Ever since Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine shattered Kickstarter records by raising over $3 million dollars for their new game, other developers like the Tecmo MMO team have met with success after taking their project to Kickstarter.
inXile, the developer behind the last year’s Hunted: The Demon Forge, has begun a Kickstarter campaign to fund a sequel to Wasteland. A lot of newer gamers may be wondering what Wasteland is. If there was no Wasteland, there would not have been Fallout. If there was no Fallout, there would not have been 2008 game of the year Fallout 3. Wasteland was the original post-apocalyptic RPG and inXile feels that it’s time for a new one.
This is where you, the fans, come in. They can’t do this alone because this style of hardcore PC RPG is frowned upon by publishers. It’s too much of a risk for publishers who only want to fund sure fire hits.
They team needs $900,000 to make the game a success. In reality, they need $1 million, but Brian Fargo, head of the Wasteland 2 team, has already pledged $100,000 if they reach their goal.
What will gamers get if the project exceeds its funding goals? The team says that at $1.25 million, they will make the game bigger, add more maps, more stories and more music. If the funding reaches $1.5 million, they will port the game to Mac OS X for even more gamers to enjoy.
The development of Wasteland 2 already has the big names attached to it. Brian Fargo, executive producer of both Wasteland and Fallout, is back on tap to head the team making the game. The game’s original designers, Alan Pavlish and Mike Stackpole, are also back on the team to make this the best love letter to classic PC RPG fans there is.
The current development team isn’t the only group working on the game. The fans who fund the project will be deeply involved with the development process. The Kickstarter page lays it out:
We’re planning on an initial 6 months of pre-production. We’ll nail down every important element that you, our creative partners, want. Once we have all that figured out, we buckle down for 12 month development cycle. During that time, players can get a sneak peek on a private closed beta through Steam. In addition, we will be giving you constant updates and showing you our progress along the way.
At the moment, the game has raised a little over $108,000 in pledges with 1,828 backers. It still has 34 days to raise the $900,000 needed to fund the game. If it performs anything like the Double Fine Kickstarter, it should reach that goal in a few days time.
The more important thing about this project is its potential success. As the Kickstarter page states, this is their chance to prove the big publishers wrong about old school RPGs. Kickstarter provides an avenue for indie developers to be heard and get the funding they need without the help of a major publisher.
If you would like to be a part of this potentially historic game in the making, check out the Kickstarter page and see what the team is up to. This is the chance of a lifetime to see the return of a genre that’s been dormant for years.
As an added bonus, check out the tongue planted firmly in cheek video announcing Wasteland 2 that pokes fun at modern game creation:
