Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[FeelTheRads]

I'm just not anti-inXile or anti-any developer that aims to specialize in the genre of RPGs that I like. That transcends any personal drama for me. With regard to inXile, when Vault Dweller said this back in November 2015 (after Bard's Tale IV, before Wasteland 3):

Calling them on lies and bullshit is being "anti". Which means the only way to not be "anti" is to never say anything bad about them.

Great rhetoric, same thing that's universally accepted in all the gaming press, you fit right it.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

One could technically argue that the stretch goals were not for the overall number of companions, but for those particular companions that were added with each one (eg, Avellone and Rothfuss' companions), so cutting the game's "base" companions would be okay even though it reduces the total number of them.

That still leaves you with The Toy who was explicitly a stretch goal, though.

Nice try I guess, unfortunately arguing technicalities in this way means looking at the updates announcing those stretch goals (actually quite interesting reading all those now, full of hope and enthusiasm and talk of live orchestras and moar famous writers):

Update 9 / $3.5m goal

At $3.5M, Chris will be joining our design team. He’ll have two primary roles. First, he will be reviewing and providing feedback on all creative elements of the game, including the story, characters, and areas. His input will be invaluable as a resource to Colin in further detailing the creative vision for the game. Second, he’ll be designing and writing an eighth companion for the game,

Seems pretty clear.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Calling them on lies and bullshit is being "anti". Which means the only way to not be "anti" is to never say anything bad about them.

Great rhetoric, same thing that's universally accepted in all the gaming press, you fit right it.

To be fair, Inf is p. up front about his shilling. A quote of his I loved and regrettably didn't txt was about someone's obviously contradictory statement in the politics subforum: "it isn't cognitive dissonance; it's trolling".

For instance, all negative aspects of Torment's development are the fault of Kevin Saunders because he's no longer a "developer that aims to specialize in the genre of RPGs that I like" (I think he's busy making Overwatch knockoffs or something), not because there's any substantial reason to believe it's the case (unless we're supposed to take people like Brother None throwing him under the bus for obvious reasons seriously).

The tragedy is that admitted shilling is ineffective shilling: Inf just isn't sociopathic enough to ever "fit right in" with the gaming press as doing so would require the shilling to be purely subconscious.

 

[Infinitron]

Jim The Dinosaur II My argument isn't so much that Torment's development problems are Kevin's "fault" than that they're more his responsibility than they are Brian Fargo's. We don't have the knowledge to determine whose "fault" things are.

Brother None hasn't thrown anybody under the bus. Back in the day, he told me that he preferred ksaun's management style in Torment over the Fargo/Keenan style of management in Wasteland 2.

 

[Fairfax]

Jim The Dinosaur II My argument isn't so much that Torment's development problems are Kevin's "fault" than that they're more his responsibility than they are Brian Fargo's. We don't know whose "fault" things are.

I don't know what's your problem with Kevin. He left the project more than a year ago.

 

[Infinitron]

Jim The Dinosaur II My argument isn't so much that Torment's development problems are Kevin's "fault" than that they're more his responsibility than they are Brian Fargo's. We don't know whose "fault" things are.

I don't know what's your problem with Kevin. He left the project more than a year ago.

He was still in charge when that first companion was cut, though. If somebody wants to do some investigation into this, maybe that's a good place to start.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Brother None hasn't thrown anybody under the bus. Back in the day, he told me that he preferred ksaun's management style in Torment over the Fargo/Keenan style of management in Wasteland 2.

I thought that when you alluded to "hearing through the grapevine that Saunders ran Torment like his own personal fiefdom" and so on, that that was BN talking back when you guys were still buds.

 

[Fairfax]

Jim The Dinosaur II My argument isn't so much that Torment's development problems are Kevin's "fault" than that they're more his responsibility than they are Brian Fargo's. We don't know whose "fault" things are.

I don't know what's your problem with Kevin. He left the project more than a year ago.

He was still in charge when that first companion was cut, though. If somebody wants to do some investigation into this, maybe that's a good place to start.

The game was held back for a year and a half because of WL2 DC, which means some of the budget was wasted due to Fargo's mismanagement, not Kevin's.

 

[Infinitron]

Brother None hasn't thrown anybody under the bus. Back in the day, he told me that he preferred ksaun's management style in Torment over the Fargo/Keenan style of management in Wasteland 2.

I thought that when you alluded to "hearing through the grapevine that Saunders ran Torment like his own personal fiefdom" and so on, that that was BN talking back when you guys were still buds.

It was. I should note that the description of Torment being Kevin Saunders' "personal fiefdom" is my characterization. BN just said that Saunders was in charge and had final say on everything, and that the game was somewhat distanced from Brian Fargo's orbit.

Brian's thing was Wasteland, and Torment started out like a fully-formed external team that he hired into his company to run a parallel project. That wasn't a bad thing in BN's eyes, quite the opposite.

 

[Prime Junta]

Software is hard. Software with a team that hasn't worked together before is harder. Software with a team that hasn't worked together before and isn't collocated is even harder. Software with a team that hasn't worked together before, isn't collocated, and is spread across a dozen timezones is harder still.

Not impossible, mind. Just hard. Thing is, they chose to do it this way.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

Brian Fargo's thing was Wasteland, and Torment started out like an external team that he hired into his company to run a parallel project.

Ok, but the anti-Fargo crowd doesn't seem to be disputing this. They just seem to be saying that this distancing is reflected in the low priority he gave Torment within the studio, undercutting and eventually scuttling Saunders' good faith effort to produce a game faithful to the KS pitch.

 

[Luckmann]

I don't get what the big deal is...politicians promise me stuff all the time before elections but they rarely deliver (and I don't even get the option not to pay them).

I'll be happy if Torment is a good game. If they can deliver a decent title, whatever they add/cut/modify up to the point of release doesn't worry me.

The comparison to the politicians is a false analogy. I don't want to pay them, either.

When you can equate inXile to a democratic political party, I think we all have to agree that we're past the point of no return, and the only solution is the final solution.

Jim The Dinosaur II My argument isn't so much that Torment's development problems are Kevin's "fault" than that they're more his responsibility than they are Brian Fargo's. We don't have the knowledge to determine whose "fault" things are.

[...]

If you're arguing responsibility rather than fault, how can you not continue this process to the actual CEO? A CEO, mind you, that we know for a fact misallocated funds and resources to focus on an unrelated project just so his baby could be consolized.

Anyone that does something like that to something they purport to love is a stone-cold killer, a sociopath as likely to mislead you and manipulate you as he is to shiv you in the night, or turn his own offspring into disfigured monstrosities through invasive surgery. Does Brian Fargo have children? We should call child services.

 

[Infinitron]

Brian Fargo's thing was Wasteland, and Torment started out like an external team that he hired into his company to run a parallel project.

Ok, but the anti-Fargo crowd doesn't seem to be disputing this. They just seem to be saying that this distancing is reflected in the low priority he gave Torment within the studio, undercutting and eventually scuttling Saunders' good faith effort to produce a game faithful to the KS pitch.

Yup, and that's a claim that requires evidence. For example, it doesn't make much sense to me that the development of an experimental Director's Cut for an untested platform would take precedence over the development of an entirely new game. I was in contact with both Brother None and sea at the time and was left with the impression that the Director's Cut was a tiny project with less than 5 people working on it.

(Which would explain why it took so long to release despite not having any new content. Compare with Pillars of Eternity's expansion which introduced entirely new content yet came out in less time. That had a full-sized team working on it.)

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Brother None hasn't thrown anybody under the bus.

... said the voice from under the bus.

 

[Fairfax]

Brian Fargo's thing was Wasteland, and Torment started out like an external team that he hired into his company to run a parallel project.

Ok, but the anti-Fargo crowd doesn't seem to be disputing this. They just seem to be saying that this distancing is reflected in the low priority he gave Torment within the studio, undercutting and eventually scuttling Saunders' good faith effort to produce a game faithful to the KS pitch.

Yup, and that's a claim that requires evidence. For example, it doesn't make much sense to me that the development of an experimental Director's Cut for an untested platform would take precedence over the development of an entirely new game. I was in contact with both Brother None and sea at the time and was left with the impression that the Director's Cut was a tiny project with less than 5 people working on it.

(Which would explain why it took so long to release despite not having any new content. Compare with Pillars of Eternity's expansion which introduced entirely new content yet came out in less time. That had a full-sized team working on it.)

InXile has animators, programmers, artists and scripters alternating between projects (forgot what's the name for that). They were busy with Wasteland 2 until it was launched in September 2014, which is exactly a year and a half after the TTON Kickstarter. 18 months a low estimate, actually, because obviously some kept working on WL2 DC, which made it even worse. The writers and designers working on TTON were still on the payroll for all that period, so that's a good chunk of the budget already.

The result was clear in the Alpha, which had abysmal performance, graphics and animations (and barely any content), despite the fact it was released 28 months after the Kickstarter campaign ended. If you think that's on Kevin, you clearly have something against the guy that's not based on facts.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Seriously though how much work is one companion? One 3d model with a few animations, that's a few days of work. Then some dialogues and scripting, that's maybe 1.5 weeks. All in all, 2 man-weeks. Something in their production pipeline is very flawed if they have to cut things like that.

 

[Infinitron]

Fairfax It wasn't an alpha, it was a "systems alpha".

But yes, the protracted development of vanilla Wasteland 2 (not the Director's Cut) is something you can pin on Fargo, I guess. But what are you going to do? It's not like WL2's development was unreasonably long at two and a half years. That was a commitment inXile had to fulfill too.

Do you wish they hadn't done the Torment Kickstarter at all when they did? Maybe they shouldn't have, but at that point you're entering the realm of alternate history.

 

[Fairfax]

Seriously though how much work is one companion? One 3d model with a few animations, that's a few days of work. Then some dialogues and scripting, that's maybe 1.5 weeks. All in all, 2 man-weeks. Something in their production pipeline is very flawed if they have to cut things like that.

An MCA companion takes 2-3 months at least. However, something as simple as the Toy would take more art/animation work than anything.

Fairfax It wasn't an alpha, it was a "systems alpha".

But yes, the protracted development of vanilla Wasteland 2 (not the Director's Cut) is something you can pin on Fargo, I guess. But what are you going to do? It's not like WL2's development was unreasonably long at two and a half years. That was a commitment inXile had to fulfill too.

Do you wish they hadn't done the Torment Kickstarter at all when they did? Maybe they shouldn't have, but at that point you're entering the realm of alternate history.

Whatever happened with WL2 and InXile not having more employees is not Kevin's fault, that's my point. Kevin did make mistakes, specially during the Kickstarter, but the biggest problems (lack of time and money) were not his fault. There's no reason to pin the cut content and failed promises on him, more than a year after he was fired.

 

[Infinitron]

I should add that if I had to guess whose lack of competence was ultimately directly at fault for the game's various problems, it would more likely be Colin McComb and/or Adam Heine, both of whom hadn't worked in game development for over a decade, yet were given senior positions and allowed to work remotely.

(But, who gave them those roles. )

 

[Fairfax]

I should add that if I had to guess whose lack of competence was ultimately directly at fault for the game's various problems, it would more likely be Colin McComb and/or Adam Heine, both of whom hadn't worked in game development for over a decade, yet were given senior positions and allowed to work remotely.

(But, who gave them those roles. )

That remains to be seen. If the final product is not good, then I'll agree that all 3 should be blame (along with Fargo).

 

[Prime Junta]

Blame in software projects is a funny thing. Sometimes a project gels right off the bat and a handful of people will get crazy shit done in no time flat. Other times you get the best people together, give them a cool idea everyone's stoked about, and chaos ensues. In the postmortem it's really hard to figure out exactly what went wrong and where; usually the best you can do is point out when it first became apparent that things aren't okay and drastic action should've been taken. That's usually pretty early, but if the project doesn't have a curmudgeon in it everybody tends to pretend it's all cool until they've actually driven off the cliff.

Whoever takes the blame is a different matter of course.

In this particular case, we can be pretty sure that the problems were known to the team and the great Brian quite some time before ksaun got axed. Nobody fires a project manager at the first sign of something going wrong. The T:ToN train will have been well off the rails by then.

Again, the thing that really pissed me off was that all this time inXile has been happily pushing out Kickstarter updates and giving interviews, pretending that all is well in Greater Garravia, when really it wasn't. They ought to have come clean immediately.

 

[throwaway]

Not to mention the innumerable updates saying how good was the ultra long (do we know how it compares to other games of similar scale?) pre-production period was for the game.

 

[Irenaeus]

I don't get what the big deal is...politicians promise me stuff all the time before elections but they rarely deliver

The deal is not being a cuck, you flaming faggot.

Speaking of politicians, ever heard of Donald J. Trump?

 

[Irenaeus]

Kevin did make mistakes, specially during the Kickstarter

Which were?

 

[Fairfax]

Kevin did make mistakes, specially during the Kickstarter

Which were?

• As many people have mentioned before, having a Lead Designer in Thailand and a Creative Lead in Detroit is not particularly efficient. You also have to fly them over a few times at least, so it's an added cost that you wouldn't have otherwise. This is made worse by the fact they hadn't worked on an actual game in over a decade. Kevin had already worked with Ziets as Lead Designer on MOTB, so it always seemed weird to me that he wasn't picked. Sure, Colin and Adam worked on PS:T, but that was mostly MCA's baby anyway.
• Putting the combat system up to a vote in the middle of the campaign. People are passionate about that stuff, and it was easily the most controversial moment of the entire campaign. The way the poll was handled, changing the descriptions because TB was losing, going back on their word about staying neutral, etc was just a mess. They should've decided that before the Kickstarter.
• Choosing 2D x 3D was another quite controversial moment. Considering it wasn't even voted by backers and they already knew about PoE beforehand, why make that decision in the middle of the campaign? Pre-rendered should've been a no-brainer anyway.
• Adding Pat Rothfuss as a stretch goal. The guy has a terrible work ethic and is more expensive than regular game designers. It's even worse in hindsight because his companion is lame as fuck.
• Adding Brian Mitsoda as a stretch goal. AP was in development hell when he left, and I don't get what people saw in Dead State. We still haven't heard about his contribution to the game, so it's possible it was a waste of money.
• 7 novellas. Why so many? That's a lot of resources that could've been spent improving and adding content to the actual game.
• Extremely ambitious stretch goals. I really doubt the Castoff's Labyrinth will be nearly as big as in the concept art.

Don't get me wrong, though. As the numbers show, he did a lot more things right than he did wrong, but it could've been handled better. It was before any of the KS RPGs came out so people didn't know better (myself included), but nowadays many of these things would be considered red flags and would hurt the campaign (and the game).