Hot on the heels of last year’s excellent Wasteland 3, Inxile Entertainment is on a hiring spree, looking for developers to help it build a next-gen RPG game. According to multiple job listings, the studio plans to switch from its traditional isometric perspective to first person for this next game, which appears to be set in a new world.
Twisted Voxel spotted the job listings for positions at Inxile, which include an art director, facial animator, senior gameplay designer, and several engineering roles. The job description for the senior gameplay designer role mentions “tactile first-person weapons” and combat abilities that “draw the player right into the middle of the action.” The art director role involves helping to “bring an extraordinary new world to life” alongside Inxile’s staff of veteran game developers.
There’s precious little else to glean from the advertisements about the game itself, or the new IP – Inxile says the game will be “AAA” quality and will be built using Unreal Engine 5. Those snippets of information, plus the fact that Inxile is now part of Microsoft’s expanding stable of game studios, hint at a project significantly more ambitious than we’ve seen from Inxile to date.
Founded in 2002 by Interplay founder and CEO Brian Fargo, Inexile has to date traded heavily on its developers’ deep experience with the Fallout series. Microsoft acquired the studio, as well as Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian, in 2018, and has since then also bought Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media.
That means all the pieces necessary for some kind of official Fallout reunion game are technically working under the same big roof, and Obsidian even shrugged “maybe, we guess” at the prospect of a sequel to New Vegas last fall.
But Inxile’s recent job listings specifically mention building a “new world,” which means a return to the ruined world of Fallout is probably still no more than a dim gleam in Microsoft’s eye at this stage. What we see next from Inxile will likely be something completely new – and it’ll be a whole new kind of game from the traditionally RPG-minded developer.
