WorstUsernameEver
But best title ever!
EDGE has an interview with Brian Fargo on the upcoming Wasteland 2, the Kickstarter model, and the problems he encountered with publishers (Bethesda included) in the past. Snippets:<blockquote>Those early '90s PC RPGs - Fallout, UFO, System Shock and so on - had so much promise, it felt like technology was the only thing holding them back. Now that side of things has caught up, do you think games have lived up to that promise?
I would argue to some degree no, because it became such a console world, and there was an oversimplification of things at points. I think part of the frustration we've tapped into by doing an old-school RPG is that a lot of people feel like games have been dumbed down, that the audience has been treated like they're not intelligent. Those games had a million words, there was a literary vibe to them.
They've become a little more shooter-oriented, and tutorials treat you are as if you've never played a game before. On console there's no keyboard, which removes a lot - being able to type in something as simple as a noun can really open up dialogue and choice. So I think they've become different, but by getting off the PC, things changed quite a bit.
(...)
Will you delay Wasteland 2 if you need to?
We've committed to try to get this thing done by next October, but if push comes to shove I'm not going to put something out that isn't right. I've come too far, and accomplished too much, to put out a product that isn't right. But you always want to have a stick in the sand that everybody's shooting for, and we'll continue to do that. I've tried to build a lot of iteration time into the schedule and our approach, so it's still quite possible.
Some people forget that Baldur's Gate was originally supposed to make Christmas 1998 - there was a lot of pressure to have that thing make Christmas. I had retailer penalties into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I sucked it up and we didn't ship until January. People talk about quality - it's easy to talk about, but when you've got a gun to your head it's much harder to make that call. I'm glad that no publisher wanted Wasteland 2 because this is the best way it could have been made.</blockquote>
I would argue to some degree no, because it became such a console world, and there was an oversimplification of things at points. I think part of the frustration we've tapped into by doing an old-school RPG is that a lot of people feel like games have been dumbed down, that the audience has been treated like they're not intelligent. Those games had a million words, there was a literary vibe to them.
They've become a little more shooter-oriented, and tutorials treat you are as if you've never played a game before. On console there's no keyboard, which removes a lot - being able to type in something as simple as a noun can really open up dialogue and choice. So I think they've become different, but by getting off the PC, things changed quite a bit.
(...)
Will you delay Wasteland 2 if you need to?
We've committed to try to get this thing done by next October, but if push comes to shove I'm not going to put something out that isn't right. I've come too far, and accomplished too much, to put out a product that isn't right. But you always want to have a stick in the sand that everybody's shooting for, and we'll continue to do that. I've tried to build a lot of iteration time into the schedule and our approach, so it's still quite possible.
Some people forget that Baldur's Gate was originally supposed to make Christmas 1998 - there was a lot of pressure to have that thing make Christmas. I had retailer penalties into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I sucked it up and we didn't ship until January. People talk about quality - it's easy to talk about, but when you've got a gun to your head it's much harder to make that call. I'm glad that no publisher wanted Wasteland 2 because this is the best way it could have been made.</blockquote>
