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Words From The Wasteland: InXile CEO Brian Fargo Talks Tides and Torments

This article is more than 10 years old.

Brian Fargo has a decent claim to be winning at Kickstarter. After all, his company, inXile Entertainment, set the record for the largest sum requested with the appeal to fund Wasteland 2, and is now in the final throes of a second multi-million dollar funding run.

Asking originally for $900,000, with Fargo promising to throw in $100,000 of his own money, the Wasteland 2 appeal closed a hair short of $3 million. Now, inXile is repeating the trick with Torment: Tides of Numenera, which enters its home strait pushing towards $3.5 million, having stolen the OUYA gaming console's laurel for the fastest race to a million dollars in funding.

Fargo's first games company, Interplay, is best known for creating the Fallout games, and publishing Planescape: Torment, an RPG which still tops many gamers' "best ever" lists. Fargo left Interplay after a public offering made possible a progressive buyout by the French Company Titus Interactive. The name of Fargo's current company comes from the period after leaving Interplay, when, without a corporate home, he made up a set of business cards jokingly declaring himself "Leader in exile". The name stuck.

You can't keep a good genre down, however, and InXile and Obsidian Entertainment, formed from the Black Isle Studios team which built Fallout, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment, are leading the charge to use Kickstarter's crowdfunding model to bring the isometric RPG back to prominence.

Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual sequel (yes, another one) to Planescape: Torment, is bringing members of that "dream team" - including Black Isle alumni Chris Avellone and Brian Mitsoda (both making their own, Kickstarter-funded RPGs with their own studios) - together again. Lightning is famously reluctant to strike twice, but Kickstarter seems intent on at least kitting Fargo and his contemporaries out with a lot of copper wire and a really big kite.

I talked to Fargo as his campaign entered its final week. We began by going back to where it all started.

I'd like to start by going back in time to Interplay  Entertainment, the company you founded in 1983. Interplay was sold to Titus, and after you left I guess from that point, from your perspective, that was the last you expected to see of the classic Interplay franchises? 

I guess that’s a fairly true statement., I mean, yes and no. The first thing I did with this company was to relaunch a parody RPG, which was The Bard’s Tale [an action-adventure title published by inXile in 2004, winkingly unrelated to the successful 1980s Interplay franchise of the same name).

So, it wasn't completely out of my mind when I left [Interplay], but certainly there is no way I would have predicted returning with this many, or done with a... classical flair. 

Which is an interesting question – we are talking about games that came out ten or more years ago. What is the confluence of circumstances bringing them back? Kickstarter, of course, was presumably a huge motivator...

I was out trying to pitch Wasteland to publishers, and it went nowhere. I didn't even get to the part of the conversation where they asked me how much it would cost. There just couldn't have been less interest.

Quite ironically, I was the keynote speaker for GDC Shanghai at the end of 2011, just before we launched our Kickstarter [for Wasteland 2] and before I had even really known what Kickstarter could do. It was all about the death of the single-player narrative RPG – talking about Bard’s Tale and Wasteland and some of these titles – because no publisher was interested. No investor was going to give me money. So I saw no way to get them made. 

Then along came Kickstarter - and the rest is history!

The investors were saying that they didn’t see a market large enough for these products to work?

Well, that was the assumption. I mean, they never really give you good reasons why. And the other part was that the market was very much focused on mobile games, and social games, and how to monetize those, so all the investor money was 100% looking at “what’s your business model?”. They’re not even interested in your title, so that doesn’t fit.

For the publishers, it’s also a matter of scale. And in some ways, you can't blame them. I mean, what did I read, that Tomb Raider sold 3 million copies in two weeks, and that wasn’t considered a success?

So, look at us – selling 60,000 units on Kickstarter. I’ll just make up a number and say we sell another 100,000 or 200,000 on digital. It could be higher, but let’s just pick a number. That’s not very successful for these guys.

But that’s the kind of number you would postulate as a success? As you say, you already have 60,000 sales in the bag – they’ve effectively preordered by backing the Kickstarter appeal at a level which gets them a copy of the game. So, if you sell another 200,000 copies of Wasteland 2 or Torment: Tribes of Numenera – these would be good numbers for you?

Very much so! For us to sell 200,000 pieces would mean that we can carry on making games like this for five years. If it’s more, maybe that’s 10 years. The way I look at it, I get to make another RPG.

And out of interest – it would obviously have been a significant step, but did you ever consider trying to adapt your model and your studio to produce what passes for a AAA role-playing game – something like a BioShock, say?

I looked at a lot of different things, but I felt that to be successful you have to look for where there is a hole in the market, an opportunity.

There was clearly a certain style of game where there was a big fanbase – they wanted it. I would get requests all the time for it.

And it’s not like I'm trying to popularize music from the 40s, where the sound has moved on.

These games hit very strongly on cause and effect. When you go to the higher budget games, which are a different kind of experience, and you are doing a lot of audio, a lot of cinematics, they tend to limit the cause and effect you can do. So, we hang our hat on the reactivity of these products. That’s a timeless concept. In fact, what makes many great games great is the sense of cause and effect. So I thought we were scratching the right itch, there.

So, let’s talk about Torment: Tides of Numenera. As I understand, you acquirted the rights to Torment a little while ago but not the rights to use the Planescape world, which was of course owned by Wizards of the Coast as a part of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s interesting to me that you could recover half the IP like that… when you strip it of its setting, what is it about the Torment IP that defines it? When you got Torment, what did you think you could do with that, without the familiar world?

That’s a very good question. If you look at our Torment Kickstarter, you see the style of game that it is, and that it’s different. It doesn’t look like Wasteland, it doesn’t look like Project Eternity, or Baldur’s Gate. It has a much higher literary vibe – using the words as weapons, almost.

By which I mean that you can play a considerable part of the game without combat. That’s harder to do in a traditional role-playing game. The sheer amount of words is another hallmark too. And the other part is the philosophical aspects – the underpinnings. The questions it creates. It’s much more inwardly focused on the human condition.

The first game was “what can change the nature of a man?” This one is “what does one life matter?”. You’re not trying to save the world – it’s about looking inwards. You’re a part of a much larger thing going on. So it just has a very different feel from a traditional role-laying game of gearing up and getting gold and killing dragons.

So, even if these two don’t have anything to do with each other from a world perspective, if you look at the two you can see where there is this commonality in what we’re trying to do.

 

And Numenera, the role-playing game which provides the world, was itself a recently Kickstarted project. It’s an IP without any history. What was the process that decided you on settling on that world? What made it a good conceptual fit?

I’d say one thing to keep in mind is that when we chose the Planescape setting to do Torment at Interplay, it wasn’t like that was a world many people were familiar with. Yes it was from TSR [the then-owners of Dungeons and Dragons], but it wasn’t Forgotten Realms. We didn’t have a lot of people going “Well, that was a slam-dunk!”

It was the weirdness of the world, and the idea of doing an RPG, but doing something really unusual. There was no way you would play that game and feel “been there, done that”. So for this one - same kind of thing.

So, in that sense the fact that we are launching into a new world makes perfect sense.

The Bloom, showing the particle effects achieved using the Unity engine

As for how we got to Numenera, I give Colin McComb credit for that, for bringing up the fact that Monte Cook – one of the creators of Planescape, along with Colin – had a new world.

It took me one second to decide that that was a good idea. So, it seems like the stars really lined up – that we could bring the band back together and that he [Monte Cook]  had a world set up that would fit well with what we were trying to do.

The Kickstarter launch is in its last few days, and it's another successful one - following on from another very successful Kickstarter, for Wasteland 2. One lesson that you can draw from that is that there is a demand in the market, but obviously there is more to it than that. What lessons did you take from Wasteland 2’s success? Did you feel under pressure to replicate that with Torment?

Well…. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect going in. There were a lot of questions. The obvious one was “you’re going to do two at the same time?”. Then “you’re going to do it without the Planescape license?” “Are you going to do it with Chris Avellone?" And "by the way, have you heard of Kickstarter fatigue?”

(Laughs)

So, the night before launch I wasn’t completely clear as to what was going to happen.

The reason why we did it is that when I used to do the role-playing games at Interplay, we’d always have staggered development. You’re going to get a better product if you have the pre-production for the next game for the team to start on right when they’re done. That way we can spend the time while everyone [sc. on the production team] is working on Wasteland, they’ll [sc. the pre-production team on Torment:Tides of Numenera] be questioning every word of the design for Torment, and every nuance and every piece of reactivity, and making pass after pass, honing it in so that when the team from Wasteland gets done, they’ll be ready to go. That certainly works better than if you finish Wasteland, and then say “now what will we do?”.

So, that’s why it made sense to do it this way. I understood the question, but because that was my system, I had to state my business case, state my creative case and then ask if it made sense to people. And clearly it made sense to them and it resonated.

On things that we learned from Wasteland – there were things like we never knew that there would be a countdown clock, so we looked at timing the ending right. We looked at Wasteland, but also everything that came after us – so, one thing we noticed is that people expect a lot more detail, now, than they did even a year ago. You’ll see that Torment has a lot more detail.

And part of the reason why it’s also had a great success is that I think the presentation of our product is very solid. But it’s also filling a niche. You don’t read our campaign and think “there’s a million of them just like that”. There are a lot of mobile games that have tried to do Kickstarters, and I think not that many successful ones, and the ones which are successful tend to have low targets, just because there are so many mobile games, on every subject known to man. So, try to articulate how this is different.

We worked pretty closely with the fans, too. Even before we launched Torment we solicited feedback  - what kind of stretch goals do you like? What do you like in your tiers? What don’t you like?

So, I think Wasteland further convinced me of the power of transparency in communication. We really tried to start that process even earlier, to make sure we were in sync. Because people will tell you the truth. You might not want to listen to ‘em, but they will.

One of the funny things about Kickstarter funding – peculiar and ha-ha – is that if you were to go to a publisher with this idea, you would give them a number - the amount of money you thought you needed to be able to make it. And then they would give you another number – a smaller number – which is how much they would want you to make it for.

 Kickstarter is almost the opposite. You set a number, and if the number you get is less than that, the project is cancelled. But you may end up – as you did – with more money than you asked for. What’s the strategy of asking? Some suggest asking for less money than you think you need, and then relying on the achievability of that figure to push donations past it. 

When you ask for a million, or $900,000, and receive 3 or 4 million, how does that affect your balance? Does the extra funding mean you are not seeking funding elsewhere? Does it means you can deliver more quickly? What’s the difference it makes?

I think that to ask for less money and hope for more isn’t the right thing to do. It’s sort of dishonest.

When we went out with Wasteland, Tim [Schafer, of Double Fine] had asked for $400,000 [for Double Fine Adventure, now titled Broken Age], and was in the millions by the time we launched. And people said “you cant ask for more than $400,000, or you’ll look greedy”.

But I couldn't do the game for less than a million. There was no way I could do even a semblance of it for $400,000. So, we basically asked for a million – I said I’d kick in a hundred thousand if it reached $900,000. That was the minimum for us to be able to do something. So, that’s how we started with the number. There's a product you’ll have to make if you barely make the numbers, and then there’s the dare-to-dream numbers, that we’d like to have but can’t really count on. 

So, we like to have those in mind. But if I see a Kickstarter which is asking for a hundred thousand, but has stretch goals on day one for a million and a half, I’m thinking “they really need a lot more than that”. That’s my natural inclination. So, we'll cover some small stretch goals, but really we try to push that out of our heads because we have got to live with the number that comes in.

Now, we have a slight advantage because we do have a back catalog. Our Bard’s Tale keeps selling, and Choplifter HD and Line Rider. So, we could always chip in some extra money to reach our goals if we needed to.

But if you came in under the result, you couldn’t kick in yourself..

You’re not allowed to do that, no. But also, if you don’t come in over the number, the game probably shouldn’t be made.

 It’s a market viability question?

Exactly. So, if we came in short I wouldn’t kick it over. If it came in a dollar short, that’s a different question. But generally, it means that people have voted with their wallets – they didn't like the concept, or we didn’t do a good job of explaining it. One way or another, it just didn’t make sense.

So, the other part is what happens when you overfund. And it’s important to remember that we don’t make a profit from Kickstarter. If we’re going to make money, it’s going to be from the sales. Every dime we raise and then some we put into the product.

So, we have a rough idea in our minds of what happens if it doubles or triples. I’m sure there’s some number out there where we start to question how we would spend it, but we’re not at those kinds of numbers. 2 million,  3 million or 4 million dollars are great, but we know that Blizzard spends a million and a half dollars a minute just on their opening cartoons!

So, I think a small indie might look at 2 million dollars might look at that and think “wow, what a huge budget”. The big guys, all my friends look at it and go “Brian, I don’t know how you do it!”

(Laughs)

So, it’s a very different outlook on what the numbers are.

 And when you look at that extra money, that goes into adding features, adding staff, and investment in marketing?”

I would agree with everything except that currently – and this is where my thinking is now, although there’s no guarantee it’s not going to change – we’re not earmarking any money for marketing.

I think we have the greatest sales force on the planet, which is 60,000 pumped-up gamers. I don’t think there’ll be any lack of awareness when this game ships.

Our industry is very much word of mouth. Now, if I want to get into retail, you can’t get there unless you spend a lot of marketing monies. I’d argue that many publishers spend money that they didn’t really want to, but had to. We don’t have those kind of pressures when we put it into the digital distribution channels. So, we think it’s going to be PR and word of mouth based on the quality of the product.

So the money involved on putting a boxed product on the shelves wouldn’t be viable…

I just think we’re better off with word of mouth and digital downloads.  I was talking to several publishers recently about their strategies for retail, and I was surprised at how many of them said they’d be out of it 100% by the end of this year.

 So, Gamersgate, GOG, Steam, things of that nature will be approaching?

We’ve had contact with people like that who are very interested in putting the product into retail, and obviously we’d talk about that, but I wouldn’t be doing that, and it wouldn’t be like they’d be publishing us or telling us what to do.

They’d be third-party distributors, effectively?

Effectively.

Mentioning Chris Avellone, and Obsidian, who have continued to develop the RPG format through technology evolutions to games like Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol, but are now going back to the isometric, 2.5D RPG with Project Eternity. You’re planning to bring him on board officially if – or when – you reach $3.5 million. You and Obsidian are both working with Unity. When you look at the dedicated engines [like Infinity or the Fallout Engine] you used back in the days of Planescape: Torment, and compare that with using a 3D engine which is not designed for this kind of approach, what are the technical differentiations? 

That’s a good question – it’s a big question. First, working with Obsidian has been great. We’re competitors, but in the same way we compete with Chris Roberts [of Wing Commander fame], and Harebrained Schemes [producers of Shadowrun Returns] – we all talk about every facet. I’ve given code to Harebrained to help them with their website. There’s this general philosophy of 1+1 = 3. They promoted us in their updates, we'll promote them in ours. So, I think it’s worked out great that we all benefit, and we don't keep score.

 You were already knowledge-sharing with Obsidian before the stretch target was announced? 

Exactly.

Then, on the use of technology:  I made a comment last week that I look at many of the indie games of today, which were made with very small crews,  and their product looks as good as most of the AAA  titles from just 10 years ago.  And so we are able to do more in three to five months than we could have done in a year and a half back then.

So, we’re just able to get things up  on-screen much faster and iterate faster than ever before. We also have the ability to access assets and technology much faster than before. That is what drew me to Unity.   When we said we were going to use Unity for Wasteland, that was not a popular decision. It’s everywhere now, but at the time the perception was that it was for small, mobile games. People would want to know how its shaders worked. But I was more focused on the Unity Store, and the ability to not have to reinvent the wheel.

If we want a prop for a gas station, I don’t want to be sitting around drawing the thousandth rock or tree, or the tenth gas station of my career! These things already exist, and we can modify them. If we need a particle effect, or if we need a tool for painting, for these things on which we could have spent months and months and tens of thousands of dollars,  we might spend 500 bucks.  We get access to a huge code and art base immediately, and stuff that’s streamlined  already for the system. So we are able to get things up really really quick. And that’s the biggest difference - that ability to do that. With Wasteland, we are a year in, and it would have taken at least two years to get this far if we had started from scratch.

Nothing replaces iteration. Nothing. There’s no amount of pre-planning in the world that will make up for iteration time. It’s all about getting the game  in and working, so you can start iterating and making it better. The faster you get there, the better the game.

We’ve done development with publishers where we get the whole product put together, we finally really get it working so we can feel it, and they want to ship it in 30 days. That’s a disaster of a formula. That’s why Valve and Blizzard  consistently do so well with their titles. It’s because they get it put together, and then they have people playing it internally and externally, they gather feedback and they tweak and they modify. That is a critical step, and these tools allow us to get there quickly. 

We have our own version of that. Valve can build a multiplayer game and put it in beta for a year. We’re a storytelling game – that’s a little bit different. However, we will put it out. We'll have a small beta and get feedback, then roll it out to the people who paid to get the beta, and we’ll be tweaking and tuning and tweaking and tuning. We will have that process.

And at the end of that process, the plan for Wasteland 2 is later this year, and Torment is late 2014? We’re starting to see the Kickstarter projects from this first wave of gaming, like Tim Shafer’s Broken Age, moving towards their delivery dates…

That’s right. The good news is  that if you look at Schafer’s  project, it seems to be coming along. Shadowrun seems to be coming along, and people seem to be happy with it. People certainly liked the Wasteland demo that we did. I know Obsidian are going to have an update soon, and they’re looking good. So the good news is that all of these big projects seem to be tracking fairly well.

Could they be late a month or two? Sure. But they’re not going sideways.

And your ideal scenario is that when the concept artists and scenario builders have finished their work on Tides of Numenera and have handed it over to be programmed, they can be put onto the next project?

That would be the model we’d like. That being said, I don't think people want to hear me talking about what’s next. What they want to hear is how we’re going to make sure these games happen. So, we’re just focused on making sure we don't disappoint.

 

The Kickstarter appeal for Torment: Tides of Numenera closes on Friday. The game is scheduled for an early 2015 release.

Corrections: The initial text referred to Unity as "open source" - this was an editorial gloss of a slightly garbled transcript. Unity is a proprietary engine, with scripting based on the open-source Mono project. This has been corrected, with thanks to sharp-eyed readers.)