Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Former Interplay boss Brian Fargo has wanted to make a sequel to Wasteland for 20 years.
Earlier this month Fargo revealed that he planned to use Kickstarter to fund a new Wasteland game, following the success of Double Fine’s experiment with the crowdsourcing site. Now in an interview with Fallout and Wasteland fansite No Mutants Allowed, Fargo has shed a bit more light on his ambitions:
“As you know I have been wanting to make a sequel to Wasteland for nearly 20 years so it seems that it is long overdue and an overnight possibility all at once,” he said.
“The whole industry was quite surprised to see Double Fine raise such a substantial amount of money for an Indie project and I’m sure every developer in the world started to think about it. Before I could even speak to my guys I started to have fans pinging me on doing another Wasteland.”
Fargo also explained that he tried to pitch a new Wasteland to publishers in the wake of Fallout 3. At this point he was being helped by Jason D Anderson, who helped to make the original game.
“Jason was working with me to create a new Wasteland and pitch it to publishers and I was quite surprised at how little interest there was. Here we had the co-creator of Fallout working with the lead designer of Wasteland (Mike Stackpole) and the guy who helped produce them both all on the heels of a massive success with Fallout 3. Publishers just had no interest in a party based RPG and they felt like they would need to go up against the production costs of BioWare which are in the tens of millions of dollars.
“It was frustrating for both of us as we had fans on one side pinging us constantly for a new Wasteland but we just had no way to finance it. Jason did a fantastic job on the design and story material so you can bet we fully plan on using it in this game. I’m fortunate to have had Jason spend close to a year on design materials. We really had a great time envisioning what it could be and I’m excited that it might finally become a reality… but of course that is about to be up to the public’s support.”
The inXile boss added that the game is unlikely to use its own engine, as the project will need to use most of its funding (if successful) on the creation of in-game assets.
However, the new game will retain the original top-down perspective – and Fargo says this should help to keep the game visually simple, while allowing for a more complicated RPG structure:
“It isn’t a real RPG if it doesn’t have deep cause and effect and true re-playability and that means you create more assets than a player will see in a normal session. We do have the advantage of this being a top down game which saves tremendously on the art creation which in turn allows us to script out numerous outcomes without the concern of creating graphics for every possible situation.”
