Jeremy Kopman joined InXile Entertainment during what I consider the most exciting time in its history — the crowdfunding chapter. He signed on shortly after the Kickstarter campaign for Wasteland 2, working on another game that the indie RPG publisher would ask its players to help fund — Torment: Tides of Numenera.
He’s now working on the series that showed InXile (and a host of indie developers) that crowdfunding could indeed be a workable path. He’s the lead level designer for Wasteland 3, the postapocalyptic RPG that InXile is releasing in early 2020 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
And just as he joined at the beginning of a new era for InXile, he’s helping finish it. Wasteland 3 will be the studio’s final game from before 2018’s Microsoft acquisition. Deep Silver is still publishing it. But Wasteland 3 is also the first to benefit from the increased support from one of the biggest game companies in the world.
I spoke with Kopman a couple of weeks ago when he brought a demo of Wasteland 3 to San Francisco. This is an edited transcript of our chat before the demo.
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Small studio, big stories
GamesBeat: How long have you been at inXile?
Jeremy Kopman: I started right after the Wasteland 2 crowdfunding campaign. I’ve been here for six and a half, almost seven year.
GamesBeat: What do you like about working there?
Kopman: The freedom that each–even when I was just starting out as a regular level designer, I still had a ton of input on what the levels I was assigned would–the content of those levels, the characters, the writing. I got to contribute to all of that. That’s not something you necessarily have at other studio.
GamesBeat: Especially at bigger studios. Level designers rarely get to do narrative.
Kopman: Right. The benefit of a small studio is you get that many-hats situation. There can be times when it gets busy and stressful, but it’s worth it for the opportunity to really put your mark on the game.
GamesBeat: Did you work on The Bard’s Tale IV?
Kopman: I didn’t. I worked on Torment. Torment — I went from Torment to Wasteland, and Bard’s Tale was kind of bridged between those.
GamesBeat: There’s a little crossover with the themes of Wasteland and the themes of Torment.
Kopman: Somewhat. Although the narrative team was not–there wasn’t as much crossover. Torment, we were starting to work on it well before Wasteland 2 released. There are certain questions, big themes that are attractive because of where we are in the world and all that stuff.
Entering the wastes
Above: Just ask the Separatists how well crab droids did for them.
GamesBeat: Bring us up to speed a bit on the story. Where is it after the events of Wasteland 2?
Jeremy Kopman: Wasteland 2 ends with a dire situation for the Rangers, where their base is gone. They blew it up in order to destroy the big bad from the last game.
GamesBeat: Which was an AI system.
Kopman: Correct. They’re scraping by in Arizona, just barely surviving, trying to rebuild, when they get a call from someone who calls themself the Patriarch of Colorado. This is a guy who offers money, supplies, weapons, what they need to get back on their feet in Arizona, if they can send a contingent and help him maintain control over this small bastion of civilization that’s been built up.
GamesBeat: Have they gone from Rangers to mercs now?
Kopman: No, it’s not — the proposition isn’t so much, I’ll just pay you to do my fighting for me. It’s, we are of a like mind. We want to maintain order in this wasteland and try to rebuild civilization. I can help you. You help me and we’ll both benefit.
GamesBeat: One of my main takeaways from Wasteland 2 was the dangers of AI. Does that carry over at all in Wasteland 3, considering how AI has become a much bigger part of our lives these days?
Kopman: I think we’re not speaking too much to the broader story of the game yet, but I actually think it’s threaded through the story, and it pops up in interesting places throughout. It’s not a straightforward “AI bad” setup. It is an important part of the world, but the story is more deeply about the Patriarch and these rich survivalist doomsday preppers of Colorado, who put away stores of weapons and food and all this stuff, and when they came out of their bunkers after the nuclear fallout from the war, they were the only people with any resources. They immediately were able to take over.
GamesBeat: I didn’t know doomsday preppers in Colorado were rich.
Kopman: Some small numbers of them are. Those are the ones who had enough resources. They may not have been super-wealthy before the apocalypse, but once they came out, they were the only ones with tons and tons of canned food and huge stockpiles of weapons and that kind of thing. He comes from the Buchanan family, which is one of the 100 families that rules the Colorado Springs area.
GamesBeat: Did you choose that name for any particular reason?
Kopman: I don’t know offhand. It almost certainly has some sort of allusion to the President. That might be–one of the narrative design people might be able to answer that question directly.
GamesBeat: In many RPGs, names are important. They have some significance. Sometimes they don’t, but especially when you draw on names in a game that takes place in an alternate U.S., that’s tied to a name in U.S. history.
[The Wasteland 3 narrative team had this to say about the Saul Buchanan, the Patriarch:
“Saul” was meant to evoke a troubled king-figure whose reign is faltering, an allusion to the Biblical Saul, obviously. For his last name, we wanted a classically American, preferably presidential name, so we looked back through the 19th century presidents and picked out Buchanan – not because of anything specifically related to James Buchanan, just because the name had the right feel to it. The Patriarch himself uses American imagery to give himself a sense of legitimacy, so that sort of name felt right.Note that all the Hundred Families – the aristocracy of Colorado – have names that are meant to evoke 19th century America –even the non-Anglo names were present in the U.S. during that time.]
No AI needed
GamesBeat: When it comes to AI, this is a very different question. More game studios use AI to help make their games, whether it’s the placement of elements, checking on bugs, and so on. Does inXile use AI in any way to help make their games?
Kopman: Not really? We’re trying to build a visually very polished, modern-looking game, but the way we make a game is still very old-school, I would say. All that narrative reactivity that’s part of Wasteland 2 and will be a big part of Wasteland 3, it’s all handled by designers manually figuring out — OK, we need to set this variable here, this variable there, and then check it over in this spot. It’s a lot of work, but it’s the way that we can get the most natural–that human work is still the best way to get that kind of reactivity.
GamesBeat: Is it hard to use AI generation with a structured RPG?
Kopman: There could be ways to do it to help with some of the systems side of things, but that’s not really the inXile style. We like to have a hand in everything and make sure it’s what we want.
Post-Microsoft
GamesBeat: How has the development of Wasteland 3 changed after the Microsoft deal?
Kopman: We got some more time and a bunch more resources. We’ve been able to step up the visual quality. We were able to fully lock in on full voiceover for all dialogue in the game. It’s not a small amount of V/O. Those things were not opportunities we had before the Microsoft acquisition. It’s really opened up some of those avenues.
Above: When in doubt, drink!
GamesBeat: As a design department lead, when you first heard of that, what did you think?
Kopman: We were pretty well into development on Wasteland 3. The structure of the story, the structure of the levels, was relatively well set. We were still iterating on everything. As we speak there’s designers still coming up with stuff and adding things to the game. But it definitely made it more comfortable. We knew the stuff we’d been planning in our heads — we could actually pull it off.
GamesBeat: Does the addition of more sets of eyes also help — here’s something you missed, you should fix this or do it this other way?
Kopman: Yeah, it gives us the opportunity to do some stuff — bringing in people who have a lot of experience. Microsoft has UX experts that can look at the game and say, here, these are some ways to tweak things to make sure that the experience flows better. That kind of insight is something that would have been harder. You can hire consultants for that stuff, but inXile wasn’t in a position to do that, necessarily. Now we have quick access to that stuff.
GamesBeat: Now that Obsidian is also under the Microsoft umbrella, can you two cooperate and say, you know, we’re having trouble here, how have you guys done with this in the past?
Kopman: I don’t think that’s come up yet. I think because they’re working on — they were well into Outer Worlds and we were well into Wasteland 3. We’re all head-down. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen in the future. I can’t really speak to that. But I know that — the ability to get — Microsoft has been able to offer us lots of resources and information-sharing and stuff. I think we’re all hopeful that that kind of thing can happen, but we haven’t experienced yet. It hasn’t been relevant to the projects yet.
