Kickstart classic RPG - Wasteland 2!

LokiS said:
To be honest, I can personally understand peoples frustration when it comes to Obsidian simply from experiences.

Kotor 2: Buggy, mass of content cut from game
Neverwinter 2: Buggy, **** poor performance issues at launch
Alpha Protocol: Decent story & Dialog etc, **** poor ai and game play mechanics
Fallout Vegas: Buggy as hell at launch, granted patched up now.
Dungeon Siege 3: Complete butchery of the franchise

I borderline hate Obsidian, they never finish their work and often leave it a buggy mess, I wouldn't want them to touch this project even if some of them had a hand in the games past.
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Ok, let's address this fun post, shall we?

Kotor 2: LucasArts gave them 11! months to develop the whole game and rushed it to christmas market before it was finished. And despite rushed ending, it is STILL A BETTER GAME than KOTOR 1. Story is just fantastic and Kreia is one of the most fascinating characters ever in a game.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Buggy, yes. However it was patched profoundly and later expansion Mask of the Betrayer is one of the best RPGs of the last 10 years.

Alpha Protocol: Was delayed by almost a whole year, by Sega, which did not pay for that year of development..so Obsidian could not work on the game eventhough it was sitting on a shelf for a year. Mechanics are good, story and choices and consequences are great. One thing that was not great were animations, granted.

Fallout New Vegas: It was developed in 16 months. QA was handled by Bethesda, which again rushed it to the market before it was ready. However Obsidian quickly patched it to perfection. I played it on release, finished it (before any patches) and encountered few insignificant bugs.And again, story-wise and design wise it far surpasses Fallout 3 in quality.

Dungeon Siege 3 - I played demo and disliked that, but then again I found DS1 and 2 to be very mediocre as well.

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Bottom line. Publishers suck. Chris Avellone, who wrote Planescape Torment/KOTOR/NV is brilliant writer and I cannot wait what he will write and design for Wasteland 2.
 
I never really debated the games not being good (minus DS3), just that they're very buggy on release and in most cases they leave it in that state post launch. To me it doesn't matter if they constantly have time restraints on development, if they're gonna be buggy as hell on release I just avoid it until I've seen otherwise or patches are out. I said hate, but more of a dislike of Obsidian if I was being more correct.

Personally I much preferred kotor 1 though, anyway I'm done, was just posting my opinion, don't wanna derail from Wasteland 2. :p
 
Paul_cz said:
Bottom line. Publishers suck. Chris Avellone, who wrote Planescape Torment/KOTOR/NV is brilliant writer and I cannot wait what he will write and design for Wasteland 2.
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Let's not forget Obsidian's other staff. John Gonzalez, Travis Stout, Josh Sawyer, George Ziets, Eric Fenstermaker etc etc had a lot of writing input into their more recent projects.

Speaking of Chris Avellone, did anyone who's played Fallout 1 find a character with the same name in The Hub?
 
Looks like they've hit the Obsidian threshold of $2.1m

It'll be interesting to see how both this and the DFA play out, it won't be so interesting to see every Tom, Dick and Harriet jump on the Kickstarter Bandwagon.
 
LokiS said:
I never really debated the games not being good (minus DS3), just that they're very buggy on release and in most cases they leave it in that state post launch. To me it doesn't matter if they constantly have time restraints on development, if they're gonna be buggy as hell on release I just avoid it until I've seen otherwise or patches are out. I said hate, but more of a dislike of Obsidian if I was being more correct.

Personally I much preferred kotor 1 though, anyway I'm done, was just posting my opinion, don't wanna derail from Wasteland 2. :p
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Fair enough, but keep in mind that it is publishers who handle QA (bug squishing) and setting deadlines. If you give studio too little time and mismanage QA, then the game will have bugs, and it does not matter how good the developer can be. Blame publishers for that. It is a huge shame that Obsidian always got sh_at on by publishers though. They do not deserve that, with the quality of their games.

sr4470 said:
Let's not forget Obsidian's other staff. John Gonzalez, Travis Stout, Josh Sawyer, George Ziets, Eric Fenstermaker etc etc had a lot of writing input into their more recent projects.

Speaking of Chris Avellone, did anyone who's played Fallout 1 find a character with the same name in The Hub?
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Yeah there are lot of good writers and designers at Obsidian. I am reading JE Sawyer's formspring so I know about them too. I just have a soft spot for Avellone specifically :-)

And yeah I met him in Fallout, Boneyard :-)
 
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Paul_cz said:
Fair enough, but keep in mind that it is publishers who handle QA (bug squishing) and setting deadlines. If you give studio too little time and mismanage QA, then the game will have bugs, and it does not matter how good the developer can be. Blame publishers for that. It is a huge shame that Obsidian always got sh_at on by publishers though. They do not deserve that, with the quality of their games.
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Obsidian needs a few dedicated staff for the business side of things, because creative people trying to do it hasn't worked out thus far. Patching the game afterwards isn't going help their metacritic score or whatever.

Paul_cz said:
Yeah there are lot of good writers and designers at Obsidian. I am reading JE Sawyer's formspring so I know about them too. I just have a soft spot for Avellone specifically :-)
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To be fair characters like Kreia (a Star Wars version of Ravel) and Atris (reference to Trias) were entirely his work. I just don't think it's reasonable to give him the credit for the whole team's effort. Especially in New Vegas, where Gonzalez and Sawyer did a lot of the work. Avellone's main contribution was Dead Money.

Paul_cz said:
And yeah I met him in Fallout, Boneyard :-)
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RPGCodex paid $10k for a forum shrine in Wasteland 2, so we can expect a few Fallout 2-esque items and locations. ;)
 
inXile entertainment said:
As many of you have noticed, we are over the $2.1 Million mark when you add in our PayPal money being raised on our web site.

It is official, Chris Avellone will be joining our design team and will be doing some writing and design for the Project. Anyone who has ever played Planescape: Torment or Fallout 2 know how huge that is!!!!!
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http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/comments
 
After seeing the Obsidian news, I doubled my pledge for the Collector's Edition :D ..It better not suck! :p
 
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It'll be Chris and maybe a couple of helpers, there's no way Brian can afford to pay all ~100 staff of Obsidian their wages on that budget (Feargus Urquhart said that OE's total expenses as an organisation are circa $1 million a month).

That aside, I don't think Fargo can afford to mess up, his reputation is worth a lot more than a couple of million bucks. He did spend decades building up his resume at Interplay and in the videogame industry in general, after all. This isn't Activision-Blizzard's CEO we're talking about.
 
Oops :eek: So likely just a handful of people from Obsidian then. Oh, well, that's still a boost, tho I might be singing a different tune when I play the beta :o. But like you said, there's a lot riding on this, so we'll just have to wait and see!
 
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