to use Wasteland as the primary inspiration.
It would take a fanbase as well I would think. Anyone can get the cash to start a restaurant, it takes deep pockets to keep it going for the first two years. At least for the same for the kind of game I think you’re talking about. It all comes back to the return on the original investment. Sure there are people like, say you and I and perhaps people here. But return on investment is a killer. If I’m not mistaken, top down RPGs, if they aren’t realtime like Diablo, are a niche. A niche that I love. And I’d go further and say I’d love a top down, RPG that’s turn based with the depth of Baldur’s Gate 2 again. And then I wake up.
No we didn’t! EA lost its nerve at the last moment and stopped calling it a Wasteland sequel (which all of us who worked on Wasteland are grateful for), but NO ONE who had creative control on Wasteland worked on Fountain of Dreams. It was entirely done by EA, and Interplay had nothing to do with it. The only tenuous connection was Dave Albert, who was the EA producer on Wasteland, but he had utterly no creative input into Wasteland (beyond maybe the infamous duck thing).
Okay. I knew that theoretically Fountain of Dreams was the sequel, but I admittedly don’t have a strong idea of companies or people involved that far back.
Autoduel rocked!
On a highway where you weren’t really sure of the map. Forward machine guns and a rear oil dropper. Just trying to find the damn town. All of a sudden you have a another car running from a side road. It’s shooting at you. You have to bring the damn cargo to the guy to get paid. You’re hit once, twice. Rear armor dropping.
You pop the oil slick. He skids out of view. You see the right turnoff.
Safe!
Damn I loved that game.
All done on a fricking C-64. Black, white and green. And more immersive than anything I’ve played since.
I just seems like a lot of money compared to some indy games. Does the artwork and writing really cost that much extra.
I remember Wasteland as a succession of cool. Every new thing made me go “oooooooohhhh”, and grin giddily.
That said a $1,000,000 kick start is somewhere between absurd and offensive.
If you don’t mind my asking, corsair, who are you? You’ve been involved with some of my all-time favorite games (in particular, I dearly loved Dragon Wars).
Look at how many dev studios die, even moderately successful ones are only 1-2 disappointing games away from dissolution. Game developer or investing in a game development studio is far from an easy road to riches, it’s almost always ruin.
Anyway, I think the more exposure Kickstarter gets the better for all its projects. Forever being known as a niche, indie, low-budget thing is not actually the path to success. Let them blow up twitter and news stories from time to time, and let people think they can get rich or get something unique out of it.
Of course, if people start drumming up a million and rush out crap, that’d be bad press… but there’s no particular reason to doubt Fargo’s sincerity, even if he happens to have access to other money.
sorry dude, wasteland is the game that clicked for me, but you actually have to invest in your own beliefs, not on guaranteed bucks for a promise of past successes. There is success based on merit, not success based on the promise of success.
Looking back, my time playing Wasteland far eclipses any of my Fallout experiences. I also rate Infocom games high on my list, it’s just what had the most effect on my imagination and fun. Nowadays, I’m spectacularly jaded and it’s a rare game that hits my mental g-spot like a good book.
I don’t think he’s revealed his name, but we do know he is in that awesome photo inside the Wasteland album cover box. This makes him Ken St. Andre, Michael A. Stackpole, Bill Dugan, Nishan Hossepian, Chris Cristensen, Alan Pavlish, or Bruce Shlickbernd. =)
And, no, I’m not trying to out him or anything. corsair, if what I’ve done is inappropriate I will gladly remove.
Regarding games like Autoduel, or Wasteland, that did so much with so little graphically – can we ever go back? I’d like to think we could. Paramount is maintaining the feel (mechanics, story, setting), of course, but how much in terms of retro graphics or sound could be tolerated?
I am sure people are free to not donate money to the kickstarter thing, but as someone else noted, its kinda weird that one moment people wants to go back to the old and good games and bemoans the fact that publishers doesn’t dare do anything other than sure cash-ins, the next instant you have a chance to kickstart a project a lot of people have wanted, its a no-no because of who the founder is?
There are a LOT of assumptions being made in this thread about how things are, how they went down, and how rich others are, and its a damn shame.
Wasteland 2 has my money - I can afford it, so why not.
I don’t believe that what you ask could ever happen again, sadly. While there are lots of people that talk the “it’s not the graphics, it’s the game” thing, these days “it’s the money not the content”.
And that’s not a dig at the developers. That’s the bean counter thing.
A good example was Auto Assault. I was a third wave beta tester for that game. And a large contingent of the testers insisted that the game was not ready to be released. We were very vocal about this. And yet the game was released none the less. And it eventually tanked. I was very pissed off. It could have been a decent Car Wars game. But it ended up being a WoW clone with cars.
No. Games like Autoduel won’t ever be made again.
Edit: This was to BigWeather.
Uh, a million bucks does not go far when you have more than a few employees, and your project is more than a few months long.
I think that the Kickstarter thing, if it’s supposed to be used by videogames projects, will work like that. The indie group of whoever will make a prototype or alpha version of their game (think Project Zomboid, or Starfarer, or Minecraft in the first version) and then they will start a Kickstarter campaign to try to get funds to make the full game. But of course, like you say, they need to show something more tangible than empty promisis.
Double Fine kickstarter campaign is more a special case, of an already dev. company with famous names attached to it, also using the nostalgy factor.