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Tags: Brian Fargo; InXile Entertainment; Torment: Tides of Numenera
Since the release of the Torment: Tides of Numenera beta in January, there's been a smattering of interviews and a couple of brief updates, but nothing really big - an unusual thing for a game meant to come out this year. Today's Kickstarter update by Brian Fargo has finally broken the silence. So there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that the game's beta has been updated and made available to all backers. The bad news is that the game's final release has been delayed to next year. Plus, there's a mystery publisher involved! Here's the main part of the update, including a few screenshots of the beta's new areas:
When we last checked in, we were heading towards a content complete milestone, and we are pleased to say we have hit that mark. The game is playable from beginning to end, which marks a major step forward. This is one of the most content rich role playing games I have ever worked on.
Of course there is still plenty of work ahead and we won't be cooling our heels yet. Our artists, writers and designers are continuing work to bring the game towards a finished state by polishing systems, artwork, quests and more, and QA is an ongoing process. In the videogames business and especially with RPGs, time to iterate is the biggest luxury you can have.
Torment has also grown to around 1 million words – bigger than the Bible – and we feel that getting a good quality translation of such a deep narrative experience is very important for a large percentage of our players. Therefore, we will be turning to professional localization services to achieve the best experience possible. With the game content complete, we have already begun locking down our text and breaking it into batches for localization, so progress is already being made.
This localization is no small feat (not to mention costly!), but we have a secret weapon… we're partnering with a certain publisher to help out on this front. But who is this partner? We can't comment on that just yet… but you will learn more very soon.
All said and done, our combined iteration and localization efforts are looking to be a 6-month process. So, we have two paths open to us, a bit of choice and consequence, if you will. Those of you who have been following our updates know we have been hinting towards a late 2016 release, and we could crunch and rush to get the game out around November. But doing so would mean both sacrificing the quality of our localization and would lead to a less polished game for the nearly 100,000 people total who have backed the game. Therefore, in the interests of giving everyone the best experience, we will be releasing Torment in early Q1 2017.
We know it's frustrating to wait a little longer, but we've come this far. I remember the pain of moving the release of Baldur's Gate 1 effectively into January in much the same way, but that ended up being the right move and we all know how fondly it is remembered today. These types of trade-offs are never easy, but from day one it's been our goal to make Torment the masterpiece you deserve.
The full update has a list of the major changes in the new beta version. So, who's that publisher? I think if it was Deep Silver, it probably wouldn't be a secret, plus they didn't really do that great of a job last time. Have Paradox added another oldschool RPG developer to their catalogue, or is it somebody else entirely?
Since the release of the Torment: Tides of Numenera beta in January, there's been a smattering of interviews and a couple of brief updates, but nothing really big - an unusual thing for a game meant to come out this year. Today's Kickstarter update by Brian Fargo has finally broken the silence. So there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that the game's beta has been updated and made available to all backers. The bad news is that the game's final release has been delayed to next year. Plus, there's a mystery publisher involved! Here's the main part of the update, including a few screenshots of the beta's new areas:
When we last checked in, we were heading towards a content complete milestone, and we are pleased to say we have hit that mark. The game is playable from beginning to end, which marks a major step forward. This is one of the most content rich role playing games I have ever worked on.
Of course there is still plenty of work ahead and we won't be cooling our heels yet. Our artists, writers and designers are continuing work to bring the game towards a finished state by polishing systems, artwork, quests and more, and QA is an ongoing process. In the videogames business and especially with RPGs, time to iterate is the biggest luxury you can have.
Torment has also grown to around 1 million words – bigger than the Bible – and we feel that getting a good quality translation of such a deep narrative experience is very important for a large percentage of our players. Therefore, we will be turning to professional localization services to achieve the best experience possible. With the game content complete, we have already begun locking down our text and breaking it into batches for localization, so progress is already being made.
This localization is no small feat (not to mention costly!), but we have a secret weapon… we're partnering with a certain publisher to help out on this front. But who is this partner? We can't comment on that just yet… but you will learn more very soon.
All said and done, our combined iteration and localization efforts are looking to be a 6-month process. So, we have two paths open to us, a bit of choice and consequence, if you will. Those of you who have been following our updates know we have been hinting towards a late 2016 release, and we could crunch and rush to get the game out around November. But doing so would mean both sacrificing the quality of our localization and would lead to a less polished game for the nearly 100,000 people total who have backed the game. Therefore, in the interests of giving everyone the best experience, we will be releasing Torment in early Q1 2017.
We know it's frustrating to wait a little longer, but we've come this far. I remember the pain of moving the release of Baldur's Gate 1 effectively into January in much the same way, but that ended up being the right move and we all know how fondly it is remembered today. These types of trade-offs are never easy, but from day one it's been our goal to make Torment the masterpiece you deserve.
