Being part of a larger umbrella of first party studios at Microsoft has to be hugely beneficial to every single developer that now falls under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. We often see that with developers at Sony or Nintendo, or even third party publishers in the industry, where a constant stream of sharing of ideas, solutions, and talents leads to significantly better games.
For inXile Entertainment, the fruits of that acquisition are also quite apparent. They’ve talked about how Microsoft’s acquisition helped them with Wasteland 3 with more time and resources for development- but it turns out it helped them in other ways as well. They’re not the only RPG developer at Microsoft, with Obsidian Entertainment having a very similar field of speciality and track record, and as it turns out, they ended up borrowing some stuff from them for their upcoming game.
Speaking with GamingBolt, Brian Fargo – studio head of inXile Entertainmet – confirmed that Wasteland 3 borrows the dialogue tool that Obsidian Entertainment used in last year’s The Outer Worlds, which makes for “a much deeper and interwoven story than we’d been able to do in the past.”
When we asked him about whether players can expect Wasteland 3 to be just as reactive to player choices as past inXile games, if not more, Fargo said, “Absolutely. Aside from combat, the deep RPG decisions and narrative choices are a hallmark for the series, so we’ve spent a lot of time on them.”
“Our close relationship with the guys at Obsidian mean that we have access to their dialogue tools that they used for The Outer Worlds, and we’re using that to create a much deeper and interwoven story than we’d been able to do in the past,” he continued. “We also have a team of writers on this project, where for Wasteland 2 it was essentially just one guy—Wasteland 3 is a far deeper game in the way it pays off player choice.”
That inXile are aiming to deliver a much more reactive and complex narrative with Wasteland 3 than ever before is, to say the least, quite exciting, and falls in line with everything they’ve said about the game in the past. For instance, they’ve also confirmed that the game is going to have at least 10 different endings.
Wasteland 3 is due out for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC on May 19. Our full interview with Fargo will be going live soon, so stay tuned.
