Two paths through the wasteland: Brian Fargo on Wasteland 2 and Fallout 4
26 years is a long time to wait for a video game sequel, especially when those intervening years have spawned a similar, but more critically and commercially successful, series of games. But here we are, at the latest juncture on a twisted path: Wasteland begat Fallout; Interplay gave way to Bethesda; and last year, the circle of post-apocalyptic life was closed with Wasteland 2, developed by inXile Entertainment, the studio founded by ex-Interplay boss Brian Fargo, who created the original Wasteland all those years ago. War never changes, as the saying goes, but the irradiated hellscapes left in their wake? That, as we’ve seen, is a different story.
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The return of Wasteland was met with excitement and accolades as well, enough to take it from niche PC RPG to a "Director's Cut" release for consoles. Fargo acknowledged that some of that durability is the result of Fallout keeping the genre in the public eye, but he attributes much of it to the depth and complexity inXile layers into its work, citing as an example a payoff scene for the shotgun-toting boozehound Scotchmo that most players won't ever see. Most of them won't even finish the game, he said. And he's not wrong: only 7.5 percent of Steam players have earned the "Back Where It All Began" achievement, an unavoidable late-game marker—but this stuff is in there, bringing a "subtlety" to the game world, as he put it, that makes the experience more rewarding for everyone.
"There's no person in my office that knows everything that's in it. The way I put these things together, we set sensibilities and ways to attack stuff, and then it gets a life of its own, and the project becomes its own thing…At the end of the day, literally you have a game that no person in this office knows everything that's in it,” he said.
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