Torment: TON - Interview with George Ziets

GameGrin:

What was the most important thing to you, going into creating Torment: Tides of Numenera?

George:

For me personally, it was recapturing the exuberant weirdness of Planescape: Torment. That's what I loved most about the game, and that's what I still remember now, more than fifteen years after I first played it. In PST, I could remove my own eyeball, carry around my intestines, learn to understand the language of creatures who spoke in rebuses, engage in philosophical discussion with giant golems. Nearly every NPC was strange and memorable, with a unique voice that sounded different from everyone else. (At the time, as someone who was just getting started in game writing, this was a revelation to me, and it inspired me to be a better, more flexible writer.)

It was clear to me that the Planescape design team wasn't worried about conforming to expectations or being too different from the usual fantasy fare - they were letting their imaginations run wild.

I wanted to do the same in TTON. Fortunately, we had the benefit of the Numenera setting, which encourages imagination. It's a setting with a billion years of history and technology behind it, and literally anything can happen. We also had the benefit of some excellent, highly creative writers. When I was designing areas and coming up with strange NPCs and circumstances for the player to encounter, it was always a pleasant surprise to see how the writers fleshed out the characters and made them even more interesting than they'd been in the design documents.

Based on my playthroughs of our first zone, Sagus Cliffs, I think we've succeeded in creating a highly imaginative world for players to explore. If anything, some of the later content feels more "Tormenty" than Sagus Cliffs - it keeps the weirdness, but it gets a little darker and feels even more like the original game.

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GameGrin:

In Torment, you're not able to customise the appearance of your character beyond the sex. What's the aim behind this design choice?

George:

In our game, the player is being dropped into the shoes of a specific character (much as the player took the role of the Nameless One in PST). In this case, that character is the Last Castoff, the most recently vacated body of the Changing God. It's important to our narrative that the character have, for example, a specific and recognizable tattoo, and that his or her head is scarred from the fall to earth that begins the story.

One notable change from Planescape: Torment is that your clothing won't be limited to a single outfit. You'll be able to wear a variety of armors, which range from the mundane (plate or brigandine) to the Numenera-exotic (living exoskeletons, synth armor from previous worlds, or even animate Bloom-flesh).

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This was a conscious attempt to follow the example of Planescape: Torment, which pushed the limits of what could be done in written text. For us, the best part is that our writers aren’t limited to what we can afford to portray through animations, unique models, and visual effects. They’re allowed to describe characters in far greater detail than our character assets depict, portray physical action in descriptive text, and even kill characters in dialogue. (We do impose some limits. Any action that can’t be performed while standing still – e.g., walking to another location – is typically animated in a cutscene. And our art director, Charlie Bloomer, is pushing hard to include as many custom animations and visual effects that he and his team can generate to support our narrative text.)

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In Torment, you're not able to customise the appearance of your character beyond the sex.

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rjshae said:

Suddenly, you hear the stir of modders gathering in the shadows…

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Elel said:

I tried to read nothing about this game in order to be surprised later. But I'd like to ask: is this set in the same world as PS:T, and are the characters new or old (if it's a sequel)? I think that's all I want to know about this game

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