If there is one thing that can be said of popular culture at the moment, it is that zombies and post-apocalyptic settings are still "in." If we trace video games that use these settings back far enough, we will no doubt settle on the game Wasteland – the game said to inspire the Fallout series.
Recently, the rights to Wasteland were acquired from Konami (who had acquired them from Electronic Arts) by the group that originally developed it. This group includes one Brian Fargo who has been designer, writer, director, or producer of such games as The Lost Vikings, The Bard's Tale, and the video game based on William Gibson's Neuromancer. In order to fund development of the game, Fargo and his team went to Kickstarter under their new company name inXile.
Funding via Kickstarter for such an influential game as Wasteland was nearly guaranteed (and has generated over 3 million dollars thus far). So, with development fully underway the time for interviews and developer discussion has begun. One of the most interesting interviews (well, snippets of one anyway) has been over at VG24/7. In this brief excerpt of a larger interview, Brian Fargo discusses Wasteland 2's companion system, permenent death, and combat.
Two quotes of note in this interview involve the idea of permadeath and companions.
"We asked Fargo about the consequences of hiring companions – particularly because some of them will actively steal items from the ground, betray you and other unscrupulous acts. It’s a bad world, and many people in it are devoid of morality."
Designing games around failure possibilities is what seems to have made X-COM's recent success a reality. With games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and other Roguelike style games rocking the difficulty level outside your standard, "press button to win," we may be beginning to see the re-establishment of difficulty and failure in video gaming. Companions that betray you are difficult to manage considering most of them are pretty blatantly foreshadowed. However, this game manages to generate random companions and the betrayal factor isn't known, then Wasteland 2 will definitely be interesting to play!
“We will indeed have perma-death in the game. If you make a bad decision and get a party member killed, they won’t come back. We committed to creating an old-school RPG experience and we are definitely looking to make this a hard core experience.”
The thing that confuses me about this statement is that he implies permadeath for allies, which is not something new. However, if the betrayal of a companion results in a character's death and this death is permenent, I think that this will definitely mean far more to players than the Final Fantasy Tactics style, "don't let your friends die."
The rest of this interview will be of great interest to fans of roguelikes and Fallout alike.
Video Demo using the Unity Engine
