Interview Torment: Tides of Numenera Postmortem Interview with Colin McComb and Adam Heine at Eurogamer

[karfhud]

The Hobbit films are obvious Peter Jackson fuckups, not made-by-committee fuckups.

Are you sure? After del Toro left the Hobbit, Jackson jumped in and basically had to start filming immediately, and that sounded to me like studio pressure, rather than a conscious decision on the director's part.

That's what's missing in T:ToN (and lots of other games too): the feeling of a coherent vision. It's a potluck, not a set dinner.

Kind of agree; I didn't feel the story coming together in Sagus Cliffs, but once I reached the bloom, things started to fall into place. I loved that part (I guess you could consider it a second half, although unsure whether it's actually 50% of total game time).

The difference is that in PS:T’s writing you have a narrative suggestion that is subtly presented in order to entice you to explore the game world to find more about yourself. “Dude, you just woke up in a fucking mortuary. There is something written on your back. It seems you are a fucking corpse? What the hell happened to you?”. That's suggestive writing, because a lot of interesting things are suggested to you, but you need to discover them by yourself. In T:ToN you are railroaded by a shitty premise, which gives you no motivation at all to care about the character or the game world. “Hey player, you are a castoff of the Changing God. Everyone in the game world knows that you are a castoff, because they are common as dirt. You need to fix that machine to move forward”. It’s patronizing in the sense that treats the player as a retard that can’t play cRPGs and needs the narrative premise to be simplistic and spoon-fed to him.

"Dude, you just fell from the sky. You're a castoff, but it's also possible you're the Changing God. You'll need to fix that machine."

vs.

"Dude, you just woke on the slab. You're basically a zombie, with some weird tattoos on your back. You'll need to find that journal."

It's all a matter of how you put it. I found it pretty cool that you learn your objective - fix the Resonance Chamber - right at the start and it's something that pushes you forward through the entire game, as you slowly learn what that machine actually does. Castoffs are common, but that's not a bad thing in itself, is it? It just says something about the Changing God himself, and it's interesting to see how all these different castoffs decided to utilize their gifts, what they think of the Changing God himself. Notice, that even though you get the idea about your brethren and the Changing God fairly quickly, it's but a general idea and what you learn later on in the game broadens that knowledge a whole lot.

Expecting a game written on the level of Planescape: Torment is a bit naive. It was developed by much younger devs, who could devote a lot more time and thought to it; it was an early magnum opus (in writing, not in general, I hope) by a very driven MCA. It was placed in a well-documented setting. T:ToN is about repeating certain approaches, a certain ambiance, but it has to be regarded as its own thing, really.

 

[Jokzore]

One only cares into pushing the player foward and the other is more passive trying to lure the player on its mistery first, one has patience and the other doesn't

This hits the nail on the head for me. Numenera is so desperate shove its non-mystery down your throat it will actively impede whatever you're trying to do in order to give you more non-answers and hints to questions you don't ask or care about. Planescape let you unRavel its plot at your own pace and piece it together yourself, it also helped that the entire thing wasn't revealed in whats literally the first 2 minutes after tutorial and that every pretentious philosophical point isn't forced on you with all the subtlety of a brick to the face rather than letting you make up your own mind(i think thats what they mean by PST is suggestive and NumNuma patronising).

The other major problem I have is the writing, its glaringly inconsistent, like reading a really good short story with highschool level fanfiction spliced in to make it a novel. Numenera markets itself saying it has 1.2mil. words but as someone else mentioned , thats just a sign that they were in a desperate need of an editor. The game vomits words at you and walls you off from itself with huge tides(HA!) of descriptors and unnecessary adjectives , all shallow , a huge amount written and a precious little actually said.

edit: fixing my illiteracy one typo at a time

 

[Azrael the cat]

In fairness, it's really fucking bizarre how the Codex hivemind forgot that it spent a solid 18 months raving about how 'more text' was a key requirement of good crpgs, and shitting on Bioware for saying that they wanted to minimise writing, and that this wasn't what 'show don't tell' means (which is true), and how much they missed the text descriptions when you click on stuff because it conveys stuff that visuals can't communicate, and kids these days are awful because they lack the patience for reading and....

That's gotta be the laziest bait i'v seen in a long time.

Great artist are always capable to reproduce their genius and have not just one hit, because they understand the art.

Bullshit. Ability to create Good Shit is a limited and non-renewable resource. What we call "great artists" just had a bit more creative mana points to spend on more than one "hit". It still doesn't regenerate when they sleep, and blue potions don't really help (nor do yellow or transparent, there are persistent rumors about the green variety though, but I believe it to be urban myth).

Great artists are never satisfied with their work, when complacency takes hold shit like TTON ends up happening

-1:26:50 Would you do anything differently? Short answer: nope!

Obviously it's bait, and yes it's lazy. Busy with RL stuff atm and can't be assed addressing the issue myself.

But there WAS a solid 18 months (and whilst it was a couple of years ago, it was never really retracted prior to TTON's release either) of demanding more text, and more text descriptions, and I honestly think that this influenced the TTON developers.

I'm going to remain lazy on this. Laziness isn't a moral vice on internet forums, it just means you've got other shit to do. But the point stands that the Codex has a degree of complicity in this, and we need to either:

1. Take responsibility for being wrong, and why we went down the wrong path (just like me and many other 1998-2002 storyfags did, by admitting that we allowed a small number of amazingly well-written and thematic games to influence us into thinking that such 'games as art' could be produced on a regular basis, and that we overlooked all the Bioware-esque shit, furries and waifu shenanigans, and completely failed to realise that developers might use that shit as an excuse for shit gameplay).

OR, if we didn't get it wrong for years, then

2. Stop pretending that we never championed the advantages of "text descriptors for every object you can click on", or that we derided Bioware for catering to illiterates, or that we made numerous posts expressing disappointment at MCA's belief that PS:T had too much text, or that we hand-waived the same criticisms we're making now as the views of illiterate console peasants. And then actually elucidate the difference between the "text-heavy crpgs" we were demanding (again, this is the 'we didn't get it wrong and then demand that developers cater to our shitty wrong beliefs' option), and the flaws that we see in TTON.


I'm not going to do it because, as you said, right now I'm fucking lazy (aka 'have work to do'). But some of you more active participants in this discussion might want to consider doing so.

 

[an Administrator]

You can never satisfy a storyfag

 

[Jokzore]

2. Stop pretending that we never championed the advantages of "text descriptors for every object you can click on", or that we derided Bioware for catering to illiterates, or that we made numerous posts expressing disappointment at MCA's belief that PS:T had too much text, or that we hand-waived the same criticisms we're making now as the views of illiterate console peasants. And then actually elucidate the difference between the "text-heavy crpgs" we were demanding (again, this is the 'we didn't get it wrong and then demand that developers cater to our shitty wrong beliefs' option), and the flaws that we see in TTON.

Theres a big difference between the classic '' text heavy crpgs '' and their pale imitations. The problem isn't that theres a lot of reading to be done but rather that nothing is being said, they have text for text sake.

 

[Lurker King]

Stop pretending that we never championed the advantages of "text descriptors for every object you can click on", or that we derided Bioware for catering to illiterates, or that we made numerous posts expressing disappointment at MCA's belief that PS:T had too much text, or that we hand-waived the same criticisms we're making now as the views of illiterate console peasants. And then actually elucidate the difference between the "text-heavy crpgs" we were demanding (again, this is the 'we didn't get it wrong and then demand that developers cater to our shitty wrong beliefs' option), and the flaws that we see in TTON.

PS:T is a niche cRPG.

PS:T fans enjoyed its writing because its good writing, not because it has a lot of text.

MCA’s comments about excessive text were accompanied by suggestions that we should look for another forms of expression, which came across as graphic whorism.

The same people who enjoyed PS:T, shit-all-over PoE writing, and the reason for that was the walls of text devoid of anything interesting. The writing was on the wall for everyone to see: “Don't do this if you don’t have anything interesting to say”.

InXile did what they always do: the isolated themselves from feedback and delivered a terrible game.

Blaming Codexers for T:ToN's stupid over-descriptive writing is disingenuous, to say the least.

You could argue that codexers had this stupid misconception that a Torment successor would be good without combat, but to insist that we must take responsibility for this is naïve, because InXile developers never cared about what we have to say in the first place.

 

[Azrael the cat]

The Hobbit films are obvious Peter Jackson fuckups, not made-by-committee fuckups.

Are you sure? After del Toro left the Hobbit, Jackson jumped in and basically had to start filming immediately, and that sounded to me like studio pressure, rather than a conscious decision on the director's part.

That's what's missing in T:ToN (and lots of other games too): the feeling of a coherent vision. It's a potluck, not a set dinner.

Kind of agree; I didn't feel the story coming together in Sagus Cliffs, but once I reached the bloom, things started to fall into place. I loved that part (I guess you could consider it a second half, although unsure whether it's actually 50% of total game time).

The difference is that in PS:T’s writing you have a narrative suggestion that is subtly presented in order to entice you to explore the game world to find more about yourself. “Dude, you just woke up in a fucking mortuary. There is something written on your back. It seems you are a fucking corpse? What the hell happened to you?”. That's suggestive writing, because a lot of interesting things are suggested to you, but you need to discover them by yourself. In T:ToN you are railroaded by a shitty premise, which gives you no motivation at all to care about the character or the game world. “Hey player, you are a castoff of the Changing God. Everyone in the game world knows that you are a castoff, because they are common as dirt. You need to fix that machine to move forward”. It’s patronizing in the sense that treats the player as a retard that can’t play cRPGs and needs the narrative premise to be simplistic and spoon-fed to him.

"Dude, you just fell from the sky. You're a castoff, but it's also possible you're the Changing God. You'll need to fix that machine."

vs.

"Dude, you just woke on the slab. You're basically a zombie, with some weird tattoos on your back. You'll need to find that journal."

It's all a matter of how you put it. I found it pretty cool that you learn your objective - fix the Resonance Chamber - right at the start and it's something that pushes you forward through the entire game, as you slowly learn what that machine actually does. Castoffs are common, but that's not a bad thing in itself, is it? It just says something about the Changing God himself, and it's interesting to see how all these different castoffs decided to utilize their gifts, what they think of the Changing God himself. Notice, that even though you get the idea about your brethren and the Changing God fairly quickly, it's but a general idea and what you learn later on in the game broadens that knowledge a whole lot.

Expecting a game written on the level of Planescape: Torment is a bit naive. It was developed by much younger devs, who could devote a lot more time and thought to it; it was an early magnum opus (in writing, not in general, I hope) by a very driven MCA. It was placed in a well-documented setting. T:ToN is about repeating certain approaches, a certain ambiance, but it has to be regarded as its own thing, really.

It just struck me. You know what would have enormously improved the basic plot of TTON, without much alteration in dialogue?

Make it ambiguous whether or not you're the Changing God's last castoff.

Keep the Calliste/Alligern immediate explanation - they've based their life's work around the search for the Changing God, so of course that's going to be their first and nigh-unshakeable explanation.

But you're a star that's crashed to earth FFS. You could be a new, entirely different god. You could be the Sorrow made manifest, with the game's existing incarnation of the Sorrow trying desperately to re-absorb you because even as a primal entity, it's lived for so long (and experienced the beauty of living) that it doesn't want to fade to death just because you, Sorrow upgrade 2.0, are so much more adept at achieving its original aims. You could be the Changing God itself, having deliberately erased his own memories in order to throw the Sorrow off the scent. You could have nothing to do with any of it, and just be some random-guy-done-good

Spoiler

(I'm thinking of the villain in Captain America: Civil War the film, where they're so focussed on stopping whatever 'great evil plot' is at hand, that it never occurs to them that it's just some random guy, a competent Slovakian intelligence officer but nothing more than that, not capable of bringing himself to torture the Hydra guy beyond basic water-boarding, seeking revenge for something they didn't even notice that they'd done)

who has given himself extremely temporary immortality at the cost of his memory, in order to get revenge for something that none of the major players even realised they caused.

Make that last one a 'special bonus' possibility for those who explore everything and then link their findings together in an intelligent way.

And then, after all of those possibilities are revealed, at the 2/3 mark, kill/destroy the one person/evidence that could tell the character which possibility is right. Players who know that it's at least possible that they have nothing to do with the Changing God still get a decent reward for that discovery, as it puts them in a very different decision for all choices from that point. It's one thing to not know which side you were on in a eons-long war. It's anothing entirely to know that there's at least a realistic possibility, a minimum 1/4 chance, that you've got nothing top do with any of it. And that you'd better hurry the fuck up and get your revenge (i.e. choose what would normally be the ultra-ultra-crazy-idiot-evil option of killing every major character involved in the Changing God v Sorrow conflict) because your immortality could run out any minute.

The player can't know whether that 4th theory is right, any more than the others. So it forces the player to think about whether the Changing God, Sorrow and all their mortal enablers should be wiped from existence, wwith the knowledge that there's at least one plausible perspective in which it might be morally justified.

 

[Lord Azlan]

Fuck merecasters man. Fuck em

When I played these reminded me of the early games such as Colossal Cave.

But with worse graphics.

 

[existential_vacuum]

main story is dissociated from the game world, companions and quests

Again, a lie. Almost everything you do in the game is tied together (1). It's weird I even have to explain this. Most of the companions (except Rhin, for a reason) have something to say about your being a Castoff and comment on the events happening while you try to uncover who you are (2) and how you can escape the loop. The game world is wrapping around the main story, almost everywhere you go and everyone you talk to has at least some association, direct or indirect, with the Changing god and his castoffs (1).

Hold on a sec. Let's go over what you said.
1.
Changing God has been around for how long?

Over hundreds of centuries, he has taken many different forms, both male and female, aligned with different Tides, effectively leading many different lives, earning him the appellation "the Changing God".

How many bodies he inhabited? As stated in the game itself

"never stayed longer than 10-20 years"

Correct me, if I'm wrong. So that's a lot of bodies -> a lot of castoffs. I'm not that familiar with Numanuma settings outside of TToN, but Earth is a small place for approx. 10000 castoffs + timetravel. Of fuckin' course everyone talks about castoffs or CG. Also, the Endless War.
2.
Trying to uncover who you are? That's not even in the game. The game excludes The Last Castoff until you are suddenly THE CHOSEN ONE. The plot revolves around Resonance Chamber for 1/2 and then around finding the First/Mazzof and shifts again to Resonance Chamber. You don't go and uncover who you are. It is stated within first minutes of the game.

"Main story dissociated from quests"? Pure bullshit, in fact the opposite is true. For instance,

Spoiler

The Ghostly woman starts out as a side quest and gradually turns out to be greatly tied into the main story (3)

3.

Spoiler

Well, big fuckin' deal. This plottwist and tie in to the plot is lame because there are no clues whatsoever, there is no build up. It is just dropped on the player.

 

[karfhud]

3.

Spoiler

Well, big fuckin' deal. This plottwist and tie in to the plot is lame because there are no clues whatsoever, there is no build up. It is just dropped on the player.

Spoiler

There are two clues that I remember: a) attack of the Tabaht in her memories, by that time we know that the Changing God fought off the Tabath in the city; b) the most striking clue, elements of her fathom are very similar to the hidden lab of the Changing God.

 

[existential_vacuum]

3.

Spoiler

Well, big fuckin' deal. This plottwist and tie in to the plot is lame because there are no clues whatsoever, there is no build up. It is just dropped on the player.

Spoiler

There are two clues that I remember: a) attack of the Tabaht in her memories, by that time we know that the Changing God fought off the Tabath in the city; b) the most striking clue, elements of her fathom are very similar to the hidden lab of the Changing God.

Spoiler

Gonna agree with the machine in the lab. But when I was playing the Sagus part, I actually thought CG found the machine.
Tabaht clue is sorta far fetched but still doable.
I still don't think the twist itself is good though

 

[karfhud]

3.

Spoiler

Well, big fuckin' deal. This plottwist and tie in to the plot is lame because there are no clues whatsoever, there is no build up. It is just dropped on the player.

Spoiler

There are two clues that I remember: a) attack of the Tabaht in her memories, by that time we know that the Changing God fought off the Tabath in the city; b) the most striking clue, elements of her fathom are very similar to the hidden lab of the Changing God.

Spoiler

Gonna agree with the machine in the lab. But when I was playing the Sagus part, I actually thought CG found the machine.
Tabaht clue is sorta far fetched but still doable.
I still don't think the twist itself is good though

Spoiler

By no means, I'm not saying it's the most well executed twist; I've been wondering if it'd actually hurt the story in any way if they revealed that CG had a daughter (maybe not in an in-your-face kind of way, but rather "there are rumours...") earlier, before the Ghostly Woman quest.

Good talk!

 

[existential_vacuum]

Spoiler

By no means, I'm not saying it's the most well executed twist; I've been wondering if it'd actually hurt the story in any way if they revealed that CG had a daughter (maybe not in an in-your-face kind of way, but rather "there are rumours...") earlier, before the Ghostly Woman quest.

Good talk!

Spoiler

Early reveal would have provided the motivation for CG at the very least; open up more dialogue with Ghostly Woman and other Castoffs, who could have been used as a source of information on the matter.
It also might have been less devastating if there was something more to the story after the reveal. Like a 3 act, but we'll never know.

 

[MRY]

Fuck merecasters man. Fuck em

When I played these reminded me of the early games such as Colossal Cave.

o.O

Have you actually played any early text adventures? They couldn't be more different! Early text adventures were sprawling dungeon crawls with quasi-simulationist puzzles and no narrative at all. It's really only the Twine games of the past few years that bear any resemblance to the Meres. The tendency to call these things "text adventure" is exasperating, but marginally tolerable when I pretend that it's because people are just saying "they are adventures, and they are text" but seriously, they bear no resemblance to "text adventures" as a game genre. It would be like saying that the battles in AOD reminded you of Civilization because they're both turn-based strategy. :shakefist:

(This is not a defense of the Meres, just a lament for proper respect for old text adventures.)

 

[Lord Azlan]

Fuck merecasters man. Fuck em

When I played these reminded me of the early games such as Colossal Cave.

o.O

Have you actually played any early text adventures? They couldn't be more different! Early text adventures were sprawling dungeon crawls with quasi-simulationist puzzles and no narrative at all. It's really only the Twine games of the past few years that bear any resemblance to the Meres. The tendency to call these things "text adventure" is exasperating, but marginally tolerable when I pretend that it's because people are just saying "they are adventures, and they are text" but seriously, they bear no resemblance to "text adventures" as a game genre. It would be like saying that the battles in AOD reminded you of Civilization because they're both turn-based strategy. :shakefist:

(This is not a defense of the Meres, just a lament for proper respect for old text adventures.)

Yes. Fond memories of Zorks and Colossal Cave.

My point (not very well made) is that I don't think the Meres are so much an upgrade from these games - less in fact.

I understand the Meres are stories whilst the early text adventures were more akin to puzzles but I found most of the Meres really difficult to understand or appreciate the settings or backgrounds they were based in.

I was hoping as the game came to an end all the Meres would fall into place and I would have a supreme "Ahhhhh" moment where all the Meres tied into the various strands - but that did not happen to me.

Could happen on a second playthrough..

The Meres were missing context - I would love to have seen a map of the world so the locations made sense to something at least - but many felt abstract..

My first home pc was a BBC B - so around 1981 - £400

 

[MRY]

Bah, people need to just criticize without using adventure games as an epithet. "PS:T is an adventure game"! "Meres are text adventures"! Humbug! :D

That's a legit computer though. And legitimate grievances re: Meres.

 

[almondblight]

"We were doing so well but then Fargo/Keenan had to go snatch defeat from the jaws of victory" sounds pretty unlikely.

How long was Saunders actually running things though? Yeah, for the 20 months of pre-production, but I'm not sure how much that counts for. Saunders was out within a few months of actual production starting, and before he left we already were seeing multiple rounds of cuts that were screwing up some of the things that were planned (and given what's happened since, it seems Fargo/Keenan are cool with cuts). If Fargo was managing WL2 and letting things happen as they were with T:TON at the beginning (at least, those are what the rumors suggest), and then became actively involved with T:TON later on, the most likely time for this would have been after the Director's Cut came out. Keenan too, I imagine; I doubt he was just twiddling his thumbs for a year at InXile and then suddenly became the director of Torment.

Who knows, the whole thing ends up being a kremlinology effort. But it seems at least possible that after the production delay, Fargo wasn't interested in giving the project the development time needed to implement pre-production plans, and wanted something that could be developed in 1.5-2 years total (total production time given Keenan's original plan for a 2016 release). He started getting involved and numerous cuts were made (hence the reports of cuts coming months into development), and the whole effort lead to a clash that ended up seeing the original lead pushed out in favor of someone prioritizing a quick release. It's worth noting that the Keenan/Fargo management style is both something that seems to explain many of Torment's problems and something that a bad manager thinks would get things done faster (Fargo pretty much said as much during WL2 production).

I mean, at the very least you have Fargo deciding on a very short production schedule of 1.5-2 years that would be problematic for most games, and particularly problematic for one were you're having to redo things because of cuts made halfway through production and where you fire the project lead halfway through. And you have the Fargo/Keenan screwups like cutting stretch goals and trying to hide it, console ports, and taking the original OK-ish portraits and replacing them with garbage. Maybe Fargo & Co were sitting back and letting Saunders do whatever he wanted for the few months he was there, and he massively screwed up. But it seems at least possible that the people responsible for a lot of Torment's issues - and responsible for a production schedule that seemed to guarantee problems - might not have been entirely benevolent forces during those first few months.

 

[Infinitron]

Wasteland 2 came out September 2014. Saunders left October 2015. That's more than a few months.

 

[Grauken]

Thing is, would the cut material have made for a better game? I somehow doubt it. Now Saunders leading from start to finish, that might have been a gamechanger.

 

[almondblight]

Wasteland 2 came out September 2014. Saunders left October 2015. That's more than a few months.

It came out October 2014. [Edit: I'm wrong, September 2014; they were still working on the Director's Cut until October 2015] It was still being patched and having it's console version worked on in November 2014. [Edit: still working on the DC until Nov. 2015] Torment was still raising funds for stretch goals in October of 2014, and in December of 2014 we got the update stating that "Over the last couple months, our highest priority has been ramping up Torment’s new team members and welcoming them over from their duties on Wasteland 2."

[Edit: Also not that one of the new hires is scheduled to start at the end of December, and they're still looking for new team members to hire in this update.]

Saunders was out by October 2015. Someone named Infinitron noticed that Saunders' blog indicated he was kicked off the project in September 2015.

So he might have been there for 12 months of production at the high end of things, but more likely he was there for 9-11 months of production considering the delay in moving people over to the new project (Edit: and finishing hiring new people) and the delay between Saunders leaving and the announcement that he was leaving.

 

[Infinitron]

It came out October 2014.

That's the Director's Cut newspost from 2015.

Torment was still raising funds for stretch goals in October of 2014, and in December of 2014 we got the update stating that "Over the last couple months, our highest priority has been ramping up Torment’s new team members and welcoming them over from their duties on Wasteland 2."

Oh come on, this is some silly hair-slitting. Ramping up the team is part of the production, and if it's "the last couple of months", then it started in October at the latest. (In reality, Torment was probably ramping up even before Wasteland 2 was released since most of the work was done)

Saunders was out by October 2015. Someone named Infinitron noticed that Saunders' blog indicated he was kicked off the project in September 2015.

That's my theory, but his LinkedIn says October: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevindsaunders/

So he might have been there for 12 months of production at the high end of things, but more likely he was there for 9-11 months of production considering the delay in moving people over to the new project and the delay between Saunders leaving and the announcement that he was leaving.

Whatever. Not that it matters anyway. I don't agree with your total minimization of the preproduction period (which btw also included a period of "limited production" during which the Bloom was created).

And what about George Ziets, anyway? Kevin was there almost three years (see LinkedIn), he must have left a clear path forward that a veteran like George would have known how to follow. Everything wouldn't just fall apart the second he was gone.

 

[almondblight]

That's the Director's Cut newspost from 2015.

Yeah, you're right. That's the DC and it was released only after Saunders was fired (Oct. 2015, with an update in Nov. 2015). So that means it's even more likely there was a long delay between the release of WL2 and the start of production of Torment (some people were obviously still working on post-release content for WL2 and the WL2 DC). Or people who were working on Torment only actually working half the time on Torment and working on WL2 content the other half of the time. Though on the other hand, maybe that means Keenan wasn't involved in Torment until Oct. 2015. Or maybe he had a foot in both ponds.

Also, Bards Tale IV was announced in Jan. 2015. So in Jan 2015, you have people starting to work on Bard's Tale prep, WL2 DC and post-release content, and Torment just starting production. (When did InXile go from 1.5 teams to 2.5 teams?)

As for the importance of pre-production - yeah, Fargo seems to think you can just set everything up in pre-production and cut down actual production time. That seems like insanity to me, a foolish effort to cut corners. Pre-production isn't a substitute for production, and no one else treats its like that. I think the results indicate this to be the case as well (and the fact that Fargo's production schedules keep being off).

And what about George Ziets, anyway? Kevin was there almost three years (see LinkedIn), he must have left a clear path forward that a veteran like George would have known how to follow. Everything wouldn't just fall apart the second he was gone.

Doesn't everyone say Ziets' work was the best part of the game? Also keep in mind that a month or two before Saunders was out, Ziets was talking about all the problems he had to fix from the multiple rounds of cuts. How useful is pre-production when you get the order to take a chainsaw to everything halfway through development?

 

[DeepOcean]

2. Stop pretending that we never championed the advantages of "text descriptors for every object you can click on", or that we derided Bioware for catering to illiterates, or that we made numerous posts expressing disappointment at MCA's belief that PS:T had too much text, or that we hand-waived the same criticisms we're making now as the views of illiterate console peasants. And then actually elucidate the difference between the "text-heavy crpgs" we were demanding (again, this is the 'we didn't get it wrong and then demand that developers cater to our shitty wrong beliefs' option), and the flaws that we see in TTON.

You are assuming the story of NumaNuma would be any better with fewer words on it. That isn't the point, if some Biodrone decided to make a wall of text about how Tali sweat is like, it wouldn't matter if he used 10 words or 500 words to express his creepy degeneracy, the content of the text would suck any way, shape or form he used. We are complaining not because we are too lazy or moronic to read just that a 10 word torture is less painful than a 500 words torture.

 

[Lord Azlan]

One of the problems I have with the developers is that they thought they could rediscover something they did in their youth.

Anyone who is basically past 30 now knows how stupid that is.

Avellone goes on about how he tried to do the opposite and go against so many gaming norms of the time.

A game where you could not die. Where succubus was the kindest person in the game. Zombies that don't kill you. Probably loads more that I never even realised since I only played PST last year.

Were the Tides games designers equally brave or did they try and copy PST and make the game PST squared?

If they were brave like Avellone, maybe they would have made a game where the hero was the weakest character in the game like Breakalot Samuel Jackson guy in the film Unbreakable.

Maybe the game tracks your death and each time that happens you lose a stat or skill.

Maybe you could only recruit animals to your party. There are a few interesting ones in the game.

Maybe getting eaten by cannibals and losing some HP is the only way to solve that quest.

If you can change reality in Meres why can't you kill yourself or bring someone back to life.

Or why is the hero the hero, why can't someone else be - a npc or companion

It seems the brave choices they made, like the implementation of Effort, basically made the game easy did not push any boundaries like PST did.

Forget the Planescape Universe for a moment. Forget C&C and story - what did PST do? Create a gaming experience like no other by going against many norms of the day.

 

[Darkzone]

One of the problems I have with the developers is that they thought they could rediscover something they did in their youth.

Anyone who is basically past 30 now knows how stupid that is.

Avellone goes on about how he tried to do the opposite and go against so many gaming norms of the time.

1) A game where you could not die. Where succubus was the kindest person in the game. Zombies that don't kill you. Probably loads more that I never even realised since I only played PST last year.
Were the Tides games designers equally brave or did they try and copy PST and make the game PST squared?
2) If they were brave like Avellone, maybe they would have made a game where the hero was the weakest character in the game like Breakalot Samuel Jackson guy in the film Unbreakable.
3) Maybe the game tracks your death and each time that happens you lose a stat or skill.
Maybe you could only recruit animals to your party. There are a few interesting ones in the game.
4) Maybe getting eaten by cannibals and losing some HP is the only way to solve that quest.
5) If you can change reality in Meres why can't you kill yourself or bring someone back to life.
6) Or why is the hero the hero, why can't someone else be - a npc or companion
7) It seems the brave choices they made, like the implementation of Effort, basically made the game easy did not push any boundaries like PST did.

Forget the Planescape Universe for a moment. Forget C&C and story - what did PST do? Create a gaming experience like no other by going against many norms of the day.

Basically this is a good post, but i would like to add some things and show you some mistakes in this very loose set of thoughts.
1) You have forgotten the Cranium Rats, which gave the "go in cellar and kill rats" a new spin. (One of the best things.)
2) Not necessary weakest, this would be a lose on the hero, and has never functioned. Ronal the barbarian is one nice example for this failure. Heroes have to be extraordinary, but they do not necessarily have to fit in into the enviroment (outsider and wanderer (the nameless) trope).
3) This would be the normal cause and death would be avoided by load and save abuse. Death should alter things, but not the protagonist.
4) Sacrifice of the hero as a mean for a desired result is an very old concept and is the major part of the greek drama.
5) A very nice thought.
6) In Mad Max films Max Rockatansky is mostly the observer. But cRPG is a medium that requires player input for progression, and by omniting the player you make a more story based game, where the player becomes an observer with limited direct influence on the world.
7) This is the problem of Numenera, like the combat.