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Torment: Tides of Numenera - New Interview

by Couchpotato, 2014-07-20 14:02:59

A Polish site called Gry-Online shares part of a new interview in English with a few developers from inXile Entertainment about Torment: Tides of Numenera.

One of the most beloved features of Planescape: Torment was the incredible uniqueness amongst found equipment. Almost every single weapon looked differently and had its own story. Is your approach to items in Torment: Tides of Numenera any close to this one?

Kevin Saunders (Project Lead): Items are very important to the Numenera setting – in fact many items are numenera, which are remnants from past worlds. We do plan to give items unique descriptions and they will help you to understand some facets of the world. How unique they will appear visually is still an open question, though certainly the most significant items will stand out.

What about game difficulty? Are you planning to escalate it somehow? If so – what will change at „hard” in comparison to „normal”? And if not – how do you want to reconcile the expectations and needs of hardcore RPG gamers and casual ones?

Kevin Saunders: We do plan to have difficulty settings, but aren’t yet prepared to discuss the details of how we’ll approach this feature. In general, we aren’t targeting super casual players, but we are using best practices for UI design and game design to make the game accessible rather than arcane. The quests, storyline, etc. typically don’t take well to different difficulty levels and we aren’t planning much, if anything, there. Meanwhile, because the Crises are hand-crafted experiences, and fairly few in number, we hope we can be somewhat sophisticated in how we alter them based on difficulty.

Unfortunately, you were unable to acquire the copyrights for Planescape: Torment and the game will be set in a completely different universe. Can we at least expect some easter eggs and references to the Nameless One, Morte and others from the original?

Kevin Saunders: TTON fans will catch glimpses of PS:T but we don’t plan to have direct references.

Even though there is still a lot of work to do, the core of the story is probably already finished. How much time will it take to complete the game? Planescape: Torment provided from 40 to 50 hours of pure gameplay in addition to almost 800 000 words to read. Can we expect similar numbers in Torment: Tides of Numenera?

Kevin Saunders: Yes, the core of the story is finished (though elements of it will be iterated upon through to the end). We don’t want to make guesses as to what the final gameplay length will be, but I expect we’ll be somewhat shorter than PST, though no less dense. In part this is because we won’t have the dungeon crawling sections that PST did. We will definitely have a lot of words, be they dialogue or descriptions. (We’ve written/implemented over 50,000 dialogue words already and we’re not yet in full production.)

Information about

Torment:ToN

SP/MP: Single-player
Setting: Technofantasy
Genre: RPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details