- Joined
- Jul 21, 2014
- Messages
- 537
It barely got more than the WL2 Kickastarter. WL2 shows 2.9 million and currently this is $3.05 million. (excluding paypal)
-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Wasteland Wasteland 3 Pre-Release Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Zorba the Hutt
- Start date
Bubbles
I'm forever blowing
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2013
- Messages
- 7,817
Fig has allowed them to add Paypal numbers directly to the total.
Man. These nothing updates.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,676
Excidium II
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,676
Last edited:
- Joined
- May 18, 2015
- Messages
- 5,132
The updates are starting to become awkward.
This one has extensive information about...the models of the characters in conversations and how they build them.
Interesting, sure, but what does it have to do with potential backers?? It's completely business side...
Oh well, at least we learned that FO1-2 were an inspiration for the talking-heads
This one has extensive information about...the models of the characters in conversations and how they build them.
Interesting, sure, but what does it have to do with potential backers?? It's completely business side...
Oh well, at least we learned that FO1-2 were an inspiration for the talking-heads
And why is the new character another Warcraft orc? Both Fallout and Wasteland had characters who looked like humans.
It's trendy to do cartoony shit like Blizzard does, you know.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,676
That's from the Wasteland 2 soundtrack.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 99,676
http://www.pcgamesn.com/wasteland-3/brian-fargo-inxile-kickstarter-interview
Wasteland 3's Brian Fargo on ditching Kickstarter: "I’m good at knowing what the winds of change are up to"
There’s a great irony in the annals of RPG development. While Bioware put together the sunny coastline of Baldur’s Gate in Edmonton, Canada - where 123 centimetres of snow falls every year - their counterparts at Black Isle built the frozen wastes of Icewind Dale in scorching California, under the auspices of Brian Fargo’s Interplay.
“That is kinda funny, I hadn’t thought about that,” laughs Fargo. He and Wasteland 3 lead Chris Keenan are calling from InXile’s Newport Beach office. It’s 80 °F outside.
“We’re burning up here,” he says. “I guess for us, when we think of the cold we think of a bleak and post-apocalyptic place.”
Wasteland 3 continues the tradition - leaving behind the cracked desert plains that sold its predecessor for the savage cold of a snow-swept Colorado.
InXile and Wasteland 2 more or less wrote the script for game crowdfunding back in 2012 - following Double Fine Adventure’s lead with a pitch that played on nostalgia, replete with comedy sketches about clueless publishers. But even now, with two more Kickstarter wins behind them, the studio get the fear in the hours before setting a campaign live.
“Even though it feels like we’re more prepared every single time, and we spend more time thinking about how we want it to go, we sit there before we press the button and we’re nervous,” Keenan admits. “It’s a constant surprise when you see it doing well.”
“Oh hey,” Fargo exclaims. In a moment of perfect serendipity, the Wasteland 3 campaign has just passed $3 million in funding.
“We never go in with too much confidence,” he goes on. “Every campaign has some unique attribute to it that has nothing to do with the last one. With Wasteland 2, it was, ‘Oh my God, you’re asking for more than anyone has asked for before, you’re crazy’. Then with Torment it was, ‘But it’s not Planescape Torment’. And with Bard’s Tale it was, ‘You haven’t finished Torment yet.’”
This time, it’s that Wasteland 3 isn’t on Kickstarter, but a new platform named Fig. Oh yes: Brian Fargo, perhaps the most visible figurehead and advocate for the merits of Kickstarted games, has moved on.
“I like to think I’m good at knowing what the winds of change are up to,” he explains. “And I felt that they were changing as it related to backing things through Kickstarter, at least at the level we were used to.”
Although Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera and The Bard’s Tale IV each pulled in millions of backer dollars for InXile, campaign totals are diminishing across the board. UK market analysts ICO Partners found that gaming Kickstarters raised $8.2m in the first half of 2016, compared to more than $20m in the previous six months.
“Everybody was happy to get these genres back going again, because there were some categories that weren’t being addressed,” says Fargo. “Certainly role-playing games, point and click adventures. People were being denied them, so we were able to step in.
“Flash-forward a couple of years later, between us and Larian and Obsidian, we have isometric RPGs. Now we’re in a new world where getting people as excited about things as we did in 2012 and 2013 I knew was going to be more difficult to do.”
At the pitch stage, Fig functions in much the same way - but the implications of throwing $30 into a campaign’s coffers are fundamentally different. Here, developers can offer shares to their backers, with the potential for financial return if things go well.
The idea - and its adoption by backers of Wasteland 3 and Psychonauts 2, to the tune of millions of dollars - marks a shift away from game crowdfunding as a vague space between pre-order and charitable donation. The emotional investment is now a monetary one.
“When I heard about equity crowdfunding I thought, ‘Now here’s an opportunity to help finance games that will never get tired,’” remembers Fargo. “Because if somebody puts a game through Fig, and everybody who put in their money got a 30%, 40% or 50% return - they’re gonna go back for that. Nobody’s going to get fatigued from making money.”
It’s worth mentioning that Fargo is no passing partner of Fig: he’s a member of its advisory board, along with Tim Schafer, Obsidian’s Feargus Urquhart, and Cliff Bleszinski. There’s a sense that Fig’s founders have been mindful of the ways in which backlashes against poorly run and poorly explained campaigns have damaged crowdfunding’s reputation. The platform works together with developers on marketing and press strategy - while the money gathered from unaccredited investors is released to studios bit-by-bit, in a fashion designed to discourage cash grabs.
“That’s an extra mechanism to help if things really go sideways,” says Fargo. “I don’t think development risk can ever be avoided entirely, but we can certainly help mitigate it. We get a chance to ask the developers some tough questions about how they’re going to do it, or where they’re going to get the rest of the financing from, or whether the concept is even any good. I get to weigh in on those conversations. I think it only helps.
“This is a paradigm shift, be it with Fig or anybody else, that could change the way games are financed forever. And I wanted to be on the forefront of that.”
The InXile boss has got his wish. With a week’s campaigning left to go, Wasteland 3 has surpassed the total his studio hit in 2012. However it goes, Fargo is in it now - along with 16,500 others.
- Joined
- May 29, 2010
- Messages
- 36,753
- Joined
- May 18, 2015
- Messages
- 5,132
Holy shit, the best update so far(I'm being serious):
On Combat & Encounter Design
Howdy Rangers,
Chris here. We've had tons of requests from you asking for clarification on certain aspects of gameplay. What's new in Wasteland 3? What will change? How are various features going to work this time around? As we've discussed in the Fig campaign text, our goal is to take all the best things we loved about Wasteland 2 and improve on them, while rethinking systems that we felt were lacking.
We’re currently in the early pre-production period, and many of those answers are likely to change and evolve over time as we prototype, playtest, and iterate. So, it's a bit too early for us to launch into detailed breakdowns of everything we want to do on the game. However, what I'd like to do today is give you a sort of birds-eye look at what we're hoping to accomplish with the combat system in Wasteland 3.
Combat has always been a huge part of the Wasteland franchise, as it's where so many of your important character-building decisions get realized. With Wasteland 2, we had a wide variety of enemy types and encounter areas to play with. In the Director's Cut, we expanded combat to include extra strategic options like Precision Strikes, which gave you more options to affect the battlefield. On a high level, Wasteland 3's combat will be created in the same vein; it will be turn-based, party-based, and will offer a wide range of tactical choices, like cover and verticality.
However, the keen-eyed among you likely saw that we mentioned a "revamped, more fluid action system". “So…what the hell is that all about?”, you ask. Well, let me tell you.
In a turn-based combat system, sometimes you can get bogged down waiting. You as a player might have an understanding of what you want to do before the system allows you to do it. This can lead to the game feeling a bit sluggish or slow. Furthermore, Wasteland 3 will offer a multiplayer mode, and if you have ever played turn-based games in multiplayer, such as Civilization, you likely know that adding a buddy can add more downtime.
Consequently, a focal point of the combat design team is to find the unnecessary wait times and see what we can do to reduce them. Why be forced to wait for my ranger to reach their final destination (which then unlocks the input) before I can move my next ranger in the turn order? Input queuing, where your control inputs aren't locked out while animations are playing, is one solution we are exploring that will allow the dance of combat to play out more on your time, rather than making you wait for our system to catch up.
This focus on a revamped action system also applies to the types of tactical options you will have in the game. Cover-based shooting is still going to be a component, but we want to expand your available options for problem-solving. Going back to the Precision Strike system from Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, we're looking at expanding and tweaking some of that functionality into more special attack types and abilities that will let you have more control over the combat zone.
One other aspect of combat we want to amp up is encounter design. While Wasteland 2 had a large number of critters and creatures for you to fight in addition to human enemies and synths, we saw the feedback that combat could feel a little stale, especially in some of our larger and more combat-heavy scenes. We're going to be looking at ways to engineer more varied, unique, interesting, and hand-crafted encounters in Wasteland 3 that have more variety or elements that change throughout - such as an enemy vehicle entering the fray in the middle of the battle.
Speaking of, vehicles will be another layer that makes combat more interesting. While vehicles may not be available in every single encounter, when they are present, they will be a significant factor. We hinted at some of these in our initial Frosty Reception video, where we showed the vehicle's turret being used to attack enemies, or using the doors as cover, but we're hoping to do even more beyond that as well, and there is no lack of creative design ideas already put forth.
Last, we're hoping that environmental interactions in general will be a bigger deal in Wasteland 3. For instance, Colorado’s harsh conditions mean you may not always get the clear line of sight offered in the Arizona deserts. Snowfall or even blizzards are one way your visibility may be affected, and we might even give you some options to manipulate things directly in your favor.
For example: Your enemies are in an entrenched position, and a snowstorm is preventing you from efficiently picking them off at range. A protracted gun battle will spend a lot of ammo, but it is a valid option. If your group is decked out for it, you could also storm their position with melee fighters, overrunning their defenses and taking advantage of the low visibility. Or, if you have a vehicle available, you could keep them pinned with some long-ranged fighters while moving part of your squad quickly behind their line, flanking their positions.
Of course, after combat comes the loot. Never fear, we’ve read your feedback on that as well. In Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut, we went through our loot tables and completely redid the distribution through the game to cut down on the randomness and to have more hand-placed loot drops with unique weapons. In Wasteland 3, we’ll keep moving in that direction, with more deterministic loot drops where you’ll be finding more unique gear that will be more satisfying to either uncover, or claim from the bodies of your foes.
Overall, I hope this has given you a better idea of what we're looking to achieve with Wasteland 3's combat. By building on the possibilities offered in Wasteland 2’s combat system, keeping the pacing fluid, and expanding the potential tactical options, we're hoping to take the great foundation we built and evolve it in ways you haven't seen before in other RPGs. Until next time!
Chris Keenan
VP of Development
Howdy Rangers,
Chris here. We've had tons of requests from you asking for clarification on certain aspects of gameplay. What's new in Wasteland 3? What will change? How are various features going to work this time around? As we've discussed in the Fig campaign text, our goal is to take all the best things we loved about Wasteland 2 and improve on them, while rethinking systems that we felt were lacking.
We’re currently in the early pre-production period, and many of those answers are likely to change and evolve over time as we prototype, playtest, and iterate. So, it's a bit too early for us to launch into detailed breakdowns of everything we want to do on the game. However, what I'd like to do today is give you a sort of birds-eye look at what we're hoping to accomplish with the combat system in Wasteland 3.
Combat has always been a huge part of the Wasteland franchise, as it's where so many of your important character-building decisions get realized. With Wasteland 2, we had a wide variety of enemy types and encounter areas to play with. In the Director's Cut, we expanded combat to include extra strategic options like Precision Strikes, which gave you more options to affect the battlefield. On a high level, Wasteland 3's combat will be created in the same vein; it will be turn-based, party-based, and will offer a wide range of tactical choices, like cover and verticality.
However, the keen-eyed among you likely saw that we mentioned a "revamped, more fluid action system". “So…what the hell is that all about?”, you ask. Well, let me tell you.
In a turn-based combat system, sometimes you can get bogged down waiting. You as a player might have an understanding of what you want to do before the system allows you to do it. This can lead to the game feeling a bit sluggish or slow. Furthermore, Wasteland 3 will offer a multiplayer mode, and if you have ever played turn-based games in multiplayer, such as Civilization, you likely know that adding a buddy can add more downtime.
Consequently, a focal point of the combat design team is to find the unnecessary wait times and see what we can do to reduce them. Why be forced to wait for my ranger to reach their final destination (which then unlocks the input) before I can move my next ranger in the turn order? Input queuing, where your control inputs aren't locked out while animations are playing, is one solution we are exploring that will allow the dance of combat to play out more on your time, rather than making you wait for our system to catch up.
This focus on a revamped action system also applies to the types of tactical options you will have in the game. Cover-based shooting is still going to be a component, but we want to expand your available options for problem-solving. Going back to the Precision Strike system from Wasteland 2: Director's Cut, we're looking at expanding and tweaking some of that functionality into more special attack types and abilities that will let you have more control over the combat zone.
One other aspect of combat we want to amp up is encounter design. While Wasteland 2 had a large number of critters and creatures for you to fight in addition to human enemies and synths, we saw the feedback that combat could feel a little stale, especially in some of our larger and more combat-heavy scenes. We're going to be looking at ways to engineer more varied, unique, interesting, and hand-crafted encounters in Wasteland 3 that have more variety or elements that change throughout - such as an enemy vehicle entering the fray in the middle of the battle.
Speaking of, vehicles will be another layer that makes combat more interesting. While vehicles may not be available in every single encounter, when they are present, they will be a significant factor. We hinted at some of these in our initial Frosty Reception video, where we showed the vehicle's turret being used to attack enemies, or using the doors as cover, but we're hoping to do even more beyond that as well, and there is no lack of creative design ideas already put forth.
Last, we're hoping that environmental interactions in general will be a bigger deal in Wasteland 3. For instance, Colorado’s harsh conditions mean you may not always get the clear line of sight offered in the Arizona deserts. Snowfall or even blizzards are one way your visibility may be affected, and we might even give you some options to manipulate things directly in your favor.
For example: Your enemies are in an entrenched position, and a snowstorm is preventing you from efficiently picking them off at range. A protracted gun battle will spend a lot of ammo, but it is a valid option. If your group is decked out for it, you could also storm their position with melee fighters, overrunning their defenses and taking advantage of the low visibility. Or, if you have a vehicle available, you could keep them pinned with some long-ranged fighters while moving part of your squad quickly behind their line, flanking their positions.
Of course, after combat comes the loot. Never fear, we’ve read your feedback on that as well. In Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut, we went through our loot tables and completely redid the distribution through the game to cut down on the randomness and to have more hand-placed loot drops with unique weapons. In Wasteland 3, we’ll keep moving in that direction, with more deterministic loot drops where you’ll be finding more unique gear that will be more satisfying to either uncover, or claim from the bodies of your foes.
Overall, I hope this has given you a better idea of what we're looking to achieve with Wasteland 3's combat. By building on the possibilities offered in Wasteland 2’s combat system, keeping the pacing fluid, and expanding the potential tactical options, we're hoping to take the great foundation we built and evolve it in ways you haven't seen before in other RPGs. Until next time!
Chris Keenan
VP of Development
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.