Brian: I can’t talk about an employee’s specific performance, but what I can do is to provide you with a factual history of things. Kevin left the project in late 2015, right? At that point, we were roughly two years into production.
This...simply isn't true. Torment didn't really start production until then end of 2014 at the earliest, and much more likely later (they were still hiring people in early 2015, and Fargo mentions in the interview that they didn't bring in some people until after WLDC came out - at the end of 2015). Would have been nice to have had some firm numbers for when the team was what size, but the interviewer kind of dropped the ball there (and still not clear when InXile moved from a 1.5 person team to a 2.5 person team).
Anyway, good to have confirmation that Saunders was let go because Fargo wanted to rush the game out rather than because of quality issues; seems to suggest
this theory was correct:
Possible scenario: Wasteland 2 delay ended up delaying the full production of Torment (
they pretty much said this), which only really got started at the end of 2014. Fargo thought that with all the pre-production and using an already built engine, they could churn out the actual game in a year (Fargo made similar comments about Wasteland 2, if you recall). July 2015, Bard's Tale IV fails to being in $4 million. Fargo tells Saunders that they need to release Torment this year, because "It's almost been three years since the Kickstarter." Saunders says that they haven't even been in full production for a year and he's not comfortable pushing out a half finished game. Fargo replaces Saunders with a "closer" who will push out Torment ASAP.
Also nice to have Fargo's confirmation that the extended pre-production period was a waste. Not sure how accurate Fargo's "It wouldn't come out until 2018 if we do this" line is; it's quite possible that he initially said "It wouldn't come out until 2017 if we do this." When Keenan came on, he said his main goal was to get the game out in 2016. Of course, if Fargo said "I fired Saunders and cut content because I didn't want to have the game delayed until 2017" now, it'd probably look a bit foolish.
Also kind of funny
how predicable their answer about the cut stretch goals was.
As for this:
Brian: Now, one of the things we like about industry publishers, at least the ones we work the best with, is that they are agile, that they don’t hold us to the specifics of the contract, that they kind of trust our judgment to do the right things in order to get the product complete and to hit the main beats we want to hit.
Yeeeeah....no. You don't sign a contract with a publisher saying that you're going to include multiplayer, then release the game without multiplayer, say, "Hey, we thought it was for the best!" and have the publisher say "All good, no problem man." I mean, hell, in all of the "Kickstarter is awesome!" vids Fargo did, he specifically talked about how it was great that he didn't need a publisher because publishers would force them to do things that they didn't want them to do. Now publishers are often because they don't? Yeah...
Also kind of bullshit to say the Codex was asking for walls of text. A few people were, others were saying that that was fucking stupid.
Anyway, nice of InXile to let the Codex talk to their PR manager. I laughed at the way he was trying to win the Codex over with "You guys really are tier 1!" bullshit - they can't possibly think such a stupid ploy would work, can they? But looking at some of the responses here it seems it did, so hats off to them.
