Fargo: Players frustrated with 'dumbed down' RPGs and re-imaginings

Wasteland 2 lead and inXile boss Brian Fargo certainly doesn't sound keen on making a new-school, watered-down RPG full of romances and action tropes.

"There’s been a lot of frustration about where the genre has been going. The console is a different kind of experience, and a lot of effort in my opinion has been on dumbing things down," Far go told GameInformer.

"I find on the PC side there’s no effort dumbing things down. The audience likes to be treated like they’re intelligent, and I’ve always tried to take that approach."

Fargo said the audience for his earlier games was even smarter than he expected, even though they were younger than current fans. This ageing group of gamers is also pretty tired of not getting the kinds of games they want, apparently.

"I think people are sick of the 're-imagining.' Where there’s a classic title and it gets re-imagined. It becomes a first-person shooter, for example, where it had been a tactical top-down game. People pretty consistently have said that they don’t want that," Fargo noted.

"There was something about that earlier product that they loved, and they want that back. They don’t want it re-imagined in any way."

The developer also said that he doesn't pay much attention to what goes on in modern-style RPGs, because he isn't concerned with attracting fans so much as pleasing the old-school crowd who want what he knows best. That said, he does hear criticisms of current trends and takes them on board.

"I hear a lot of negative things about focusing on relationships. I think that is something that is more popular now, and it certainly was not popular back then, and there is kind of a negative backlash to focusing on the relationships," he noted.

"There can be a lot of ways of describing what that means, but my audience is saying don’t do it."

Wasteland 2 is expected on PC in October after successfully raising $3 million to fund the sequel to a 1989 classic.