Wasteland 2 delayed, beta now planned for October

InXile Entertainment plans to begin beta testing Wasteland 2, its Kickstarter-funded role-playing game, in October, the month in which the developer originally estimated the final game's release, studio head Brian Fargo revealed in an update posted today on the game's Kickstarter blog.

He expects a "feature complete" version of the game that includes "all basic game functionality" to be ready in the next month, which is behind schedule.

"This feature complete playable is about 6 weeks behind where I had wanted it to be but I can't be too surprised considering the increased scope," he wrote. "We have been able to accomplish so much in so little time by our experience, fantastic team and tools."

Wasteland 2's crowdfunding campaign wrapped up in April 2012 with $2,933,252 of its original $900,000 goal. The financial success allowed InXile to create a larger game than was planned when it set the Oct. 2013 release date, Fargo explained, and making a larger game takes more time.

"There is an inherent struggle with the original date hovering despite our greatly increased budget and design."

"One of the unique aspects to our crowdfunding campaign is that we greatly overfunded which is wonderful in allowing us to create a larger experience, one that is in fact quite epic in size," he wrote. "It could well be the largest RPG I have worked on to date. Of course there is an inherent struggle with the original date hovering despite our greatly increased budget and design."

Fargo said that the studio "learned from this lesson" during the Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter and adjusted the "end date as the monies increased and the stretch goals were met."

Early this month, Double Fine Productions head Tim Schafer announced that the developer would launch the first half of its Kickstarter-funded adventure game, Broken Age, through Steam Early Access to raise additional funds. That will allow the developer to "sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development."

The following day, Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail provided commentary and context in a blog post. In it, he outlined the challenges developers face when "scoping" the initial development costs and, as a project grows, dealing with the challenge "overscoping."