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Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #15: Animated Second Screenshot, Colin McComb Q&A

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Colin McComb; InXile Entertainment; Kevin Saunders; Mark Morgan; Torment: Tides of Numenera

The Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter campaign is in its final stretch, and today's update is basically the last one with any major new content. You might not be surprised to learn that the highlight of the update is an animated version of the screenshot from yesterday's update. Come on, inXile, you're just showing off at this point! In addition to that, Colin McComb has published his first Q&A video, answering questions asked by backers on the Torment website.

Here's the animated screenshot, with a snippet of new Mark Morgan music as an added bonus. The Cold Calculating Jack makes a repeat performance.



And here's Colin's Q&A session. The most notable new detail revealed in it is that the maximum party size in Torment will probably be four members, including the player character. That's smaller than the original Planescape: Torment, but then, I'm not sure that having a Baldur's Gate-sized party in PS:T really added much to that game.



The campaign is really booming at the moment, and the number of backers has exceeded 66,000, thereby unlocking the Inception-esque ninth Fathom of Castoff's Labyrinth. To help speed things up even more, no less than four last minute add-ons have been made available. Three of them are actually Wasteland 2 items - beta test access, the digital soundtrack, digital concept art, and the autographed collector's edition. The fourth add-on is the "limited edition signed print" from Torment's $1000 tier, which costs $750.

That's pretty much it. inXile's wrap party for the campaign will be broadcasted tomorrow on their TwitchTV channel. Now we just need to wait and see how high this thing will go!

Update: There's an interview with Colin McComb and Pat Rothfuss over at PC Gamer. As you might expect, it's mainly about the topic of writing in games. Have a snippet:

The flip side of that question, that I kind of alluded to: Where do you think game storytelling can go forward here? Where would you like to see it go?

Rothfuss: It’s easy for me, because I haven’t seen the sausage being made. I honestly don’t understand some of the difficulties underneath it all. So I can talk about what I want and not worry too much about how practical it is. But the truth is, video games are such a new genre of storytelling. They’re just teenagers at this point. It’s so new, and they’re making all their bold, brave newbie mistakes. They’re making the mistakes Hollywood made 30 years ago. In the same way that comics have matured–because comics are much older than video games–comics are out of their adolescence now, and this brilliant storytelling that’s happening with comics is taking advantage of what that medium can do that no other medium can.​

Right now, video games are kind of trying to be movies. That’s great, but a video game can never be as good a movie as a good movie. I think the real opportunity that’s presented is immersion in a story and the interactive nature of that story. Those are the two things that video games can do… They have the opportunity to do so much more of it than movies can. The more they explore those and the better they get at that, the better the games will be. Otherwise they’re just going to continue to be second-rate movies.​

McComb: I think that we can get deeper into the reactivity. We can explore more mature themes. We don’t have to be all about the big guns and the explosions and the “Gee whiz, wow!” effects. We can tell some really deep stories. We can focus on delivering a human experience that people will be interested in and enthralled by, because it will be something that is real. But we can also transport people to another world in which this stuff takes place. It’ll help them examine their own lives through that prism. That’s where I would like to see stories go in games.​

Pat also reveals that he wants to write a female companion for the game. Problem, Roguey? :smug:

Update 2: The crowdfunding campaign has reached 70,000 backers including PayPal, and so the tenth Fathom has been unlocked. Inception? More like Recursion.
 

Lancehead

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Colin's reply to party size sounds almost like the BioWare developer who said complexity is evil and advocated constantly asking oneself what can be removed. :eek:

Although, the difference would be (I hope so, anyway) that while TToN puts limitations to try and maintain high complexity in the existing content with the available resources, BioWare makes the entire thing more and more shallow.
 

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Although, the difference would be (I hope so, anyway) that while TToN puts limitations to try and maintain high complexity in the existing content with the available resources, BioWare makes the entire thing more and more shallow.

That's pretty much what he said.
 

Murk

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Magnificent. Obsidian, where the fuck my waterfall at?
 

HanoverF

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MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
I think out of all the ks campaigns so far this one is saying pretty much exactly what I want to hear, whether they're able to deliver on any of it is totally up in the air but here's hoping they can.
 

Stabwound

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Is this using the same overall Unity-based engine of Project Eternity? These videos are running straight in Unity, right? Not some kind of prerendered thing? Look great so far, anyway.
 
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We're up to 10 fathoms now. Pretty unique for death to grant new playable areas.
 

Havoc

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath
I always liked the stronghold ideas in RPGs (NWN2, BG2, Suikoden etc.). I don't think Torment will get to 4,5m. :(
 

Carrion

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Colin didn't really answer the question about how they're planning to make the "evil" path an enjoyable option.

Great update. There's nothing stopping this from making 4 million anymore.
 

hiver

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Great to hear we wont be able to have more than three or four companions in the party.
I hope that means we wont be able to collect the rest and have them waiting somewhere to be switched between easily, like in bioware games.
I would ask Colin to maybe confirm this but he is traveling so...

A great answer to the "evil" gameplay too.
:thumbsup:
 

winterraptor

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I hope that means we wont be able to collect the rest and have them waiting somewhere to be switched between easily, like in bioware games.

Yeah, I'd prefer each NPC be treated differently there. Some might take their share of the moolah and go chill somewhere, another might just be a machine-type you turn off and stow somewhere, others argue with you and tell you to get fucked if you insist (and they disappear basically), etc.
 

Murk

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Colin didn't really answer the question about how they're planning to make the "evil" path an enjoyable option.

Great update. There's nothing stopping this from making 4 million anymore.

That would require having a lot of the quests and interactions already established to pull direct examples from. One hypothetical example like that was given by Nathan Long.
 

hiver

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I hope that means we wont be able to collect the rest and have them waiting somewhere to be switched between easily, like in bioware games.

Yeah, I'd prefer each NPC be treated differently there. Some might take their share of the moolah and go chill somewhere, another might just be a machine-type you turn off and stow somewhere, others argue with you and tell you to get fucked if you insist (and they disappear basically), etc.
Good ideas. yeah. I hope we wont be able to even collect them all to begin with, because of C&C changes of the story.
 

Zeriel

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Colin's reply to party size sounds almost like the BioWare developer who said complexity is evil and advocated constantly asking oneself what can be removed. :eek:

Although, the difference would be (I hope so, anyway) that while TToN puts limitations to try and maintain high complexity in the existing content with the available resources, BioWare makes the entire thing more and more shallow.

That was Maxis/SimCity, not Bioware. GET OUT.
 

Lancehead

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Colin's reply to party size sounds almost like the BioWare developer who said complexity is evil and advocated constantly asking oneself what can be removed. :eek:

Although, the difference would be (I hope so, anyway) that while TToN puts limitations to try and maintain high complexity in the existing content with the available resources, BioWare makes the entire thing more and more shallow.

That was Maxis/SimCity, not Bioware. GET OUT.
Well, replace BioWare with Maxis, my post remains intact. The point to note how similar Colin's reply was to what the Maxis guy said.
 

Avantre

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Is this using the same overall Unity-based engine of Project Eternity? These videos are running straight in Unity, right? Not some kind of prerendered thing? Look great so far, anyway.
From the update that had the first animatied screenshot: "We added Mark Morgan’s music separately, but otherwise this little scene is running in Unity."
No likely reason why the second animated screenshot would be done differently to the first, so yes it should be running in Unity except for music
 

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