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Wasteland 3 Fig Update #21: Getting The Band Back Together

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Wasteland 3 Fig Update #21: Getting The Band Back Together

Game News - posted by Infinitron on Fri 30 June 2017, 22:42:26

Tags: Charlie Bloomer; inXile Entertainment; Paul Marzagalli; Thomas Beekers; Wasteland 3

inXile recently released The Mage's Tale, their Oculus Rift VR game set in the Bard's Tale universe. Although The Bard's Tale IV is still a ways from release, this has apparently freed a number of former Wasteland 2 developers at their New Orleans studio to join the Wasteland 3 team. The game will be co-developed by both of inXile's studios. The new Fig update has the details on that:

Thomas here! We mentioned in our previous update that Wasteland 3 is moving from pre-production to full production. A big part of that is rolling in new developers from projects that are wrapping up. Now that The Mage's Tale is released, that team is dispersing across inXile to our different games. Some developers are moving over to The Bard's Tale IV, others are staying on The Mage's Tale to continue support for that title, and there are some that are joining us on the Wasteland 3 team.

Back when inXile opened a new studio in New Orleans, a number of key developers who played vital roles on Wasteland 2 ended up moving to the new studio. Now that Wasteland 3 is in production, we're very happy to bring some familiar faces back into the fold. Wasteland 2 level designers/scripters Jeremy Kopman, Ben Moise, Joby Bednar, and Zack Vulaj are all back to work on Wasteland 3, as is engineer Jeffrey Corrales. As you can imagine, bringing people in that are so familiar with the tools and setting means we can really hit the ground running. Having this kind of veteran carryover makes us very confident that our team gets what makes Wasteland tick and knows what lessons we want to carry over from the previous project.

As a small studio, we also benefit from being flexible regarding developers moving between projects and we want each of our devs to be on the project that best fits his or her skills. It's a quality of life element that we strive for, too: letting developers be where they can find the ideal professional/personal balance for their goals.

To help with the process of onboarding, last week we had part of the Wasteland 3 team (Chris Keenan, George Ziets, Jeremy Kopman and Alex Kerr) fly to New Orleans to meet with the level design team there, as well as inXile president Matthew Findley. With a solid base of knowledge of the setting and game already there, we could really delve deeply in meetings about multiplayer, the mechanics of our Ranger Base, and more. On top of those were the opportunities to have a number of in-person general meetings on story and level design pipelines, processes, and best practices. It was a real marathon of meetings, but those of you who have been with us longer may recall that we've had similar gatherings for both Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and they always pay off in a big way.

A small bit of inXile trivia: the main conference rooms at our Newport and NOLA studios are nicknamed Ranger HQ and Cochise Base respectively! The shots below are from Base Cochise on the NOLA side, and show off the team reviewing the Stanley Hotel's early level blockouts - we'll have more to share about that in a coming update.
The update also has some details on inXile's initial efforts to implement vehicles, courtesy of art director Charlie Bloomer.

Hi all, Charlie here. Vehicles? In Wasteland 3? Oh it's happening, and we've made some good progress on that front in the past few weeks! We now have a vehicle playground, a test scene in Unity that we're using to drive around in so we can figure out our parameters for fun vehicle gameplay. While we intend to show that at least one faction in post-apocalyptic Colorado is equipped to build their own vehicles, most of the drivable machines you'll find are examples of ingenuity and resourcefulness, with a healthy dose of auto shop and welding skills thrown in. In this world, scrounged materials can make the difference between barely mobile and fortified, armed transport.



The first vehicle you'll acquire in the game is a bit of a beater. We wanted to provide the player with something that is functional - it can be trusted to get you from point A to point B - but that would be sparse when it comes to weaponry or armor. Our beater has nice big tires and some attached armor plating, so it's a whole lot better than walking. On the other hand, the starting place for those modifications is a vehicle that looks like its previous owner might have been a "soccer mom." Not to worry, if you survive with this puppy, you will be well rewarded with the next vehicle, which is a beast!
It sounds like Wasteland 3 is still just at the beginning of production. It'll be a while before there's a video. How about giving us some more Bard's Tale IV stuff in the meantime?

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