Torment News Roundup: Brian Fargo interview, First Castoff statuette, Mark Morgan music

It's been relatively quiet on the Torment: Tides of Numenera news front as inXile prepare for their next, apparently exciting update. There have been a few minor things, though.

Brian Fargo was interviewed by videogame marketing website thealistdaily, where he spoke a bit about the marketing and project management aspects of Torment and Kickstarter in general. Here's an excerpt:

[a]list: What are your views on Kickstarter as not just a funding platform for games, but one where game makers can test the waters for what players want?

Brian Fargo: People have often talked about Kickstarter fatigue but instead I saw that as crowd funding doing its job. In conversation, people will often tell you how excited they are about a concept or how badly they want a sequel, but the rubber meets the road when it comes down to people voting with their money. And the process has a secondary effect of having the gamers more invested - financially and emotionally - such that we have a strong dialogue about what the game becomes. This is the paradigm for future development as far as I’m concerned.

[a]list: What about as a marketing platform, do you think getting visibility during a successful Kickstarter campaign can translate into broader interest and sales momentum when the game ships?

Brian Fargo: And yes another benefit of having all these great people behind a game is the word of mouth that spreads purely on the game itself. No marketing jargon or false hype but pure organic and viral communication. Once again I see a shift away from the old days when people ran marketing campaigns to trick people into buying bad games for a few weeks. With crowd funding you have a large body of people who were part of its creation from day one.

[a]list: Based on what you’ve seen on Kickstarter, is it a setback for creators who don’t get funded the first time or is it ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try again’?

Brian Fargo: I believe a creator can take another go at Kickstarter so long as they were 100 percent honest and transparent when they tried the first time. It may well have been that they only failed because concept was not strong enough. I had a friend of mine launch an unsuccessful Kickstarter campaign based on a concept that was not really in his wheelhouse. I told him it that it was like going to a concert for my favorite band only to have them play all new material. You need to focus on delivering what the audience would like to see.

I wonder who that friend was.

Brian also posted a photo of the First Castoff statuette, which is one of the rewards for the game's $2000 tier. And he sent Kotaku (grrr) a new Mark Morgan track entitled "The Bloom", which is presumably the theme for that location in the game. You can bypass Kotaku and access the music directly here. It's pretty awesome - any chance of a Youtube version, inXile?

Finally, a reminder that the Torment Reddit AMA is today at 16:00 GMT. In addition to the inXile staff, the always enthusiastic Steven Dengler will also be participating.

Update: The Penny Arcade Report has posted a second interview with Colin McComb. This one's mainly about one of the Codex's "favorite" topics:

Torment won't allow you to craft your own character from scratch in the way we've become accustomed to in games like Skyrim.

“As with the original Torment we are telling a specific story, and that requires a specific character. The player will have a choice of genders in the game, and it will have some impact in the reactivity of the world,” McComb explained. “This is a billion years in the future, so I don’t think there will be much reactivity of people saying that you’re a woman, and you’re not capable of… there’s a billion years of gender equality.”

Outside of the choice of gender, which will change the game in certain ways, you'll not be able to make your own, personal character. “We’re not going to customize the looks. This is primarily an internal journey. It’s not dress-up,” McComb said.

This leads to an interesting question: If we're billions of years in the future, with all the social change that goes along with it, will the game support same-sex couples? When I asked this there was a long pause.

“We do plan to have relationships in the game. I don’t know if we’re necessarily approaching romance, at least not in the way it’s been explored in games recently. There’s a lot more to the word love than simple flesh coupling,” McComb explained. “That’s frankly the aspect of it that’s least interesting when you get right down to it. It’s the interpersonal intimacy. It’s learning the depth and turmoil of another person that I think is more fascinating. That’s the aspect we want to explore with relationships with people.”

"Flesh coupling", how quaint.

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