How Wasteland 2 Will Acknowledge Gender, Discrimination
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Wasteland 2 isn't necessarily trying to make a statement, though. Rather, the goal is to portray a world full of interesting individuals each with their own preferences and prejudices. This place certainly isn't a kind one, so some will inevitably be assholes. Others might give you the benefit of the doubt simply because you've picked a certain sex/background or brought a certain character with you.
(That particular character loves all-women parties,) Findley continued, still referring to the merchant. (But some characters might not give any information to an all-women party, because they might have a problem with women. The idea is to make each NPC unique in their world view. A guy might be more likely to give women information or more likely to give men information. This guy specifically, I think he says something inappropriate, and then raises his prices.)
It's an admirable attempt at infusing the world with its own internal realism, but also a risky one. What if most of the game's male NPCs speak to women in overtly (or covertly) sexual fashions, whether being jerky or (nice)? What if a majority of characters of a certain gender or preference end up in negative roles or clustered into joke factions? Or those concerns in mind what if inXile ends up playing it too safe, creating an implausible wasteland of rainbow sparkles and butterfly kisses? For his part, Findley was confident that his studio has crafted a balanced, believable setting.
(We want to be true to the individual characters, and not try to apply some sort of global morality to all the characters in the world,) he said. (We want to allow the characters to be unique and to have their own world view and to be consistent.)
But when mechanics are tied closely to character and story, sometimes certain choices can garner preferential treatment despite a developer's best intentions. Think of morality-based games where the (evil) side grants cooler powers. That sort of thing. In these situations, it's not that left hand and right hand have never met. It's that they don't quite see eye-to-eye, and the message they write together comes out muddled and sloppily skewed. Again, however, inXile is doing its best to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
