Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Lacrymas]

This is actually a really good question. I'll be honest. I gave it a real shot. I really tried. But then I stopped, had to do more schoolwork, and.. I'm not feeling any pull whatsoever to go back. None. No itch to scratch. No push to continue or interest in learning about what's going on, or how the next situation is going to turn out, or what I can make of the characters. It's like after you've topped out in Skyrim and the novelty has worn off and you just sorta stop, never finishing the campaign because it's just not interesting anymore, except here there wasn't even any novelty and no point to it all, and whereas I probably sank hundreds of hours into Skyrim just doing popamole shit, here I couldn't even get enjoyment out of that, because it's not even good at being a bad game.

Like, at least a shitty FPS, say, Modern Warfare 47 or whatever they're called these days, at least they know that they're shitty and do their shit well. But Tides of Numenera doesn't even realize that it's shitty, or tries to do something that is shitty but does that shit well, no, it's just.. shit.

The game is obnoxious, especially with all its pretenses. I've already uninstalled it.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

So which of these would be the worst Torment: being flayed alive and being turned into a living banner of skin flapping in the Endless Gate, but with a possibility of a merciful death at the hands of a hero one day; or being forced to play T:ToN for eternity with no hope of rescue or sweet release of death?

 

[Lurker King]

Fecal matter can be used as a fertiliser to grow magnificent crops

I seriously doubt whether Numa will inspire anything good

Some interesting lessons that developers can learn from this fiasco:

- Just because everyone is saying that they played PS:T and love reading walls of text, doesn’t make it true.

- Choose your release date wisely. Game journalists are influential, but they are not miracle workers.

- The cRPG audience can be uneven in its preferences and tastes, but at the end of the day is a small community. If you distance yourself from your audience, you are shooting on your own foot.

- Don't piss off a part of your target audience. You can suffer backlash.

- Be transparent and coherent. People are not dumb as you think.

- The notion that the gameplay in cRPGs can be satisfactory without combat or any other tactical, resource-based, systematic mechanic, is a myth created by storyfags who wrongly assumed they would enjoy PS:T without combat. cRPGs need engrossing mechanics.

- The fact that some developers were part of a team that made a great game in the past means nothing if the development practices changed, or the developers themselves don’t have the same passion for their craft.

- cRPGs, even cRPGs with more narrative, are not books, and shouldn’t try to emulate books. Good writing in cRPGs does not mean the same thing as good writing in novels, because they are focused on gameplay.

- WALLS OF TEXT ARE CANCER. AVOID WALLS OF TEXT AT ALL COSTS.

- cRPGs are better written when (1) they have fewer writers; (2) less word count; and (3) are written by designers who also happens to be passionate gamers.

- Dont EVER accept strech goals that dont add to the game (John will play game X, John will apologize, novellas, etc).

Some interesting lessons that players can learn from this fiasco:

- It doesn’t matter how awesome developer’s interviews and game concepts are, you need to play the game before you can make a reasonable judgement.

- Before you start throwing money at developers from the past check your facts first. Does the setting or the narrative concept look interesting to you?

* I added your suggestions, MRY and TT1.

 

[TT1]

Some interesting lessons that players can learn from this fiasco:

- It doesn’t matter how awesome developer’s interviews and game concepts are, you need to play the game before you can make a reasonable judgement.

- Before you start throwing money at developers from the past check your facts first. Does the setting or the narrative concept look interesting to you?

Also, dont EVER accept strech goals that dont add to the game (John will play game X, John will apologize, novellas, etc)

 

[MRY]

These are good points, though I find it depressing (though probably practical) that you start with the lessons related to distributing the game rather than those related to making the game.

I am not 100% sure on the combat point, but I think you could probably substitute in something like "tactical, resource-based, systematic encounters." It happens that combat is a venerable (and thus well-developed and well-understood) form of that kind of encounter, maybe the only venerable one, and one that is quite satisfying to the player and consistent with the normal RPG narrative framework. But I think it's at least possible that you could build an RPG around other forms of encounters, like trading or hacking or surviving on a journey or something. But you do need something like that providing the medium that the rest of the game's elements float in. (Having not played TTON, I can't say whether the Crisis system satisfies this requirement, but I am confident that the effort system doesn't because it is non-systematic and non-tactical.)

 

[Luckmann]

So which of these would be the worst Torment: being flayed alive and being turned into a living banner of skin flapping in the Endless Gate, but with a possibility of a merciful death at the hands of a hero one day; or being forced to play T:ToN for eternity with no hope of rescue or sweet release of death?

Endless Gate, hands down. At least there's a chance of release.

 

[Lord Andre]

Aha! More proof that these faggots didn't polish anything like they said. I released the Squid into the reef map and the first thing that popped into my head was "I should check it out with the Omiscope in Caravanserai" and lo and behold - nothing. They didn't bother changing the text.



Also you have no idea how asshurt I am that killing a ruthless slaver that wants to take a scared little girl from my custody means that I have to play half the game without tidal surge. Because clearly the logical thing to do was negotiate. Absolutely livid.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Agreed, the non-combat gameplay in T:TON may have failed hard, but that doesn't mean it's not an idea worth exploring. The takeaway here is not that reading needs combat to break up the pace, but that games need gameplay. For example, I think you could make pretty cool storyfaggy RPG, you married T:TON with Dead State base-building mechanics and set it in an besieged city instead of a school.

 

[Luckmann]

Agreed, the non-combat gameplay in T:TON may have failed hard, but that doesn't mean it's not an idea worth exploring. The takeaway here is not that reading needs combat to break up the pace, but that games need gameplay. For example, I think you could make pretty cool storyfaggy RPG, you married T:TON with Dead State base-building mechanics and set it in an besieged city instead of a school.

That actually sounds like a really cool idea.

 

[Roguey]

Why you hate Kevin Roguey ? My impression of him has always been that even though he might fuck up he's usually honest... Fargo probably fired him for refusing to lie to backers.

I didn't like his inept handling of system design in kotor2, Storm of Zehir's world map, and he probably mismanaged this project as well.

 

[Parabalus]

Also you have no idea how asshurt I am that killing a ruthless slaver that wants to take a scared little girl from my custody means that I have to play half the game without tidal surge. Because clearly the logical thing to do was negotiate. Absolutely livid.

Related, how do you get specialized in Tidal Surge before Bloom? I had a grayed out option in Miel Avast, dunno how you can get it other than this slaver.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

Just looked on Steam and noticed the positive user review percentage has fallen to 68% from the 69% where it had lingered for days.

But on a more positive note, Brian Fargo retweeted this bit of news which may help his future games get better ratings. Valve is now changing things so that only reviews of people who actually bought the game will factor into the overall score. Its hard to say how much this would have helped T:ToN, but he obviously liked this news well enough to retweet it. Did he pressure Valve to make this change, or is it only a coincidence?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...eview_system_to_make_scores_more_accurate.php

 

[darthaegis]

Just looked on Steam and noticed the positive user review percentage has fallen to 68% from the 69% where it had lingered for days.

But on a more positive note, Brian Fargo retweeted this bit of news which may help his future games get better ratings. Valve is now changing things so that only reviews of people who actually bought the game will factor into the overall score. Its hard to say how much this would have helped T:ToN, but he obviously liked this news well enough to retweet it. Did he pressure Valve to make this change, or is it only a coincidence?

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...eview_system_to_make_scores_more_accurate.php

This system is already in place. Only Steam purchases count for the overall review score.

 

[MRY]

Yeah, they just expanded it from excluding keys bought through bundles and through Kickstarter to also exclude keys bought through Steam but given as a gift. Rather annoying, as it knocked some 200 reviews off Primordia. :/ It's not clear to me whether it overall helps or hurts game ratings, though. At least among the WEG catalogue, the latest change looks about pretty evenly dividing among games where it upped scores (Technobabylon, Shardlight, Blackwell Deception), lowered scores (Resonance, Gemini Rue), and did nothing (Primordia, Epiphany, A Golden Wake). If you included all reviews for TTON, it would be 71%, but with the exclusions it's 68%.

 

[Iznaliu]

- Good writing in cRPGs does not mean the same thing as good writing in novels for the most part, because they are focused on gameplay. Walls of text are cancer.

- cRPGs are better written when they have fewer writers and less word count.

- cRPGs are better written when they are written by designers who also happens to be passionate gamers.

Finally somebody realises this.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Spoiler

Some interesting lessons that developers can learn from this fiasco:

- Just because everyone is saying that they played PS:T and love reading walls of text, doesn’t make it true.

- Choose your release date wisely. Game journalists are influential, but they are not miracle workers.

- The cRPG audience can be uneven in its preferences and tastes, but at the end of the day is a small community. If you distance yourself from your audience, you are shooting on your own foot.

- Don't piss off a part of your target audience. You can suffer backlash.

- Be transparent and coherent. People are not dumb as you think.

- The notion that the gameplay in cRPGs can be satisfactory without combat or any other tactical, resource-based, systematic mechanic, is a myth created by storyfags who wrongly assumed they would enjoy PS:T without combat. cRPGs need engrossing mechanics.

- The fact that some developers were part of a team that made a great game in the past means nothing if the development practices changed, or the developers themselves don’t have the same passion for their craft.

- cRPGs, even cRPGs with more narrative, are not books, and shouldn’t try to emulate books. Good writing in cRPGs does not mean the same thing as good writing in novels, because they are focused on gameplay.

- WALLS OF TEXT ARE CANCER. AVOID WALLS OF TEXT AT ALL COSTS.

- cRPGs are better written when (1) they have fewer writers; (2) less word count; and (3) are written by designers who also happens to be passionate gamers.

- Dont EVER accept strech goals that dont add to the game (John will play game X, John will apologize, novellas, etc).

Some interesting lessons that players can learn from this fiasco:

- It doesn’t matter how awesome developer’s interviews and game concepts are, you need to play the game before you can make a reasonable judgement.

- Before you start throwing money at developers from the past check your facts first. Does the setting or the narrative concept look interesting to you?

* I added your suggestions, MRY and TT1.

At least you're being constructive instead of just whining.

Having not played TTON

Um... I must say, I find it weird for somebody who actually contributed to writing the game, not to play it... Popular opinion of it aside, I'd at least be curious.

Related, how do you get specialized in Tidal Surge before Bloom? I had a grayed out option in Miel Avast, dunno how you can get it other than this slaver.

I wanna know this too. There's also a greyed out option to use it on the Philethis in Sagus Cliffs, but I too couldn't find a way to get Tidal surge by then.

Also,

Spoiler

does anybody know whom to feed to the Maw in the Gullet that feeds on despair? I think I've exhausted every possible option and still couldn't open it.

 

[MRY]

As I said in another thread, basically I lack the computing power and the time to play it, and the longer I wait the more of the plot I'll forget and the more coats of polish it will get. I'll probably play it someday.

[EDIT: Wait, it was in this very thread! http://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph...a-release-thread.113925/page-143#post-5008785]

 

[StaticSpine]

This is actually a really good question. I'll be honest. I gave it a real shot. I really tried. But then I stopped, had to do more schoolwork, and.. I'm not feeling any pull whatsoever to go back. None. No itch to scratch. No push to continue or interest in learning about what's going on, or how the next situation is going to turn out, or what I can make of the characters. It's like after you've topped out in Skyrim and the novelty has worn off and you just sorta stop, never finishing the campaign because it's just not interesting anymore, except here there wasn't even any novelty and no point to it all, and whereas I probably sank hundreds of hours into Skyrim just doing popamole shit, here I couldn't even get enjoyment out of that, because it's not even good at being a bad game.

Like, at least a shitty FPS, say, Modern Warfare 47 or whatever they're called these days, at least they know that they're shitty and do their shit well. But Tides of Numenera doesn't even realize that it's shitty, or tries to do something that is shitty but does that shit well, no, it's just.. shit.

I wanted to ask about your motivation to spend that much time to express your hateful opinion over and over again writing walls of text about the game you dislike that much. And it all makes sense now.

Treasure your free time, kid.

 

[Luckmann]

I wanted to ask about your motivation to spend that much time to express your hateful opinion over and over again writing walls of text about the game you dislike that much. And it all makes sense now.

"Hateful".

Treasure your free time, kid.

I'm sad to say that I'm 31. Never stop learning, kid.

 

[Western]

"After eating this bland porridge, my low expectations made me appreciate and eat shit, I especially liked the chunky bits"

Maybe he's German.

 

[Belegarsson]

Also,

Spoiler

does anybody know whom to feed to the Maw in the Gullet that feeds on despair? I think I've exhausted every possible option and still couldn't open it.

You can open it with

Spoiler

transdimensional scalpel IIRC, do the hilt without blade quest to get it.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Can't you convince someone there to get eaten by it?

 

[vivec]

A quick recompilation of the biggest issues in the game:

Lack of depth to the portrayal of the central premise: what does one life matter? Apparently, it does not. That question is brought up exactly once (which is okay) but almost out of context just to motivate the catchphrase. Never referenced again.

Inability to exploit the interesting setting and turn the inherent weirdness of 1B years later into a quirky story. The best part was the Maw and even that was not interesting enough; rather becoming some kind of body horror.

Badly written, uninteresting quests. e.g. Fifth eye quests, Endless horror quest. All have potential in storytelling but in the end, can not deliver. Even seemingly important stuff is passed over as sidequests: The Adversaries.

Shallow character motivations, including those of the protagonists and companions. Why is the last castoff doing any of this *now*? He can afford to wait. It's not like the sorrow is *really* chasing him or anything, only appearing *because* of plot progression.

Encounters are completely uninteresting and a cakewalk. Unexploited mechanics. It's very easy to get across checks due to all the items and companion inputs.

Surprising lack of reactivity. Most events happen in the background. Even things as important as the Endless war. Meres as the source of reactivity do not work because the in-game effects are non-existent.

Inconsistent themes. e.g. Slavery in a city ruled by the people who rebelled against it.
Finally, of course, broken campaign promises.

 

[Infinitron]

Lots of cut content info here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-03-14-the-making-of-torment-tides-of-numenera

The making of Torment: Tides of Numenera
A written and two-hour podcast accompaniment.

One 4am nearly five years ago I ended a Skype call and went to sleep, but two of the people I was chatting to stuck around. They were Chris Avellone and Colin McComb. I had been speaking to them, and others, about Planescape: Torment, a game they all helped make. And it was a really good game. A legend, if you like.

We'd assembled for a Planescape: Torment postmortem podcast, and now, five years on, we're here to look back on the development of Torment: Tides of Numenera for a podcast - and written article - too.

Back then no one had any idea Torment: Tides of Numenera was going to be made. McComb didn't know he would be creative lead and Adam Heine didn't know he was going to be design lead. They weren't even really in the business of making games anymore - Heine lived and still lives in Thailand raising orphans, and the reason McComb had stuck around was to ask Chris Avellone about getting a job, writing for Wasteland 2.

Well, McComb got it, and not long after he got a phone call from inXile boss Brian Fargo. "So Colin," Fargo said. "I've registered Torment as a trademark, I managed to pick that up. And I was curious if you would be interested in working on that... as the creative lead?

"Holy crap, Brian!" was McComb's reaction. "I can't believe what you're asking me to do here. I know how people feel about Planescape: Torment - I know how I feel about Planescape: Torment. If you screw that up then your reputation is ruined forever."

But he agreed, emailed Heine - "do you want in?" - and the rest is a history I will be going over in detail here. Be warned! There are massive spoilers ahead. Oh, and there is talk of the missing stretch goal content - so hold your horses, it's coming.


Where do you begin making a successor to Planescape: Torment when you don't have the weird Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Planescape? You go big. You create your own world and as ambitious a story as you can man

That story had a Changing God even back then, although as an actual god rather than a man who discovered a kind of immortality through cloning and consciousness transfer. "He basically fractured," says McComb. "Your job was to go and retrieve his pieces before the Elements of Entropy - the Angel of Entropy became the Sorrow - destroyed them all and wiped out ... the universe." Problem was, "it was too epic", he adds. "It's not just save the world, it's save all of creation." It just wasn't Torment. But then, what was?

In pondering the answer, McComb and Heine created their design pillars and nailed their essential question, 'What does one life matter?' (Planescape: Torment asked 'What can change the nature of a man?') McComb also realised the Numenera RPG he was helping his friend Monte Cook with might make a fantastic setting for his own game. Things started falling into place, and after weeks of working on spec, the Kickstarter make or break day arrived. Would Planescape: Torment fans go for it? "Or," McComb says, "would they say, 'Oh my god you guys are just vultures picking at a carcass?'"

The campaign went live on March 6th 2013. Adam Heine was watching the 1996 Tom Hanks film 'That Thing You Do' at the time it all started. "There's a montage scene in that movie where the band is just skyrocketing and they're jumping up the bestseller charts," he says. "And I'm watching the scene, and I'm watching the Kickstarter on the screen right next to me, and the numbers are going up and I was just like, 'Holy crap! What's going on?!'"

Torment: Tides of Numenera was funded in six hours, smashing its $900,000 goal. Money flooded in so quickly the team struggled to keep up. "We didn't even have enough stretch goals ready so we were just scrambling to get stuff put in there," says McComb - a point which came back to bite them in the bum. It was also clear from the record-breaking final take of $4.19m that no way was this suddenly much bigger game coming out in a year.

The Changing God on his moon, shortly before the fall.


After the madness of Kickstarter, McComb, Heine and team had roughly three months to whip up a plot for a writers' meeting in July 2013. And this is where we begin venturing into spoiler territory.

"The player still falls from the sky, lands in a junk heap, gets picked up by a guy called the Clock Maker, who sort of rebuilds you and nurses you back to health. You head up to an aldeia [a village], you meet some Aeon Priests who tell you about the Sorrow that's chasing you. You board The Container, the one that crashed into the Bloom, and you take it and you crash it into the Bloom.

"You do some Bloom stuff and you climb up the mountain to Sagus Cliffs, and you do a whole bunch of Sagus Cliffs stuff. You travel from there along the shores of the sea. You hit the Valley of Dead Heroes, you go into a library, then you go into the Castoff compound and that's when the Sorrow comes in. And from there you take an airship up to the Oasis, and from the Oasis you head over to Ossiphagan, and from Ossiphagan you had to..."

It was bam, do a thing, bam, do another thing, bam, etc. Your motivation was always to go somewhere else, never explore, never get to know an area as with the city of Sigil in Planescape: Torment. "If we could make a 200-300-hour game it would be cool," Heine jokes. But they couldn't so it had to be trimmed.

"We went through seven or eight really major iterations," says McComb, "and each time the pace and experience and the delivery of everything we were trying to convey became much more focused and concise."

Sagus Cliffs, where the game begins.


What remained constant was the idea of the Changing God, falling from the moon after an attack by the Sorrow, departing the body you are suddenly awoken in. But there were some major differences about where the story would end up. Another spoiler alert!

Originally, you were going to meet the Changing God, and come face to face for a showdown. "You were going to finally meet him at the House of Empty Time," says McComb."We salvaged that into something else. It was originally his home on an eyrie some place. And you and the First [Castoff] would both be transported there and you were essentially trying to get through his futuristic fortress as he's trying to [race] you back to where the Resonance Chamber crashed. There would have been a great big confrontation there. But again, it was wildly ambitious and way out of scope."

Back then The Specter was intended as something unrelated. "The Specter was originally going to be a memory virus," he says, "growing and taking shape in your head, and would eventually be born into the real world." But then someone said, "Well what if the Changing God actually didn't get driven out of your body?" And then came the question-slash-realisation, "Holy shit! What if The Specter is actually the Changing God?!'"

The First Castoff is the one with the mask.

Except, is he? I interrupt McComb and Heine here, because in the game you discover The Specter is not really the Changing God but a copy. One that's constantly updated, and one that's incredibly complex, but not the real deal. And I wanted more than anything to meet the real deal. "Well," says McComb, blindsiding me, "it could be you."

The ambiguity is absolutely intended, and actually if you look through the game there is a solid path available to role-play as the Changing God. "If you make the case that you're the Changing God throughout the game, if you say to yourself, 'I am the Changing God,' then it actually becomes more real," says McComb.

Think about it. If the Changing God were not you then where is he? The Specter lives inside your head, and you can enter the Changing God's memories from inside there. Why? You can also merge all Castoffs into your consciousness, exactly as the Changing God wanted to, thereby satisfying the Sorrow and ridding yourself of her relentless menace forever. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Oh and talking of the Sorrow, did you know she is non-organic? "She - sorry, it - is a biomechanical creation that is essentially a generated energy field," explains McComb. A kind of extremely advanced security program to protect the Tides, which are the currents of human emotion Castoffs are destroying.

Originally the First Castoff was different too. She isn't actually the first Castoff at all. "She's definitely not," says McComb. "One of the original ideas for her is that she went around hunting down older Castoffs to eliminate them." Consider the Changing God is several thousand years old and the First Castoff is several hundred years old, and that the Changing God casts off a body every couple of decades, and there must have been many Castoffs by the time the so called First awoke.

What's more, the First Castoff was nearly someone else, someone close to you. Not Callistege, which was my guess, but Matkina, your Castoff assassin pal. "The original design for Matkina had Matkina as the First," reveals McComb, "because she was an assassin in the shadows and her name was derived from the Vietnamese word for 'mask', 'mat na'. We also discovered 'matkina' means 'mother's' in Slovak, and thought that was a cool extra layer of meaning."

The Castoff compound, where you meet your siblings.


The stretch goal content that didn't materialise includes three companions, a crafting system, and an area called The Oasis. InXile has publicly apologised about this before.

The tricky thing in talking about the missing companions is that at least one of them, Oom, the Toy, will reappear. InXile announced this recently. So McComb and Heine don't want to say too much.

Oom is a blob of a creature from a prior world, maybe a byproduct of an ancient experiment. He could change shape as he levelled up, but into what would depend on you. If you kept telling him to be quiet, for example, he might become invisible, wrote Adam Heine wrote in an Oom blog post.

Heine tells me now: "We have a lot of design for him and we have some words written for him. The issue is that he's... different than all the other companions. There's a lot of custom stuff that has to be made for this guy."

"He's got five different shapes," adds McComb.

The other companions who really nearly made it in are Riastrad and Satsada, the star-crossed lovers. "Riastrad is mentioned a couple of times in the game," says Heine. "When you find the Magmatic Amulet and you're reading the Changing God's journal of what happened to him in that lab ... that is Riastrad's birth you're witnessing."

"His backstory," continues McComb, "is the Changing God fell into a dark place in the Ascension, with all the crystal and stuff around there. Crystalline spiders started coming out of the woodwork and the Changing God was like, 'Screw this! I'm out of here.' And Riastrad awoke."

Excitingly, Riastrad was to have his own reusable merecaster - a device the Last Castoff uses to time travel via memories, and even alter reality - and it was intrinsically linked to his character development. "You could change his history throughout the game and basically use that to change his abilities," says McComb.

Talking of meres, they were originally going to be fully realised scenes rather than picture book interactions, and the team used to refer to them as Quantum Leaps!

Beside Riastrad, Satsada and Oom there were companions who weren't as developed. In the original conception, The Specter was one, would you believe. There was a crippled beggar, too, who had a card and collected numenera, the mysterious magical items of the world. The beggar went quite far through development, as first a companion then a major NPC, then a minor NPC, then "he sort of slid on out of the game", says McComb. "The problem with him was we looked at the party composition and we were like, 'Crap, we're overloaded on nanos.'"

The Ascension, where Riastrad is awoken.


The Oasis - The Oasis of M'ra Jolios to give it its full name - was to be a huge aquatic dome of a city in the middle of a desert, and the game's second major hub. It was a $4m stretch goal but it never made it in. Well actually that's not correct - it sort of did. Right at the end of the game you can visit a small part of the Oasis in a Fathom portal in your mind labyrinth. It's the Fathom you swim around in, as you would have the Oasis.

"See, the swimming was really cool but it was also a lot of trouble," says Heine. "If you watch carefully when you're in that scene, you'll notice that a lot of animations you have [normally], you suddenly don't have - which is not noticeable in that Fathom because it's a very short time and there's no combat in it.

"We were like, 'OK, well, we could build this up into a big city and make the game extra long at the cost of the Bloom and Sagus and all of this other stuff we have in, or we could streamline it and make what we have in here a lot better.' The Bloom, especially the Bloom Depths, would not have been what they are if we had kept the Oasis - it would have been a really tiny scene without a big battle."

Nevertheless, the Oasis went through a lot of design, says Heine, and had several areas and its own faction. Whether it will return is a trickier prospect. "I don't think the Oasis will come back as DLC, though some of us hope maybe we could do an expansion or something," he says. "Who knows? I wouldn't hold up my hopes."

Crafting, meanwhile, was one of the first systems Heine designed. "It wasn't like a recipe system where you were crafting your own cyphers," he says, "it was almost like modding your weapons and armour. But the Numenera aspect of it was that as you attached things there would be side-effects because the numenera interact with each other in weird and different ways. It was trying to create a crafting system that felt Torment and especially Numenera. I really liked the system, it could have been a lot of fun - but it did not fit the game."

The Oasis, a giant fish tank of a city in the desert.


Foci are phrases that describe - and grant - character's abilities in Numenera. I was "a graceful jack who masters defense", for example. "Graceful" was my descriptor, "jack" was my class and "masters defense" was my focus, which granted me the Counterattack and Shield Master abilities. But whereas the Numenera game offers loads of brilliant-sounding foci - "Bears a halo of fire", "Controls gravity", "Explores dark places", etc - in Torment: Tides of Numenera you as the Last Castoff can choose between three (your companions each have their own unique focus).

"In everything I would like to have more!" says Heine. "We did design more in the beginning, but then as we got into implementing... The class has a bunch of abilities at each tier, the focus has a bunch of abilities at each tier, and then the companions each have their own focus. It was getting really spread out. It was getting really hard to figure out what does this ability do that's different from this ability? Especially in a game where there's a lot less combat, or it's a lot less priority...

"You may not always realise when you're playing an RPG just how many of your abilities affect combat and only combat," he adds. "But in Torment the game is something else, so if we throw in a bunch of abilities that affect only combat, a lot of players, they're not going to care about this stuff because they're not fighting.

"Again, hard decision," he says, "but what we ended up with is - ahem - more focused foci, and the classes are a lot better too. The abilities you can get from the class are a lot better than they would have been because of it. The companion abilities are a lot more unique also."

The dimension-straddling city beast that is the Bloom.


Five years later what was an exciting possibility - what seemed like a dream when I last recorded a Torment podcast - is now a reality. The taboo has been broken, a successor to Planescape: Torment has been made. And it's a good game, too. Of course there are criticisms, and I talk about mine with McComb and Heine in the longer recording, but let's not lose sight of what has been accomplished.

"I'm overjoyed with what we've done here," says McComb. "I'm really happy with the way this game has turned out, and I'm really happy with the way people are responding to it, because it makes me feel like we did our jobs - and we surpassed our jobs. But at the same time there's a lot of little things that obviously I would love to fix up. In retrospect there's decisions that were made that we could have made better or made differently that would have improved the quality of the game even more. But that ship has sailed."

Where the Torment idea goes from here remains to be seen. InXile has shown Torment can flourish as a theme independently of Planescape, and there are no shortage of ideas about where that theme could go next: somewhere else in Numenera, a new setting, a world created by inXile? That was the original idea after all. But whether there will be a next time depends on you. If the world wants a Torment 3 I have no doubt it will be made. I just hope it doesn't take 16 years this time to come about.

 

[Iznaliu]

"I can't believe what you're asking me to do here. I know how people feel about Planescape: Torment - I know how I feel about Planescape: Torment. If you screw that up then your reputation is ruined forever."

Prophetic words