Wasteland 2
The irradiated desert has never looked so inviting.
Iknow what a high-profile Kickstarter project this is,” Brian Fargo tells me. “There’s the pressure from 60,000 people saying, ‘Don’t screw this up,’ and then I’ve got all of my fellow developers who are saying, ‘Brian, don’t screw this up.’” He chuckles, but the pressure is real. Backers gave Fargo’s in Xile almost $3 million to make this game, a sequel to the classic RPG that inspired Fallout.
Fargo shows me an optional quest where a bartender asks our party to save his shipment of alcohol. We load into the encounter with the shipment itself, on a delivery truck ambushed by a rogue group of hobos. It looks as though the party will have to mow down some homeless to get the beer back.
Fargo clicks through some dialogue then waits. After a few beats, but right before the party attacks, one of the party members rushes forward to try to save the day. He is Scotchmo, a hobo NPC, and he implores his bum brethren to remember the Hobo Code: “we beg, we borrow, we do not steal!” The hobos are properly shamed and begin to disperse.
This is just one way to resolve the encounter, according to Fargo. You could have started shooting, or used conversation skills—the variety in outcomes and content is unprecedented.
Playing for myself, I find I’m facing
I underestimate their battle prowess, and the rabbits feast on our sunbleached corpses
branching decisions from the get-go. The character creator feels ripped from Fallout: ability scores such as ‘coordination’ and ‘luck’ affect your chances to hit with a ranged weapon or talk your way out of a bad deal, while skills such as ‘toaster repair’ or ‘animal whisperer’ bend your build toward some warped sense of usefulness. You’re given enough choices at the beginning to make a specialized character, but spending too deep in the strange skills will hinder your normal abilities.
I receive two different distress calls: one for a settlement under siege by raiders, and another for a botanical area where the plants have come alive and are eating people. I probably can’t save both.
I rush to fight the plants, but never make it: a warren of giant rabbits ends my party’s life after I underestimate their battle prowess, spending action points on poorlyaimed range attacks. The rabbits feast on our sun-bleached corpses.
You can kill anyone, but the consequence may not be apparent for hours of play time. Fargo says: “you can’t just have a combat and figure out which result you like better and do it a different way. It’s sometimes going to be hours later before you know what’s happening.” That sounds cool in theory, but I’m worried the abundance of options could be overwhelming.
Fargo says that the more than 60 hours of playtime are a consequence of his desire to “overdeliver” on content—an attitude that can only please that army of backers.