Game News inXile admit that Torment stretch goal content has been cut, including companions

[l3loodAngel]

I personally don't give a fuck if they deliver an above average game for us. Some reasons seem legit, some dubious, but I have more faith inxile than other studios, because I could see from wl2 that at least they were trying to do what fans wanted. Unlike some other studios I could mention.
P.s. I am sure gona miss the goo companion, but life goes on.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

They are handling this incredibly badly.

Fargo spent a lot of the pitch for W2 demonstrating his experience as a senior figure in the industry. The fact that this has been handled so badly doesn't reflect well on him personally as the head honcho. MRY said that he was always willing to listen and get involved, but this suggests that either he's not as shit-hot as he'd like to believe or he's given people with too little experience too much rope.

 

[CyberWhale]

but this suggests that either he's not as shit-hot as he'd like to believe or he's given people with too little experience too much rope.

Didn't being assfucked in AAA industry already prove that (instead of merely suggesting it)?

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Didn't being assfucked in AAA industry already prove that (instead of merely suggesting it)?

Maybe, but I was trying to be polite!

 

[Wizfall]

They are handling this incredibly badly.

Fargo spent a lot of the pitch for W2 demonstrating his experience as a senior figure in the industry. The fact that this has been handled so badly doesn't reflect well on him personally as the head honcho. MRY said that he was always willing to listen and get involved, but this suggests that either he's not as shit-hot as he'd like to believe or he's given people with too little experience too much rope.

My personnel belief is that they don't have the technical personnel needed for the job and that game development, especially cRPG are incredibly complicated.

Just looking at all the kicktasters, there are almost lot of issues, no matter the budget when the project is ambitious.
The only game that do well are those with very limited graphics and animations (so not really a viable" commercial product for a "middle size ambitious" company like InXile) or scope (like Stasis adventure game much easier to make or SRR with a very compact design from the start).
A kickstarter cRPG + ambitious scope + commercial quality animation/graphics = an accident waiting to happen 99% of the time.

 

[Phase]

Can't bring myself to care as I haven't given InXile a cent, and this is simply the obvious trainwreck slowly unfolding. I think this is worth a share:

Neogaf "Torment: Tides of Numenera stretch goals being cut/reduced due to dev issues"

<Developer> We made a design decision

<Website Full Of Actual Social Cripples> DEVELOPER OUT OF CONTROL, SELLING LIES TO THE PUBLIC, NO MORE WE WILL NOT STAND FOR THIS!!!

I think it's important to always keep in mind that prior to the advent of internet discussion forums, there were many thousands and perhaps millions of mentally ill individuals in this country who were largely "out of sight and out of mind" to most Americans. These are people who might be on disability and spend virtually all of their time as shut-ins at home, so most people would never encounter them in work or social situations.

For most of us, such people simply didn't exist. When these people would venture out into public, they would often have "episodes" and "outbursts" which would cause normal people to recoil, shun and ostracize them, thus causing these people to further withdraw into their shut-in lives.

But with the advent of internet discussion forums, these people are "in their element" here. They can now talk to literally thousands of people from around the world, from the safety of their little hovels, without fear of any negative physical consequences they would expect to receive in the real world. Hence they feel free to say whatever thought passes through their tortured minds, and there's not a damn thing anyone can do about it. This is the greatest development of their entire lives, and they often spend all day her to the exclusion of all other activities.

So now you understand the RPGCodex.

Y'all actually want me to post the "niggers should be hanged" stuff from the Codex or are you willing to die on this hill?

I love you guys.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

For all the talk of loving crowdfunding and the "open communication with the backers" (and yes, I realise that is mostly bs), the communication strategy of Fargo going around talking about how awesome everything is while BN and Sea churn out platitudes on the forums should have been abandoned long ago - certainly once major changes and cuts were made. A year ago they could have done really interesting interviews and updates about ambitious goals, the realities and problems of implementing the desired levels of reactivity and how the length of the game and development time could spiral out of control without some tough choices. We all know why many studios avoid branching narratives and reactivity for these very reasons, they could have discussed how attaining the necessary depth in the companions meant one had to be cut - but hopefully returning in an expansion or sequel. Likewise with the creative choices that led them to focus on a different city, but again leaving plenty of already-written material for later additions.

There would have been discussions, debates and butthurt, but by now everyone would be looking forward to the game rather than discovering major departures to what was promised from a couple of Sea's forum posts. I guessing hyping the pure incline of the partnership with Techland was more important than mentioning this trivia.

 

[Somberlain]

Lot of people here appears to be complete noobs concerning game development despite the site having a reputation of hardened veteran.
Quite incredible, everyone and his grandmother know game development is almost always more or less a cluster-fuck where things change greatly from the start to the finish evzn for AAA games.
Now you can tell Inxile should have not commit to add certain features, but experienced as we are, it was quite naive to put too much expectation it.

I'm not disappointed at all InXIle dropped some features which are more like ideals things to do, it's a good thing to have them however in a kickstarter as it show the way to go and give a perspective.
And it's a good thing to drop them as the project evolve to concentrate on the good parts and make the better game possible considering the constraints that we can be sure will arise.

PoE 1 is a good example of features that should have been dropped like the too bland megadungeon and even the whole stronghold thing.
They should have made a 3/4 levels dungeons instead. And drop crafting too to make better itemization
And imo they should have even reduced the size of the Twin Elm to make Definace Bay a real city, not a boring place with too few things to do in each zone.

At the end all i care is the game being good, not if it checked a "to do list" of features that in game development are always dropped partially anyway.

Hey, shillboy. I'm pretty sure that most people here aren't upset that a few additional features got cut but the lack of professional communication and the utter contempt and stuck up attitude this company is showing their backers. You know, the people who made this whole game happen.

 

[Bleed the Man]

In Fargo's defense some of those missing features will probably be added after release via patches and DLC
We know how these things work, they will release the game, patch the game to a somewhat decent state during the first month and then start adding content 3 4 months after release

Probably this that and the other, yeah right.

They are handling this incredibly badly. They should have been open and up-front about this, explaining the situation, the actions they have taken, and the actions they want to take later to mitigate the damage. There would've been a lot less damage had they come up with something like this a few months ago:

"Hello backers. We have some good news for you, and some bad news. The good news is that we have a release date for T:ToN, and it's Feb 28. The bad news is that not all the stretch goals we promised in the Kickstarter are going to be in it.

<<list them, explain what was dropped, what was added, and why>>

"Now, we realise many of you are going to be disappointed by these changes. That's why we're offering all of you backers <<store credit/partial refund/hero of the ninth world badge/another apology video for the Complete Book of Elves>>. We are also making plans for implementing <<cut features>> as post-release DLC which will, naturally, be free to you.

"We'll be more careful with stretch goals in our future projects so this doesn't happen again. We've also taken steps to tighten up our design and development practices. Our new Director of Development, Joe Stalin, will tell you all about it in an upcoming video update.

"Once again, we are immensely grateful for your support. We dun goofed, are doing everything in our power to make things right with you and stop this from happening ever again. Over and out, this is your humble community manager, Bob Baghdad."

The funny thing is it would have sufficed with just telling the backers that these things got cut upfront, without needing to promise to deliver them in the future. We are no longer new to crowfunding these types of games and we have experienced similar cuts in other high profile kickstarters with minimal backlash (Larian cut some pretty major things without outrage, for fucks sake) because they just told us that these things that were promised wouldn't make the cut.
But for some inexplicable reason, they decided that the best way to go was to shut up and hope it goes unnoticed, and it obviously backfired. This is pretty scummy behavior, the type "evil publisher" that Fargo liked to demonize in the kickstarter craze usually do.

This will not bite them in the ass in terms of Torment sales or such, but I believe a relevant if still minor number of people willing to back their campaigns will be a lot less inclined to do so.

 

[Prime Junta]

My personnel belief is that they don't have the technical personnel needed for the job and that game development, especially cRPG are incredibly complicated.

Sure, software is hard. I'm totally willing to cut a lot of slack for people fresh out of the gate (the Barkley 2 lunatics for example). But, these guys aren't spring chickens. They're industry veterans. It's not unreasonable to expect that they clear the "basic competence" bar -- i.e., delivering what's promised (on-schedule and on-budget is optional).

Same thing with crisis communication. If a company knows it's going to publicly disappoint a hundred thousand paying customers, there are good ways and bad ways to proceed, and the good ways are taught in first year business school (I know that even though I haven't been to business school): be timely, honest, up-front, accessible, and make sure they get the news from you rather than someone else. Not doing that is, among other things, just plain incompetent. It's not how you run a successful business. It's not fun, but it's not hard: even I could do it and I'm not even a business guy.

 

[CRD]

be timely, honest, up-front, accessible, and make sure they get the news from you rather than someone else.

Master in communication in a nutshell

This so much. When people find that they have been lied, it's not really a good feeling and doesn't build trust for the future.

If instead of this inxile would have been honest since the beginning talking with the backers about their problems, the changes, the decisions and even maybe asking them for opinions during the years, no one would have say anything. But the way they manage it, is a shitfest and they deserve every bit of criticism.

 

[Wizfall]

My personnel belief is that they don't have the technical personnel needed for the job and that game development, especially cRPG are incredibly complicated.

Sure, software is hard. I'm totally willing to cut a lot of slack for people fresh out of the gate (the Barkley 2 lunatics for example). But, these guys aren't spring chickens. They're industry veterans. It's not unreasonable to expect that they clear the "basic competence" bar -- i.e., delivering what's promised (on-schedule and on-budget is optional).

Same thing with crisis communication. If a company knows it's going to publicly disappoint a hundred thousand paying customers, there are good ways and bad ways to proceed, and the good ways are taught in first year business school (I know that even though I haven't been to business school): be timely, honest, up-front, accessible, and make sure they get the news from you rather than someone else. Not doing that is, among other things, just plain incompetent. It's not how you run a successful business. It's not fun, but it's not hard: even I could do it and I'm not even a business guy.

The designers, narrators are experienced but my guess is that technical personnel, the "code" guys are much less experienced/competent as most are working in big AAA company with better wages.
So all the talk is quite nice but whan you can't implement it...

No question about InXile communication though, it was at the least bad (to not say dishonest).
I think they were fearful of the commercial issue and the bad image it would have given to the game if they said "we have dropped this and that and also this..."
They should have acted as you said but I can understand their behaviour under heavy stress though and i don't reallly care about not absolutely fundamental features so...

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Even Larian managed to admit upfront that the day/night cycle was shit, that didn't get pages of reactions. Is being honest teh hard?

 

[Wizfall]

Even Larian managed to admit upfront that the day/night cycle was shit, that didn't get pages of reactions. Is being honest teh hard?

Typical outdated behaviour of companies that did not register that nowadays with internet it's very difficult to keep things under the carpet as before.
They succeeded to keep all this under the radar almost to the release date though.

 

[gromit]

...wasn't this MCA's character?

 

[Jarpie]

Probably one of the rare times I actually agree with Prime Junta...one of the first things they teach in business school about communicating with your customers is to get in front of the problem ASAP and make sure there's nothing left what can come to bite you in the ass afterwards.

The reply junta got from Fargo is perfect example of how not to communicate with the customer, people will see it when the company is trying to shift blame on you instead of owning their own shit. When I was involved with the customers in my old job, they always reacted much better if I just told them "Yeah, we screwed up. Let us fix it and make it up for you." rather than trying weasel our way out of it. I find it surprising that Fargo seemingly doesn't understand it that keeping old customer is much much cheaper than losing customer and trying to gain new one to replace them, that was one of the things our bosses hammered into us - do as much as possible to keep the customer.

Not sure how possible it is for game development company to do these kind of calculations, but in most businesses they do studies and calculations on how much does it cost to gain new customer, and how much does it cost to keep one.

 

[FeelTheRads]

MRY It wasn't meant to be a pejorative. On this forum, where many people seem to think Brian Fargo is on a personal mission to ruin their games, it's quite the opposite.

No, shilling cuck, nobody thinks he's on a personal mission to ruin games. What they think is that he's using games for his personal reasons and the result, either because he doesn't care or because he's incompetent, is ruining those games. The result is what matters here.

I see you're trying hard to master corporate speak, and hell, soon you might be up to inXile's standards.

These guys are so inept it's ridiculous. I tweeted about this, and Fargo actually replied. His reply?



That's, like, the classic notpology: the one thing you're supposed to not say in a situation like this. Even "sorry we disappointed you" is better.

(I for one am sorry Fargo is a greasy little shitweasel. I'll save that for when I owe him an apology.)

There you go.

Sorry you don't like it, it's not our fault.

 

[made]

And to think that I even considered pirating this pile of crap. What a waste of bandwidth.

 

[Ismaul]

Fargo is a wise weasel. He knows most people, even most backers, don't even remember the stretch goals and promises after all this time. He even knows many backed without reading the whole pitch and all the updates. So why would he remind them, only to tell them he didn't deliver?

By doing so, assuredly he would lose many backers, especially for future projects, and there might even be news about it, affecting potential future costumers. But by commiting it to silence, and having his henchmen stealthily break the news to the few involved enough to be on the forums and follow the game's development, he insures that the damage is limited to those alone. And he might even think, those backers are so hardcore that they'll come back anyways, like battered wives.

They did calculate it. The most hardcore are always the first on which the trigger is pulled.

 

[taxalot]

I want to be outraged, but I really don't. I'll just wait for the Director's Cut and live a peacefun, zen, life in the meantime.

 

[l3loodAngel]

These guys are so inept it's ridiculous. I tweeted about this, and Fargo actually replied. His reply?



That's, like, the classic notpology: the one thing you're supposed to not say in a situation like this. Even "sorry we disappointed you" is better.

(I for one am sorry Fargo is a greasy little shitweasel. I'll save that for when I owe him an apology.)

Well, I do believe that he is saying the truth. They were doing their best and fucked up.

I am sure you wanted him to bow down and do the slurping (every liberal's wet dream). I, however, have more respect for him now. An uncomfortable truth is better than a fucking lie from the depths of his rectum.

Not surprised, he thought not letting people in on the cut content was fun:

I was talking to George [Zeits, lead area designer on Torment] and he mentioned that the game had been cut down a lot during development. As executive producer on this project, I imagine you had oversight of what was cut -- how do you decide what stays and what goes, in a game like this?

Well, ultimately I let the writers decide that. I'll extrapolate out and say well, at this rate, this thing is going to go too long by x amount, and we need to change something. I'd rather have more time in the iteration cycle, right.

I tell the guys all the time, we're either going to have more levels or more time to iterate. Which would you rather have

It's always more time to iterate, because you get to polish more, and make what you have better. So that always wins out. So I let them ultimately decide how they need to tell this really heavy, single-player narrative story, yet still remove things. And so yeah, they had to work themselves into pretzels a couple different times in order to do it. But it's fun, because at this point we're the only ones that know what's not there anymore. And at the end of the day, the game is still pretty massive -- it's probably a 40- to 60-hour game. But again, I let those guys make that decision, in terms of what makes sense.

Oh yeah. He definitely meant promised content that everybody knows about. He was already day dreaming about dominating his fans and licking their tears. That's dishonest of you.

 

[Ovplain]

Fargo is a wise weasel. He knows most people, even most backers, don't even remember the stretch goals and promises after all this time. He even knows many backed without reading the whole pitch and all the updates. So why would he remind them, only to tell them he didn't deliver?

By doing so, assuredly he would lose many backers, especially for future projects, and there might even be news about it, affecting potential future costumers. But by commiting it to silence, and having his henchmen stealthily break the news to the few involved enough to be on the forums and follow the game's development, he insures that the damage is limited to those alone. And he might even think, those backers are so hardcore that they'll come back anyways, like battered wives.

They did calculate it. The most hardcore are always the first on which the trigger is pulled.

I disagree. Yeah, it clearly had to have been a thought out move, but can't see how it was a 'wise' one. People would not be as pissed off now, if they bothered to explain all of this way back when. Don't think people are nearly as uspet with content being cut, as they are with the way inXile just kept quiet about it. I mean, I can't imagine. I just know this game's gonna get bombed with negative steam reviews right out of the gate, that's a given now at least.

 

[Ismaul]

can't see how it was a 'wise' one

Yeah... I should have said 'cunning'.

 

[Sensuki]

It would be interesting to compare those that were ambiguous toward or defended inXile over the codex interview cancellation and their responses to this thread.

 

[FeelTheRads]

It would be interesting to compare those that were ambiguous toward or defended inXile over the codex interview cancellation and their responses to this thread.

There's always the golden "they cut something so something else must be better as the result". inXile themselves are hard at work pushing that line.