Wasteland 2 - Interview with Brian Fargo

Wasteland 2, and more recently, Torment: Tides of Numenera, are among two of the biggest Kickstarter-funded games of all time. What’s it been like to deal with the success of your own games?

All I can do right now is keep my head down and work on delivering against expectations. It has been a wonderful experience and I am grateful for the support that opportunity that has been given to us. Kickstarting our projects allows us to spend 95% of our energy on simply making a game.

Beyond the games themselves, do you think it’s within the ability of game makers or the media to influence the culture surrounding our beloved hobby to make it more inclusive? If so, what can we do?

I think the real question here is whether we managed to make our medium more inclusive over the last few decades. Years ago I used to constantly be asked why we don’t make more games for girls and I always questioned what that meant. It seemed like their version of that statement included games about shopping or vanity which I found ridiculous. My assumption is that women too want to run a city, manage an army, gear up for a romp in an RPG or solve puzzle physics games. There is so much variety to choose from in gaming these days. I would say that things have improved when you look over the last 20 years, but one of the things we can do now is to avoid the offensive stereotypes.

Games have the potential to address serious issues. BioShock addressed libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, while Spec Ops: The Line painted video game violence in a completely different light from normal, run-of-the-mill first person shooters. Is Wasteland 2 going to approach any difficult, or even political, topics?

The main purpose of Wasteland 2 is not to tackle the big questions. It’s primarily a game about having wild and dangerous adventures in a post-apocalyptic world, and, in the tradition of the first game, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Having said that, post-apocalyptic worlds have always been great venues for satire of the contemporary world, and we can’t resist taking broad potshots at our society’s obsessions and foibles as we create the various towns and people our rangers meet along the way.

The residents of the wasteland are rebuilding society from scratch, and because they don’t know much about the past, they’re pretty much making it up as they go along. Just about every form of society is being tried out, from theocracy to meritocracy to dictatorship to democracy to the-one-with-the-biggest-gun wins. What could be more fun than poking every one of those systems with a sharp stick?

We need to start delivering against our promises before we spend two seconds wondering about what’s next. For now it is all about focus.

Beyond Wasteland 2 and Torment, what’s next for InXile?
We need to start delivering against our promises before we spend two seconds wondering about what’s next. For now it is all about focus.

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The Hulk said:

I wish Fargo could go on kickstarter to get enough funding for another try at Stonekeep 2(I still have fond memories about the opening intro for the first Stonekeep game), but even if he did try, and even if he did get several million for it, I don't think that would be enough to make the game how he originally envisioned it when he first began work on it(Work was begun on it and they had an engine for it, and a novel was written about it that made it to release, but the game eventually got cancelled for those who don't know). With several million, I think he'd have to scale it way back(he doesn't have millions of dollars of cashflow from Interplay like he used to) and have the game be a shadow of it's former self. Still, I suppose I'd rather have a scaled down version of Stonekeep 2 than no Stonekeep 2 at all. Just wish he could get his hands on enough cash to make the game exactly like he originally wanted to.

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