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Torment:ToN - Interview @ RPGCodex

by Hiddenx, 2017-04-13 22:16:20

Our friends at the Codex (who can be real drama queens sometimes) are talking with inXile Entertainment again:

RPG Codex Report: A Codexian Visit to inXile Entertainment

Ever since Techland canceled our interview with Brian Fargo last year, our relations with InXile have been strained, to say the least. And now that it has been a month and a half since the release of Torment: Tides of Numenera, it's quite clear that the game has not been a success. It may not be a coincidence that shortly after its release, we received an entreaty from inXile PR representative Jim Redner. Jim told us he was seeking to make peace with the Codex, and that he was willing to hear our demands. Our initial proposal was a humble one - a reveal-all AMA with George Ziets, probably the only person at inXile who still has our community's trust. To that Jim responded with a counter-proposal - an in-person visit to inXile, to be followed by an AMA with several of Torment's developers. That was an opportunity we couldn't pass up, and so a couple of weeks ago we dispatched our secret agent in Southern California to inXile's headquarters in Newport Beach. Today, we'rehappy to present the report of his visit to Brian Fargo's court.

[...]

Kevin Saunders left before the end of production. Can you talk about why he left and how his departure affected production?

Brian: I can’t talk about an employee’s specific performance, but what I can do is to provide you with a factual history of things. Kevin left the project in late 2015, right? At that point, we were roughly two years into production. At that point, we’ve gotten the first pass of combat. The story was not yet at first pass. No abilities or weapons were in outside of the alpha systems. And so, at that time, if we had gone along that route, the game would not be done until the year 2018. I could not afford to stay on that path. I had to change what we were doing.

And, to talk about scope, the product was wildly over scoped. Even today, after we made the “cuts,” the original specification for the game was 600,000 words. You know how many we are at now? It’s 1.6 million words, probably a world record for a single player game. I think the only games that have more word count is MMOs done over a long period of time.

[...]

Did the fact that InXile was taking on several different projects – Wasteland 2, Director’s Cut, Wasteland 3, Bard’s Tale 4 - at the same time affect Numenera's production? Why did you decide to take on so many projects at the same time, given this risk?

Brian: The majority of the entire company was on Torment, that was very much the case. Maybe we could’ve moved the start time up a couple of months while we were doing Director’s Cut things. Maybe. But overall, they had the lion’s share of the resources of this company.

I’ve been involved in a lot of products before as you know, and whenever we’re doing something different or innovative, they’re messy behind the scenes. Fallout 2, behind the scenes, was a mess. Planescape: Torment was a mess. The original producer for that project was replaced. So this drama is part and parcel of development. I’ve been involved in very few products in which it was straight forward. The only times it was straight forward was, for example, Icewind Dale, where all the systems were in place, we knew what it was, it wasn’t that deep as a product – and by the way, it was one of my favorite games – but it was very straight forward, you knew exactly what you were doing, all the systems were in place.

When everything’s place, it can become more like that, but whenever you’re trying to innovate in any way, it’s always very messy. I’ve never been on a product where it was run perfectly and you know everything. There’s a great book called Creative Inc. by the founders of Pixar, in which they talk about how every Pixar movie starts off as a piece of shit. Those were his words. It’s basically a mess and it’s a false goal to try and make production perfect, because when you do that, production will not be perfect and you’ll have a dry product. So I think there is messiness that comes with the territory.

They’re messy. We could go back thirty years to talk about how all the different products were messy. From Stone Keep to Battle Chess to Descent, they all had some drama behind the scenes. You know, in production you could have a lead programmer quit in the middle, and you could lose two months because you have to train a new person to take over their code. Think about the cost of losing two months and what that would do. That didn’t happen in this particular case but I’ve had it happen before. You can’t just swap people out easily.

[...]

Information about

Torment:ToN

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


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