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Codex Interview Wasteland 2 RPG Codex Interview - Part 2: Michael A. Stackpole

Castanova

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Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers. As it reads now, it's giving me a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of vibe.
 

Brother None

inXile Entertainment
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Yeah, he drops some of the wrong keywords. But this can't come as a surprise to anyone. I mean, you knew it wasn't going to be a *carbon copy*, right? Wasteland had a ton of challenges by design, and a lot that were simply artificial barriers in the way games worked. Do you want to recreate that carbon-wise?

No, I'm not talking about simplification, but the opposite. There's core concepts you've got to stick to, but that doesn't leave zero room for change. The real question is not if Wasteland 2 will attempt that balance, it's whether or not it'll succeed.
 

Morkar Left

Guest
Space Rangers 2 great game with no emotional involvement. Civilization 2, and many other strategy games. Doom, Blood, Far Cry SP. FPS/RTS in MP. Fighting games.

I was a lot emotionally engaged when I finally started to kick some pirates and dominators ass in Space Rangers 2 and managed to get promoted. And I think this was a design decision and not an accident by the developers.

But I see your point anyway. You want good gameplay mechanics to have such an effect. And I agree here. But Stackpole seems to be the writing guy firsthand and is talking about his perspective foremost. And it's a great addition to have good writing, too. But I will not be emotionally engaged by hot gay elves sex porn cutscenes (or here: voiceover moaning for robotmutant porn). And I think Stackpole won't either.
 

Stabwound

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The reference to a literal "GPS" is funny because that's exactly what I refer to the typical "quest compass" as. It's just a GPS that points you toward your goal. Even reading the word "quest markers" brings stomach bile hurtling up my esophagus, but I suppose it's possible to incorporate them WITHOUT dumbing down the game to retard levels which no modern dev seems to understand.

Why not design the game and quests so that they can be completed entirely without any quest markers for players that want to play that way? Then have optional quest markers for people that want them. Games like Skyrim make the quest compass optional, but then it's almost impossible to complete any quest because they designed the entire game around the assumption that you'd be following the quest markers around the map. A random quest telling you "Go get my sword from Derp cave." is basically what a Skyrim quest looks like. If it was instead "Get my sword from Derp cave, which is south east of town near Decline Lake." you could play without the compass at all.

The Wasteland 2 guys obviously will need to make some compromises. If they have to have quest markers or shit like that, I hope they design the game with them being secondary and not entirely based on the assumption that every person that plays the game needs to wear a helmet when they go outside like Bethesda does.

I would also prefer no voice acting, and don't see why they would want to commit a large amount of budget to something superfluous. If they have to do it, having it very sparingly like the Baldur's Gate games do it would be best. Have everything with text, and LOTS of it, and then get voice actors to voice the few important lines from quests and that sort of thing. I'm imagining that there are so many downsides as a game developer if you have to use voice acting for every line like many modern games. Every time you write a line of text, you have to have the cost of having it voice acted in mind. Not to mention it makes it impossible to go back and edit or expand upon things after they've had the voice acting recorded.

I think games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment make the perfect use of voice acting because you can still have as much text as you want and go back and revise most of it if you want to.
 

Cenobyte

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Interesting read. And as someone who has read a lot of Stackpole's BattleTech novels I'm intrigued in what he will come up for Wasteland 2. Haven't played the 80ties Wasteland, though, so I've no idea about the writing and plot of the original game.
 

Country_Gravy

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Wasteland 2
When he was talking about the voice overs I thought he was referring to just the narrator. I think that could work really well. I think he meant that by using a VO narrator that it can convey a lot more than just a description of the area. They do something like that in DDO and it works OK. The budget would be the only thing that would make this tough, but if you just have one voice actor doing descriptions of some major areas in the game, it shouldn't cost too much.
 

Jasede

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
Nothing wrong with a narrator reading area descriptions, if he's a very good one.
Nobody wants full voice acting. They won't have the money for that anyway.
 

MMXI

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Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers. As it reads now, it's giving me a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of vibe.
This didn't look possible given the circumstances. There was a large enough delay already for Part 2 as inXile are incredibly busy right now setting things up for the Kickstarter.
 

MisterStone

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Michael A. Stackpole said:
MS: The things that players tend to remember the most about Wasteland adventures were not the puzzles per se, but the moral choices players had to make.

Er, no, I think it's the puzzles I remember. I don't think emotion played a big part in the Wasteland universe for me. Of course, I was 12 and thought that blowing shit up was cool. Does anyone else have an opinion about this?

Anyway, sounds like they've got most of their priorities straight... I sure hope it works out! Thanks for taking this project on, inExile!
 

Brother None

inXile Entertainment
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Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers. As it reads now, it's giving me a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of vibe.
This didn't look possible given the circumstances. There was a large enough delay already for Part 2 as inXile are incredibly busy right now setting things up for the Kickstarter.

Hell, I'm impressed Codex got this one through at all, and thought of doing so. Great job guys.
 

Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Stabwound said:
I would also prefer no voice acting, and don't see why they would want to commit a large amount of budget to something superfluous.

Rereading this...

MS: Brian's already noted that audio is going to be a component we'll be exploiting, and I agree strongly with that. Having an actor read text can put so much more nuance into things that it really enriches the experience. I think having text available as a back-up, or as the primary source of information in places where a voice would not be appropriate (like reading a message scratched on a jail cell wall), is a good way to go. We'd also be foolish if we didn't recognize that any clues and code words aren't going to be backstopped by web pages and YouTube walkthroughs. The trick with text is going to be to make it engaging enough that folks will want to read it.

To me, it sounds like they want to go for something like Bastion's narrator, which would be cool imho and would only require 1 voice actor. But I may be wrong, of course.

EDIT: Beaten by Country_Gravy. :salute:

Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers.

Literally any interview on any website could benefit from more back-and-forth, but really, we've taken too much of their time already -- they're really swamped with stuff to do currently -- and it was cool of Michael to answer ALL those questions for us (there were quite a few of them already, as you'll surely agree). The questions were pretty detailed and tough, you know, and his answers were for the most part pretty on-topic if sometimes evasive (for obvious reasons).

But most importantly, I believe his vision and preferences are in general perfectly clear from the interview. We couldn't ask for more, that would've been both pointless and impolite.

We do hope for another interview in the future, though. Definitely. And rest assured, we're going to ask some tough questions -- once we have more specifics about the project.

Balance like what? Quest compass on cool down?

No need to get too ridiculous. As Stabwound has already pointed out, a game CAN be designed for the quest compass to be optional. Whether they'll do it right or wrong, is up to them entirely.

Why didn't you ask him for more detail I don't know what he means by that statement, what elements he thinks would be suicidal exactly? TB, and top down aren't already suicidal? Why would those "today's player" pledge anything on Wasteland 2?

It may come as a surprise to you as a Codexer, but many people who grew up on Wasteland and similar titles (and still love them and are willing to donate towards the sequel) are now perfectly enjoying stuff like Oblivion and Skyrim and generally consider contemporary CRPGs an evolution of and continuous with the old school ones. They are potential Kickstarter contributors as much as we are (and there are more of them!), and therefore finding balance is a VERY delicate task. I just hope they don't ponder exclusively to that kind of people.

And as you pointed out, TB and top down are risky enough indeed. It's good they don't consider that "suicide", in contrast to what today's publishers believe.

1mln$ project doesn't need allot of supporters. Just 30k at ~34$.

That's a lot. Like, a whole lot. RPG Codex has less than 10k members in total, and how many out of those are going to donate? 1/4 tops (being optimistic here). Then there's NMA. And that's it -- no more niche hardcore CRPG websites. Where do they get the remaining 25k? Besides, 34$ average is already quite optimistic; most peeps will only donate $10-20, I think.
 

Monolith

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Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers. As it reads now, it's giving me a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of vibe.
This didn't look possible given the circumstances. There was a large enough delay already for Part 2 as inXile are incredibly busy right now setting things up for the Kickstarter.

Hell, I'm impressed Codex got this one through at all, and thought of doing so. Great job guys.
Thanks. To be honest, we were quite afraid you'd beat us to it.
 

MMXI

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It may come as a surprise to you as a Codexer, but many people who grew up on Wasteland and similar titles (and still love them and are willing to donate towards the sequel) are now perfectly enjoying stuff like Oblivion and Skyrim and generally consider contemporary CRPGs an evolution of and continuous with the old school ones. They are potential Kickstarter contributors as much as we are (and there are more of them!), and therefore finding balance is a VERY delicate task. I just hope they don't ponder exclusively to that kind of people.
Yeah. Like the CRPG Addict.
 

almondblight

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Aug 10, 2004
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I wonder if this is why the kickstarter is going to be one million. RPG's cost a lot more to make than adventure games. Especially if they have lots of voice acting, you know.

I'm also curious as to what lessons they learned from MMORPG's.

It's funny how we've gone from "they aren't bad developers, the publishers made them do it!" to "they aren't bad developers, the casual audience is making them do it!". Eh, fine. But there are people right now working on the kind of games I want. And they'd be doing a lot better if they got the kind of support Fargo is asking for.

Still hope this will be good. I am starting to wonder, though, if "Turn-Based" is going to turn into some kind of RTwP ("they're taking turns shooting at each other").
 

thesisko

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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2
It may come as a surprise to you as a Codexer, but many people who grew up on Wasteland and similar titles (and still love them and are willing to donate towards the sequel) are now perfectly enjoying stuff like Oblivion and Skyrim and generally consider contemporary CRPGs an evolution of and continuous with the old school ones. They are potential Kickstarter contributors as much as we are (and there are more of them!), and therefore finding balance is a VERY delicate task. I just hope they don't ponder exclusively to that kind of people.
I find that hard to believe. Wouldn't they rather consider recent games like NWN2, Dragon Age or Drakensang to be the evolution of older top-down party-based games?

I think it's pretty far-fetched to assume that a majority of people who played Fallout 1/2 are in love with Skyrim for the same reasons they liked those games. Perhaps they also enjoy Skyrim, but they'd pretty much have to have forgotten everything about the older games if they think it's an evolution, considering the only thing they have in common is a genre description on the back of the box.

As for pandering to the masses, Piranha Bytes keeps quest compasses and level scaling away from their games just to target a niche that aren't satisfied with the likes of Skyrim - I'd say that this project needs to target an even smaller niche. It makes no sense to contribute to a game like this if you're already satisfied with current "AAA" RPG's and it would be pointless to try to cater to those gamers.
 

Brother None

inXile Entertainment
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Thanks. To be honest, we were quite afraid you'd beat us to it.

Nah, I'm easy to beat, I really never think of doing interviews or hurry along, plus I know InXile was busy. Will probably do more once the Kickstarter thing is successful, there's not that much of a point of doing more interviews until it is. NMA's interview got a ton of coverage all over the place (Eurogamer, RPS, etc), so we did our bit to spread the word. Until we can actually talk development, it's a bit wait and see.

That's a lot. Like, a whole lot. RPG Codex has less than 10k members in total, and how many out of those are going to donate? 1/4 tops (being optimistic here). Then there's NMA. And that's it -- no more niche hardcore CRPG websites. Where do they get the remaining 25k? Besides, 34$ average is already quite optimistic; most peeps will only donate $10-20, I think.

DF averaged $34, which I would guess is why Kraszu brought up that number. I'd actually expect this to average more than DF did. There's a more starved, less casual audience.

Also, let's not pretend NMA and the Codex really represent the whole of this audience. There's plenty of people with interest who aren't going to register on forums or who simply want nothing to do with us and our shitty reputation. How many? I dunno.
 

Monolith

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Fargo let me share his comment on some of the reactions here
I will say there is no way this game will have that boring homogenized style of other RPG'S. And audio will be a function of the budget and be part of the explanation on Kickstarter. Cause and effect and interesting choices is #1.

I made the last part stick out.
 

Crooked Bee

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I find that hard to believe.

You'd be surprised, really. MMXI has already pointed out CRPGAddict, which is the most famous examples. I'm not really talking about Fallout 1&2 fans; no idea about what the most of them have grown up into. Rather, I only have two words to add: Ultima fans. A whole LOT of Ultima fans are mad about Skyrim. Heck, just look at the guy who runs Ultima Aiera: he loves both Skyrim AND Mass Effect 3. And he's really passionate about the Ultima series at the same time. Wasteland had a lot of common with Ultima (turn-based, top-down, exploration-focused, etc.), and their fans tend to overlap to some extent. Many of them would definitely donate to Wasteland 2, I believe.
 

Monolith

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Thanks. To be honest, we were quite afraid you'd beat us to it.

Nah, I'm easy to beat, I really never think of doing interviews or hurry along, plus I know InXile was busy. Will probably do more once the Kickstarter thing is successful, there's not that much of a point of doing more interviews until it is. NMA's interview got a ton of coverage all over the place (Eurogamer, RPS, etc), so we did our bit to spread the word. Until we can actually talk development, it's a bit wait and see.
:thumbsup:
 

Crooked Bee

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Unfortunately, this interview could have benefited from one more round of e-mail back-and-forth where you could have asked follow-up questions based on his first set of answers. As it reads now, it's giving me a "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" kind of vibe.
This didn't look possible given the circumstances. There was a large enough delay already for Part 2 as inXile are incredibly busy right now setting things up for the Kickstarter.

Hell, I'm impressed Codex got this one through at all, and thought of doing so. Great job guys.
Thanks. To be honest, we were quite afraid you'd beat us to it.

Yeah, we (well, mostly I) had this in-joke after coming up with the interview idea: oh no, they still haven't replied, they must be too busy replying to Brother None's interviews. :P

Also, let's not pretend NMA and the Codex really represent the whole of this audience. There's plenty of people with interest who aren't going to register on forums or who simply want nothing to do with us and our shitty reputation.

I sure hope so.
 

thesisko

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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2
You'd be surprised, really. MMXI has already pointed out CRPGAddict, which is the most famous examples. I'm not really talking about Fallout 1&2 fans; no idea about what the most of them have grown up into. Rather, I only have two words to add: Ultima fans. A whole LOT of Ultima fans are mad about Skyrim. Heck, just look at the guy who runs Ultima Aiera: he loves both Skyrim AND Mass Effect 3. And he's really passionate about the Ultima series at the same time. Wasteland had a lot of common with Ultima (turn-based, top-down, exploration-focused, etc.), and their fans tend to overlap to some extent. Many of them would definitely donate to Wasteland 2, I believe.
I can understand liking different types of games, but if someone truly think that Skyrim is the evolution of those games, why would they pay for a low-budget version of the same? I thought this whole Kickstarter thing was about resurrecting genres that wouldn't be funded otherwise - not making a lo-fi version of mainstream games. Those guys would probably be satisfied with "Wasteland 2: Bethesda Edition", no need for a Kickstarter campaign.
 

Crooked Bee

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I'm speculating here, but I'd say mostly because they fondly remember Wasteland. I mean "hey, the game of my childhood! I'll donate!", or something along those lines. And they do love old CRPGs, no mistake there, and replay them from time to time; they just like both, surprisingly enough.

But maybe I've got it all wrong. I mean, there definitely are those kind of peeps all over the place, but maybe they wouldn't donate. I can't really tell. Nostalgia is a mighty factor for them too, though, no doubt about that.
 

Elwro

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Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2
Somehow I'm fully confident Wasteland 2 will not be "a low-budget version of Skyrim". For starters, Bethesda's worlds are almost devoid of any reaction of the world to the character's actions.
 

thesisko

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Project: Eternity Wasteland 2
[
Also, let's not pretend NMA and the Codex really represent the whole of this audience. There's plenty of people with interest who aren't going to register on forums or who simply want nothing to do with us and our shitty reputation. How many? I dunno.
I think there's quite a few. I personally know several PC gamers who never read forums and they are all dissatisfied with the post-Oblivion trend of hand-holding and simplification in RPGs. Let's not forget that it is a rather recent trend and one that strongly correlates with the migration of RPG developers to consoles. I don't think many Codexers would say that "Mask of the Betrayer" had too much hand holding for instance.
 

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