Microsoft (also) buys inXile Entertainment

Hot on the heels of the news that Microsoft has bought CRPG masterminds Obsidian Entertainment, it has also been confirmed that Microsoft has acquired fellow RPG studio inXile. Unlike Obsidian's acquisition, which was widely anticipated, inXile's is a surprise.

inXile Entertainment was founded in 2002 by Bryan Fargo shortly after he quit the company he founded back in the early 1980s, Interplay, after it fell into financial mismanagement involving outside investors. The company survived its first decade by making 3D console ports and then games for mobile devices.

In 2012 the company launched a crowdfunding campaign via Kickstarter for a new RPG, Wasteland 2 (a sequel to the classic Electronic Arts RPG Wasteland, which in turn had inspired the original Fallout). Released in 2014, Wasteland 2 was a significant sales and critical success. The company followed this up with Torment: Tides of Numenera (2017), a "spiritual successor" to the classic Interplay CRPG Planescape: Torment. Despite strong reviews, Torment sold poorly.

inXile's most recent game, The Bard's Tale IV (2018), attracted mixed critical notices and has also apparently not sold well. This pattern of low sales for their games and the reduced income from crowdfunding - although it should be noted that both Obsidian and inXile moving from the very-well-known Kickstarter platform to the obscure Fig system would not have helped - has likely made it necessary to consider selling the company.

inXile have almost completed work on Wasteland 3, which is due for release in 2019 and will now presumably be a Microsoft-branded game.

Intriguingly, both Obsidian and inXile started as Interplay and unusually (given the passage of 20 years) many of the same people work at both companies, raising the interesting prospect of them perhaps being merged to work on future projects, effectively recreating the "good old days" of Interplay in the 1990s.

WASTELAND 3 announced

inXile Entertainment have announced development of Wasteland 3, the sequel to their 2014 post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland 2. Like its predecessor, this game will be crowdfunded.

The head of inXile Entertainment, Brian Fargo, formerly worked for Electronic Arts, where he made the original Wasteland back in 1988, and then founded Interplay. When they were unable to create a sequel to Wasteland as EA refused to give up the rights, they instead created the Fallout video game series. After Interplay collapsed in the early 2000s, Fargo founded inXile and reacquired the Wasteland licence. In 2012 inXile launched a Kickstarter campaign for Wasteland 2, asking for $900,000 and eventually ending up with over $3 million. The game was released in late 2014 to strong critical acclaim, and a "Director's Cut" was then released a year later which upgraded almost every aspect of the game.

Wasteland 3 will feature radically enhanced graphics, including a much-improved scaling system. This will allow for cinematic cut scenes and action shots similar to those in XCOM and its sequel. The game will also be fully voiced and will have co-op multiplayer with players able to carry out quests in different parts of the world map simultaneously and have a knock-on effect on the other player's story (similar to what is being developed for Divinity: Original Sin II). The game will also feature an upgradeable home base and will be released on PC and console simultaneously.

This time around inXile are using the newer crowdfunding service Fig. Unlike Kickstarter, Fig acts as an investment plan and will see any profits from the game returned to the investors. inXile are targeting a budget of over $7 million for the game, mostly paid for by the profits from Wasteland 2, but will be seeking to raise $2.75 million from investors.

inXile are also finishing off two other games, both crowdfunded. Torment: Tides of Numenera is mostly completed and is in bug-fixing and QA ahead of an early 2017 release. Development is in full swing on The Bard's Tale IV, with a mid-to-late 2017 release date mooted. Wasteland 3 is more likely to come out in 2018 or 2019.

Wasteland 2

AD 2102. The world is still basking in the afterglow of a devastating nuclear war. In Arizona, a law-enforcing militia known as the Desert Rangers is trying to bring justice and order to a land plagued by bandits, warlords and crazed cyborgs. When Desert Rangers start turning up dead, it becomes clear that someone or something has it in for the Rangers, and their attempt to find out who is responsible will take them to every corner of Arizona, and far beyond.

Wasteland 2 has an interesting history. The original Wasteland was a hugely successful, genre-defining roleplaying game when it was released by Electronic Arts in 1988, featuring a rich story and solid gameplay for the time. Brian Fargo and his team at Interplay later left EA to go solo. In 1996 they tried to get the rights to make an official sequel but EA turned them down. So they had to make a spiritual successor, a similar post-apocalyptic game with a nicely non-copyright-infringing, alternate-history twist to set it apart. The result was a game called Fallout. You may have heard of it, and its increasingly massive, mega-selling sequels.

Years later, after Interplay went down in flames and the Fallout franchise rights were purchased by Bethesda, Fargo and some of his team-mates regrouped as inXile Entertainment, purchased the Wasteland IP rights from a now-more-relaxed EA and raised over $3 million from crowdfunding. The game was finally released in September 2014. To say it represented a labour of love for its creators, who had spent a quarter of a century trying to get it made, is an understatement.

So much for the history, what about the game? Wasteland 2 is a top-down roleplaying title. You create a party of four characters from scratch who can then be joined by up to three additional companions as the game proceeds. You control the development of both the created and original characters, determining where skill points are assigned and what equipment they use. The game demands a fairly broad-based approach and it pays to split skills between party members, so making one a computer specialist, another a master lockpicker, another a medic etc is pretty much essential. All characters need to pour points into their fighting skills as well, with the game providing a nice variety of ranged (rifles, pistols, miniguns, laser weapons, sniper rifles, shotguns etc) and melee weapons. There are also non-violent skills, most notably the conversation skills which can dramatically change how conversations, quests and entire storylines unfold. Roleplayers will enjoy seeing how much combat in the game can be avoided by picking the right dialogue options and using either logic, determination or appeals to mercy as befitting the other character's nature.

Grenades and bazookas can be a vital equaliser in really tough fights.

Wasteland 2 is reasonably attractive graphically, although the first half of the game is very, very brown. You spend so much time zoomed-out it's not really a problem (the - fortunately very brief and rare - in-game cut scenes are a bad idea), and the game's excellent graphic design shines through at every point. The game employs the old Infinity Engine technique of having some well-designed maps and areas that aren't actually that huge, but cleverly-designed paths and well-placed enemies can make crossing them a lengthy challenge. There's also an absolute ton of them. Wasteland 2 is a massive game, taking most players north of 50 hours to complete (I did in 54, and that included rushing some late-game areas and not exploring every nook and cranny as it was no longer necessary) and does a good job of maintaining interest over that time. I certainly never found myself glancing at the time and wishing the game was over like I did through most of the second half of Dragon Age: Origins, for example.

The writing is pretty good, although inconsistent. Chris Avellone was parachuted in from Obsidian to help on several sections and his Planescape: Torment co-writer Colin McComb played a large role, resulting in a twisting and turning narrative which never shies away from asking hard questions and leaving players feeling that all choices are bad ones. However, some other sections of the game are more pedestrian and more easily resolved through combat. The writing is good but certainly not a major selling-point of the game (as it is for Pillars of Eternity, for example). Combat is more enjoyable, being turn-based and emphasising positioning and cover. XCOM fans will particularly enjoy the fights. As better weapons are secured and combat skills are levelled up, battles become more elaborate and enjoyable. However, towards the end of the game your party will start outstripping the enemies arrayed against it and tactics will become less important as you shrug off massive volleys of enemy fire like gnats.

Although your party does eventually become unstoppable walking tanks, it takes a while to get there. Unlike most RPGs, the game is pretty stingy with ammo and money. Looting items provides only a small return, while the cost of everything is absolutely astronomical. Late in the game I still found kitting my side out with enough bullets to get through a few fights without running dry to be ruinously expensive. It doesn't help that the game is also stingy with its vendors and their bank balances, sometimes necessitating large trips across the map stopping off at every merchant you know to stock up.

Despite small and undetailed textures, the graphics can be ocassionally excellent.

The other key weakness is the overly exacting use of skills. Having Safecracking and Lockpicking as separate skills felt like one step too far into pedantry, as was the splitting of Medic and Surgeon. It does force some hard choices in levelling your characters, which is good, but the gap between tough choices and unnecessary busywork is very small and the game does step over it several times.

Still, if Wasteland 2 repeats some of the mistakes of old-school RPGs, it also embraces some of the best bits. There are lengthy, branching storylines with multiple outcomes. Quests with three or four different outcomes which have associated subquests with their own branching endings. Entire storylines can be missed if you don't open the right door. Decisions made in the opening minutes of the game have huge consequences in the endgame. One wrong judgement during a particularly tense, dramatic confrontation with a bunch of warrior-priests can determine if a nearby town is enslaved, left alone or destroyed. Wasteland 2 gives every one of your decisions weight and consequence, and makes you care about those consequences.

Wasteland 2 (****) is occasionally tough, sometimes obtuse and perhaps overuses the brown texture colour a tad too much. It's also brilliantly designed, well-characterised and knows how to gut-punch the player when they're least expecting it. Amongst the recent surge of old-school RPGs it may be the ugliest (although this is very relative) but it's definitely one of the most rewarding. Wasteland 2 is available now on PC from Steam and GoG, with PS4 and X-Box One versions to follow later this year.

WASTELAND 2 approaches completion

InXile Entertainment today confirmed that Wasteland 2, their forthcoming post-apocalyptic RPG, is nearing completion. The game's beta testing stage will commence in mid-December, allowing thousands of players the chance to try a 10-hour slice of the game (which, depending on some reports, may only be about a quarter of the whole game). They will be testing for bugs and reporting back on gameplay issues such as combat and UI, which inXile can tweak before the final release.

No final release date has been set yet, but typically betas last 2-3 months, making a Spring 2014 release highly likely. Wasteland 2 is the sequel to a 1988 RPG which is counted as being highly influential; the Fallout franchise was created by the same team ten years later when they were unable to use the Wasteland name.

With work drawing to a close on Wasteland 2, the inXile's team are now ramping up work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, their other RPG which will be a spiritual successor to the classic 1999 game Planescape: Torment. That game is expected to be released in 2015.

The SF of Gaming

Where would computer games be without science fiction? Alien bad guys, stonking great railguns, cyborg protagonists and post-apocalyptic landscapes are ten-a-penny in games. The number of games out there without any SF or fantasy elements is tiny; even the historical simulation Civilization games allows Gandhi to build an army of death-dealing laser tanks and then fly to Alpha Centauri, whilst the Crusader Kings series postulates fantastical alternate timelines where Wales is a European superpower.

Scientifically inexplicable.

That said, SF in games is usually scenery rather than the focus of the setting. The socio-economic basis of why the alien Lord Mental, with access to vast resources and commanding a star-spanning empire, needs to invade Earth in the Serious Sam series remains resolutely unexplored. And how do those suicide bomber guys scream when they don't have a head anyway? The science in science fiction is often questionable in books (and almost non-existent on TV and in film), and even moreso in games.

Still, exceptions exist. Here's a look at some games which attempt to use real science as more than just wallpaper.

Frontier: Elite 2 - Real Astronomy & Newtonian Physics

Released in 1993, Frontier was David Braben's ambitious follow-up to the classic, medium-defining 1984 space sim Elite. Frontier allows you to take on the role of the captain of a spacecraft. You can indulge in trading goods between star systems, fighting pirates (or turning pirate yourself) or undertaking missions for one of several interstellar powers (the Federation, the Empire or numerous independent worlds, as well as various corporations). You can switch between spacecraft and upgrade them.

Where the game was truly stunning was that it simulated the entire Milky Way Galaxy on just a single floppy disk. 100 billion stars were located in the galaxy, and the several hundred closest to Earth were placed in their (more or less) correct astronomical positions, along with a few hundred other major stars. You could fly to the Pleiades (though it'd take a while), check out Polaris or skim the surface of Arcturus. The game also used real Newtonian physics, complete with effectively infinite inertia once you had fired your engines in a particular direction, and space stations simulating gravity through centrifugal force. You could even fly over planetary surfaces and land at starports.

Of course, the game looks pretty primitive by modern standards, 99% of the stars in the game are randomly placed and named and the Newtonian physics make space combat unintuitive and almost ridiculously difficult to pull off (and the fact that few later space games - I-War and Tachyon's nods to it side - use real physics may be down to Frontier's problems). But the ambition and scope are there. It will be interesting to see if Elite: Dangerous, due in 2014, manages to solve the issues whilst retaining the immense scale, scope and ambition of its forebear.

Damocles: Mercenary II - Comets and Time Dilation

Predating Frontier by a few years, Damocles similarly depicts an impressive 3D universe which allows you to land and take off from planets. The setting is much more limited, with just a single solar system on offer. The spacecraft is also merely a way of getting from planet to planet, with the focus being on your character wandering around (in first-person 3D; a stunning achievement in 1990). The premise is that the comet Damocles is about to crash into and destroy the planet Eris and your character has to find a way of stopping it. The game presents several possibilities, from the direct (finding and blowing up the comet with a mega-powerful antimatter bomb) to the sensible (redirecting the comet away from Eris onto a safer orbit by blowing up another, uninhabited body nearby).

One of the more interesting things about the game is that your spacecraft can accelerate to near-lightspeed to get around the system, but this results in time dilation. You can travel right across the system in minutes, but the doomsday clock will tick down at a ridiculous rate. This forces the player to find alternate ways of travelling around (teleporters being the favourite alternative, but their locations are unknown at the start of the game) to avoid the problem.

Syndicate - Cyberpunk Dystopia

Also released in 1993, Syndicate was an action-strategy game set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, where the world is controlled by corporations who influence and pacify citizens via chips in their brains. These chips can be subverted by the player, allowing them to take control of huge crowds of people during missions to be used as cannon fodder or a distraction. This notion of human/computer interfaces is only lightly touched upon in the game due to control limitations, although it does bring in other SF ideas such as robot policemen and massive corporate advertising boards (influenced by Blade Runner). Most sinister is the way the game postulates a future where governments are rump states at best, with the real power held by corporations and their private armies.

A sequel, Syndicate Wars, moved the game into 3D in 1996. Recently, several of the design team for Syndicate and its sequel announced a Kickstarter campaign for a 'spiritual sequel', Satellite Reign, that will expand upon many of the ideas in the original game and allow for things like hacking and more freeform approaches to missions.

Hostile Waters - Nanotech Singularity and Social Revolution

One of the greatest (though also underplayed) strategy games of all time, Hostile Waters (aka Antaeus Rising in the USA) places you in command of an immense aircraft carrier with orders to liberate a chain of newly-risen islands from the control of a hostile power. What at first appears to be a remake of the classic 1987 strategy title Carrier Command (itself given a lacklustre, official remake in 2012) quickly turns into a different beast. Part of this is down to the compelling fiction, created by writer Warren Ellis.

The game postulates a technological singularity (in 2012) which comes to pass due to the invention of Creation Engines, devices which use nanotechnology to break items apart and reassemble them at a molecular level. Anything can be turned into anything else. Rubbish can be transformed into food, sand into diamonds. This immediately removes scarcity - famine, lack of resources - as an issue for everyone on the planet and would seem to herald a golden age. The owners of the means of production, who are effectively out of a job, resist by trying to regulate the introduction of Creation Engines, resulting in a messy, bloody global civil war. At the end of the war the 'old guard' are defeated and everyone lives in a world of plenty. Needless to say, some of these old guard launch a new assault using weaponised Creation Engine technology...technology which gets out of hand very rapidly.

Dealing with SF hot topics like nanotechnology, the Singularity (not exactly in a robust way, though, as the post-2012 society is still pretty comprehensible to us), life-extension via 'saving' consciousness on AI systems, the conflicts of closed systems versus open ones and ideology versus religion, the game's storyline is surprisingly deep though arguably flawed: the world also being a secularist paradise with billions of people abandoning religion seems a bit far-fetched, though there are hints that the new society has a sinister side as well. All the more remarkable is that this background is there purely to explain the game's use of standard strategy tropes, like being able to build vehicles instantly on the battlefield. The fiction is impressive and well-thought-out, complementing the amazing gameplay very well.

Portal - Science as Fun

Released in 2007, Portal was a small game but a hugely influential one. The game is based around the idea that you can create two linked dimensional portals on certain surfaces, allowing for intelligent ways to solve apparently insurmountable puzzles. Jumping across a vast chasm is possible by creating a portal on the wall behind you and another at the bottom of the chasm: falling into the chasm builds up enough momentum to shoot through the portal, over the top of the chasm and landing safely on the other side.

The portal technology is of course highly speculative, but it's a rare example of a gaming taking its central scientific/technological premise (no matter how ludicrous) and exploring it intelligently. The 'science!' theme, the impressive AI antagonist, the game's remarkable sense of humour and it's bigger, better sequel all help cement the game's reputation as one of the finest first-person action games in existence.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Augmentation and Cyborgs

This prequel to 2000's classic Deus Ex deals with a number of important near-future issues. As well as the standard cyberpunk government/corporation tension, the game explores the theme of augmentation and using technology to enhance human abilities in depth and with intelligence. The notion of how much of our bodies we can replace and remain human is also a key theme: does the corporation 'own' protagonist Adam Jensen because they paid for the augmentations that allow him to live? A rich and involving game (let down a little by silly boss fights).

BioShock Infinite - An Infinity of Possibilities

This recent game is set in an alternate timeline in which a huge flying city called Columbia was built in the early 20th Century thanks to the invention of quantum engines, technology that never existed in our world. As the game progresses, the protagonist and the girl he was sent to save find themselves passing through tears in the fabric of reality into other universes, including some similar to our own and others completely different.

The 'many worlds' theory of quantum reality is a common theme in modern SF, but this is the first time a game successfully explores the same theme with some intelligence and uses it to tie together the disjointed narrative in a manner which makes sense.

Wasteland 2 - Post-Apocalyptic Wildlife

The upcoming Wasteland 2, from some of the same team that gave us the Fallout games, is a post-apocalyptic romp which makes few pretences towards scientific realism in its backstory or how anyone survived the nuclear apocalypse. However, the developers have called upon the services of real scientists to help portray environments and creatures, leading to the creation of the fearful giant hermit crab, which hides within the shells of abandoned and burned-out cars and gives the players a nasty surprise when they wander by.

As we can see, there are a few games around which do make more use of science and real SF ideas than as just a cheesy explanation for insane ultraviolence. Hopefully this is something we will see more of in the future.

See also: Polygon has interviews with the scientists who have consulted and advised on games such as Wasteland 2, BioShock Infinite, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the upcoming Outlast.

Chris Avellone on RPG design, PROJECT ETERNITY and too many great games to count

At the Rezzed gaming conference this weekened, Obsidian developer Chris Avellone did a presentation on CRPG design. You can check it out here.

Avellone has a CV that is interesting. At Black Isle back in the day he was the project lead on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment (probably the greatest Western CRPG of all time) as well as working on Icewind Dale and its sequel. At Obsidian he was the lead designer on Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues and Alpha Protocol. He also worked on Neverwinter Nights II and its expansion Mask of the Betrayer as well as the main game of Fallout: New Vegas. He has also been hired out to inXile to assist on the upcoming Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Avellone is a noted proponent of player choice and including more complex thematic, and philosophical elements than is normally found in games, not to mention more complex characterisation.

Some of those things are discussed in the interview, along with progress on Project: Eternity, some interesting info on how they made Planescape: Torment and Fallout: New Vegas, and on the merits of Kickstarter as a business model. He also namechecks Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss in a discussion of magic systems, though he doesn't mentioned Obsidian's planned Wheel of Time CRPG (which is still on hold until Red Eagle raise the funding for it).

First WASTELAND 2 gameplay video

inXile have released the first gameplay video for their upcoming, Kickstarter-funded, retro-RPG, Wasteland 2.

Wasteland 2 is a stand-alone sequel to the original, released, way back in 1988. The new game features similar turn-based combat and text-based descriptions of events, but also a vastly more advanced graphics engine based on 3D models. It'll be interesting to see how this old-school style of gaming resonates with modern audiences, but there's a lot here that looks promising (particularly the fully-customisable UI). The game is due for release at the end of the year.