Updated Our Journal (57): Techland Partnership
tl;dr: The mystery publishing partner is Techland!
Chris here for some important and exciting news. Last update we teased that we’re working with a new publisher on Torment. For those who have not yet seen the news that broke shortly after, we are pleased to inform you that we have partnered with Techland Publishing. You might know Techland as having developed some excellent games including Dying Light and Call of Juarez, but they have also done regional publishing and distribution on titles for many years now. With Torment, they are making the move to global publishing.
The partnership is something we are very excited about. Techland will be handling retail distribution, marketing the game, and physical backer rewards come release. This allows us to focus the vast majority of our resources on development of the game itself. They are an experienced team and are able to lend their expertise on a number of fronts, while we can spend more time working directly in the world of Torment.
Techland is offering a partnership with a full understanding of Torment's legacy and goals as a narrative-driven RPG, and they want it to succeed as much as we do. As developers themselves, Techland has a great understanding of how important it is to stick to your vision, so we will be keeping full creative control over the game. We look forward to working with them to deliver a quality release we can all be proud of.
This isn't the only component to our partnership, however. In addition to helping with the PC version of the game, we are pleased to announce that Techland is also lending its backing to bring Torment: Tides of Numenera to Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
For those of you who backed Torment and are wondering, "how does this affect the game?" the answer is rather simple, it doesn't. Torment was developed from the ground up as a successor to the legacy of the original Planescape: Torment. Those of you who have played the beta will see that it is a rich, deep RPG full of involving quests, characters and a world full of detail.
You'll also likely know that this isn't our first rodeo when it comes to consoles. With Wasteland 2: Director's Cut on Xbox and PS4, we proved that it was possible to bring all the depth of a PC style RPG to new audiences without sacrificing the tactical complexity and scope, and with Torment our approach is not changing. As developers, we're pleased to bring the game to even more players, and with the success of WL2: DC critically, commercially and among our fans, it had long since been in our plans to do a console version of Torment.
Most importantly, you might be wondering if this affects our timeline for the game beyond what we've previously said. We have great news for you there: it will not! We talked about our production timeline in the last update, and how our plans to localize and polish the game meant we are looking at an early Q1 2017 release. When looking at our production timeline, it became clear that our art, design, and engineering resources were becoming available, giving us the opportunity to bring the game to consoles without affecting the PC version and overall timeline.
Torment at Gamescom
On a related note: next month at Gamescom, we will be presenting Torment on consoles with Techland from August 18th to the 21st. If you are able to visit the convention in Cologne Germany, you can find us in the entertainment area in Hall 10.1. We're always happy to chat with fans and talk shop. Additionally, Brian will be holding a signing on August 19th, at 3 PM local time in Hall 10.1, booth B-073, so swing by if you can.
For those of you not attending, there will be many more Gamescom goodies to come, including interviews, screenshots and videos. We will be sure to showcase them in future updates and on our social media and news pages.
Torment: The Explorer's Guide
We also have some news for fans of pen and paper gaming. When the Kickstarter began, we said we'd partner with Monte Cook Games to offer a Torment Sourcebook for the Numenera tabletop game. That has now come to fruition in the form of Torment: Tides of Numenera – The Explorer's Guide by Shanna Germain.
The Torment Explorer's Guide (for short) is a deluxe sourcebook containing background in Torment's section of the Ninth World, including locations, items, characters and events from the game itself, as well as some that do not feature directly in the game but are part of the wider fiction and lore. Many of these were contributed to by our own designers and writers, and Monte Cook Games also expanded and fleshed them out for the tabletop.
The Torment Explorer's Guide comes illustrated with artwork from the game and Monte Cook Games' own artists. If you preorder the hardcover version for $40 USD and use your preorder code on the Monte Cook Games store before midnight on August 10, you will gain access to a free digital copy of the PDF, as well as
several special extras.
Meanwhile, if you prefer the digital PDF version, it is available to new backers for $15 USD. (Those backers who pledged for the digital version at $12 previously during the campaign will still keep their early discounted price.)
To get your copy, just visit the Rewards -> Shop page on the Torment site and
filter by "Monte Cook PnP". You'll see options for both the digital and hardcover Explorer's Guide available. Once again, the
preorder for the hardcover bonus is only available until midnight August 10, so get in now if you want to get the extras with it. Both versions will be available mid-August.
Brian Talks Development, Adam's New Novella
If you follow our social media channels, you may have noticed we mentioned Brian Fargo was attending Reboot Develop in Croatia earlier this year. Reboot has now posted the full talk he gave on their YouTube channel for everyone to enjoy.
The audio quality is a little choppy in spots, but if you'd like to hear some of Brian's insight about managing and embracing the chaos of game development and his role in "parenting" games, it's definitely worth a watch.
Next, we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Adam Heine's new novella, Izanami's Choice, which is published by Broken Eye Books. It's a sci-fi story about a ronin who lives in Meiji Era Japan... and fights androids. The book will be released on September 1st, but you can
pre-order it right now. More information on Izanami's Choice and other stuff can also be found on
Adam's web site.
That's all for this update. Thanks for checking in with us, and we'll have more to share on how we've been polishing and iterating on Torment as we steadily get closer to release early next year!
Signing off,
Chris Keenan