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Didn't Fallout have a pretty shaky development time to begin with? It came close to getting cancelled twice.

18 months might be cutting it a little close but they might be able to pull it off if the team has a clear enough vision from the outset. I guess it probably helps that Jason Anderson already concepted a fair bit of the game.

Yeah. I'm hoping that even if they're approaching 18 months but aren't done, they're not going to throw it out the door in an unfinished state. Anyone would rather have a late game than a broken and unfinished one. Also, if they put out a disaster of a Wasteland 2 it would be the end of the kickstarter thing for Fargo, and he seems pretty keen to keep doing it.

Also, you guys need to keep in mind they've already got over a year's worth of development time put into this pre-Kickstarter. I seriously doubt they'd be fucking about with this much money and peoples' reputations at stake. At least I'd rather believe they're smart adults who know how to plan properly than the alternative...that they bit off more than they could chew and their eyes were bigger than their stomachs.

I think the vast majority of backers are prepared to give them up to a year more. And Fargo will not want to release a broken or sucking game for sure, what would be the point of that. The real problem I am afraid of are kickstarters which run for 18 months, then another 18, and then still no end in sight.

Without an engine?

Vince you're just butthurt that Fargo can actually finish a game in a reasonable time and you can't. Or maybe you're jealous that you don't get all the attention anymore? You have really become the joke of RPGCodex and should stop talking trash all the time.

Ah, silly me. You're right. The creative process (i.e. brainstorming, writing, etc) doesn't take any time at all.

I wish Fargo nothing but the best and I'm very excited about the game. It gives us hope and out of all KS projects, that's the one I'm interested in the most. My ONLY concern is the 18-month development time. It's just not enough and I hope that Fargo isn't planning to stick with it, because if he does, the quality will suffer, to say politely.

I've been following games for a long time and I can't think of a decent RPG (developed from scratch) that was made under 3 years. Games that can be done in 1.5 years or so are games like Kotor 2 - you have the engine, all systems (character, combat, inventory, maps, journal, etc), art assets, etc, but we all know what state Kotor 2 was shipped at.

Yeah. Silly you.

Pretty much.

I'm sure they talked about it for a while, threw some ideas around, especially since they've pitched the game a few times, have a story outline and such, but it won't affect development time. Obviously, we aren't talking about a year of proper work, because it costs money and nobody would invest that much without any guarantees that the game will be funded.

Well, complete conjecture based on not much information...but the interviews Fargo did gave me the impression he and Anderson did a good deal of story-boarding for a good deal of time. So my point is still salient, re: they're not going into this empty-handed and blind.

Do you really think that story-boarding is a big chunk of work that's bound to reduce development time dramatically?

Considering that most games nowadays dont have anything resembling a coherent story we can only assume its extremely time consuming and has to be cut first. Always.

As an artist and musician myself, yes I believe the creative process can be long and time-consuming. I wouldn't imagine it would be insane to make the comparison here but I don't have the first-hand experience with game devlopment, no.

You can stop the patronizing attitude anytime, bro.

Vault Dweller: I would trust BF to have enough experience with similar projects that he may well pull this off (especially given what he's said about iterating and task distribution -- after all, he is going to have quite a number of designers working on individual portions of the game), unless they overstretch and make the game too big, the combat too complex, etc. (which doesn't seem to be the case, note how careful they are to point out that people shouldn't expect anything like the JA2 level of complexity or to make any specific comparisons in terms of size, i.e. they say the world will be "deeper" at a certain amount of funding -- some extra dialogue, quests, maybe a location or two -- but never something like "it is now going to jump from Fallout to Fallout 2 size"). And, by "pull off" I mean that in 18 months he may have a playable alpha/beta ready to give (some of) his backers access to and help test and balance further (which should keep them happy as anyone else doesn't really care much about shifting release dates). In other words, I know you are probably right in that the risk is there (especially since they do not have the engine in place and will probably not be building on top of something they already know), but I want to trust Brian to know what he's doing. If you had to make a game like AoD from scratch, perhaps with a new (but not entirely unfamiliar) engine (and if I recall correctly, you have some experience with this, as you have switched several times during the development process), but had all the experience you have now, complete story/vision, five writers/designers and a budget of $2.5-3 million, do you think it'd be impossible to get to roughly the stage you are at now in 18 months, if you were careful not to overstretch?

I wouldn't trust anyone blindly.. It took Fargo 2 years to make Bard's Tales, Hunted - 18 months. These are realistic, proven development schedules, hence my concern, since I certainly expect more from Wasteland 2.

My honest opinion is that it's impossible and has nothing to do with being careful or having money (which isn't a lot by today's standards). I've noticed that people who have some development experience have raised similar concerns - link.

From what I've seen over the years and from my personal experience, if you want to make a non-action RPG and you're starting from scratch, you're looking at about 3 years (full-time). If you have the engine, systems, and assets (i.e. working on a sequel), you can do it in half the time.

Fallout 2 was created in ~1 year and Torment in ~2 years if I remember. With a dedicated team of experienced members, modern PCs, a modern game engine and no need for super graphics, 18 months doesn't sound too bad to me. Especially since it seems that they have done some work already.

Fallout 2 was a straight sequel - same engine, same systems, same assets. Torment was an Infinity Engine DnD game - same engine, same systems.

Edit: re: modern PC? You think that it took them longer to make games 5-10 years ago because their computers were too slow?

Fair enough, you certainly have more experience than I do. I still think that a solid public beta in 18 months and a full release in under 2.5 years is optimistic, but not impossible (and that scope does play a role, i.e. it's possible to deliver a game of around Fallout size and complexity in that time frame, but not an Arcanum, lest it have even worse issues than the actual Troika's product). We'll see how it works out.

How are they going to fund development for 2,5 years if they're budgeting for an 18 month project though? Once the kickstarter money is spent there won't be any more serious income until the game goes on sale, and while Fargo himself may be willing to work without a salary, I suspect most of his team have bills to pay, and are unable to work for a year without getting paid.

Both of you come from the independent scene, though.

I gotta say, videogame development's constantly changing, and it doesn't seem right to me to give an absolute 3-year scope for a full-sized RPG without voice acting, cutscenes or advanced graphics when we don't really have any test case for this that's still relevant. Other than long investment in graphical and presentation polish, the main thing seems to be iteration of the RPG systems, character system, etc, but for that they're going to use a lot of the basis of what Wasteland did, and add Obsidian's tools.

So, I dunno. But your conclusion that it's impossible to do an RPG like this within this timescope seems to be based on too little information, and too many assumptions.

They wanted $900,000 for an 18-month development period and got 3x that. As long as Fargo isn't a complete moron, and he's been in this business for 30 years so I doubt it, I don't see the problem.

That is venturing a bit too far into the realm of the hypothetical, as my point was basically "they probably know what they're doing", but: a combination of foresight/contingency planning (even if you discount VD's assumption that they might be counting on a longer development period than they let on, they are hardly planning for the best case scenario only), and further pre-orders (both ongoing and based on the playable beta release), to name just the most obvious options.