Torment: Tides of Numenera - Writing Milestone

The first pass of the writing for Torment: Tides of Numenera is officially completed. This means that the story has been written, quests are layed out and that the finetuning and optimizations of the story can begin.

Eric here! We'd like to start today's update with an important announcement. As of February 29th, our writing team on Torment: Tides of Numenera has completed its first pass on all of the game's writing. Our latest estimates put this at around one million words. We will know the final count in the coming months, but this is a big milestone for a Torment game, as you can no doubt imagine.

Torment's story is a carefully crafted one, and "first pass" means we have a lot of revisions and edits still to do as we perfect the game's word-smithing. But it does mean our story and quests are more or less set, and our design, scripting and engineering teams can focus their efforts on tightly implementing our remaining game systems and environment/level scripting.

So what is next for Torment? We are hoping to have the game content complete by the beginning of April. At that point, we will be taking the game into iteration. We are dedicated to getting Torment right, so just like the writing needs to go through polish passes, we have allotted significant time for ourselves to improve upon the game's content. This includes things like additional passes on environment art and visual effects, quests and dialog, user interface art and functionality, and gameplay balance, not to mention fixing bugs and optimizing performance.

We know that this will make some of you wonder – when is the final game coming? As we've mentioned before, we are still targeting a 2016 release.

And there is also a lengthy part about the feedback from the beta.

More information.

It sounds like they are going to edit or rewrite most dialogues. To hell with release dates…

Long-standing community site RPGWatch has also named Torment its most-anticipated game, which we are certainly honored by.

Your typical novel is around 100,000 words. That's a lot of reading folks.

That seems a lot wordier than PS:T? I enjoy reading, but don't want an "interactive fiction" experience…PS:T never felt like that (to me at least). I tried the alpha and it was quite fun - and the amount of reading didn't seem too excessive, hope they keep the balance sensible.

some of the writing is so-so, some is pretty good, but most of it has just the right 'flavor'. I'll enjoy reading… err playing through this game.

I was under the impression this was not too far from release. "First pass at the writing complete" was not what I was expecting to hear.

Also, one million words? The seven volumes of Proust come in at 1,267,069 words! I wonder if they meant one million characters.

Originally Posted by booboo
That seems a lot wordier than PS:T? I enjoy reading, but don't want an "interactive fiction" experience…PS:T never felt like that…

There was a ton of reading in PS:T… just over 1 million words… ToN should be about the same.

Originally Posted by Ripper
I was under the impression this was not too far from release. "First pass at the writing complete" was not what I was expecting to hear.

Also, one million words? The seven volumes of Proust come in at 1,267,069 words! I wonder if they meant one million characters.

I'm guessing you'll only see a small fraction of that in any given playthrough.

Yeah, I guess they're counting the words for all the different choices. So if a phrase is slightly changed, they probably count again all the repeated part.

Originally Posted by GabrielMP_19
Yeah, I guess they're counting the words for all the different choices. So if a phrase is slightly changed, they probably count again all the repeated part.

and words used in the UI: item descriptions, quest logs, journal, etc.

Yeah, that must be the case. No way we're going to be reading through that much narrative text in the course of the game.

I have no problem believing those million words are just what's in the events.
I know the word count of a couple of games; Expeditions: Conquistador has over 220.000 words, Thea: The Awakening over 130.000, but they're working on an expansion and also get to some 200.000. I know a million is about 5 times as much, but if they have a bigger team, are really concentrating on writing and when people who've had a sniff of the game are saying it's very text-heavy, then that million words does not surprise me.

You might just read a fraction of it. When I last finished Thea the closing screen told me I had taken part in 7.79% of the events…

Originally Posted by Ripper
Yeah, that must be the case. No way we're going to be reading through that much narrative text in the course of the game.

I can see that you've never played Planescape Torment… It was by far the most dialogue heavy RPG I've ever played. Officially, the script was over 5,000 pages and contained over 800,000 words of dialogue. Add in extraneous text, and it ballooned to over 1M words.

Unlike most RPGs where you play the hero who is questing for fame and fortune, in Torment you play an amnesiac Nameless One… an immortal who just wants to die.
The writing is excellent. Here is a sample:

Nameless One: "Can you dig around in my body for anything?"
Marta: "Marta can do that, cancha Marta? Yes you can!"
Nameless One: "Check the intestines… anything could be lodged in there."
Marta: You lie upon the table, and Marta stands over you, a rusty knife at the ready. There is a stabbing pain as she slices into your abdomen, then cuts brutally downwords in a saw-like motion, exposing your innards. Despite the pain, you watch in silent morbid fascination as she plunders your organs, humming to herself.

If you don't mind lots of reading, I strongly encourage you to put it on your must play list.
It holds up surprisingly well for a 16 year old game.

Originally Posted by Vindicator
I can see that you've never played Planescape Torment… It was by far the most dialogue heavy RPG I've ever played. Officially, the script was over 5,000 pages and contained over 800,000 words of dialogue. Add in extraneous text, and it ballooned to over 1M words.

I played Torment when it came out, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I wouldn't call the writing excellent, but it was certainly well above the average game writing.

All I'm saying is that I'd be surprised if I'd actually read that amount of narrative text in the course of the game. That'd almost be reading War & Peace, twice. It might just be a perceptual trick - that I don't realise how much text I'm getting through while playing, but, as I say, I just find that very surprising.