Wasteland 2

Wasteland 2 is an upcoming post-apocalyptic role-playing video game under development by inXile Entertainment and Obsidian Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is the first official sequel to the 1988 video game Wasteland (though both Fountain of Dreams and the original Fallout were considered spiritual successors). The game was successfully crowd funded through Kickstarter, part of a trend of high-profile developers launching projects on the site. It is currently expected to be released in late 2013.

Plot


The game is set in an alternate history timeline, in which a nuclear holocaust took place in 1998 in relation to an impact event involving a cluster of meteors that sparked a global nuclear war. On the day of the cataclysm, a company of U.S. Army Engineers were in the desolate southwestern desert constructing bridges in an area with a number of small survivalist communities and a newly-constructed federal death row prison with light industrial facilities. The soldiers sought shelter in the prison, expelled the inmates and invited nearby survivalists to join them shortly thereafter. Years later, together they formed "the Desert Rangers, in the great tradition of the Texas and Arizona Rangers", to help other survivors in the desert and beyond it.

Gameplay
Wasteland 2 will be a turn-based and party-based role-playing game with tactical combat. The player's party will feature seven characters, split up into four player characters (Rangers) and three non-player characters. The Rangers will be highly customizable and the player's choice of statistics, skills and appearance will give the Rangers an individualized personality. The party will also include non-player characters, each with their own personality, motivations, opinions and agendas.

Development
In 2003, inXile (founded by Wasteland's producer, Brian Fargo) acquired the rights to Wasteland from Konami, which held it in relation to the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise. In June 2007, Fargo stated: "I am indeed looking into bringing back the game that spawned the Fallout series. Stay tuned..." In November 2007, Fallout fan website Duck and Cover reported on possible concept art images from Wasteland 2 displayed in the main header of the inXile Entertainment website.

On February 16, 2012, inXile announced their plans to have a crowd funded production of a new Wasteland game, inspired by Double Fine's recent success of using Kickstarter to fund Double Fine Adventure. Project director Brian Fargo has reassembled key team members from the original Wasteland: Alan Pavlish, Michael A. Stackpole, Ken St. Andre and Liz Danforth, as well as the early Fallout games' designer Jason Anderson (Anderson, however, left the company in December 2010). The composer Mark Morgan, who created the soundtracks for Fallout and Fallout 2, was also hired to compose music for the game.

On March 13, 2012, the Kickstarter page for the production of Wasteland 2 went live. A minimum budget of $1,000,000 was set for the project, but Fargo agreed to cover up to $100,000 if need be, should the project fall short, and the campaign's was set at $900,000, the largest target for any Kickstarter project to date. Within 24 hours, the contributions totaled nearly $600,000, and the original goal was reached in under 43 hours. Much of the money raised for Wasteland 2 came from first-time backers of Double Fine Adventure. On March 30, it was announced that, should the funded amount reach $2.1 million or more, the game would be co-developed by Obsidian Entertainment, and Chris Avellone in particular. The Wasteland 2 Kickstarter ended on the April 17, raising a total of $2,933,252 (making it the third highest crowd funded video game on Kickstarter to date), with an additional $107,152 in PayPal pledges. On April 24, it was confirmed that Obsidian developers would be working on the project.

Brian Fargo stated that the team aims to ship Wasteland 2 around October 2013, and on July 10, 2012 it was announced that the original Wasteland would be bundled with it. There are no plans to support any consoles or handheld devices. In August 2012, Planescape: Torment's writer/designer Colin McComb joined the development team as a writer. Nathan Long signed up as a co-writer two months later. The first trailer for Wasteland 2 was released on February 9, 2013, showcasing some of the story, art and gameplay, with an audio commentary from director of development, Chris Keenan.