Wasteland 2 - Interview @ Forbes

How will this game be different from its predecessor? With all the changes in technology between now and the first Wasteland, will it be a challenge to keep the spirit of the first game alive?
That’s been a hot topic around the design round table. We’ve stated many times that we want to make this an old school RPG and we are sticking to that. That said, there are many elements from the original Wasteland that we can improve upon now. All combat was purely text based in the original. We will be keeping the great descriptive and colorful text but also adding more visual payoff to the combat. With the party based nature of the game, combat can be a bit slow. We want to make sure that it’s as strategic as the original without dragging each encounter to a halt. One element that we loved about the first was the literary nature of the world. Almost every square you stepped on had an amazing description of what was going on around you that made the environment larger than the art. We definitely want to keep the charm of the original Wasteland alive in the new one.

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We are talking about a 18 month development cycle. We’ll spend the next 6 months doing a rock solid paper design. We want to be able to play through the entire game using pen and paper before we implement it into the game. In the mean time, our tech team is working on our pipeline to import assets into the different engines we’re looking at and then they’ll start to create our tools in addition to what they provide. Once the initial 6 months are up, we hit the ground running and build the game with an extended team.

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