Torment: Tides of Numenera - Interview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a new interview with Brian Fargo and Kevin Saunderstalking about Torment: Tides of Numenera.

RPS: At what point in the pre-production process is the game right now?

Saunders: We just hired a programmer, who joins us in a couple of weeks. We’ve had a little bit of art. Some of our artists are working on figuring out how we’ll develop our environments. Mostly it’s been about the design. It’s been about the story, about our conventions for dialogue and how we’ll implement reactivity. The character design, who the companions will be, how they’ll interact with the player and with each other.

RPS: Having that mix of voices and people who had some experience with Planescape before, how has that all been meshing? How has it come together?

Saunders: It can be difficult. A lot of the people involved are spread out, so there’s a lot of e-mail communication. Adam, Colin, and I have conference calls twice a week where we discuss things. What we’ve done is, we’ve had e-mail threads where all of these people will chime in… There’s this understanding that we can ignore their comments. If we were compelled to respond to every single idea and thought, it’s just too much. So we steal the best ideas and incorporate them into the next thing we send out. Then, “Hey, what do you think of this?” That’s worked pretty well. Also, I know Chris and Colin talk fairly regularly just about developing the story. Colin bounces ideas off of him pretty often.

RPS: Do you think the gaming industry as a whole should place a higher value on writing? I mean, people like people, characters, personality. Are we scaring them away without the common human touchstone of, er, humanity?

Saunders: I think it’s a different approach, a different kind of experience. One of the things we’re doing in Torment is, in the dialogue, it won’t just be the NPCs lines that they say. We’ll also have scripted text. We might describe what they do. We’re letting our writers be free in terms of that. They can write what would happen. Not all of it is anything we’ll be able to show. With a triple-A game, you need to show everything that you want to have happen. You can’t describe a scene. It’s not a novel. The production expense of showing some things could be prohibitive, or showing everything. But we can take an approach where we can let the writers run free and not have to worry about then executing every crazy and great idea they have.

More information.

I like their take on (lore?) dialogue skills being presented without huge click me disclaimers but I'm not sure about the whole idea behind lore skills. As long as the PC is a blank slate (and I expect him to be one) a skill that uses information available only through meta-gaming doesn't make much sense. NWN2's implementation (the only one I've seen) had general Dnd lore that the character was supposed to have learned during his years as a villager. I'd hate T:ToN doing the same with just Numenera lore instead of dnd.

While it's not particularly surprising I like the fact that they mention descriptive bits of text being important. Even MotB, a 3d game, benefited hugely in terms of atmosphere from the significant increase of text descriptions in comparison to NWN2.

Also not sure about them mentioning that item crafting having a big role to play. They're probably smarter than that but I hope the main quest will at no point involve creating a big/legendary/powerful/godly weapon or tool. There's a reason the only bit of crafting involved in PS:T is a completely optional tool that just presents TNO with more options at the end.

Could also do without the rather embarrassing rambling at the end. It's obviously the interviewers fault but I'd expect the people being involved in the gaming industry and more specifically in what aspires to be PS:T's spiritual successor would be smarter than falling for the most cliche old man's rant.

Since lore skills would be something gained during the game that would mean that the character is learning about the world around him/her as the story progresses. It would be entirely unrealistic for someone that is a blank slate to not learn about the world about him/her. If I didn't have any memories I would be talking to people and reading books to learn as much about the world I'm in as much as possible. All of that should translate as skills in the game to simulate the acquirement of knowledge that is happening. You probably won't see all of that since it is nearly impossible to show everything that is happening with a character in a game at all times but it is likely you will converse with npcs and read some books during the game.

Well, this would not be something new to the series, it was actually already there in planescape right ? Even if it was not exactly in that form.

They're only just hiring a programmer? Do they have anybody doing computer graphics? Modelling? Animation? Yeesh, it's been four months already.

Originally Posted by rjshae
They're only just hiring a programmer? Do they have anybody doing computer graphics? Modelling? Animation? Yeesh, it's been four months already.

See wasteland2.

Originally Posted by rjshae
They're only just hiring a programmer? Do they have anybody doing computer graphics? Modelling? Animation? Yeesh, it's been four months already.

T:ToN is in preproduction. Basically just doing a rough draft of the game. Getting an idea of story, areas, etc Won't actually start coding for awhile. Plan is to have preproduction finish a bit after WL 2 launches where coding/programming will be in full swing working off of the more finalized draft.

Torment was given a longer development cycle because they wanted to spend more time with writing and preproduction. I don't see anything to indicate that production isn't going exactly according to plan yet. Once all the programmers are done with Wasteland 2, they will transition to Numenera.

Both look like very exciting projects. Honestly, there isn't enough information out there for me to read about Wasteland 2, I am so stoked for that one. I hope it meets my vast hopes.

Okay. Well Torment is currently slated to ship December 2014, so that gives them a little time…

Even so, I wouldn't be terribly surprised by a delay, similar to what we saw with Wasteland 2.

A delay is never surprising. Shipping on schedule is!

Originally Posted by rjshae
Okay. Well Torment is currently slated to ship December 2014, so that gives them a little time…

I could be wrong, but I believe that was the maximum time that Kickstarter would let them set for delivery as well, so it might have been a somewhat artificial target in the first place.