Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Roguey]

Secondly, the lead director was fired midway through for reasons unknown and replaced by a company drone. He was a kind of a guy who maybe could have kept it all coherent at least to some extent. That version was more or less scuttled, with probably some parts stapled into the new version and we got the result.

We know why he left, he was unwilling to compromise on the original vision. Fargo was unwilling to fund it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Trying to recreate a cult classic that sold poorly is a pretty bad business decision tbh. The odds of actually measuring up to what made it a cult classic are low, and the audience is already pretty small. Sometimes it's better to just leave things as they are.

 

[Mikeal]

We know why he left, he was unwilling to compromise on the original vision. Fargo was unwilling to fund it.

Hwat was original vision?

 

[Roguey]

We know why he left, he was unwilling to compromise on the original vision. Fargo was unwilling to fund it.

Hwat was original vision?

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-numenera-thread.113925/page-221#post-5441268

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Is that all you have on it?

I dont see anything there that specifically reveals Kevin was "unwilling to compromise on the original vision which was too expensive for Fargo".
I do see nonsense that turned a more or less coherent design into a explosive vomit mess.

Just like i assumed it was.
See, that start of the game makes sense, the one we got - you fucking fall out of the orbit and drop right onto that "resonance chamber" ... from orbit.
In one of the most boring areas of the game, where you get torrent of exposition - instead of the Bloom, which was a simulacrum of Sigil.

Secondly,

"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 Catena, 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."

See... if you wanted the player to stop and explore and get to know an area - then you need a 200-300 hour game.
When you bam do one thing and then bam do another - you dont.

Not to mention how hilarious that last sentence looks in hindsight. Concise! Ahahaha.

Seems to me its far more probable Kevin was ousted by Colin and Heine and their awesome vision - which was fitting Fargo as he thought he can cut corners and divert money into other games too.
While they and the new lead cut up what they had and rewrite it into ... shit. Or it was just Fargo cutting corners and the others just... turned their heads away.

Whats least probable is that someone like Kevin Saunders couldnt calculate the costs of content compared to what they had available.
Even a dumbass like Infinitron got that right, although of course he assumed completely opposite of logical conclusion. And he got rewarded for his services justly later on. That was hilarious btw.

If anything needed to be cut it was Sagus cliffs, while any interesting characters and quests could have been transfered to the Bloom and an experienced dev like Kevin couldnt have had any problem seeing that.
The other mentioned characters and stuff that were cut out, thats just the normal stuff in game design and happens in every game. Nothing special there.

- Except the Oasis and Ossiphigin which were kickstarter goals.
Atleast one should have survived in some form.

- And lets not forget that W2 was suddenly extended into double the originally planed size - mid way through development.

 

[Roguey]

Is that all you have on it?

I dont see anything there that specifically reveals Kevin was "unwilling to compromise on the original vision which was too expensive for Fargo".

It's that combined with
https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10604

Brian: I can’t talk about an employee’s specific performance, but what I can do is to provide you with a factual history of things. Kevin left the project in late 2015, right? At that point, we were roughly two years into production. At that point, we’ve gotten the first pass of combat. The story was not yet at first pass. No abilities or weapons were in outside of the alpha systems. And so, at that time, if we had gone along that route, the game would not be done until the year 2018. I could not afford to stay on that path. I had to change what we were doing.

And, to talk about scope, the product was wildly over scoped. Even today, after we made the “cuts,” the original specification for the game was 600,000 words. You know how many we are at now? It’s 1.6 million words, probably a world record for a single player game. I think the only games that have more word count is MMOs done over a long period of time.

Brian: After cuts, it ends up being several times what we wanted it to be. Planescape: Torment, the number that was thrown around a lot was 750,000 words. But when you talk to Avellone, he would say we actually double counted some sentences, so it might not even be that high. I think the Bible is like 700,000 words so that seems plenty of words to do a narrative piece, something that is as big as the Bible.

So basically, after two years in, I had to change plans. So those are the facts. I’m not trying to disparage Kevin, I don’t want to talk negatively about him in any way, but I can at least speak to the facts behind what was going on at that point.

Alongside https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...ith-monty-markland.120041/page-5#post-5451016

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Yeah, tickle me so i laugh more.
Brian says.

And after all those "cuts" he ended up in "word count" way above any sane expectations and several times over scope. So neither the cuts or firing Kevin achieved anything. Not that word count alone means anything. Which this game painfully proves.
Yeah, he had to change plans. Couldnt afford it. Indeed.

None of it really points to anything that would make Kevin somehow a bad manager who ruined it all.

As for Markland epic thread, ive enjoyed that previously but cant access it now so if there is anything specific youll need to quote it for me. - I mean, i dont remember anything Monty said that would support that nonsense about Kevin, and what i do kind of hazily remember was aimed at higher management and various sycophants in the company.

 

[True Ukrainian]

MRY pretty much hits the nail on the head. The world overall feels flat, its weirdness laid on a backdrop of more weirdness that just leaves the player saying "OK, whatever you say fam." The mechanics of the game also reinforce this, the game gets progressively easier the further you play into it, the perks that you get allows that the protag to literally effortlessly succeed in challenges. There is really no sense of mystery or danger present in Torment.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

not exactly like planescape felt any less weird

 

[Jarpie]

Yeah, tickle me so i laugh more.
Brian says.

And after all those "cuts" he ended up in "word count" way above any sane expectations and several times over scope. So neither the cuts or firing Kevin achieved anything. Not that word count alone means anything. Which this game painfully proves.
Yeah, he had to change plans. Couldnt afford it. Indeed.

None of it really points to anything that would make Kevin somehow a bad manager who ruined it all.

As for Markland epic thread, ive enjoyed that previously but cant access it now so if there is anything specific youll need to quote it for me. - I mean, i dont remember anything Monty said that would support that nonsense about Kevin, and what i do kind of hazily remember was aimed at higher management and various sycophants in the company.

I remember Markland saying that they diverted funds from Torment to finish other projects (Wasteland 2 in this case), someone might correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while, but there was something about the project which made me convinced that the game was made in the last 1,5 - 2 years, and not in the 4-5 when it was in "development", IIRC it was Kevin being fired and something else they had said. From what I played of it, TToN felt like it had been stitched together from the remnants of something else, most quests I did in Sagus Cliffs felt like they should've been longer and interconnected.

 

[StaticSpine]

I remember Markland saying that they diverted funds from Torment to finish other projects (Wasteland 2 in this case), someone might correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while, but there was something about the project which made me convinced that the game was made in the last 1,5 - 2 years, and not in the 4-5 when it was in "development", IIRC it was Kevin being fired and something else they had said. From what I played of it, TToN felt like it had been stitched together from the remnants of something else, most quests I did in Sagus Cliffs felt like they should've been longer and interconnected.

IIRC what was figured out (and confirmed by Monty): Chris Keenan was appointed instead of Kevin to cut everything unfinished to meet deadline/release dtae.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

I remember Markland saying that they diverted funds from Torment to finish other projects (Wasteland 2 in this case),

Yup, thats what i remember too.

W2 should never had California at all. But, all that has been said already.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Curious how they will work with Microsoft and stricter accounting.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

not exactly like planescape felt any less weird

PS:T had rules!!! You spend the early part of the game wandering around Sigil and figuring out how the planes work. The problem with TTON isn’t so much the constant weirdness—although MRY’s right that the lack of normalcy means there’s very little contrast to make the weird stuff seem remarkable—it’s that the Numenera setting has no rules. Anything could happen for any reason.

There is method to Planescape’s madness, and the game takes a lot of time explaining that method—when something bizarre happens, you usually know why and how it happened. TTON doesn’t really have that. Maybe if they’d set the whole game in a single place with its own rules, like the Bloom, the weirdness would have been more interesting. But that’s still an uphill battle: in a setting where anything can happen for any reason, nothing is going to feel very meaningful or interesting.

 

[Viata]

Planescape is also a fucking good setting and I don't think Torment 1 would be as good as it is if it not had that setting.

 

[Rahdulan]

The absolute first things I would do if writing for the Numenera setting would be:
-deciding what the numenera from each of the prior Nine Worlds generally looks like and does, per specific World by number. Perhaps the sixth world was the most sophisticated, perhaps there are still isolationist holdouts from the seventh, etc.
-what the legends are surrounding the society, religion and eventual doom of each of the Nine Worlds, and how the different Worlds and their remnants compare to each other.
-Which places Earth trades with through space travel

Instead, there is ZERO description of the Nine Worlds as nine distinct prior civilisations and eras. The trade center shown in the game is the Bloom, which trades with different places and times (!) completely at random. I have a deep and abiding hatred for the way the setting was dealt with. If I was religious I would call such a total rejection of all order Satanic. Instead I guess I'll call it postmodern and throw in some grumbling about SJWs or something.

You are not wrong. Thing is, that's source material problem. It specifically has empty lots in the world left for the GM to fill it with whatever he wants for his players. Even if you go beyond that the entire game touts the opposite of what you want - freedom in the hands of GM and players to present the story and world itself however they see fit. Lack of overall definition was seen as the way to tackle the subject in this case.

 

[Efe]

its not okay if dm (or nobody including mccomb) knows shit about the world and its history.

 

[MRY]

One of my biggest grievances with the Numenera setting is that while the books suggest that setting it as future Earth is meant to allow the GM to include stuff like communism (I think that's an actual example!) or Inspector Clouseau films or, being less facetious, cultural references to our own world (e.g., a character quoting the Bible or using a conventional turn of phrase), the manual also says (and our marching orders were consistent with this) that nothing from our era can survive in normal terms into Numenera so you can't have a dog that is a dog, if you have a dog it has to be an octopus with 1d4 (haha, no d4 actually) heads.

This could not be more antithetical to the philosophy that has driven me in my own work (especially but not exclusively Fallen Gods), which is that there is a unity to our lives: to the natural world, to our language, to our cultural signifiers, our religion, our family structures, etc. To give a dumb example, the phrase "cultivate one's own garden" is situated in a whole web of meaning -- not just literary (Candide) and religious (the conversation in Candide immediately draws a connection between the act of garden-tending and the Garden of Eden), but also ecological (it presupposes a wilderness that exists in contrast to gardens) and economic (it presupposes a level of economic development in which people cultivate not just farmland but gardens) and cultural/historical (it invokes the hortus conclusus as a longstanding "safe space"(!!)) and social (the expression is not referring to huge public gardens or estate gardens, but to the smaller kind of family gardens perhaps tended by a grandmother and played in by her children etc.). It's not necessary that the listener be able to consciously follow every strand of that web (I'm sure I've missed or mistaken many), but the web trembles all the same, as long as it has not been totally torn apart.

"Cultivate one's own garden" can't exist in TTON because, inter alia, as far as I know there are no gardens in the game, and to the extent the Ninth World has gardens, I'm sure they only grow piranha plants, except that since piranhas in the setting are actually lobsters, we'd have to call them Venus fly traps, except because there's no Venus and flies are actually robotic transformers that switch between cars and urethras, we can't call them that either.... But aside from the inability to use that or some other particular expression (and believe me, this was something that pained me daily, like, you can't call someone "loyal as a dog" because there are no dogs, they can't grin "wolfishly" because there are no wolves, etc., etc.) The problem is, no webs exist at all.

Planescape was not a perfect setting -- a lot of it is idiotic, like Mount Celestia as a concept seems horribly stupid -- but at least as filtered into PS:T, there were some webs. For instance, the "rule of three" is a web with strands that are both within the setting and within the broader life of the player. Internally, it comes up over and over again, in different permutations (e.g., enemies three, the three principal incarnations). And externally, it conjures not just the fairy tale norm of three but also the Trinity, and all sorts of strands radiating out from those concepts. And the game's characters were clearly designed to reference well-worn and familiar tropes -- to subvert them (to an extent) but at the outset to rely on them as shorthand to get the player up to speed -- Dak'kon as a ronin samurai, Grace as the whore-madonna, etc.

In writing this out, I Unlocked a Memory: just about six years ago, in early March 2013, I told an all-around genius I knew from Primordia's development that I was excited about the TTON Kickstarter because the team seemed to have captured the PS:T feel. Here's what she said:

They didn't (yet), and they won't. Not enough 'stupid' to have traction. The setting will go the way of nWoD, with a bunch of dissociated ideas no one cares about. Planescape the setting was stupid. It was written on the intellectual level of college kids in pre-Internet times. Because of the former, its philosophies make no sense but have memetic power; because of the latter, its logistics couldn’t have possibly been made to work, but hardly anyone really cares. What I see in the new Torment is too unusual and not stupid enough to have traction; and RPG writers famously suck at logistics, so I don't trust them to actually make use of the weirdness enough to deserve the “science” qualifier. Neat art, though.

When I got huffy about the "stupid" point, she added:

Yes. Planescape:Torment got rid of most – if not all – of the original stupid (the game is a theme park ride through a weird world, what might be left doesn’t stick out as much as it would in a cooperative tabletop RPG) .... But them starting with an inherently ludicrous, memetically (don’t touch my spelling, Word 2007) powerful “the Universe according to college kids” concept and brushing it up was an advantage.

As to my specific question re: whether it would miss the humor of Morte and Nordrom:

Yes. Modrons were polyhedral creatures from a plane of Law – living dice. Because the multiverse ran on dice. I don’t think Monte Cook will be having any of that (capitalizing on quirks and uniqueness); rather, I expect soft focus and tired old tropes: “so, the zzbarloxxians are big and strong, let’s roll out the tough dumb guy stereotypes”.

She wasn't right about all of it, but she basically called it.

 

[ga♥]

I do not know how someone can consider Planescape stupid. I wonder what is Pathfinder then.

You can call it "overly complex" and I could agree, with all those rules about planes locations, planar distance from your deity plane of residence and spells power, etc etc.

But stupid...? Compared to what?

I mean just read the "Manual of the planes" by Jeff Grubb, it looks like a physics university book

 

[The_Mask]

Planescape was not a perfect setting -- a lot of it is idiotic, like Mount Celestia as a concept seems horribly stupid

That one's taken from Dante's Divine Comedy - The Paradise. And it is just as stupid here as it is there. Thank God (<- see what I did there?) Avellone didn't go there much.

 

[Alpan]

"Cultivate one's own garden" can't exist in TTON because, inter alia, as far as I know there are no gardens in the game, and to the extent the Ninth World has gardens, I'm sure they only grow piranha plants, except that since piranhas in the setting are actually lobsters, we'd have to call them Venus fly traps, except because there's no Venus and flies are actually robotic transformers that switch between cars and urethras, we can't call them that either.... But aside from the inability to use that or some other particular expression (and believe me, this was something that pained me daily, like, you can't call someone "loyal as a dog" because there are no dogs, they can't grin "wolfishly" because there are no wolves, etc., etc.) The problem is, no webs exist at all.

I think the problem is that all this is described in present-day language. Numenera did not go far enough in imagining Earth a billion years (or whatever) into the future, because it fails to account for the metamorphosis (or collapse) of existing linguistic structures. A Ninth World game based on the idea of making heads and tails (let alone sense) of a totally alien world could have some appeal, I think.

 

[MRY]

Planescape was not a perfect setting -- a lot of it is idiotic, like Mount Celestia as a concept seems horribly stupid

That one's taken from Dante's Divine Comedy - The Paradise. And it is just as stupid here as it is there. Thank God (<- see what I did there?) Avellone didn't go there much.

You mean Purgatory. (Paradise is the concentric spheres.) In any event, I'm pretty sure that Purgatorio doesn't have gods from the "Dwarvish pantheon" cavorting alongside gods from the "Chinese pantheon," as Mount Celestia does. And, of course, the seven layers of Mount Purgatory correspond to the deadly sins, which are not part of AD&D, etc., etc. More generally, while Dante actually does have quite a bit of silly bric-a-brac in his setting, the Divine Comedy isn't meant to be a space for varied adventuring, it's a purpose-built environment for a specific allegory.

Anyway, as long as we agree that Mount Celestia is dumb, I'm fine.

 

[MRY]

Alpan I don't think it would be much fun (and not really a Torment game), but it might be interesting. (There's a bit of interactive fiction sort of along these linguistic lines called The Gostak (obviously inspired by Jabberwocky).) I think one of the things the team tried to do, which was admirable, was not have TTON be about that. It's one of the reasons for the giant infodump at the start -- rather than having the game be a big mystery where you don't know anything about what's going on, they wanted to give you most of the information up front. I'm not sure it worked though.

Obviously the notion that the setting is Earth plus a billion years is ridiculous; I recall some bit about how the humans in the setting aren't even humans, they're just some recent genetic creation that looks like humans from our era. But to some degree, every Dying Earth scenario ends up being the present day, plus the author's politics, plus edginess like the knight snorting cocaine in Viriconium or the Pilgrim being a cannibal in Just a Pilgrim.

 

[The_Mask]

You mean Purgatory. (Paradise is the concentric spheres.) In any event, I'm pretty sure that Purgatorio doesn't have gods from the "Dwarvish pantheon" cavorting alongside gods from the "Chinese pantheon," as Mount Celestia does. And, of course, the seven layers of Mount Purgatory correspond to the deadly sins, which are not part of AD&D, etc., etc. More generally, while Dante actually does have quite a bit of silly bric-a-brac in his setting, the Divine Comedy isn't meant to be a space for varied adventuring, it's a purpose-built environment for a specific allegory.

Anyway, as long as we agree that Mount Celestia is dumb, I'm fine.

Both are layered.

I think you're right, it's much closer to The Purgatory. You're right.

And yes, we agree.

 

[zapotec]

Why mount celestia is dumb?