Torment: Tides of Numenera - Beta Delayed

Torment: Tides of Numenera - Beta Delayed

December 19th, 2015, 01:03

Torment update 50 has arrived and comes with information on Backer NPCs, Beta and some information on Sagus Cliffs.

Backer NPCs

Ziets here. As backers of our Kickstarter campaign, you probably know that certain pledge levels unlocked the ability to design content for our game - an item (or item description), a monument, or an NPC. In this update, I'm going to talk about the NPCs that were created by our backers… and how we integrated them into our world.

So what does it mean to create a backer NPC for TTON? If you pledged at the backer NPC level, we asked you to provide a name and description for your character, as well as a preference as to where your NPC should appear in the game (e.g., Sagus Cliffs, the Bloom) and what role they should fill (e.g., merchant, cultist, traveler). As TTON has some rather dark moments, we also asked whether you'd mind if we did terrible things to your NPC. Some of our backers provided that basic information and nothing more, while others took advantage of our "Additional Notes" section to tell us about their characters' backstory, motivations, or the reasons their character was important to them. By the time we hit the submission deadline, we'd received about 55 backer NPCs.

Incorporating 55 backer-created NPCs into the game was a challenge, especially because we set high standards for ourselves. It was important to us that backer NPCs feel indistinguishable from other NPCs in the game and be integrated seamlessly into our quest and exploration content. (The quality of NPC submissions was high, which helped a lot. Backers clearly put a great deal of effort into making their NPCs feel creative, weird, and "Tormenty," so most of them fit easily into our setting.)

On the Beta:

Chris here. Our team is continuing to work hard on getting the Beta Test ready to deliver to you. Torment is in that exciting stage where things are coming together rapidly, and it's been amazing over the last few months to see so many elements of the game take shape. We want to continue cleaning up some rough edges so that you can have the best experience possible. For that reason, we are planning to release the Torment Beta Test early next year so we can deliver a more polished and complete Beta Test.

We know that you have been waiting for this, and we want to get the game to you as soon as we can, but we felt that the Beta version we could bring you would be that much better with a little more time in development. We appreciate your patience.

The Order of Truth (pictured above)

From George Ziets:

The Order of Truth is dedicated to the study of numenera - artifacts of long-dead civilizations that inhabited Earth millions of years ago. Its adherents, known as Aeon Priests, have established enclaves throughout much of the known world. In the city of Sagus Cliffs, far from the lands where the Order arose, the Aeon Priests are few, and not all of them share the high principles of their distant brethren.

Fortunately for them, Sagus Cliffs sits atop a massive trove of numenera, layer upon layer of ancient cities and long-forgotten technologies, waiting to be unearthed. The local headquarters of the Order is inside an ancient starship, abandoned countless millennia in the past and locked in the accumulated sediments of the ages.

More information.