Chris Avellone Reminisces About Wasteland
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I'm a big fan of using non-video-card-and-non-engine-innovations to drive development, and sometimes it only requires stepping back a second and taking a fresh look at the game to pull it off as an example, my favorite example of non-tech innovation is low-INT dialogue options in Fallout. Brilliant. Wasteland did the exact same thing, except with skill progression and location setting it allowed your character to grow in new ways, and it took you to places in its low-rez world that I haven't seen rivaled or done half as well in contemporary games.
So the whole Kickstarter model, Double Fine's adventure game, and now the hopes of Fargo bringing Wasteland on-line is amazing. It's probably no secret after Old World Blues how much I enjoyed Wasteland and giant scorpions and proton weapons, but Wasteland has a lot of my childhood tied up in it. To explain: I was in early high school, I was coming off of the Bard's Tale series and needed another fix... and from what I saw of Wasteland on the back cover of the package, it seemed to fit the bill. I was wrong.
Why? When I booted it up, I found it confusing and not like Bard's Tale at all - (well, beyond the combat), and the navigation especially threw me off a bit at first. Separate the party? What did all these skills exactly do? Where was I supposed to go? I was prepared for several more hours of disappointment and thought I'd wasted my money. I was used to the faux-3D corridors and environments... then a number of things happened that woke me up to what this title was doing, and I realized Interplay had made something different and well on par with Bard's Tale. Such as...
- I was placed in an unpleasant moral situation early on in the title when I hit Highpool. I had to put down someone's pet, and just as expected, the owner wasn't happy about the situation I was placed in. And I felt horrible. This was in the first 15 minutes, and the game had caused a new reaction in me I'd never had when playing an RPG.
- Skill progression started defining my character's personality. There was enough skill choices for me to start imagining what these Rangers had been trained in, what their talents were, and the ability to choose nationality of the characters fleshed them out even more, especially my RPG-toting near-silent Russian demolitions strongman, Romanov, who I began to build an increasingly-complex backstory for. (And yes, my Mom probably worried about me.)
- Despite the graphics at the time, the locations were areas I couldn't have imagined, certainly not in a computer game. Here was a game where I could use my Intelligence to fight adversaries, transport my consciousness into an android's brain and battle my character's childhood fears, contract some serious post-apocalyptic STDs, use a mortar to blow up sections of towns, help a nomadic tribe of railroad tribals predict the future with snake-squeezed moonshine, and navigate a mine-covered golf course only to come face to face with a giant robotic scorpion in the middle of Vegas. Not to mention the range of enemies, personalities, and allies that can join you all of these things didn't require some high-tech solution, only a different approach to the game context.
