Interview Brian Fargo and Kevin Saunders talk Torment with Rock Paper Shotgun

[UnknownBro]

So much talking. Must... resist... boredom... I... will keep... reading... zzz

 

[Roguey]

The "decline of reading" isn't rooted in reality.

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/20/reading-habits-in-different-communities/
http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/06/25/younger-americans-library-services/

Olds getting irrationally mad at youngs, nothing new.

 

[Rake]

The "decline of reading" isn't rooted in reality.

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/20/reading-habits-in-different-communities/
http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/06/25/younger-americans-library-services/

Olds getting irrationally mad at youngs, nothing new.

How many of those are also gamers?

 

[tuluse]

Olds getting irrationally mad at youngs, nothing new. Nathan Grayson trying to sound superior

ftfy

I'm slightly disappointed the InXile crew played along instead of being like "the people you just said don't read gave us 4 million bucks to making a reading rpg".

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

More consolitis ahoy!

When nobody responds to your obvious trollpost it means you're an easily-identifiable shitposter not "Yo, dawg! Try again and it'll be wicked-rad! Y'all!"

 

[Balor]

Unlike speech and visual image processing, reading and writing are not 'intuitive' and introduce a level of abstraction. Reddin is objectively teh harder for ALL people, as it requires more effort.
No everyone is willing to make it. Hence, to maximize TA, it must be kept to a minimum and replaced with video and audio whenever possible.
Captain Obvious out.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

The "decline of reading" isn't rooted in reality.

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/12/20/reading-habits-in-different-communities/
http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/06/25/younger-americans-library-services/

Olds getting irrationally mad at youngs, nothing new.

Oh please, not that argument again. The problem isn't that they don't read, it's what they read.
For example, here's the part of Goodreads' Most Popular Books Published In 2013 (clickable)


[src & more]
Let me just present summaries of the first 10, without comment.

Allegiant (Divergent #3) (Young Adult, Dystopia)
by Veronica Roth (Goodreads Author)
4.6 of 5 stars 4.60 · rating details · 2,893 ratings · 744 reviews
One choice will define you.

What if your whole world was a lie?
What if a single revelation—like a single choice—changed everything?
What if love and loyalty made you do things you never expected?

The faction-based society that Tris Prior once believed in is shattered—fractured by violence and power struggles and scarred by loss and betrayal. So when offered a chance to explore the world past the limits she’s known, Tris is ready. Perhaps beyond the fence, she and Tobias will find a simple new life together, free from complicated lies, tangled loyalties, and painful memories.

But Tris’s new reality is even more alarming than the one she left behind. Old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless. Explosive new truths change the hearts of those she loves. And once again, Tris must battle to comprehend the complexities of human nature—and of herself—while facing impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice, and love.

Told from a riveting dual perspective, Allegiant, by #1 New York Times best-selling author Veronica Roth, brings the Divergent series to a powerful conclusion while revealing the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of readers in Divergent and Insurgent

Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices #3) (Young Adult, Paranormal Romance, Angels. Oh, and author started her career from HP fanfics, IIRC.)
by Cassandra Clare (Goodreads Author)
4.59 of 5 stars 4.59 · rating details · 47,786 ratings · 9,289 reviews
A net of shadows begins to tighten around the Shadowhunters of the London Institute. Mortmain plans to use his Infernal Devices, an army of pitiless automatons, to destroy the Shadowhunters. He needs only one last item to complete his plan: he needs Tessa Gray.

Charlotte Branwell, head of the London Institute, is desperate to find Mortmain before he strikes. But when Mortmain abducts Tessa, the boys who lay equal claim to her heart, Jem and Will, will do anything to save her. For though Tessa and Jem are now engaged, Will is as much in love with her as ever.

As those who love Tessa rally to rescue her from Mortmain’s clutches, Tessa realizes that the only person who can save her is herself. But can a single girl, even one who can command the power of angels, face down an entire army?

Danger and betrayal, secrets and enchantment, and the tangled threads of love and loss intertwine as the Shadowhunters are pushed to the very brink of destruction in the breathtaking conclusion to the Infernal Devices trilogy.

Inferno (Robert Langdon #4) (Fucking Dan Brown)
by Dan Brown
3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 53,735 ratings · 11,367 reviews
In his international blockbusters The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown masterfully fused history, art, codes, and symbols. In this riveting new thriller, Brown returns to his element and has crafted his highest-stakes novel to date.

In the heart of Italy, Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon is drawn into a harrowing world centered on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces . . . Dante’s Inferno.

Against this backdrop, Langdon battles a chilling adversary and grapples with an ingenious riddle that pulls him into a landscape of classic art, secret passageways, and futuristic science. Drawing from Dante’s dark epic poem, Langdon races to find answers and decide whom to trust . . . before the world is irrevocably altered.

And the Mountains Echoed (Afghan author, Contemporary Fiction, War)
by Khaled Hosseini
4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 29,384 ratings · 6,094 reviews
An unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else.

Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.

In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most.

Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.

Walking Disaster (Beautiful #2) (New Adult, Romance)
by Jamie McGuire
4.27 of 5 stars 4.27 · rating details · 50,136 ratings · 7,021 reviews
Finally, the highly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestseller Beautiful Disaster.

Can you love someone too much?

Travis Maddox learned two things from his mother before she died: Love hard. Fight harder.

In Walking Disaster, the life of Travis is full of fast women, underground gambling, and violence. But just when he thinks he is invincible, Abby Abernathy brings him to his knees.

Every story has two sides. In Beautiful Disaster, Abby had her say. Now it’s time to see the story through Travis’s eyes.

Entwined with You (Crossfire #3) (Romance/Erotica)
by Sylvia Day (Goodreads Author)
4.08 of 5 stars 4.08 · rating details · 42,325 ratings · 6,148 reviews
The worldwide phenomenon continues as Eva and Gideon face the demons of their pasts, and accept the consequences of their obsessive desires…

From the moment I first met Gideon Cross, I recognized something in him that I needed. Something I couldn’t resist. I saw the dangerous and damaged soul inside–so much like my own. I was drawn to it. I needed him as surely as I needed my heart to beat.

No one knows how much he risked for me. How much I’d been threatened, or just how dark and desperate the shadow of our pasts would become.

Entwined by our secrets, we tried to defy the odds. We made our own rules and surrendered completely to the exquisite power of possession…

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (Goodreads Author) (Magical Realism, Urban Fantasy)
4.19 of 5 stars 4.19 · rating details · 27,721 ratings · 5,810 reviews
Sussex, England. A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean) behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.

Forty years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie—magical, comforting, wise beyond her years—promised to protect him, no matter what.

A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.

Requiem (Delirium #3) (Young Adult, Dystopia)
by Lauren Oliver (Goodreads Author)
3.74 of 5 stars 3.74 · rating details · 32,217 ratings · 6,227 reviews
They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past.

But we are still here.

And there are more of us every day.

Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has been transformed. The nascent rebellion that was under way in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.

After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven—pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators now infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels, and as Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor.

Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings.

Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.

But we have chosen a different road.

And in the end, that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.

We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

Requiem is told from both Lena’s and Hana’s points of view. The two girls live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.

Life After Life (Magical Realism, Historical Fiction)
by Kate Atkinson
3.85 of 5 stars 3.85 · rating details · 18,066 ratings · 3,988 reviews
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born, the third child of a wealthy English banker and his wife. Sadly, she dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in any number of ways. Clearly history (and Kate Atkinson) have plans for her: In Ursula rests nothing less than the fate of civilization.

Wildly inventive, darkly comic, startlingly poignant — this is Kate Atkinson at her absolute best, playing with time and history, telling a story that is breathtaking for both its audacity and its endless satisfactions.(less)

The Storyteller (Historical Fiction, Drama, Holocaust)
by Jodi Picoult (Goodreads Author)
4.24 of 5 stars 4.24 · rating details · 26,759 ratings · 5,046 reviews
Sage Singer befriends an old man who's particularly beloved in her community. Josef Weber is everyone's favorite retired teacher and Little League coach. They strike up a friendship at the bakery where Sage works. One day he asks Sage for a favor: to kill him. Shocked, Sage refuses…and then he confesses his darkest secret - he deserves to die, because he was a Nazi SS guard. Complicating the matter? Sage's grandmother is a Holocaust survivor.

What do you do when evil lives next door? Can someone who's committed a truly heinous act ever atone for it with subsequent good behavior? Should you offer forgiveness to someone if you aren't the party who was wronged? And most of all - if Sage even considers his request - is it murder, or justice?

And so on. Oh, and I'm sure that some people who voted (and answered to that questionnaire about reading) don't read at all, they just skim through hyped books out of peer pressure, and then are lying about the fact they're reading constantly.

Anyway, somehow I doubt that the audience of all of the above books (excluding Gaiman's) would be interested in Torment, even if they do play computer games.

 

[villain of the story]

When nobody responds to your obvious trollpost it means you're an easily-identifiable shitposter not "Yo, dawg! Try again and it'll be wicked-rad! Y'all!"

If the world is a better and easier place for you to exist when you assume that stuff you don't agree with must be trolling, be my guest.

 

[communard]

Curmudgeonery

And 150 years ago those darn youngsters were reading penny dreadfuls. I fail to see the decline.

 

[Kz3r0]

Curmudgeonery

And 150 years ago those darn youngsters were reading penny dreadfuls. I fail to see the decline.

That's too soon decline started with mass literacy, when only monocled people could read we had the like of Virgil and Dante.

 

[communard]

Curmudgeonery

And 150 years ago those darn youngsters were reading penny dreadfuls. I fail to see the decline.

That's too soon decline started with mass literacy, when only monocled people could read we had the like of Virgil and Dante.

Ah, that makes sense. Conservative reasoning is so fucking adorable I just want to smother it to death.

 

[karfhud]

Nice interview and all, but it doesn't really deliver any news. Then, it might just be me and my hype resting on the highest level possible.

Consolitis? Get real.

 

[Stainless Veteran]

Curmudgeonery

And 150 years ago those darn youngsters were reading penny dreadfuls. I fail to see the decline.

Youngsters? DO HO HO HO HOH. You do realise that Yong Adult genre wouldn't be so prevalent without its adult readers? Romance novels, YA and Critically Acclaimed Books (which people often buy, but seldom read) are the only "genres" (to use the term broadly) that the main populace reads or pretends to. To argue that reading them contributes even to literacy, not to mention critical thinking or intellectual stimulation is... strange, to say the least.

tl;dr Public have shitty tastes and enjoys simply written crap. We all hope that Torment's writing wouldn't be crappy and/or simple. Ergo, general populace probably won't like it, no matter how many YA drivel they have read. Well, most of them don't play games, so the point is moot anyway.

 

[communard]

Curmudgeonery

And 150 years ago those darn youngsters were reading penny dreadfuls. I fail to see the decline.

Youngsters? DO HO HO HO HOH. You do realise that Yong Adult genre wouldn't be so prevalent without its adult readers? Romance novels, YA and Critically Acclaimed Books (which people often buy, but seldom read) are the only "genres" (to use the term broadly) that the main populace reads or pretends to. To argue that reading them contributes even to literacy, not to mention critical thinking or intellectual stimulation is... strange, to say the least.

Again. This is not a new development. Get your head out of your ass.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

If the world is a better and easier place for you to exist when you assume that stuff you don't agree with must be trolling, be my guest.

Oh. So you're finally admitting to simply being an idiot? Fair enough. Sorry!

 

[gromit]

Picoult's not bad. Just... not for us.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Oh please, not that argument again. The problem isn't that they don't read, it's what they read.

Remember you're talking to Roguey. Plebs don't actually process information, because there's little they actually comprehend, they just vomit it out as it reaches them.

 

[majestik12]

We want what we call cosmetic reactivity, where the next set of player options will be the same, but the NPC’s response to what you said will be different.

Awesome!

 

[UnknownBro]

Yeah, reading is TEH HARD but reading the same shit over and over... it gets really tiresome real fast.

 

[Roguey]

Oh please, not that argument again. The problem isn't that they don't read, it's what they read.

Remember you're talking to Roguey. Plebs don't actually process information, because there's little they actually comprehend, they just vomit it out as it reaches them.

Grayson wasn't saying "People aren't reading enough quality books" (which has always been true). He said

RPS: I really like that idea, but then, I’m a writer. However, I think a lot of things are moving away from being text-oriented and focused on reading or writing. Society is moving toward video. We have social media apps right now that are dedicated solely to video, things like Vine. Google Glass is about to happen. Who knows what that will do, but it’s all about images and watching and less about reading and writing. Is that worrisome to you, that people aren’t as keen to read now?

which, as my sources show, is false.

 

[ksaun]

Olds getting irrationally mad at youngs, nothing new. Nathan Grayson trying to sound superior

ftfy

I'm slightly disappointed the InXile crew played along instead of being like "the people you just said don't read gave us 4 million bucks to making a reading rpg".

At the beginning of that tangent, I believe we did talk about that briefly. It just didn't make the article. But in any case, I think we'd all agree that the people who backed TTON aren't a representative sample of society at large. =) Fortunately the audience for games like Torment, Wasteland 2, Project Eternity, Shadowrun Returns, Expeditions: Conquistador, Dead State, etc. proved to be large enough to justify their creation without having to make compromises to cater to a broader market.

inXile is small enough of a company -- and our "publishers" don't directly care about sales #s -- that we can create niche products. Over time we can increase our specialization in incline RPGs and we'll be able to create increasingly high quality ones, have more opportunities to innovate in terms of gameplay, etc. As much as CRPG players may be excited about the Incline, I bet we developers are even more so.

Hopefully with this wave we'll also be able to draw more attention to these kinds of games and more will realize they enjoy them.

This blog we posted about yesterday begins with pointing out the author's initial resistance to trying Planescape: Torment. I'd speculate that there are many out there who want the Incline, but don't realize it yet.

 

[karfhud]

This blog we posted about yesterday begins with pointing out the author's initial resistance to trying Planescape: Torment. I'd speculate that there are many out there who want the Incline, but don't realize it yet.

I've read this blog post earlier today and it almost perfectly reflects my own experience with Torment. Just when I got the box, all shiny and smelling fresh, I enjoyed the game very much - but nothing more. With each subsequent playthrough my own, personal experience led to me being able to interpret the storyline on a different level.

This brings me to my point - it's not necessarily true that people who just skim through the dialogues can't enjoy PS:T. It still comes across as a pretty good cRPG. There are some important concepts that are conveyed through gameplay, rather than description. Take Mourns-for-trees as an example - his quest is quite small, but tells us a lot about the universe (of course, if the player took NO to the Smoldering Corpse Bar earlier on, chances are he already knows; on the other hand, if he doesn't read...).

Summa summarum, hopefully different audiences will be able to take something away from TToN, which, in turn, will lead to the game's success. And then sequels!

 

[tuluse]

@ksaun, I appreciate the response.

Surely you see it causes some cognitive dissonance when you have been given 4 million dollars from 70 thousand people to make an RPG where reading is going to be of paramount importance and you are complaining about how people don't read anymore.

Neither your nor Fargo said anything bad really, it just seems all so unnecessary.

 

[Gozma]

You guys have got exaggerated expectations. What I want out of literariness in video games is not HIGHBROW LITERATURE but just the work you can get from competence. Like I don't think the writing in Betrayal at Krondor is any better than a '90s fantasy novel, but I still really enjoy how much texture it adds, at trivial development cost, for even crap like eating a spoiled ration or something

 

[Stainless Veteran]

You guys have got exaggerated expectations. What I want out of literariness in video games is not HIGHBROW LITERATURE but just the work you can get from competence. Like I don't think the writing in Betrayal at Krondor is any better than a '90s fantasy novel, but I still really enjoy how much texture it adds, at trivial development cost, for even crap like eating a spoiled ration or something

Yeah, because clearly BaK and PST were the same game.