Wasteland 2‘s fate as an actual, real game was cemented less than two days after it appeared on crowdfunding site Kickstarter, slamming into its $US900k target and continuing unabated to $US1 million and, as of writing, $US2.1 million. Obsidian’s Chris Avellone is now on board and if things couldn’t get sweeter, developer inXile has rewarded fans with the above piece of concept art.
CEO Brian Fargo managed to sneak the image into his most recent blog post. It’s dark, evocative and clearly differintiates itself from the likes of Bethesda’s re-imagined Fallout 3 — the Fallout games (the isometric ones, at least) are considered the spiritual successors to the original Wasteland.
The art is a good start, yet, I can’t help but have this nagging concern about how the game will be eventually received. I’m not worried so much about inXile’s ability to deliver, but that nostalgia and the original game’s low-tech graphics (relatively speaking) means that every person who’s played Wasteland has their own perfect version of it in their mind, polished to perfection by time and completely untouchable by anything except an official sequel.
On an unrelated note, for those out there wondering how a game could possibly cost more than $10-$20 thousand, Fargo explains exactly where the money will be spent — on people:
Most of the cost of development is in paying for the team to create the game.
There will be a team of engine programmers, game-play programmers, UI engineers, character artists, environment artists, animators, effects artists, UI Artists, sound designers, composers, writers, game designers, systems designers, level scripters and testers. Not to mention all the interns it will take to handle the mailing out of the physical goods. It is simple math that the bigger this budget gets, the more jobs it will create. The bigger the team, the deeper and bigger the game gets.
If you want a deeper and larger game, and we think that you do, you want us to raise as much money as possible to spend on the game.
Even politicians agree that Kickstarter is awesome. [The Wasteland Chronicles]
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