Interview "How to make a Torment game" - Mega-Interview with Kevin Saunders and Adam Heine at Iron Tower

[Roguey]

The content limit in your imagination, you mean?

Colin said it wouldn't be a time limit, ergo it's a content limit.

No. He said there would be an urgency mechanic. That doesn't imply that there any limits at all, because like I keep saying, there's nothing to indicate that you won't be able to return to previously visited areas.

At which point I likely will have overleveled those difficult challenges they said they'd have. So wizard-who-has-more-mp-than-hp.

 

[Infinitron]

At which point I likely will have overleveled those difficult challenges they said they'd have. So wizard-who-has-more-mp-than-hp.

You sure love jumping to conclusions.

But okay, let's try to bring this issue to CMcC's attention and clear it up once and for all.

Edit: Or maybe Adam Heine's.

 

[Maiandros]

choo choo, anyone here it?

Will be awesomz!!! Let's build some moar hype !1!!

choo choo

sick and fucking tired of all this shit..your retweets, your RSSs, your youtubes and myspaces and whatever the fuck else you use. More tools, more dependencies, less of a substance in the end. Anchors added, and something lost. Tap your brain into the intricacies of digitised nothingness and relish the nonsensic experience some more.
sad that a good number of people find such -interviews- matters worthy of discussion;

choo choo

i know..Must be early menopause..or maybe my period

choo choo

what do you see when you look in your mirror dear RPG freak?

choo choo

 

[Zeriel]

At which point I likely will have overleveled those difficult challenges they said they'd have. So wizard-who-has-more-mp-than-hp.

You sure love jumping to conclusions.

But okay, let's try to bring this issue to CMcC's attention and clear it up once and for all.

Edit: Or maybe Adam Heine's.

I think we already pretty much know the game will be easy, just like Torment was. Game's target audience is not X-COM fans, after all. This is a game about reading blocks of text.

 

[ksaun]

I like how this interview is sort of like a complement to our own interview with Colin McComb. We got one, VD got the other two.

ksaun, how long does it take you to write those walls of texts? Have you considered doing some writing for the game as well?

Calendar time or real time? =)
I don't have enough experience writing dialogue to write for this game. =)

"We’ve talked about the basic structure of our writing organizational approach before, so I’ll just mention that part briefly here"


eight paragraphs of stuff follow

Haha... by the "writing organizational approach" part I meant just the first paragraph, which was a summary of things we've said in greater detail before. The rest we hadn't explicitly talked about.

At which point I likely will have overleveled those difficult challenges they said they'd have. So wizard-who-has-more-mp-than-hp.

You sure love jumping to conclusions.

But okay, let's try to bring this issue to CMcC's attention and clear it up once and for all.

Edit: Or maybe Adam Heine's.

We intend to have an urgency mechanic, yes. A few intentionally noncommittal comments (i.e., they shouldn't be read as necessarily being relevant to Torment):

• I think that could be rather predictable and boring if the "rules" of any urgency mechanic remained constant throughout the entirety of a game.
• Returning to some previously visited areas can be an excellent way to realize the consequences of your decisions.
• When returning to a previously visited area, the inhabitants may not be the same as your last visit (including in terms of effective combat difficulty). A game's world may not have been sitting still while you roamed.

 

[jewboy]

Wow. Great interview. It's funny that some people commented about its length (even Infinitron!), but if anything it seemed too short to me. Great questions as expected from Vince. The real surpise was Kevin's answers. Very well written and well thought out.

 

[hiver]

We intend to have an urgency mechanic, yes. A few intentionally noncommittal comments (i.e., they shouldn't be read as necessarily being relevant to Torment):

• I think that could be rather predictable and boring if the "rules" of any urgency mechanic remained constant throughout the entirety of a game.
• Returning to some previously visited areas can be an excellent way to realize the consequences of your decisions.
• When returning to a previously visited area, the inhabitants may not be the same as your last visit (including in terms of effective combat difficulty). A game's world may not have been sitting still while you roamed.

That would be excellent.

How are you (as in whole team) - strictly theoretically speaking of course - feeling about some time limits in quests - but only where appropriate due to narrative and setup of those quests and without "game over" result?
Speaking of sub quests, of course - not the main quest.

 

[Monty]

Yes, great interview. As usual, some pointless try-hard responses on here.

The game sounds better and better.

 

[Adam Heine]

How are you (as in whole team) - strictly theoretically speaking of course - feeling about some time limits in quests - but only where appropriate due to narrative and setup of those quests and without "game over" result?
Speaking of sub quests, of course - not the main quest.

Favorable.

 

[Roguey]

When returning to a previously visited area, the inhabitants may not be the same as your last visit (including in terms of effective combat difficulty). A game's world may not have been sitting still while you roamed.

Level scaling. Hee.

 

[Infinitron]

When returning to a previously visited area, the inhabitants may not be the same as your last visit (including in terms of effective combat difficulty). A game's world may not have been sitting still while you roamed.

Level scaling. Hee.

Do we need to have another discussion about the difference between encounter scaling a-la BG2 and Oblivion-style "all bandits get glass armor" level scaling

Besides, even PE will have scaling of major encounters on the critical path, remember?

 

[Roguey]

Do we need to have another discussion about the difference between encounter scaling a-la BG2 and Oblivion-style "all bandits get glass armor" level scaling

Besides, even PE will have scaling of major encounters on the critical path, remember?

I don't really care about level scaling. I just know it causes kneejerk rage with some posters.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I don't really care about level scaling. I just know it causes kneejerk rage with some posters.

Of course you don't. You just have kneejerk rage about important stuff like writers you've never read working on the game.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Great interview. I though question 5, on skills, was particularly interesting for explaining some of the complexity involved in designing skills and the way the in-game usefulness of skills can affect and be affected by other aspects of the game design process and team. I know I wouldn't have thought about the potential for an artist's strength in interior designs affecting wilderness survival:

And not only can it take a lot of effort to devise these abilities and ensure they’re sufficiently propagated throughout the content, but even if you achieve this, you have this extra strain from the RPG system on the rest of the game. Whether at a conscious level or not, your area designers are molding their designs around these requirements. Maybe you find that an area of the game that you envisioned as an interior now needs to be adjusted to be an exterior area because you have a Wilderness Survival skill (Torment probably won’t have one, by the way) that hasn’t received enough love. So now you’ve altered your creative view of the game slightly. Of course there are many other factors involved – maybe with how your game is built, there are different artist skill sets required for interiors versus exteriors and your best guy is an interior guy, so you favor those. Or maybe you’re determined to have a day/night cycle with visible impact, but it’s time-consuming to get it to look right so you want to have very few exteriors so that you have the time to polish them all. There’s myriad considerations that you’re at least subconsciously weighing in your decisions and so if you’ve got skills in the mix, too, there’s just one more facet that influences decision – you lose some of the game’s focus.

.

Edit:

Also, on skipping combat, I think some of the best encounter dungeon design involves great combat that you will always be thinking about avoiding for reasons of balancing risks and rewards. Every combat encounter can be "skippable", but you are skipping for tactical reasons (to preserve resources, the risk of defeat is too high etc.).

 

[hiver]

Favorable.

Marvelous.

Level scaling. Hee.

Bad form Roquey,... bad form.
and its not funny.

Also, on skipping combat, I think some of the best encounter dungeon design involves great combat that you will always be thinking about avoiding for reasons of balancing risks and rewards. Every combat encounter can be "skippable", but you are skipping for tactical reasons (to preserve resources, the risk of defeat is too high etc.).

Even better - if skipping combat isnt just about skipping itself, but results in different consequences.

Tangentially - i had a nice idea of a "faction" or a settlement or something like it, where people will be modeled around old Japanese sense of honor and ideas of sepuku or honorary death in combat.
Therefore - spearing a life of one of them that you just defeated or even avoiding combat would result in various negative consequences.
While killing would bring positive reactions - though that doesnt mean they would automatically start to love you because thats too simplistic and doesnt correspond to such cultural mindset at all.

That would depend on narration and plots and specifics of situation you get yourself into, with that faction or settlement or cult.
But killing or not killing, engaging in combat or avoiding it would have great influence on it all.

 

[Roguey]

I don't really care about level scaling. I just know it causes kneejerk rage with some posters.

Of course you don't. You just have kneejerk rage about important stuff like writers you've never read working on the game.

Don't need to read 'em to know I won't like 'em.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Yeah, baby! Roguey don't need'ta die 'ta know she's alive!





Adam Heine Which market did you buy that kid from?

 

[janjetina]

Developers' mindset and intentions look right. They have mastered the theory, let's see what practice brings.

 

[crawlkill]

Have not finished reading, but how fucking cool is it that Adam's theme for the game is actually something that's, like...personally important to him? It's almost as if...people creating games...put pieces of themselves into them, just like people making anything else. I don't think the "Are games art?" question is important, but I also don't see how anyone can read a conversation like this and be in any doubt of it.

 

[SCO]

It's easy to doubt when people every are calling The Last of us, which is, let me remind you, a fucking zombie invasion title, the best game ever.

It's not the medium, it's the audience.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Have not finished reading, but how fucking cool is it that Adam's theme for the game is actually something that's, like...personally important to him? It's almost as if...people creating games...put pieces of themselves into them, just like people making anything else. I don't think the "Are games art?" question is important, but I also don't see how anyone can read a conversation like this and be in any doubt of it.

Well...without getting into that old debate I will say one thing which almost brought a tear to my eye while reading--the difference between Kevin and Adam's wonderfully thought-provoking responses regarding their design intent and, well, idiots like these guys:



It's nice to know there actually are people working on games who are attempting to be intellectually stimulating to any degree. Whether or not they're successful doesn't even matter as much as knowing, contrary to those fucking Bethesda clowns, there are people out there trying.

 

[Gurkog]

BGS clowns don't care as long as the dew swillin', dorrito munching hordes can drool over their controllers while mashing the 'awesome' button for a quick ego stroke. The zombie invasion is going to take over the world not by eating the living, but by being a larger physical presence.

 

[villain of the story]

Kevin: While by no means strictly linear, I expect Torment will be considerably less “open world” than some CRPGs, so we should have a pretty good sense of the PC’s power level going into each combat. This means that we should have an easier time than average in balancing the combat difficulties to provide the type of challenge we want from a design perspective.

ksaun are we to understand that game will be fairly linear?

 

[ksaun]

Kevin: While by no means strictly linear, I expect Torment will be considerably less “open world” than some CRPGs, so we should have a pretty good sense of the PC’s power level going into each combat. This means that we should have an easier time than average in balancing the combat difficulties to provide the type of challenge we want from a design perspective.

ksaun are we to understand that game will be fairly linear?

I'm hesitant to answer your question directly because I don't know precisely what implications come with your definition of "fairly linear." =) So instead I'll say some things that maybe get at what you and others may be curious about.

When the two aspects are at odds with each other, we are favoring greater reactivity over greater freedom. (Generally speaking, the more non-linear the game, the more effort it is to have robust reactivity because there are more permutations to account for. This is not an absolute.)

You will often have choices about what you do/where you go next. You won't be able to go anywhere at any time. In general, I expect players will have considerable freedom, but we'll use story-based gates (and other techniques as well) to allow us to create the high degree of reactivity we want while keeping the scope of work manageable.

 

[Infinitron]

ksaun People want comparisons. How linear will it be compared to PS:T?