Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Pre-Release Thread [ALPHA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[hiver]

Brian:

Pretty much all of my talks with the kid publisher are steeped in reality. Yes I did have publishers that offered to spend marketing dollars for me so they could have the publishing rights for Wasteland 2. I explained that we had a killer sales force of RPG players and didn't need what they were offering. And it is often expected that you should just wind your team down at the end of each game and that is a crime. It is bad for the brain trust and horrible for the families. There were many people that questioned by decision to start another KS campaign before the first one was complete but I had a logical reason and a method I used for years. I figured I would state my case to the backers and let them decide. And thankfully they agreed.

 

[hiver]

Blaine

If you dont mind, how about:

Would it be right to presume there will be more different AIs (not necessarily godlike at all) and do they plan to have all AIs as antagonists? Or will there be diversity?
Same question for various synthetics, androids and such artificial creatures. Same question about nanites or nano swarms.

-edit-

 

[Jaesun]

Monte Cook ‏@MonteJCook55m
Getting ready to jump into a Reddit AMA (ask me anything) with the inXile guys! Come ask stuff. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ao3p4/we_are_monte_cook_brian_fargo_colin_mccomb_and/ …

 

[Koschey]

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ao3p4/we_are_monte_cook_brian_fargo_colin_mccomb_and/c8z5usl

This is a good question, and I suspect that it's simply because a lot of games pander. Instead of presenting the material in a straightforward, no-nonsense way, the material is presented in a way that draws attention to it. It then feels like fan-service, like aiming toward a certain group and specifically excluding others (which, I grant, was the default anyway, but aimed at a different group).
While we have ruled out physical relationships in Torment, we do intend to leave the question of exploring relationships open, and we're going to do that without regard for gender or race. The Ninth World is a billion years in the future, and humanity has changed in that time. We'll present what we consider alternative relationships today in a simple, matter-of-fact format, and that's because that's what those relationships should be. We don't want to "earn points" for this--we want to present a logical, coherent world.
Does that answer your question?

Blaine Question for Reddit:

Exploring romantic feelings seems to be in. Besides the pandering/fan-service and RPGs devolving to dating sims, another annoyance with ingame romances is that it is easy to say 'ignore it, if you don't like', but quite often that causes involved NPCs to become dull, offering nothing else besides relationships, or leads their personal stories into a brick wall without any sense of conclusion. Imagine TNO only being able to complete the circle of Zerthimon if he were in a relationship with Dak'kon and otherwise this personal story leading nowhere. With a small(ish) cast of NPCs, this effect can be disastrous. How will inXile try to avoid this, if they try at all?

 

[Brother None]

He's been in for a while now. Some interesting stuff. For example

I suppose I could go off on a tangent about ba'atezu and tanar'ri, portals, and so on, but really that's not the heart of it. The biggest difference is this: belief versus action. In Planescape, belief shaped the planes. The factions, deities, and everything else were all about belief. Numenera is much more about action. I don't mean like Bruce Willis action (although there's plenty of action movie action too). I mean what you do.
In Numenera, characters have all these amazing artifacts and discoveries of the past all around them. But the remnants of the past also make their world extraordinarily dangerous and difficult as well. So really, the game is about what you do with what you have to try to shape the world. In other words, even though you've got all this history, it's really about the present, and shaping the future. There's a lot of choice involved there, and a lot of direct interactivity.
In Planescape, the world was what you believed it to be. In Numenera, the world is what you make it.

Also, from Colin

The PnP rules for Numenera discourage monster grinding for XP. Instead, they focus on finding solutions for problems, for completing particular tasks, and for inventive, elegant answers. We plan to continue that. In short: 1. We want to promote thoughtful, careful play, though we'll certainly allow for crazy, slapstick play. 2. Successful non-combat resolutions with antagonists. Finding secrets. Unlocking discoveries. Well, and resolutions with antagonists, if that helps to unlock narrative. 3. We're still discussing that. 4. Numenera's character development relies on three stat pools, and you build your character with a sentence: I am an adjective noun who verbs (or descriptor, type, and focus). For instance: I am a charming glaive who speaks with the dead. Each descriptor, type, and focus modifies the pools. And since I don't know how much is still under NDA, I'm going to stop talking now.

 

[hiver]

among answers to the question about romance sex slanders:

I blame RPG Codex.
It's the No.1 breeding ground for the "all RPGs have to be exact replicas of what 1980s pen & paper games were like" mentality - both with respect to game mechanics/combat, and with respect to game content/themes.

godamn right.

 

[Jaesun]

Jaesun999 4 points 1 hour ago
Question: Will the Story/Setting (towns places etc)/Lore of Torment become canon of the Numenera setting?

MonteJCook 4 points 31 minutes ago
Yes. It's all one setting.

Interesting.

 

[Captain Shrek]

among answers to the question about romance sex slanders:

I blame RPG Codex.
It's the No.1 breeding ground for the "all RPGs have to be exact replicas of what 1980s pen & paper games were like" mentality - both with respect to game mechanics/combat, and with respect to game content/themes.

godamn right.

DAMN STRAIGHT.

 

[Blaine]

Blaine

If you dont mind, how about:

Would it be right to presume there will be more different AIs (not necessarily godlike at all) and do they plan to have all AIs as antagonists? Or will there be diversity?
Same question for various synthetics, androids and such artificial creatures. Same question about nanites or nano swarms.

Done.

Exploring romantic feelings seems to be in. Besides the pandering/fan-service and RPGs devolving to dating sims, another annoyance with ingame romances is that it is easy to say 'ignore it, if you don't like', but quite often that causes involved NPCs to become dull, offering nothing else besides relationships, or leads their personal stories into a brick wall without any sense of conclusion. Imagine TNO only being able to complete the circle of Zerthimon if he were in a relationship with Dak'kon and otherwise this personal story leading nowhere. With a small(ish) cast of NPCs, this effect can be disastrous. How will inXile try to avoid this, if they try at all?

Not touching controversial romance questions, sorry. It's absolutely nothing personal, I just don't want my inbox filling up with angry feminist/brony/Biodrone rants. Reddit (at least, the "gamer" portion of Reddit, who've surely found this AmA by now) is filled with decline.

Believe me, I despise the 'drones et al in this regard too.

 

[Stabwound]

Regarding Torment trademark:

Acquired is a more accurate statement. It's important to understand trademark law a bit and its intention. The good news is that the laws are very much set up for the entrepreneur to utilize marks that are no longer in use. You can imagine that the big corporations would like to lock them down for eternity but fortunately the system is not set up that way. It's use it or lose it. In fact, there have been companies in the past who have tried to keep marks by shipping one unit into each state and that strategy was overruled in trademark litigation. After enough years marks find there way back in the public domain and then you can file for it the major countries. This is the major expense of acquiring marks.

So anyone could have registered it and made a Torment "sequel." Very tricky, Mr. Fargo.

 

[hiver]

oh right, a question about passage of time:

Will there be some specific situations, quests or subquests where passage of time will matter? Such as some sort of reasonable emergency. A settlement dying because of disease or because it is attacked by some creature or creatures or nanites.
Kidnappers demanding ransom to be delivered in a few days. An NPC being poisoned. Or lost in a very inhospitable, dangerous place.

-edited-

Blaine or anyone else that feels like it.

-thanks!


kevin on voice overs, second part is of interest since we already know the first:

No. The expense is significant (the recording, the editing, the QA), but even more importantly, you really need all of the content locked down before you can record. So it pushes out the development schedule significantly and complicates further changes to the dialogue. You can do pick-ups, but its another expense. Typically, projects are schedule-constrained, so you end up compromising the quality of the design in order to get all of the voice in.

-
As an aside -- on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, we had a trick here -- by having aliens and alien voices for some of the characters, we could change some lines even after the VO was recorded -- we turned more than one voiced character into an alien so that we could avoid the VO issue when fixing bugs.

heh.

 

[Blaine]

oh right, a question about passage of time:

Will there be some specific situations, quests or subquests where passage of time will matter? Such as some sort of reasonable emergency. A settlement dying because of disease or because of it is attacked by some creature or creatures or nanites.
Kidnappers demanding ransom to be delivered in a few days. An NPC being poisoned. Or lost in a very inhospitable, dangerous place.

Blaine or anyone else that feels like it.

Done.

 

[Blaine]

Would it be right to presume there will be more different AIs (not necessarily godlike at all) and do they plan to have all AIs as antagonists? Or will there be diversity?
Same question for various synthetics, androids and such artificial creatures. Same question about nanites or nano swarms.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/commen...rian_fargo_colin_mccomb_and/c8z9sqz?context=3

 

[hiver]

Would it be right to presume that there will be a wide variety of AIs (not necessarily godlike in any way) and do you plan for all AIs to be antagonists?
This applies to synthetics, androids, nano swarms, nanites, and other artificial creatures/intelligences.
Colin:

Probably. Though you might not recognize them as such.

What kind of half assed answer is that... cmoonn! : x

well, ok... i guess he meant synths and androids.

 

[sea]

I think the authors got swapped around there in Brother None's quote.

Anyway, from what I recall reading, they have to do all of the 3D modeling, rendering and texturing, more-or-less, get the landscapes and camera angles positioned properly and so on, and only then do the laborious hand painting touch-up on top of it.

It depends on how much you want to invest in it.

Here's a map with the Dragon Age Toolset I made in less than 5 minutes (could also be done in NWN2 etc. and many other editors out there):

This map is perfectly usable for an isometric game. There are tons of shortcuts that can be taken - objects don't have to be placed perfectly on the ground, terrain can be mostly flat and doesn't have to look natural due to fixed camera perspective, lighting can be pretty basic because it's an outdoor scene, level of detail on a small objects can be reduced significantly, etc. You can get away with using far more prefabs because you know they will be covered up and altered later on, and of course will be seen from only one angle so you can get more mileage out of a model by rotating it in a scene and using lots of copy-paste.

Although it's obviously not fair to compare this directly to the requirements involved when building your own artwork and models (big initial investment cost), and the layout itself is very simple, considering inXile's reliance on community assets, stuff purchased from the Unity store, etc. I'd say their initial cost is significantly less than if they were doing everything themselves from scratch, and obviously not every map is going to be so simple.

I'm not saying that this stuff is easy and I am probably making it seem faster than it really is - but the point remains that since you can get away with limited assets and far less detail in the 3D stage, you could make up for it much faster and less expensively in the painting stage. This is why, to me, it seems strange to say that 2D is less efficient than doing 3D, assuming they aren't going to be as minimalist and simple as possible with their 3D levels.

 

[Infinitron]

sea This "2D vs 3D: Which is more expensive?" is a question that keeps popping up on the Codex. What I suspect is that it's very much a question of workflow. That it's easier and cheaper for a large team to collaborate and iterate on a 3D environment.

Maybe we should make a dedicated thread for this. Would you like to have the honors?

 

[hiver]

Thanks for straightening my spelling too, Blaine.

 

[Kirtai]

sea This "2D vs 3D: Which is more expensive?" is a question that keeps popping up on the Codex. What I suspect is that it's very much a question of workflow. That it's easier and cheaper for a large team to collaborate and iterate on a 3D environment.

I suspect 2D also has early decision lock-in effects similar to voice acting. A 3D scene is much easier to change at the last moment than a 2D painted one.

 

[Blaine]

Thanks for straightening my spelling too, Blaine.

No problem, was necessary to ensure they understood clearly. This actually hasn't been a massively active AmA, so we've gotten a lot of responses. Lucky. I usually don't get shit, but to be honest, my questions either suck, or I don't have any.

 

[hiver]

I guess its over huh. Well, it went pretty good i think.
I guess someone will collect and arrange all of it for easy reading... maybe some line producer?

- on a side note i doubt i would have any questions or care, if this wasnt Torment.

 

[Blaine]

I guess someone will collect and arrange all of it for easy reading... maybe some line producer?

don't do that anymore.

I thought about doing it myself, but I'm far too lazy at the moment. It's not hard though, you just click on their usernames and check all of their responses for context. Best thing is to read through all of it and write a summary, which a random Redditor (probably with autism) will very likely do on his or her own, if we're patient. Sometimes they'll also do a large summary with hyperlinks.

 

[hiver]

ah, im in no big hurry. They mostly reiterated on a lot of stuff we know and the rest i details i caught most of, i think.

There should be that awesome update later on or tomorrow anyway. No rush.
Also my eyes are shutting down almost as fast as my brain. i think ill assume my anti gravity position very soon.

 

[Koschey]

Exploring romantic feelings seems to be in. Besides the pandering/fan-service and RPGs devolving to dating sims, another annoyance with ingame romances is that it is easy to say 'ignore it, if you don't like', but quite often that causes involved NPCs to become dull, offering nothing else besides relationships, or leads their personal stories into a brick wall without any sense of conclusion. Imagine TNO only being able to complete the circle of Zerthimon if he were in a relationship with Dak'kon and otherwise this personal story leading nowhere. With a small(ish) cast of NPCs, this effect can be disastrous. How will inXile try to avoid this, if they try at all?

Not touching controversial romance questions, sorry. It's absolutely nothing personal, I just don't want my inbox filling up with angry feminist/brony/Biodrone rants. Reddit (at least, the "gamer" portion of Reddit, who've surely found this AmA by now) is filled with decline.

Believe me, I despise the 'drones et al in this regard too.

Oh well, regrettable, but understandable. There is a reason I'm not on Reddit after all.

 

[Jaesun]

Brian Fargo ‏@BrianFargo3m
We are working on a #torment Kickstarter update which should go live tomorrow. We want to make sure the updates have substance.

Like pets and weather?

 

[Stabwound]

I know I want to have a social and/or combat pet whose body I can inhabit and trick NPCs and finally discover what can change the nature of a puppy.