If you enjoy the thought of exploring an apocalyptic landscape, then the upcoming computer role-playing game Wasteland 2 will be the perfect experience for you. Furthermore, creator Brian Fargo says that your time in the wasteland will be completely unique to you. It's just a matter of mathematics.
"We want quests, we want events, this is how many, this is how we want them to roll, this is the morality stuff. The possibilities of two people having the same experience playing this game is almost statistically impossible," Fargo told Digital Spy in an interview.
Wasteland 2 is an apocalyptic RPG from inXile Entertainment. The game raised almost $3 million on Kickstarter back in April 2012, and it will finally be finished and released in August 2014.
The game is filled with moments where what you say or what you do affects the various characters and factions in the world. It may even turn someone who has joined you on your travels to turn against you. Fargo explains that one optional character that joins you doesn't want another character to know about her. You can walk all the way back to the beginning of the game and tell that character what's going on. That optional character will then walk away from you and out of the game forever.
"It's a small moment, but it's a meaningful moment," Fargo told Digital Spy. "It's an effect where you think, 'I'm going to try this and see what happens', and guess what, something really comes out of it. This game has thousands of those little moments. To me... when you do three or four of those in a row, I think that's when you're really immersed."
This same sense of freedom is extended to other aspects of the game's story, including how it ends. According to Fargo, the choices a player decides may result in the story ending after a few hours, 20 hours or even a lengthy 60 hours. The variety of endings will emerge organically from your actions and not just be a simple choice of A, B or C that takes place after you've played all the way through the whole game.
Wasteland 2 is the sequel to a 1988 post-apocalyptic science fiction role-playing game for the computer. The game's unique setting and gameplay attracted a cult following. The original Wasteland was published by Electronic Arts. When the developers at Interplay wanted to make a sequel and EA didn't want to publish it, Fargo et al created the Fallout series. Fallout 1 (1997) and 2 (1998) were made in a similar vein as Wasteland, but then that series ended. The rights to the Fallout series were eventually sold to Bethesda and they created Fallout 3 (2008) as a first-person shooter/role-playing game, which was very different from the original Wasteland and Fallout games.
But with the success of niche games on Kickstarter and downloadable games on Steam, Brian Fargo pursued the rights to create a new game in the mold of the original Wasteland. Besides Wasteland 2, inXile is also working on Torment: Tides of Numenera, a pseudo-sequel to another beloved computer RPG, Planescape Torment. The new Torment raised $4.2 million on Kickstarter in April 2013.
