14 DAY TRIAL // Wasteland 2 creator Brian Fargo says that it's "almost statistically impossible" for two players to experience the same events in the upcoming game, due to the large amount of player agency involved.
The game sets out to offer gamers the closest equivalent to "free will" they can get in games, where conversations can go either way and the story choices presented during the post-apocalyptic journey always have multiple, branching outcomes.
Wasteland 2 focuses on presenting many small choices that players will be able to explore and experiment with, just to see what happens, such as being able to tell Ranger leader General Vargas that a new party member asked you not to alert him to his presence, at which point the party member is completely removed from the game.
"It's a small moment, but it's a meaningful moment, It's an effect where you think, 'I'm going to try this and see what happens,' and guess what, something really comes out of it. This game has thousands of those little moments. To me… when you do three or four of those in a row, I think that's when you're really immersed," Fargo tells DigitalSpy.
The game piles these small choices on top of the bigger ones that are tied to its narrative, offering a potentially completely different experience to its every player. Killing innocent people will cause General Vargas to denounce you, radically altering the way that the role-playing game develops from then on. From that point on, you can no longer finish the game as a hero, but you can start fighting his forces instead.
The multitude of branching endings isn't all that's at play here, as Fargo also points out that there is an underlying emphasis on what each ending actually means.
"We're really revisiting what it means for a game to end. A lot of games say they have multiple endings, but they all happen at the end. You've done one of those - A, B or C - and that's it. Life doesn't work that way. If I go out and commit a crime right now, my ending and my life is probably going to prison right now. 80 years old is not going to happen, it's going to happen on this spot," Fargo explains.
He details the concept, pointing out that there are several ways that the game could end, and they're not all a summary of your deeds that happens at the very end of all the events, but instead a summary of your life up until that point.
He refers to a moment right at the start of the game, when you can choose do disrespect a fallen fellow Ranger and dig up his remains, at which point General Vargas and the rest of the Rangers shoot you up, and that is one of the endings.
There are similar potential endings waiting 20 hours into the game, 40 hours in, 60 hours in, and so on, with many derivatives along the way, a feature which Fargo describes as "innovative," because it hasn't been present in this form in any other game.
Wasteland 2 is slated for an August 2014 release, for Windows PC, Mac and Linux.