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.
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.
