Since the game's release is imminent, I figured I'd share some brief thoughts about my experience working on it. This doesn't include any interesting insider information, just fond musing, so be warned...
In April 2013, I sent Colin a rather ridiculous Codex PM that began: "I probably should've sent this while you were drunk with victory, rather than hungover, but I've never been good with timing..." Through many rambling and awkward paragraphs I proposed the possibility of my working on Torment. Because Colin is a mensch, he asked for my resume and we exchanged some pleasantries and things seemed more or less to stop there. (It turns out that Colin asked for my resume by Thomas Beekers had played and liked Primordia, and he'd learned about Primordia because of the generous coverage it had gotten here.)
Setting aside the fact that I would've had no means to contact Colin absent the Codex and he would never have heard of me but for the Codex's coverage of Primordia, it's unlikely I would've bothered to had I not stumbled across this strange and fickle place some 12 years ago. Some odd sequence of events had made me interested in making a Wasteland-style RPG, and one search or another led me here, yielding many years of bickering and pondering RPG design. What had been a fairly superficial interest in a small number of computer RPGs (PS:T, Fallout, and Dark Sun, mostly) thus turned into a more serious interest not so much in the games themselves as in the ideas behind them.
Anyway, matters might not have gotten much farther than an awkward PM except that more than a year later, in August 2014,
Infinitron and the gang gratuitously and unexpectedly offered me the Codex's invitation to the the WL2 launch party. This was itself a remarkable and wonderful experience, which I wrote about
here. Apparently, it wound up being a kind of informal job interview, which, in the rather glacial way of things, turned into a real interview in February 2015, and ultimately a part-time job around the same time. From around March 2015 to August 2016, I worked on Torment in a piecemeal fashion, putting in around 500 hours overall.
I start with this background because -- despite my frequent dismay and occasional disgust at some aspects of the Codex -- I owe a real debt of gratitude to this place for the opportunity I had, which, as I explain below and as I've said before, was a wonderful one. It's unfortunate that the Codex's reaction to the game, or perhaps more to the game's marketing, has been negative. Ultimately, I have a very narrow window into Torment and even narrower window into its marketing. I never had time (or computing power) to play much of it, and I have had even less time to follow the publicity and various cycles of unhappiness about it. I really can't say whether the game will be good or not. Even if I had played it, I wouldn't trust my judgment, which is too close to be fair and too informed to experience it like a real player. (Though I haven't played it, I do know its plot, etc.) It's weird that the same site that, with boundless enthusiasm, made it possible for me to work on the game now awaits the game's coming by sharpening hatchets, but, as I wrote in my first post on this account, "The venerable tradition of the Codex is to love the past, hope for the future, and hate the present."
As I've said many times, the one thing I can say with certainty is that Torment is a product of love and hard work. Of course, people love stupid things and work hard on complete fiascoes. Love and labor aren't sufficient for success; they might not even be necessary. But it is hard to be mad at people who commit those things to their project. Literally everyone I worked with on Torment, from Brian down, seemed to deeply love classic RPGs, to deeply love PS:T, and to deeply love this project. That love doesn't mean blindness to economic considerations and deadlines, though to the extent people cared about those things I wasn't affected because (1) I worked for very little pay (making less per hour than I did at my college jobs 18 years ago) and (2) my work was sufficiently peripheral that no one much cared how quickly or slowly it came. But game development can't run on pure naivety, so I'm sure that managers were managing as well as simply expressing their passion.
But what I didn't see, ever, was a sense of glibness or corner-cutting. I didn't hear anyone ever withdraw from a challenge with "who cares." Codexers have repeatedly suggested that the game was dumbed down, but that kind of cynicism was completely absent from every conversation I heard and had and every email exchange I read. Of course I wasn't in every conversation or on every thread, and even Homer nods. But that kind of attitude -- which is at bottom contempt for your players -- isn't something that you can turn on and off. Either you love your game and your customers, or you don't, and however charming Brian is, even he wouldn't be able to fake that kind of affection. From everything I saw, the goal was to provide the richest, most engaging experience to the players, not to cut costs with simplifications or draw in crowds by eliminating depth.
This may sound defensive, and I
am defensive because of the deep respect and admiration I feel for the people I worked with. I don't know if I can call them friends -- it's a status that always makes me uneasy to claim over someone else -- but I do know that they went out of their way to improve my writing, to enrich my enrich my experience on the project, and to help me in my other pursuits (like Primordia and Fallen Gods). They were kind and wise and generous with their time and experience. You're not necessarily a bad person if you say bad things about them, but I can't help but think you're wrong. Kevin, George, Colin, Adam, Chris, and Brian -- in fact, all the writers and artists I worked with -- never ceased to impress me with their curiosity and passion and commitment to the game. The sense of star-struck awe that permeates my report of the WL2 launch party never went away. These guys are who they seemed to be. Working with them was an opportunity of a lifetime; not
the opportunity because, candidly, writing stories for computer games isn't the be-all and end-all of life, but it was still something very special.
None of this means that the game is good. None of it means that Codexers shouldn't criticize the game, or be pissed over a cancelled interview or the lack of features discussed in Kickstarter updates. None of it even means that people shouldn't engage in the Codexian game of semi-ironically saying mean things about developers, though I think that's a pretty crappy practice and one that drives away and hurts a lot of good people. At the end of the day, complaining about things is one of the pleasures of life, and complaining hyperbolically is part of being on the Internet. And, contrary to Gandalf, I don't believe that "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom." Sometimes tearing things apart and pawing through their guts actually advances us down the path of wisdom quite a bit, and the Codex does that very well.
In a few days, I guess I'll be able to find out second-hand whether the game is good or not, whether any of what I worked on stayed close enough to the critical path to even be noticed, and whether the Codex's past exuberance or present gloom is more apropos. But before that happens and my view of my months working on Torment is unavoidably altered by the reception of what came out of it, I just wanted to note what a great experience it was, and to say thanks to everyone here who made it possible. I'm grateful for the dumb luck that got me here and from here to there.
