A couple of days ago, we informed you about inXile’s plans to use the Unity Engine on their upcoming sequel to the classic ‘Wasteland’ game. A lot of PC gamers got upset with that decision and that’s why inXile decided to post a new update at their Kickstarter page, in which they explain why they’ve chosen the Unity Engine.
According to inXile’s Director of Technology, the company wants to keep the main focus – of the development – on story and character, retaining the party-based and turn-based mechanics. The top down POV would remain as well but they would go with a full 3D render to bring it into the modern graphics era.
The team was interested in various game engines (among those was Crytek’s CryEngine 3) and concentrated on five major features in order to decide which one was appropriate for their game. Those features were : ease of use by artists and designers, Windows/Mac/Linux support, support and expertise available from vendor and in community, adaptability for player modding, and 3D rendering, pathing, AI, physics, character animation tools.
According to Alvarado – and given the top down POV and camera height required to show a party of characters and enemies in Wasteland 2 – it would be overkill to spend too much of their resources on detailed character models and all the cutting-edge rendering and animation techniques associated with that level of detail.
As a result of that, Unity hit the sweet spot for them defined by the specific requirements of the Wasteland 2 game design, deployment plan, and the unique circumstances of the development effort which includes community involvement on an ongoing basis.
It will be interesting to see how Wasteland 2 will look visually and whether or not artists will be able to overcome Unity’s limitations.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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