After taking a week off, Matt Barton is back with the third and final episode of his interview with Colin McComb. The episode begins with some more discussion of Colin's days at TSR, where Forgotten Realms ruled the roost but he and his colleagues still got to create a bunch of weird settings that didn't sell much, which he attributes to the executives being clueless. Afterwards the interview finally gets to his work on Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2 at Black Isle. Colin ultimately doesn't say very much about those games, but he does reveal that he has an idea for a new Planescape RPG set in the Upper Planes which he'd like to create someday.

The primary topic of the episode is really Torment: Tides of Numenera, which Colin has much more to say about than George Ziets did in his interview. Like George, he thinks the root of the game's flaws is that it was overscoped, with too many stretch goals and lots of content that got cut and replaced with boring walls of text. He has a list of specific things he'd do differently if he could: Get an editor, replace the companion Matkina with Riastrad, add more non-human companions, improve the ending, and make the Meres real gameplay sequences instead of just text adventures. Colin also has a bit to say about Wasteland 2, which he had fun with even though it seems to have ended up differently than he thought when he wrote his area. He says Wasteland 2's lengthy development (including the Director's Cut) meant that full production on Torment didn't begin until 2015 which hurt the project, although he believes the game's scope would have needed significant cuts regardless.


So that's the end of another Matt Chat interview. Annie VanderMeer is coming up next, but it might take a while for Matt to start uploading that because a new semester has started at his university.