Brian Fargo on Wasteland 2's rapid progress due to financial independence and the Unity Asset Store

Cita:gamesindustry[/url]"]
InXile's Brian Fargo used his keynote address at this year's Unite conference to put the value of creative autonomy for Wasteland 2 in the frankest possible terms.

"We've been working on Wasteland 2 for about 100 days, with no distractions from any kind of corporate overlord," he said. "We have hundreds of pages of design done, we have our first music in, we have our basic UI up-and-running, and we've taken our first screenshots.

"The bottom line is that, without any interruption, we're kicking ass."

Fargo detailed the way the industry has "come full circle" since he began his career 30 years ago, shifting away from the console model that has dominated since the late Nineties and back towards "two and three man teams" empowered by new platforms, new distribution methods, robust tool-sets like Unity, and financing secured through crowd-funding.

InXile raised more than $3 million for its long gestating Wasteland 2 project through Kickstarter. Along with Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure, InXile's success helped to drive the current enthusiasm for crowd-funding in game development, but Fargo believes the implications of crowd-sourcing will reach further than simply raising finance.

"I'm slow to the party on this one, but we're really utilising it in a big way. People ask why we chose Unity, and it has a lot of technical positives, but really, for me, it came down to the store, the communication and the sharing of knowledge. That's the real power of Unity; it's not the technical aspects. You can't beat the crowd."

The current build of Wasteland 2 uses 49 different assets from Unity's Asset Store, and Fargo expects that number to reach 500 by the time the game ships. This sharing of expertise has allowed InXile to make rapid progress, and get the most out of its budget.

With systems like Kickstarter and Unity in place, more and more developers will be able to build financial security without sacrificing creative control - a rarity even five years ago. This combination of factors, Fargo said, leads to the very best work the industry produces, even in the commercial sector.

"Corporations don't have artistic integrity; people do. This sort of integrity impacts on production and how a property is exploited... There are employees of these organisations that have this integrity, but they don't have the power to do anything about it.

"The best creative work we're seeing is from creative people who have the power, or the financing, to control their destinies... These visionaries can be within an organisation: Rockstar would not achieve the level of quality it does if Sam Houser wasn't running that place with an iron fist. He's not a corporation; he's a person."

Fargo listed several other examples to support his thesis, all of which have either total creative control or financial independence to take their time and pursue their ideas: Shigeru Miyamoto, Yu Suzuki, Hideo Kojima, Ken Levine, Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games.

"They can keep the craziness at bay," he said.

In the independent sector, designers like Jonathan Blow and Edmund McMillen have illustrated what can be accomplished with autonomous creativity, and Kickstarter gives these people even simpler access to the fans and funding that can make it happen.

Fargo also noted the philanthropic nature of successful developers, pointing to other indie designers as the source of Wasteland 2's largest Kickstarter pledges.

"Look at Notch. He's invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in Kickstarter projects. You don't see that coming from publishers. As we do well, we tend to help each other out. Once there are more developers that control their destiny through IP ownership or otherwise, it will allow the wealth in our business to be distributed more evenly.

"Good things always come from that. When so much of the money is consolidated in a few publishers, it's no good for any of us."

Since InXile's success with crowd-funding, Fargo has started an initiative called Kicking It Forward: the group's members will pledge 5 per cent of any profits from their crowd-funded projects back into the Kickstarter ecosystem. So far, 100 projects have committed to the idea.

"If one Minecraft comes along, that's going to put $2 million or $3 million back into the ecosystem to for other people, and it's going to help find the next one."

Podcast de Planescape

Cita:eurogamer[/url]"]Why only post-mortem new games? Why not, say, reach back in time for one of the best-loved role-playing games, try and track down the key people involved, and gather them for an hour-long chat and post-mortem?

Maybe they haven't spoken in a long time. Maybe they've got a new perspective on what they once created because of the path their life took since then. And maybe it's just nice to reminisce.

Why not, indeed. And so I present to you an hour-long Planescape: Torment post-mortem.

My guests:

    Chris Avellone, the lead designer of Planescape: Torment, and currently chief creative officer at Obsidian Entertainment
    Colin McComb, Avellone's second, if you like - the second designer on Torment after McComb's own PlayStation Planescape game "got rolled up into it". Now commands an iPhone App company called Three Pound Games, and also writes the Oathbreaker series of fiction
    Adam Heine, scripter on Planescape: Torment, now living in Thailand "fostering 10 billion kids" and writing science fiction and fantasy for young adults (the final post on the official Planescape: Torment website concerns Heine's departure, and it's written by...)
    Scott Warner, then a junior designer on Planescape: Torment. Now, lead designer of Halo 4

Como sería una secuela de Planescape: Torment

Cita:kotaku[/url]"]Perhaps you remember Planescape: Torment, a wonderful role-playing game that set a new bar for video game narrative when it was released back in the late 90s. Even today, very few games weave stories as intricate and fascinating as Black Isle's masterpiece.

So when I read designer Chris Avellone say he was "very tempted" to Kickstart a spiritual successor to the revered RPG, I knew I'd have to harass him until he told us more. Turns out I didn't even have to ask twice: Avellone was kind enough to immediately sit down and write us a detailed outline of what he'd like to see in a hypothetical spiritual successor to the Nameless One's story.

Here's what a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment could look like:

***

Chris Avellone: [Game development studio] Obsidian has talked about Kickstarter for some time. Not to put myself or Planescape down, but the range of ideas we've had internally for a KS are, IMO, better than doing a spiritual successor to Torment, and it involves more of the powerhouses in the studio rather than turning me into the Nameless One.

So even though this wouldn't be an Obsidian Kickstarter, here are my thoughts on a Torment spiritual successor:

┬á ┬á It'd be best not to use [the Dungeons & Dragons] mechanics or the Planescape license. One reason is doing so would undermine some of the joys of the Kickstarter (not having to answer to anyone but the players ÔÇô if we take a license, we have to answer to the franchise holder), I'm not sure Wizards/Hasbro/whoever knows where to take the license, and looking back on Planescape: Torment, it's been clear to me that we had to bend a lot of rules to get some of the mechanics and narrative feel we wanted. Could we have done that easier outside of a Planescape universe? Sure.
    Utilize similar writing style elements (slang, dialogue screen format similar to Planescape), depth (lots of choices per node, lots of reactivity), presentation (action descriptions interwoven in the text) and density (the Wasteland 2 backers have repeatedly asked for more text in Wasteland rather than spending resources on something else like [voiceovers], thankfully enough).
    Similar narrative mechanics. As a classic example, there's some form of morality/personality bar that's affected by your actions, although I'd want to research some other mechanic tied to the narrative.
    Similar, but not exact, campaign mechanics in the following respects:

    1) A plane-jumping universe with diversity in environments, cultures, religions, and people.
┬á ┬á 2) Tactical combat ÔÇô it doesn't need to be turn-based, but pausing and choosing your actions is important.
    3) A diversity of creatures, perhaps not to the same extent as in the Planescape original title (would depend on budget, but just like the main cast, I'd prefer to have fewer, higher-quality creatures that allow for a spectrum of behaviors rather than a grab-bag of a thousand random monsters).
    4) A small group of extremely detailed companions.
┬á ┬á 5) A mechanic similar to "remembrance" in the original game ÔÇô this metaphysical interpretation of your immortality and amnesia is something that can be explored in a number of ways depending on the game premise.
    At first glance, the painterly world and the HUD would be as distinctive as something you'd see in Planescape: Torment. We'd need to nail down a new art style, but there's elements related to Planescape that transcend that universe (dimension-bending landscapes, Escher-layouts, etc.). We wouldn't do anything approaching traditional fantasy in the look/layout of the world. Why? Because I'm exhausted with that. And if that's not compelling for people, then they won't back it on Kickstarter, my question of how appealing that is would be laid to rest, and I'll never have to wonder about it again.
    A camera and click-movement presentation similar to the Infinity engine isometric games. Even if the mechanics are different, at first glance, the game should share the view that Planescape did.
    Having a character basis and an advancement scheme with spells, traits, and abilities that are suited to the campaign setting and the system and narrative mechanics. As an example, Dak'kon's Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon and the spells he gained from that had a strong narrative bent, and I enjoy balancing out skill and spell trees that reinforce the philosophy of the world.
    Items with stories. One of my favorite parts of Torment and the Icewind Dale series was giving them names and writing short stories for each inventory item... and sometimes very long stories (The Fanged Mirror of Yehcir-Eya). The best moment I had for Icewind Dale 2 was creating an inventory item name that used the token in the title and having a developer come into the room and accuse me of ripping off his character for the sake of a magic item. When he was done ranting, I explained to him that it was actually a scripted reference that was personal to each character playing the game. At least that's the story I stuck to.
    You would play a single character and gather a handful of companions over the course of the game. I'd rather have a smaller cast of more reactive companions (and enemies) than a ton of shallow ones.
┬á ┬á Lastly, this is also something that set Torment apart ÔÇô we had a good chunk of the story, dialogues and the flow of the narrative laid out before production began. This was key. If I had the power and funding to sit down for a year and script a spiritual successor out, then we built from there, I would do that, but that process is something no publisher would agree to ÔÇô you're constantly under the gun, either as an internal or external developer (Josh Sawyer had to write the Icewind Dale 2 storyline over the course of a weekend, for example ÔÇô he did a great job, but that's not an ideal way to write a story). Generally, you have 2-4 weeks.
┬á ┬á I also think a lot of the strength of Van Buren (Interplay's Fallout 3) was the same process we had with Torment ÔÇô I was able to sit down for 3 years and plot out the flow and locations of the game before production began, and even playtest it in pen-and-paper roleplaying games with the future developers on the title.

So maybe I should do 2 Kickstarters ÔÇô one that does the worldbook and characters for the game, and the second one would be for the production of the title itself if enough people like the idea? Hmmmm.

Anyway, that's just a few thoughts. It's not all of them, but I wanted to share my mental process on this.

Me ha parecido muy interesante la de Brian Fargo. Espero que esto del crwofunding vaya a mas y haga replantearse un poco como está montado esto a la industria en general.

La verdad es que he participado en bastantes proyectos y estoy más expectante por algunos de ellos que por la mayoría de juegos que quedan por salir en esta generación.