Matt Barton has uploaded the second episode of his interview with Kevin Saunders. It turns out they're not done talking about Torment: Tides of Numenera yet. Matt asks Kevin about the difference between working with publishers and working with Kickstarter, where players are in effect the publisher. As an example he brings up Torment's combat system backer poll, where turn-based won by a tiny margin. That leads to an extended discussion, taking up almost two thirds of the episode, in which Kevin lays out his thoughts about decision-making and dealing with player feedback in game development.

In the final third of the episode, Matt circles back and asks Kevin about the decision to use Monte Cook's Numenera setting for Torment. Kevin reveals that he actually preferred Numenera over Planescape, because it spared his team from having to create an inevitably disappointing sequel or callback to Planescape: Torment, because he thought Numenera's systems were more suitable for computer adaptation than Dungeons & Dragons (not sure I agree there), but mostly because it gave the team a direct line to the setting's creator. Monte was apparently easy to work with and rarely demanded that content be changed, although Kevin does appear to obliquely confirm certain stories we've heard about his dissatisfaction with the game's portraits.



That being said, Kevin doesn't know what Monte thought about the final game. Nor can he answer that question himself, because it turns out he was so bummed out about being fired that he was never able to bring himself to play it. He knows little about what happened to the game after his departure, but he has full confidence in the team that he left behind.