"I have been wanting to make a sequel to Wasteland for nearly 20 years," says Fargo

Brian Fargo, co-creator of Wasteland, has said he's wanted to make a sequel to the franchise for "20 years" and before he even started contemplating a Kickstarter project, "quite a bit of" story and character design were already waiting to be revisited.

Fargo also said that RPGs tend to be harder to create while being on a tight budget, and it isn't a "real RPG if it doesn't have deep cause and effect and true re-playability." However, with Wasteland, the team would have more of an advantage due to it being a top down game, which in the end would "tremendously" save the developer money on "the art creation in turn allowing [the team] to script out numerous outcomes."

"I have been wanting to make a sequel to Wasteland for nearly 20 years so it seems that it is long overdue and an overnight possibility all at once," InXile CEO Brain Fargo told No Mutants Allowed.

"We were a small developer when we made the Bard's Tale series and Wasteland but despite their success we just were not making very much money. I had a vision of hiring talented people in their respective areas to work as a team rather than rely on the talents of just a few people. We became a publisher and EA kept those rights so I assembled a team to create Fallout. Fallout had so many ties to Wasteland and did a beautiful job of setting the mood and keeping the tactics interesting.

"The whole industry was quite surprised to see Double Fine raise such a substantial amount of money for an Indie project and I'm sure every developer in the world started to think about it. Before I could even speak to my guys, I started to have fans pinging me on doing another Wasteland. I dared to get a little excited and think this game might fit the build for a Kickstarter type project.

"We had already put quite a bit of effort into the story and character design when Jason Anderson was on board so I wasn't starting from ground zero."

Fargo also said that while Jason Anderson was at InXile, he was helping create a new Wasteland and pitch it to publishers. Unfortunatley, the duo found there was "little interest".

"Publishers just had no interest in a party based RPG and they felt like they would need to go up against the production costs of Bioware which are in the tens of millions of dollars," he said. "It was frustrating for both of us as we had fans on one side pinging us constantly for a new Wasteland but we just had no way to finance it."

He goes on to say that the design and story material Anderson spent a year creating will be fully used. There also won't be any continuity issues with a new Wasteland as " people who had a great time with [the original] Wasteland will step quite comfortably into the new world and feel at home."

It's a rather good read, and you can glean more information on what Fargo and the rest of inXile are up to through the link.

The Kickstarter fund for the project is expected to go live sometime next month.