Hey Rangers,

It is May and things are good. Another big beta update went out, patch notes here. We are nearing the end of the three-month plan we outlined earlier, and hit all our internal end-of-April milestones, which is a rarity. We're getting closer every day, and we intend to announce the official release date sometime this month.

At this stage of the project some portions of the game require less manpower than they did a few months ago, which is all part of our plan for moving people to Torment: Tides of Numenera when their work on Wasteland 2 is simply done. One of those things we're slowly wrapping up is writing, which at this stage is really just tweaks or minor NPCs and encounters added. You may have heard us mention Nathan Long before, a talented and veteran writer who we were very lucky to have join us on this project. This feels like a good time to give him the floor and have him talk a bit about the writing process, so without further ado, here's Nathan.
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So, what is my day to day job here at inXile?

Well, earlier on in the process, it was expanding the design docs created by the writers that had come before me - breaking them down into individual encounters, writing the descriptions and dialog for those encounters, and figuring out how they all tied together into a cohesive whole. And when I was done with one zone, I would move on to the next and do it all over again.

These days it’s a little more scattershot. We are in the tweaking and tuning phase, so I am doing a little of everything. Today Matt needs an extra radio call for an encounter in Arizona, Jeffrey needs a rewrite on a NPC in the Mannerite map because the logic for the encounter has changed, Zack needs to cut some interiors, so I have to rewrite a few scenes so the characters don't talk about being inside when they're actually outside, Brian wants me to rewrite a gag which he feels is in poor taste, and the backers have pointed out a continuity problem in a newly released encounter, so I have to come up with a solution.

I usually start the morning with a call to Matt (which he loves) to determine the priority of all the issues I've got on my list, then I get to work, knocking down items as quick as I can while more get added throughout the day. Occasionally an emergency will come up, and I'll suddenly have to switch over to something else, but usually it's just a slow steady flow of emails and delivered documents all day long.

But in all this work, no matter how scattered, no matter how minor the tweak, the most important consideration is making all of it feel like Wasteland. Brian, Matt and the rest of the developers have a clear, focused vision of what Wasteland 2 is and isn't, and it's my job to be in sync with them and make sure that all the writing in the game - no matter who originally wrote it - delivers on that vision and feels right and true and consistent from zone to zone and character to character. It’s a terrifying responsibility, but I'm happy to have been given the opportunity to do it.​

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