Wasteland 2

Platform(s): Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
Genre: RPG/Strategy
Developer: InXile
Release Date: Sept. 19, 2014

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'Wasteland 2' Upgrading To Unity 5 Engine

by Rainier on Feb. 27, 2015 @ 12:25 p.m. PST

Wasteland 2 is a turn based top down role-playing game, sequel to what many considered the godfather of post apocalyptic RPGs.

Wasteland was set in a dangerous, post-apocalyptic world in the American Southwest. Over the course of adventures rangers would receive promotions, acquire new skills and equipment, then face new challenges with outcomes that changed depending on the strategy used to defeat them. The game featured a strong storyline which required painful decisions by players; and a storyline that allowed for maximum re-playability. Wasteland 2, with your participation and insights, will recapture all that and provide more.  It'll finally be the game worthy to be a Wasteland sequel, as challenging and rewarding as the original, with all added capacity and dazzle of games today.

We recently released the sixth major patch for Wasteland 2, which added Steam achievements for Mac and Linux, cleaned up some issues that were sitting on our lists, and included another pass on text and localization to make sure even the finest details are polished as best they can be.

Part of the newfound freedom we’ve gained from being an exclusively crowdfunded company is that it allows us to offer a high level of post-release support. While this is normal practice for an active multiplayer game, we believe that the ongoing improvements to the single player experience in Wasteland 2 are worth the time and money. The game truly continues to be a passion project for the team here at inXile.

And we’re not done yet…

If you've been keeping a close eye on things, you might have heard tell that we're looking at doing some more balancing and improvements of Wasteland 2 in the future. We have expanded our original plan and decided that this is going to be a part of something much larger for all our fans.

In pursuit of this goal, one task we're working on right now is migrating the Wasteland 2 codebase from the Unity 4.5 engine to Unity 5, which will enable some new possibilities for us. A major benefit of moving to Unity 5 is that 5 will include many of the tools from Unity 4.x Pro. We relied on many of these tools during our development (like creating and building navigation meshes), and they will be available to modders without having to pay thousands of dollars for a Pro Unity license. There is no doubt that this migration will allow us to release better tools for modding to our community in the future.

So what’s the “something bigger” that I teased earlier? Let’s just say that the Orange County lifestyle might be getting to us as the game will be receiving a facelift. Unity 5 offers physically based shading, which is already starting to look amazing in the scenes we’ve touched up.

As well as visual improvements, we have quite a few quirky tricks up our sleeves. The character system is getting perked up and will include some new elements to modify gameplay. Of course, more details will be released in the future so stay tuned!

The original Wasteland, released in 1988, has been widely held as one of the top RPGs of all time, and inXile has stated that Wasteland 2 will stay true to its roots. The player will be forced into moral dilemmas and will need to deal with the consequence of their actions throughout the game. Not all decisions are a net positive but it’s up to the player to decide which course they take.


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