Game News Wasteland 2 News: Kickstarter Update, Ranger Concept Art, and Michael Stackpole on Wasteland

[Burning Bridges]

 

[Outlander]

Übercool!

Five words: Warriors of the World United

 

[Burning Bridges]

(I really really hope W2 will not look like Mad Max.)

I think A Boy and His Dog would be a good style:

 

[Burning Bridges]

And what about him?

 

[Burning Bridges]

What with this? Not a post apoc theme, but fighting with bow and arrow could be very popular in the Wastelands. Why must everyone have a HK416 in the new old-school game?

 

[Azrael the cat]

What with this? Not a post apoc theme, but fighting with bow and arrow could be very popular in the Wastelands. Why must everyone have a HK416 in the new old-school game?

Whilst I'm pretty sure that whoever desgined Daryl's character on The Walking Dead basically said 'let's take Sawyer from Lost and put him in a zombie apocalypse' and then stopped work for the day, it sure does a good job of making the crossbow look like a viable, and situationally superior, alternative to a gun - stealth kills galore and can always make more ammunition.

[I'm also pretty sure that the writers have written him into a hole for next season. Too similar to Miccone to have both characters present simultaneously, but haven't given him enough of an arc to make killing him off interesting (c/f the end of Boardwalk Empire season 2 - it works not because the guy is the 2nd main lead, but because by the time he goes into his final "I thought you knew. I died years ago, in the trenches...." monologue you've already spent 2 seasons slowly realising that the guy is a walking corpse who just wants to put a few things right before biting a bullet. As much as I enjoy The Walking Dead, by comparison, the writers are incapable of developing more than one character at a time - this season we had Shane ala the first run of the comics, with a tiny bit of characterising Glenn (even Rick is a pretty poorly developed character) - you need more than that for a show to stay interesting past the first 2 seasons).]

Back on topic, surely bows (going from simple to mechanical Olympic bows) and crossbows would be the 'modern/post-apoc' version of the fantasy thief's dagger? I mean, all characters could have uses for melee weapons (even in current military scenarios, unless there's artillery, MG or air support to keep people pinned, a lot of killing is at melee/bayonet range, and they still train the fuck out of it for that reason), but in a post-apoc setting, a 'stealth guy' isn't going to be a professional thief - he's going to be a hunter or a woodsman, who wants to track, silently pick his way past a gate without alerting his prey, and pick off a deer or two for dinner without creating a ruckus (that will drive the herd away, or worse - attract human scavengers). Bows and crossbows fit right into that.

Also, with the 'not a post-apoc' theme. Taken seriously, there's no reason why it couldn't be PART of a post-apoc setting. Look at Chernobyl. Ok, you want the urban wasteland to dominate the setting for thematic reasons, but there's going to be low-rad areas where a few decades later wildlife is thriving now that the human menace has retreated. There SHOULD be forests and wildlife in pockets outside the urban areas - after all, the nukes will be aimed at the cities and military outposts, so any travelling outside of those areas should lead to renewed forests. It's one thing that STALKER got right, simply by copying the Chernobyl area outright. I wouldn't want a whole game set in a forestry area if it's post-apoc, but it could certainly be part of the game-world.

 

[Azrael the cat]

And what about him?

FUCK YEAH!!!

As absurd as the idea is, I kind of wish they had let Carpenter make the sequel they were talking about before they settled on that prequel under a different director. Of course, I can understand the studio's decision: Carpenter apparently insisted on starring Kurt Russel and the same guy who played the other guy still alive at the end of The Thing, set it about 2 days after the original finishes, and try and explain away the actors' 30 year age alteration as the effects of frostbite. As much as I would say FUCK YEAH MAC!!!, I can sympathise somewhat with the studio execs who may have suspected that the old director was in the middle stages of dementia. 'But John, anyone with THAT much frostbite would have to have limbs amputated, in the miniscule chance that they survived at...'. Carpenter: 'IT HAS TO STAR KURT RUSSELL! He's box office dynamite! Hell, Big Trouble in Little China almost topped the video rentals last year in 1986'. 'Uhh John, that was 16 years ago' 'IT MUST STAR KURT RUSSELL!!'

At least that's how I imagine that Carpenter would have made his pitch. It might explain how they greenlighted the abomination that we ended up getting instead.

 

[Infinitron]

How dare you not remember the name of the awesome Keith David

 

[Azrael the cat]

How dare you not remember the name of the awesome Keith David

Very true. Even more awesome was that he had never acted beforehand. Now, that's actually a damn good performance for someone who had never even seen a film set before - even most 'big stars' today were pretty shit in their first films, which were usually after years of training etc.

I've also wronged Carpenter. He did the magnificent 'Cigarette Burns' for the Masters of Horror anthology as recently as 2005.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Just my 2c.

Mel Gibson would get routinely butt raped by homosexuals in that leather dress of his. He could however make a living as some sort of male prostitute.

A youth like Don Johnson could survive in the wastelands due to his cat like instinct. That's classic RPG stuff with nothing but raw agility, dexterity, marksmanship.
There was also this kid in Damnation Alley (?) that only threw stones, but hit every time.

Kurt Russel would be the kind of guy that no one wants to mess with, that would eventually become some sort of leader. The guy that when confronted by a group, no one comes forward to face.

 

[Havoc]

What with this? Not a post apoc theme, but fighting with bow and arrow could be very popular in the Wastelands. Why must everyone have a HK416 in the new old-school game?

Yeah, but they're DESERT RANGERS FOR FUCKS SAKE. I'm really pissed at you guys "it's not wasteland!", "why guns?!", "brown and orange! buuu!", "banal shit boring!".

 

[Tel Prydain]

Eh looks more F3/F:NV than wasteland, then again, that's probably what most of the backers want unfortunately
I still believe though...

To be fair, New Vegas drew a lot from WL1. There is a giant Desert Rangers monument, for f@!%ks sake. You could obtain Desert Ranger armour, which was designed to look like the description of a wasteland Desert Ranger.
It might look a little New Vegas, but that’s cool. If it starts to look like FO3, THEN we should start to worry.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Eh looks more F3/F:NV than wasteland, then again, that's probably what most of the backers want unfortunately
I still believe though...

To be fair, New Vegas drew a lot from WL1. There is a giant Desert Rangers monument, for f@!%ks sake. You could obtain Desert Ranger armour, which was designed to look like the description of a wasteland Desert Ranger.
It might look a little New Vegas, but that’s cool. If it starts to look like FO3, THEN we should start to worry.

And surely one could forgive them for putting in a minor location that happens to be a very poorly lit Isle somewhere in the game.

 

[meh]

Awesome shops everyone, thanks!