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Exploring Wasteland 3 with the original creators
Legendary developer Brian Fargo on the future of the crowdfunded Fallout alternative.
Wasteland 3
© inXile Entertainment
The visuals look vibrant and colourful
© inXile Entertainment
“I like the concept of you starting off alone and trying to survive with all the elements against you, so you don’t get the luxury of having your squad around helping to save your ass,” starts Fargo. “The thing with role-playing games is that at the start, we’re already asking you to spec out a guy before you really understand what’s best. And it compounds the problem when we’re asking you to spec out four people before you know what’s best. So, for all those reasons, we really liked that, from both a psychological perspective and also from a gameplay perspective.”
Keenan agrees, and the team have been watching Twitch streams to see how the players actually enjoyed the game. “It seemed like there was a group of people who were used to that old-school character creation right off the bat, with lots of stats and numbers, who you could tell just immediately loved,” he says, but there were other people who were more apprehensive to that creation system, and Keenan offers a solution. “What if we give the player a little bit of a sense of the world so they can start to feel it out and then building that stuff up afterwards so they can really make it count?”
Colorado’s snowy regions
© inXile Entertainment
After spending time in Arizona for Wasteland 2, Fargo is happy to tell us how the new setting, Colorado, fits into the lore. “The idea was that the Rangers [the dominant faction in the Wasteland] wanted to expand their territory and bring law and order not just to Arizona, but to the rest of the States. And Colorado was interesting because NORAAD (North American Aerospace Defence Command) is located there, too. So it seemed like an obvious place to go.”
Switching the arid deserts of Wasteland 2 for the cold weather of Colorado means that the radiation suit you needed to stay alive is now going to be replaced by protection from the cold, but there’s still a world map in play, it’s just that inXile isn’t quite sure how it will work yet. Keenan explains: “There will be some amount of overworld travel as you move through. Whether it looks like the old world map is up for debate,” while Fargo insists that the team are currently experimenting. “But the idea of a world map goes all the way back to Wasteland 1 and the original Fallout series, and that’s not something we want to deviate from.” So the game won’t be Skyrim sized, then, but Keenan insists that “we still want you moving between locations and feeling like you’re outside a local space.”
With the current political state of the world, and Wasteland being a… well, wasteland, perhaps we can expect some real world elements seeping into Wasteland 3? “You know, people make a lot of jokes about us wanting to hit on the whole Trump phenomenon, but I think that’s a little too on-the-nose,” says Fargo.
Keenan is aware of the socio political state of the world, too: “It feels like right now in politics there’s this idea that reality can be created if you say something enough times, whether it’s true or not. You see a lot of this stuff happening, where politicians will say something that a lot of people will know is a complete lie, but if it gets blasted out enough on social media, you start to see this groundswell of people believing it.”
Looks like fun, right?
© inXile Entertainment
Keenan meanwhile is aware of the fact that the black and white system isn’t always that satisfying. “What is kind of fun, though, is testing people’s morality and putting them in very grey situations, where you can kind of make an argument for both sides and you don’t really know with certainty how each choice is going to work out,” he tells us.
It seems we won’t be getting a fully voiced game any time soon, however, as Fargo is clear about the cost of such systems. “It requires a commitment to create a lot of content that you know a lot of people won’t see, and I think that’s difficult for a big AAA company to sign off on spending $10 million, or whatever the number is, to create a bunch of things we know people probably won’t get to experience. So, us smaller guys, we’re OK with that. We have a cost, too.”
Explosions always end well
© inXile Entertainment
On the multiplayer side of things, it appears Wasteland 3 will let us mess with other players. It’s still (obviously) in very early development, but Keenan gave us some info on something that sounds rather cheeky: your decisions change the world, so that affects others, and vice versa. “You’ve got the world and environment and my choices, but also somebody else’s choices that you can’t really control. And maybe you’re a good leader and able to convince them to do things that you think are right, or maybe you’re not. That’s going to be part of the experience.”
One thing that’s not set in stone yet, though, is the save system. With your friends interacting with your world, does that mean we’ll need an offline and an online save system to solve any syncing issues? Keenan is tight lipped, it seems. “At the moment we have something that we think is gonna work,” he begins. “We’re really big on iterating it and playing it, because to be honest at any time in game development probably half of good ideas you have don’t work out well. We have a couple of directions we’re going to take and play around with. But we probably won’t talk about that for, I would imagine, around a year or so!”
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