Wasteland 2 Kickstarter to launch this week

InXile hopes to launch its bid to crowdfund Wasteland 2 over the next couple of days.

Speaking to Rock Paper Shotgun, inXile boss Brian Fargo said the developer was on track to submit to Kickstarter on the day of the interview - late last week.

"There’s an approval process which takes a couple of days. I would say early [this] week; Monday, Tuesday, something like that. It’s imminent, that’s for sure," he said.

The designer revealed that he had only very recently given up on pitching Wasteland 2 to publishers, and that development is likely to take about five months thanks to plenty of pre-existing pre-production materials.

"We worked on it at InXile for nearly a year, and so we worked through the storyline, what the life of the ranger is, dialogue structure, social skills, party influence, character stats. We worked through quite a lot of things so we’re not starting at ground zero," he said.

"We pretty much know the templates, the next step after that was to bring all the writers in, and bring the artists in, and really fill out the meat of the world. That’s the costly part and where we didn’t get anywhere.

"In order to do this and be super efficient you have to design everything up front. We’ll have a pile [of paper] a phone book high, we’ll sit around in a conference room and we’ll step through the game over, over and over again."

Fargo has made several mentions of his ongoing dialogue with EA over the rights to Wasteland, but said he has "a lot of love" for the publisher.

"I’ve got to give credit, they’ve been very reasonable in working with me," he said.

InXile will seek $900,000 for the project; it expects to need $1 million, but Fargo will pony up $100,000 himself.

A top-down, party-based RPG, Wasteland was first released in 1998. It was highly influential and strongly inspired the plethora of PC RPGs which released throughout the 1990's. Fargo founded Interplay, which produced the first Fallout games, as well as several well-loved early 2000's classics.

The full interview, accessible through the link above, is a lengthy but fascinating read for fans of the 1990's PC RPG scene.