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

by Couchpotato, 2013-08-08 01:17:34

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a new interview with Brian Fargo and Kevin Saunders talking 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.

Information about

Torment:ToN

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


Details