WASTELAND 2: RPG FANS REJOICE

Old-school cRPG fans rejoice

It’s been a busy set of days, folks, what with school, work, life, the universe, everything ...

... and possibly a weekend in Vegas.

Pretty awesome, if you ask me, but I’m totally back, and I’m not the only one. The Godfather of Post-Apocalyptic RPGS is back! That man is Brian Fargo, a man who blazoned the trail for so many of my oh-so beloved 90s RPGs, and he’s hard at work on Wasteland 2. 

But before I get into that, I have a short anecdote that directly preceded the writing of this article, just to get you in the same mood that I’m in. 

           I met a kid (I consider anyone younger than 25 a kid) at the Community College I attend who began gabbing about video games, & Skyrim in particular. I listened tolerantly, and offered basically the same response I reserve for evangelical Christians, which is that I am a Godless heathen who smokes crack and worships the Dark Lord. 

           Actually, what I said was, "I miss 90s RPGs. Now those were fun." 

          But considering his response I might as well have gone with the first one. At the very least it would have been more amusing. "BS, man! You don't know what fun is! I'm getting my [_____] to 100 by making and selling knives in Skyrim. That's fun." 

           <blink-blink> "What about the story?" 

           "F*** the story!" 

And in that moment I could feel the Twilight Zone of modern gaming sucking me in with its brown dust, cover based combat, and basically all those other things that I found myself rooting about when Zero Punctuation pointed them out. And I didn’t like it. 

So back in the good ol’ days, all the way back in 1988, Interplay released Wasteland, the spiritual predecessor to the Fallout franchise, the Adventure Game of the Year and was inducted to several “Hall of Fame” lists. 

Hell, this game predates me by a few.

According to Brian Fargo, Wasteland, “It was one of the first games to have a real sandbox world with cause-and-effect on both a micro and macro level. It also had moral dilemmas, ones where you were making choices, tough moral choices that had consequences that rippled through the entire gameplay.” 

Shiny. 

Brian Fargo, after much mishap working to pitch the sequel to no avail, and has now turned to fan funding through Kickstartercrowdfunding. He has reassembled much of the old team from the original Wasteland for work on this sequel, including bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole, and one of the co-creators of the first game, Jason Anderson, one of the co-creators of Fallout, who is working on plot and character, and Mark Morgan, composer for the original Fallout doing the soundtrack for Wasteland 2. 

In the first twenty-four hours of the fan-funding going live they reached $600,000, and as of this article, they’re up around 1.5 million dollars. Check it out here.

It’s an amazing thing to see the support of fans for seeing the kinds of games they loved and that they grew up with being brought back. Maybe with fan-funding and digital distribution, we can see a return to the form of game that I love, so that I don’t have to tolerate the generic Xbox 360 musclehead that roams the halls of Community College.

~ Godzello