Game News Fargo being serious about crowdfunding Wasteland 2

[GhostBadger]

..nothing at all except a name and its oldschool, how oldschool ?

Oh yes an the new ultima : ultimate garage sale

 

[Country_Gravy]

Damn...I read the headline as "Crowdfucking"

I must be one sick bastard.

 

[PorkaMorka]

A million dollars is nowhere near AAA-standards (think 20 million and higher) and no one's getting a salary on AoD. As a better example, Jeff Vogel does give himself a salary and he said it cost him $120,000 to make Geneforge 4 and estimates would have been 50% higher had he done the graphics/code from scratch.

You are right that 1 million dollars is not an AAA budget, although I think you are mistaken if you think that $20 million represents the median budget of an AAA game.

My point was that setting the minimum budget at one million dollars illustrates that this game is probably going to suffer from the wasteful obsession with graphics and sound that are endemic to modern commercial games. I feel like you would get more bang for your buck if you funded some other developers who are more divorced from that mindset.

I probably could have expressed it better, admittedly.

 

[Roguey]

I doubt Fallout 1&2 cost a million dollars, and I don't see why Fargo needs it unless he plans to spend most of that money on the visuals.

I'm not so sure. It was in development for 3.5 years and had some pretty detailed death animations, and a few talking NPCs. Wikipedia citing Game development and production claims the average game budget in 2000 was 1-3 million with an additional 250k-1.5 million on marketing. It seems likely that it was closer to a million than not.

Edit: After digging around, I found an interview with Richard Garriott from 1992 where he mentions that Ultima 7 cost a million dollars to develop. And where the money went:
G: "It took 25 person-years to develop Ultima VII. We about had 8
programmers, 4 artists, 4 writers, 4 TDA's (Technical Design
Assistants), 2 audio engineers, myself, and Michelle (production
assistant). That's basically it. The group fluctuated a little, and
it was as high as 30 for a while, and lemme tell ya, that's a nightmare
to manage."

You are right that 1 million dollars is not an AAA budget, although I think you are mistaken if you think that $20 million represents the median budget of an AAA game.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/97413-Study-Claims-Average-Game-Budget-Is-23-Million

 

[almondblight]

uh..... well fuck me running. There might be some hope after all?

Seriously? Read what he said again. Old school vibe doesn't mean anything. Top down/isometric probably means Bards tale iOS type action game. Stats means, level up, and shoot faster.

Here's Fargo on his Bard's Tale remake:

"And specific to the console side, we're bringing more of the PC attitude to a console RPG. That is, not linear, different players get different experiences depending on their party mix, the feats that they focused on, the route that they played the game (because things get cut off depending on the route that you take). So we're bringing more of that kind of experience. Plus the old classic secret doors, and darkness areas, and magic mouths -- kind of the classic D&D PC RPG stuff, which has been minimalistic at best (on consoles), if it exists."

http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/october03/fargo/index2.shtml

 

[Jaesun]

uh..... well fuck me running. There might be some hope after all?

Seriously? Read what he said again. Old school vibe doesn't mean anything. Top down/isometric probably means Bards tale iOS type action game. Stats means, level up, and shoot faster.

Here's Fargo on his Bard's Tale remake:

"And specific to the console side, we're bringing more of the PC attitude to a console RPG. That is, not linear, different players get different experiences depending on their party mix, the feats that they focused on, the route that they played the game (because things get cut off depending on the route that you take). So we're bringing more of that kind of experience. Plus the old classic secret doors, and darkness areas, and magic mouths -- kind of the classic D&D PC RPG stuff, which has been minimalistic at best (on consoles), if it exists."

http://archive.gamespy.com/interviews/october03/fargo/index2.shtml

That doesn't really mean much towards his Wasteland 2 project. All his games with inexile had a publisher and publisher/marketing department demands that is be the same fucking boring formula "Console! Awesome buttan! mass accessible! action game!" etc etc.

When you are told (and paid) to make turd soup, there's not really much you can do.

 

[almondblight]

"You can trust me guys! All that shit I said before were just lies!"

The idea is, when he said that game was old classic PC RPG stuff, he was just spinning because he wanted the money. But now that he says the same thing while looking at kickstart cash, we should assume that he's not doing the same? Why not? We like to pretend that the publisher has their guns to developers heads, but Troika was still able to release stat-heavy turn based games and games with branching storylines. What has Fargo attempted? When was the last time he designed a halfway decent game?

This thing sounds like it could be more of a sequel to Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel.

 

[Jaesun]

eh I'm still sold if it's isometric, skill/stat, and party based. I however have no faith at all about his current team at Inexile (how much experience have any of them in making actual cRPG's, as in Obsidian who has lot's of people from BIS). Also the term "probably isometric" is bothering. We don't need any more shitty FPS post apoc shooters that think they are RPG's.

Anyways it's all more speculation till we here the exact specifics. I'll need to know more before they get my money. If the would however work with Obsidian on this TAKE MY MONEY PLEASE!

 

[Kz3r0]

Why should we give money to studios that aren't making the kinds of games we want, when there already are people working on these games? 200k would go a lot further with VD, the Eschalon guys, Vic Davis, the KotC guy, funding Cyclopean, etc. With these large companies, it'd just go to more bloom, and they'd probably put the kick-starter goal at a million or so. At the same price of funding one of these guys you could fund several good indie studios already working on the kinds of games we want for several years. Hell, if the money they probably want from one kick-starter was spread out over the developers I just mentioned, we'd probably already AoD out, Cyclopean on it's way, KotC almost done, etc.

Fund the people that are doing this stuff now, not the people that suddenly salivate when they see the dollar signs.

Add DoubleBear 's Dead State and this post would be perfect.

 

[Cabazone]

Why would someone hope to see him cooperate with obsidian ? Fargo is the Romero of RPG, he was good in a certain time, in a certain context; they are gone. I don't really see what he can bring on the table.

 

[commie]

My point was that setting the minimum budget at one million dollars illustrates that this game is probably going to suffer from the wasteful obsession with graphics and sound that are endemic to modern commercial games. I feel like you would get more bang for your buck if you funded some other developers who are more divorced from that mindset.

I probably could have expressed it better, admittedly.

But what is the problem with having decent graphics and sound? AoD certainly looks better than most games from the 90's. Should they have gone down with Ultima 4 tile sprites instead? Would that help or hinder their sales even among the monocled here? Now if they want to go all Bioware in presentation then you may have a point, but having at least a somewhat decent budget so the game looks ok and conveys the relevant information and atmosphere should be essential even in an indie title.

InXile though can suck dogs' balls. You may as well get Infinity Ward to make an RPG, although to be fair I enjoyed InXile's Choplifter 'remake'...

 

[J_C]

My point was that setting the minimum budget at one million dollars illustrates that this game is probably going to suffer from the wasteful obsession with graphics and sound that are endemic to modern commercial games. I feel like you would get more bang for your buck if you funded some other developers who are more divorced from that mindset.

I probably could have expressed it better, admittedly.

But what is the problem with having decent graphics and sound? AoD certainly looks better than most games from the 90's. Should they have gone down with Ultima 4 tile sprites instead? Would that help or hinder their sales even among the monocled here? Now if they want to go all Bioware in presentation then you may have a point, but having at least a somewhat decent budget so the game looks ok and conveys the relevant information and atmosphere should be essential even in an indie title.

InXile though can suck dogs' balls. You may as well get Infinity Ward to make an RPG, although to be fair I enjoyed InXile's Choplifter 'remake'...

Seeing that even the monocled Codexers complain about graphics all the time, I bet they wouldn't touch a game with Ultima 4 graphics in this day and age. I ceratinly wouldn't. Being monocled is one thing, but the game should have M&M6 or Ultima 7 graphics at least.

 

[thesisko]

Edit: After digging around, I found an interview with Richard Garriott from 1992 where he mentions that Ultima 7 cost a million dollars to develop. And where the money went:
G: "It took 25 person-years to develop Ultima VII. We about had 8
programmers, 4 artists, 4 writers, 4 TDA's (Technical Design
Assistants), 2 audio engineers, myself, and Michelle (production
assistant). That's basically it. The group fluctuated a little, and
it was as high as 30 for a while, and lemme tell ya, that's a nightmare
to manage."

It would require a lot less people to reproduce a similar game today (and with better graphics). Development tools are an order of magnitude better, there are existing assets to use for a lot of things and you don't have to worry about constraints on hardware if you're making a low-end game. Aside from the writers (and I doubt they all worked full-time), you could probably use just a handful of people for the rest of the stuff.

Fargo shouldn't start out asking for that much money. He should have start with the absolute minimum required to realize a game like Wasteland today and then used any additional cash on production values. By asking for $1M right of the bat, it seems like he's only interested in making something that will be profitable beyond the costs of development. Essentially, it seems like he's interested in Kickstarter because it'll get him more money than a publisher deal.

 

[Morkar Left]

Guys, what do you expect from a Wasteland 2? I imagine something like Fallout with a fully controllable party. Does somebody know how much development costs Fallout 1 had?

 

[thesisko]

The total budget of Fallout isn't very interesting here since I would assume that the bulk of the budget went to the animations/talking heads/voice-acting/CGI-cutscenes and all of those could be removed from the game without making it much different.

 

[Morkar Left]

I think expectations are damn high even if it's a oldschool game. Games such as Fallout and BG set the marks pretty high and I assume people expect something of equal quality.
10 people working on it for 1 year at 40,000 $ salary (not much) = 400.000 €. A good game would need 2 years I guess plus some additional money for random stuff and marketing. Sounds that reasonable? How much people worked on Fallout fulltime?

 

[thesisko]

I think expectations are damn high even if it's a oldschool game. Games such as Fallout and BG set the marks pretty high and I assume people expect something of equal quality.
10 people working on it for 1 year at 40,000 $ salary (not much) = 400.000 €. A good game would need 2 years I guess plus some additional money for random stuff and marketing. Sounds that reasonable? How much people worked on Fallout fulltime?

No that doesn't sound very reasonable at all.

Schafer: We do, but we’ve been thinking about how...at first, at the earlier, smaller budget, it was going to be a cool, cute, little fun game, but it would probably be kind of hobbled as far as adventure games go. It wouldn’t have compared Day of the Tentacle or our old games.

What you're describing would be like Schafer asking for $1M right of the bat and people expecting a modern version of "Day of the Tentacle".

 

[Morkar Left]

To be honest, regarding to adventures I fully expect something like Day of the Tentacle. Why should I not? It's mainly about creativity, the tech has even less advanced in adventure games than in rpgs. Sure, it might be not as good as DotT but I expect it in a similar class. Why even bother with him making an adventure if he can't deliver a very good one. There are already good ones available without having me to "fund" them.

 

[nihil]

This sounds great. You have to remember that Brian Fargo has been businessman first, game designer second on the last few games (anyone saw the Matt Chat episode?). If this Kickstarter allows him to put the businessman in the backseat, there might be hope. As Gamasutra put it in their coverage:

He explained that since he game will not be tied to a publisher, he and the team at InXile will have more freedom to create a game for dedicated Wasteland fans, rather than a large-scale, mainstream audience.

I'm optimistic this time.

 

[Nope]

I'm not sure I understand this whole "if the entire team hasn't made a game on par with Fallout they shouldn't even try to make a CRPG" viewpoint. A great deal of the people working on some of the classics were fairly new to development them from what I recall.
You just have to look at Meretzky, Bob Bates, Steve Barcia and Brian Reynolds current work to know that even great designers can make shit if that's what their companies require of them.
I'm not really sure if Schafer and Gilbert's Point & Click is as comparable in price point since the genre itself is a lot more linear than most cRPGs and it seems to have an abundance of well-developed engines with good licensing terms to pick and choose from.

 

[Gakkone]

I'm not really sure if Schafer and Gilbert's Point & Click is as comparable in price point since the genre itself is a lot more linear than most cRPGs and it seems to have an abundance of well-developed engines with good licensing terms to pick and choose from.

Not to mention their plans of developing it "over a six-to-eight month period". Would totally work for an rpg, right?

 

[Text Adventurer]

I'm not saying it was bad or average, it was good. Just not great as some people think it is.

Maybe it's nostalgia, but I adored Wasteland back in the day. Being a pen-and-paper RPGer back then, it reminded me of Gamma World (and the Road Warrior). It was doing things I'd never seen in CRPGs before. Sure it was kind of like Bard's Tale with guns, but it was (for me) the first CRPG to do that.

 

[Lyesmith]

Brian Reynolds

Reminding him in this thread, in regard to crowd-funding, gives false hope, please stop.

 

[Brayko]

New tweet

Don't worry. This game will have those ingredients that made the first one shine with lots of additional atmosphere.

 

[almondblight]

Damn, all this time I assumed that Fargo was responsible for Wasteland and Bard's Tale. I just looked it up, and it looks like most of the game was made by a guy called Alan Pavlish, with an RPG system created by a couple other guys. Those guys and Fargo (being the owner of the company) did some input.

People are getting excited because Fargo produced a good game made by Pavlish 25 years ago?