Wasteland 2 isn't the prettiest game in the world, although it is one of the brownest, it taking place in the irradiated desert an' all. Of course, fancy images aren't the reason you play a game like this—but it can't hurt, as long as it doesn't put a strain on your PC. inXile have just announced that a visual upgrade is coming to Wasteland 2, thanks to them moving the game engine over from Unity 4.5 to Unity 5. Unity 5, you might be aware, features something called "physically based shading", which...look I'm no shading expert, alright? Here's a big explanation from Unity. 'Nicer graphics', basically.
That isn't the only thing coming to Wasteland 2—modders should soon be getting some new tools too.
"In pursuit of this goal," project lead Chris Keenan writes in that Kickstarter update, "one task we’re working on right now is migrating the Wasteland 2 codebase from the Unity 4.5 engine to Unity 5, which will enable some new possibilities for us. A major benefit of moving to Unity 5 is that 5 will include many of the tools from Unity 4.x Pro. We relied on many of these tools during our development (like creating and building navigation meshes), and they will be available to modders without having to pay thousands of dollars for a Pro Unity license. There is no doubt that this migration will allow us to release better tools for modding to our community in the future."
"As well as visual improvements, we have quite a few quirky tricks up our sleeves. The character system is getting perked up and will include some new elements to modify gameplay. Of course, more details will be released in the future so stay tuned!"
Ta, Blue's News.
