Wasteland 2 - Kickstarter Passes $270k

As per yesterday's post, InXile's Kickstarter campaign for Wasteland 2 is up and running and after a few hours is currently a little over $270,000 of the required $900,000 - it looks like this will be a runaway success with a over a month of pledges yet to come. Chris Avellone and Notch are among the supporters.

Here's a snip from the Kickstarter page and head over to view the video introduction and, of course, pledge:

This is your chance to influence the kind of game you want to see. With fan funding, you drive the direction of game design and development. If it is important to you, it is important to us. 

This is probably the last chance for a Wasteland sequel.  We have tried to pitch this game multiple times to game publishers, but they’ve balked. They don’t think there’s any interest in a solid, old school type of game.  This is our shot at proving them wrong. And more importantly this could help bring back an entire genre of RPGs. The power of the Indie scene continues and we see this as all part of a bigger trend of bringing control back to the developers. [...]

We’re going back to the original and building from there. No first person shooter, we’re going top down so you get a tactical feel for the situation. And we’re not ditching the party play to turn it into some hack-and-slash bloodfest. It’s turn based, tactical, with a storyline that will be deeper and broader.

We’re determined to keep the gritty, grim and satirical writing. We’re going to pitch those moral dilemmas at you. You’re going to be faced with the consequences of your actions.

We’re planning on an initial 6 months of pre-production. We’ll nail down every important element that you, our creative partners, want.  Once we have all that figured out, we buckle down for 12 month development cycle. During that time, players can get a sneak peek on a private closed beta through Steam.  In addition, we will be giving you constant updates and showing you our progress along the way. [...]

But we’re looking ahead to what we can do if you all back this project in force. At $1.25 million, the money will go primarily into making the world bigger, adding more maps, more divergent stories and even more music. 

At $1.5 million, the world gets even bigger. You’ll have more adventures to play, more challenges to deal with, and a greater level of complexity to the entire storyline.  We’ll add more environments, story elements, and characters to make the rich world come alive even more.  We will even be able to bring Wasteland 2 to OS X for Mac lovers. And after $1.5 million the sky is the limit.