Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #61: Release Date - February 28th, 2017

[Infinitron]

Tags: Chris Keenan; InXile Entertainment; Torment: Tides of Numenera

inXile's Chris Keenan published a brief Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter update today announcing that yes, Torment finally has a release date - February 28th, 2017.

Hello Exiles,

Today's update is a little on the short side, but I think you'll forgive us this time…

We are extremely excited to announce that Torment: Tides of Numenera will be releasing February 28th, 2017! It has been a long journey, and without your help on Kickstarter it would never have happened. We could not be happier to be delivering a successor to the Torment name and legacy, and we look forward to you enjoying it early next year.

When the game releases, those of you who already have your Steam keys redeemed for the beta version of the game will auto-update to the final build, and those of you who are planning to enjoy the game DRM-free from GOG will be able to as soon as that version is ready. We will also make a key exchange option available around that time for those of you who want to deactivate your Steam key and switch to GOG. At that point, most of the remaining digital rewards will also be made available to you.

For those of you with physical goods, we'll be prompting you to confirm your final shipping information in the near future. We do not have an exact shipping timeline for those goods just yet, but Techland is hard at work getting them ready for you as soon as possible. Please be sure to keep us advised of any changes by updating your shipping details on the Torment backer web site!

Rest assured that while we have our release date, that doesn't mean our work is quite done yet. We'll be using our remaining time to polish the game for you up to the last possible moment. And of course, once we get closer to release we'll have more news to share with you as well.

Chris Keenan,
VP of Development​

When the game is released, it will have been just under four years since the Kickstarter campaign was launched. Most of the prominent Kickstarted games released thus far have been rushed to one degree or another. They definitely won't have that excuse this time. It's great news, but I wonder what's going on with that final beta update they mentioned last time?

 

[almondblight]

Eh, sure. But when will the final content update for the Enhanced Edition be released?

 

[Marten Broadcloak]

If a kickstarted CRPG is less than three years late, I'm not playing it.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Yes!

 

[l3loodAngel]

Until they prove that they can succeed at something:

"...and not a single fuck was given that day."

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Until they prove that they can succeed at something:

"...and not a single fuck was given that day."

Saunders. McComb. Heine. Avellone. Ziets.

 

[l3loodAngel]

 

[Infinitron]

You could also play the beta to see if the game is good.

It's so funny that it has fewer owners on Steamspy than people who backed the Kickstarter. People outright refusing to activate their keys.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

You could also play the beta to see if the game is good.

It's so funny that it has fewer owners on Steamspy than people who backed the Kickstarter. People outright refusing to activate their keys.

Or there's a lot of GOGfags.

 

[l3loodAngel]

Nowadays beta lasts 12 months after the release. I have it, but I just don't want to play a pre-alpha.

 

[MRY]

It's so funny that it has fewer owners on Steamspy than people who backed the Kickstarter. People outright refusing to activate their keys.

Fans are so excited about this once-in-a-generation game that they want to avoid spoiling it by playing an incomplete beta!

:pangloss:

 

[Kev Inkline]

I will activate it once the director's cut goes live on whichever service it was I chose (can't recall).

 

[Infinitron]

It's so funny that it has fewer owners on Steamspy than people who backed the Kickstarter. People outright refusing to activate their keys.

Fans are so excited about this once-in-a-generation game that they want to avoid spoiling it by playing an incomplete beta!

:pangloss:

I see what you did there.

It's entirely possible that this game is going to be a commercial disappointment, just like Planescape was. Lots of people on the Codex have developed this idea that inXile is "Brian Fargo popamole", not noticing that they've clearly been the nichiest of the big three Kickstarter devs. Wasteland 2 with 7 character party, dozens of skills, turn-based combat, a wall of text Torment game, and a frigging blobber.

Is Wasteland 3 a betrayal, or do inXile have no choice but to escape the niche they've found themselves buried in (which hasn't even gotten them much credit from the RPG Codex)?

 

[Bumvelcrow]

I'm struggling to drum up any enthusiasm for this. I backed it enormously and ostentatiously but haven't even got far into Wasteland 2 yet. I'll have no problem waiting until the final release in a couple of years. Plus, after what they did to poor trusting Infinitron Fargo and his gang are on my shit list until they prove inXile is more than a cynical money making exercise.

Edit: Infinitron pre-emptively smacked me down.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Release on February 28th; patched and feature-complete on February 29th.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Release on February 28th; patched and feature-complete on February 29th.

Grimoire is feature complete.

 

[mitochondritom]

I have purposefully avoided the whole Early Access beta bollocks because this game was billed as a Torment successor with a huge focus on story. I wan't to experience it as a whole and not some crappy half done act 1 type deal. I could understand with Pillars perhaps, where there was perhaps less focus on the plot (wasn't their beta area Dryfood Village?) but here, I am happy to stay blind.

Having not really followed this game's updates I was surprised to see its now over 2 years late "Est Delivery 2014". The recent trailers make it look janky as all hell so I hope it turns out OK. I am basically their dream customer in that I loved Planescape Torment and I like the Numenera Setting, but even I am a little wary of it. I have a strong feeling that this game will be received quite tepidly, much like PST I guess.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

At last. Roqua to review the console version?

 

[Fairfax]

At last. Roqua to review the console version?

You know who Infinitron has picked.

 

[MRY]

I have a strong feeling that this game will be received quite tepidly, much like PST I guess.

This prompted me to pull up the contemporaneous reviews PS:T got from mainstream commercial reviewers, and it's actually striking to me how much they nailed it.

Though this from Eurogamer made me laugh out loud:

You will also discover that you are immortal - every time you are killed you spring back to life. And this is the first of Planescape Torment's problems, as it cheapens death.

It doesn't matter if you die, because the Nameless One will simply get back up again with full hit points. You don't even lose any stats, experience, or items like you would in a massively multiplayer RPG like Asheron's Call.

Asheron's Call! That said, the Eurogamer review does make some sensible points, along with some silly ones ("And you will find yourself dying a lot, because the game is bloody hard!" "It's also a little disappointing that the game has no multiplayer support.").

 

[mitochondritom]

I seem to remember that PC Zone and PC Gamer (uk) weren't exactly glowing with praise on release. I can't find a digitised copy of the reviews but I think it was sort of compared to the BG games and not in a favourable way.

Planescape: Torment actually passed me by as a 12 year old because even though I loved Baldurs Gate, the CGI trailer for PT on one of the BG discs was so fucking strange I had no idea what it was supposed to be. It made it seem like the entire game was about the Lady of Pain and a first person shooter or something. My friend at school gave me the game because he bought it thinking it had something to do with Descent or Quake based on that trailer and then immediately dumped it when he realised what it was. My first playthrough was predictably as a high Str, Con and Dex Fighter so I obviously got a lot out of it and it was only years later when I was at university did I replay it and realised how good it was.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Asheron's Call! That said, the Eurogamer review does make some sensible points, along with some silly ones ("And you will find yourself dying a lot, because the game is bloody hard!" "It's also a little disappointing that the game has no multiplayer support.").

Ah, the typical template review.

durr too hard
hurr no multiplayer

No matter the kind of game, no matter how inappropriate, the rats in the guise of gaming journalists must follow the same path.

 

[Fairfax]

I have a strong feeling that this game will be received quite tepidly, much like PST I guess.

This prompted me to pull up the contemporaneous reviews PS:T got from mainstream commercial reviewers, and it's actually striking to me how much they nailed it.

Though this from Eurogamer made me laugh out loud:

You will also discover that you are immortal - every time you are killed you spring back to life. And this is the first of Planescape Torment's problems, as it cheapens death.

It doesn't matter if you die, because the Nameless One will simply get back up again with full hit points. You don't even lose any stats, experience, or items like you would in a massively multiplayer RPG like Asheron's Call.

Asheron's Call! That said, the Eurogamer review does make some sensible points, along with some silly ones ("And you will find yourself dying a lot, because the game is bloody hard!" "It's also a little disappointing that the game has no multiplayer support.").

Keep in mind Eurogamer was founded in the same year, they weren't relevant yet. The mainstream outlets like GameSpot, IGN, GamePro, PC Gamer, and Computer Games all gave glowing reviews.
Also, the game didn't sell poorly like most people think. According to Scott Warner, it did better than Fallout:

We did sell-through around 400k worldwide on Torment. There seems to be an ongoing legacy that the game did very poorly at retail, which isn't true. It actually sold more copies than the Fallouts did.

Those aren't Final Fantasy numbers, but it certainly was profitable for the company.

 

[MRY]

The "PS:T sold well" thing is now accepted wisdom, but my understanding is that while it may have been profitable, it underperformed hopes and expectations. BG and BG2 were both like 2 million copies, the expansions were both close to a million[1], and what I can find suggests that Icewind Dale also did better[2].

Here is one useful-ish data point from Desslock in 2000:

But PC Data's statistics are still useful for revealing trends – and the PC Data sales statistics for recent RPGs are extremely interesting. While the genre has been extremely popular over the past few years, very few titles have actually been overwhelming commercial successes. Only Diablo and Baldur's Gate are undisputed commercial blockbusters, with Diablo selling over 1.3 million copies and Baldur's Gate selling over 500,000 copies. Sources within the industry that would prefer not to be named have informed me that those sales statistics are off by around 50%. If that's the case, the actual overall sales of Diablo and Baldur's Gate are likely as high as 2.6 million and 1 million, respectively.


The sales statistics for a variety of other titles may surprise you. Fallout and Fallout 2, which are considered to be two of the best RPGs released in recent years, sold approximately 140,000 and 120,000 copies, respectively, in PC Data's tracked data. Very good sales, especially since the overall figures are likely double those amounts, but considerably below the sales volumes for true blockbuster titles.

Even more interesting are the sales statistics for other RPGs. Diablo-clones such as Revenant and Darkstone have sold quite poorly, according to PC Data, in spite of decent critical praise and word of mouth, selling only 35,000 and 75,000 copies, respectively. But the most interesting sales statistics involve Ultima IX: Ascension and Planescape: Torment. Planescape: Torment received fantastic critical acclaim (almost universally receiving the 1999 RPG of the Year Awards) and great word of mouth, has to date sold only about half of the number of units that the Fallout games have sold. Ultima IX: Ascension, on the other hand, was a major release from a major company, and perhaps due to poor word of mouth and its negative reception from game reviewers, similarly achieved a mere 73,000 unit sales in the markets tracked by PC Data. While the sales numbers are almost the same for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IX: Ascension, it's worthwhile to note that most of Torment's sales have been in the year 2000, while Ascension's sales were predominently in 1999, even though Ascension was released later in 1999 than Torment. Again, word of mouth and critical praise obviously bolstered Torment's sales and negatively affected Ascension's potential sales.

Here's a summary of sales statistics for a variety of recent RPGs in the markets PC Data tracks, based upon data current to the end of March, 2000:

Title Units
Baldur's Gate (all formats) 500,000
BG expansion pack 156,000
Fallout 144,000
Fallout 2 123,000
Diablo 1,300,000
Revenant 37,000
Darkstone 75,000
Ultima IX: Ascension 73,000
Planescape: Torment 73,000
How meaningful are these statistics, especially considering the fact that I'm dubious of the utility of PC Data's statistics for the reasons set out above? Well, rather than rely solely on those statistics (and the anecdotal evidence I've garnered from industry sources that suggest that PC Data's numbers are generally off by about 50%), I also tracked information from a dedicated PC gaming store. The store I selected is called Mediascape, and it's located in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Mediascape also has a PC lab for multiplayer gaming and it attracts a lot of hardcore gamers. Interestingly, the sales statistics were as follows:

Title Units
Baldur's Gate 775
BG: Tales of the Sword Coast 160
Fallout 318
Fallout 2 209
Diablo 835
Diablo Hellfire 190
Revenant (discount priced) 49
Darkstone 68
Ultima IX: Ascension 66
Planescape: Torment 172
Note that at this hardcore gaming store, Baldur's Gate is even more of a commercial success, and while Diablo's figures are still very impressive, they are not as out of the ballpark as PC Data's numbers suggest. Ultima IX: Ascension was killed in sales by Planescape: Torment at the dedicated gaming store, and sales of Torment are actually closer to the sales of the Fallout games than PC Data's numbers suggest. Most of the other trends noted by PC Data are duplicated at the dedicated gaming store. Interesting.

What do these statistics reveal? That very few RPGs actually sell blockbuster numbers, even though the genre has been extremely popular over the past few years. Even the most critically acclaimed games, such as Planescape: Torment, are not guaranteed overwhelming commercial success, but games that generate negative word of mouth and critical reviews understandably don't do well either, in spite of being published by large companies and being the recipients of huge advertising campaigns. Those factors seem to be more important at dedicated gaming stores than in the markets PC Data tracks (suggesting that PC Data's figures can be very misleading for titles that receive strongly positive, or negative, word of mouth and reviews).

Not surprisingly, in order to generate good commercial success, games have to establish good buzz prior to release (suggesting that previews are far more valuable than reviews) in addition to establishing good word of mouth and critical reception upon release. Perhaps the majority of that information was intuitive, but I found it interesting to sort through it. Let me know what you think....

 

[Fairfax]

I don't know if IWD sold more, but it was cheap and quick to develop, and Sawyer said it had a better ROI than PS:T because of it. The PC Data numbers are the main reason the game got the "cult classic, commercial failure" status.

Sources within the industry that would prefer not to be named have informed me that those sales statistics are off by around 50%. If that's the case, the actual overall sales of Diablo and Baldur's Gate are likely as high as 2.6 million and 1 million, respectively.

Their BG numbers were wrong by a lot, for example. According to BioWare, Tales of the Sword Coast sold 600k at launch, but the list above gives it 156k up to March 2000. No doubt PS:T was off by a lot as well.

As for expectations, we don't know how much they were expecting, but pre-order numbers were looking good:

We got some interesting news today - Planescape: Torment is already high on the list of reserved titles at Electronics Boutiques nationally. Apparently people are nervous after product availability on Baldur's Gate last year, and want to make sure that they have a copy when the first shipment arrives (given that we are getting close to the holiday season).

The game was also hurt by the fact it missed the holiday season in Europe and came out in December in the US. Baldur's Gate was unusual in how successful it was just days before Christmas, but it sold most copies in 1999 or later due to word of mouth, reviews, awards, the expansion, the sequel, etc. They didn't make the same mistake afterwards, and ToSC, BG2 and ToB were all released well ahead of the holiday season.