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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Bard's Tale 4 were backed while W2 was still in production.

No it wasn't.

They had Kevin Saunders (who is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints - see MOTB) and they let him go. Irrational upper management (Fargo) decision to turn the PC game into a console game in the middle of development was probably the key factor, but we must not disregard that primadonnas like McComb probably don't take kindly to being ordered around and are running to daddy Fargo for protectiion every time they hear something resembling an order.

lol what a pile of Codex wishful thinking

ksaun Do you have anything to say about this claim?
 
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Parabalus

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InXile is a mess, didn't iirc roguey post a company review from an ex-employee that said the place was a mismanaged circus?

Their Glassdoor is legit the worse rated company I myself have seen on there, few reviews but still. Obsidian in comparison is pretty good.

Tybir turned out to be a lot of fun, Erritis was a blast (and his companion quest was the best written) and Aligern could have been alright, but felt unfinished. I should have ditched him and take Rhis with me (I felt bad when I left her) or Matkina with me. Did anyone include Matkina into the group?

Overall, at the moment I would give the game 7 out of 10. Maybe a 7.5, when I had more time to reflect on it ... or a 6.5.

Matkina is awesome, best one for me. Gives you access to another ending too.
 

Malpercio

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figDjPU.jpg

Do we know who wrote what? This area felt genuinely better written the the Fifth Eye slog.
 

Zeriel

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The Dark Age of Technology is considered a dark age not to cover things up, but because they (primarily the Cult Mechanicus) genuinely consider it an age of decadence and hubris that ended with humans becoming corrupted and the entirety of human civilization collapsing, sparking the Age of Strife. Most new 40k fluff is shit and it completely forgets that the universe is genuinely fucked up, and the the "evil" of the Imperium is brought about by necessity, not malice.

It really isn't an honest assessment, though. It would be easier to take the Empire's historia seriously if they didn't react to every found STC blueprint with "HELL YEAH LETS USE IT". Sure, the Dark Ages of Technology ENDED in catastrophe, but everything ends. That the humans at the time were more prosperous than under the Empire is indisputable. And the Cult Mechanicus' viewpoint is especially hilarious in light of the fact that most of their blessed technology that they have ordained to be acceptable is functionally no different from other STC blueprints they haven't found--it just happens to be the shit they had on hand where they were. Even the idea that it was somehow decadent humanity's fault that Chaos energies corrupted their androids is a bit rich. Chaos corrupts everything in Warhammer. Including, sometimes, even glorious bastions of light like the emperor.
 

janjetina

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Torment: Tides of Numenera
They had Kevin Saunders (who is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints - see MOTB) and they let him go. Irrational upper management (Fargo) decision to turn the PC game into a console game in the middle of development was probably the key factor, but we must not disregard that primadonnas like McComb probably don't take kindly to being ordered around and are running to daddy Fargo for protectiion every time they hear something resembling an order.

lol what a pile of Codex wishful thinking

It's always nice to get a "citation needed" rating from an official Codex purveyor of speculation, who has an ample history of being indiscriminate with respect to the truth and falsehood of the articles he posts. You deserve the participation award for trying to goad Kevin to comment on his departure, but that would really be wishful thinking, I'm afraid.

1: Saunders' role on MOTB was formally lead designer, but effectively his job description was the one of a project manager
2: MOTB had a limited budget and development time
3: MOTB turned out to be a very good game in design and execution and is probably the best polished Obsidian title (when it comes to bugs)
1+2+3 -> 4: Saunders is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints.
5: Torment was planned and designed to be a PC game and was pitched as such
6: In the middle of development, Torment was changed to accommodate a console version
7: Dramatically changing a project in the middle of development incurs huge costs and results in an incoherent product
8: Consolization of Torment was ordered by Fargo
5+6+7 + 8 -> 9: Fargo's decision to turn Torment into a console game was irrational
10: Saunders was let go from Inxile in the middle of TTON development
11: Saunders' departure coincided temporally with the consolization of TTON
12: Colin Mccomb says things like "I can have (and enjoy having!) reasonable and productive discussions with real conservatives - but not with the modern Republican party." on his twitter, i.e. he can have "reasonable and productive discussions" with people, except when they disagree with his views.
11+12 -> 13: Colin Mccomb is a primadonna of a nu-male variety.
14: Primadonnas, especially those of the nu-male variety, don't like to be ordered around and easily become "offended" by it
15: When faced with what they perceive as offensive from someone with authority over them, primadonnas often go straight to the top to whine and complain

All of that justifies the lighthearted speculation laid out in the post you quoted.
 
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ArchAngel

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They had Kevin Saunders (who is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints - see MOTB) and they let him go. Irrational upper management (Fargo) decision to turn the PC game into a console game in the middle of development was probably the key factor, but we must not disregard that primadonnas like McComb probably don't take kindly to being ordered around and are running to daddy Fargo for protectiion every time they hear something resembling an order.

lol what a pile of Codex wishful thinking

It's always nice to get a "citation needed" rating from an official Codex purveyor of speculation, who has an ample history of being indiscriminate with respect to the truth and falsehood of the articles he posts. You deserve the participation award for trying to goad Kevin to comment on his departure, but that would really be wishful thinking, I'm afraid.

1: Saunders' role on MOTB was formally lead designer, but he effectively his job description was the one of a project manager
2: MOTB had a limited budget and development time
3: MOTB turned out to be a very good game in design and execution and is probably the best polished Obsidian title (when it comes to bugs)
1+2+3 -> 4: Saunders is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints.
5: Torment was planned and designed to be a PC game and was pitched as such
6: In the middle of development, Torment was changed to accommodate a console version
7: Dramatically changing a project in the middle of development incurs huge costs and results in an incoherent product
8: Consolization of Torment was ordered by Fargo
5+6+7 + 8 -> 9: Fargo's decision to turn Torment into a console game was irrational
10: Saunders was let go from Obsidian in the middle of TTON development
11: Saunders' departure coincided temporally with the consolization of TTON
12: Colin Mccomb says things like "I can have (and enjoy having!) reasonable and productive discussions with real conservatives - but not with the modern Republican party." on his twitter, i.e. he can have "reasonable and productive discussions" with people, except when they disagree with his views.
12+13 -> 14: Colin Mccomb is a primadonna of a nu-male variety.
15: Primadonnas, especially those of the nu-male variety, don't like to be ordered around and easily become "offended" by it
16: When faced with what they perceive as offensive from someone with authority over them, primadonnas often go straight to the top to whine and complain

All of that justifies the lighthearted speculation laid out in the post you quoted.
Saunders was released from InXile and you are missing #13 in this list.
 

Jarpie

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Codex 2012 MCA
Bard's Tale 4 were backed while W2 was still in production.

No it wasn't.

They had Kevin Saunders (who is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints - see MOTB) and they let him go. Irrational upper management (Fargo) decision to turn the PC game into a console game in the middle of development was probably the key factor, but we must not disregard that primadonnas like McComb probably don't take kindly to being ordered around and are running to daddy Fargo for protectiion every time they hear something resembling an order.

lol what a pile of Codex wishful thinking

ksaun Do you have anything to say about this claim?

Why do you keep snidely and passive-agressively implying that Saunders was let go because he fucked up? We don't why he was let go but at least he has shown with MOTB that he can lead and manage the project, like janjetina said, unlike McComb who haven't been inovlved with game development for over a decade, and Keenan has barely any credits to his name.
 
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On top of that, using those numbers doesn't make any sense. Torment didn't sold 400k in three days, and neither did BG2 sold 1 M copies in the same amount of time, they sold those numbers in about one year since release. Comparing them to what PoE and TToN sold in half a week is retarded.

These numbers are misleading because they don’t reflect how many players still genuinely appreciate these games. They didn’t have steam back in the day. So when BG2 sold more than two million copies, more than two million people actually went to the stories to buy the game and play it. They were actual gamers. Now, when you look at the numbers and see that PoE sold more than 800 thousand copies, what does it mean, especially if you consider the abysmal completion rates, sales and bundles? That most of these sales results from impulse from people who don’t appreciate these games. The same thing holds for ToN. The actual target audience is just a segment of the backers. That old-school cRPGs are a dying culture was never clearer than now. The new generation of cRPG players is smaller than ever. So, the next time you decide to throw numbers to show how cRPGs are selling better, stop and think a little bit.
 
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InXile is a mess, didn't iirc roguey post a company review from an ex-employee that said the place was a mismanaged circus?

Their Glassdoor is legit the worse rated company I myself have seen on there, few reviews but still. Obsidian in comparison is pretty good.

These ratings are diamond! Just imagine how much shit must have been going on behind doors.

inxile-entertainment-squarelogo-1429686804687.png

"Good work environment, poorly organized"
StarStarStarStarStar
Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Newport Beach, CA

Recommends
Neutral Outlook
No opinion of CEO
I worked at InXile Entertainment full-time (More than a year)

Pros

Very positive atmosphere, great location, producers are encouraged to get feedback on design choices from everyone. Willing to promote from within, which is rare for the industry. This is not a good place if you're looking long-term, but as a 1-2 year position, it's worth it.

Cons

Disorganized in how they execute their projects. Very large communication gap between upper management and the engineers/artists, which sometimes translated into offhanded comments turning into week-long or even month-long blind alleys distracting important team members from the primary project. There was also a philosophical clash between the Leads' expectations of team members and HRs' expectations of team members which could result in a pat on the back from a Lead turning into a negative review from management.

Advice to Management

The main thing that I hope has been learned is that having focused, clear project goals is vital to keeping everyone on the same page during development. Especially once you get toward feature-lock and engineers are pushing hard for their pet feature to get included, having a solid design bible at hand can save the project from grinding to a halt.

"Good luck to inXile - don't touch with ten foot pole"
StarStarStarStarStar
Former Employee - Senior Artist in Newport Beach, CA

Doesn't Recommend
Disapproves of CEO

Pros

-While I was there, there were many talented people that I was proud to work with.
-Good location, right next to the beach.
-Pay was pretty good for the industry.

Cons

-Company had a hiring frenzy, by placing more cooks in the kitchen and crossed their fingers.
-You have to pick up slack of other people.
-Very visual game company, gameplay second or third.
-No backend, and management doesn't understand technology and limitations.
-Laid off everyone that was competent, and left behind the muses.
-No one left to make games, only management.

Advice to Management

Be more involved with design decisions. Don't come in at the end of development and wonder what's going on! Don't leave your trusted few to do the work, be involved for success! It such a small company, talk to your own workers! Corporation mentality doesn't work anymore, you don't have hundreds or thousands of employee like the Interplay days.


"Blind leading a sight seeing dog""
StarStarStarStarStar
Former Employee - Anonymous Employee in Newport Beach, CA

Doesn't Recommend
Disapproves of CEO

Pros

Pay is generally higher than surrounding studios

Cons

"Upside down cake" studio.
Higher ups have no clue why things are failing. They refuse to talk to their own workers to acknowledge and fix their problems.

Advice to Management

Please google the following:
Peter's Principle and Dunning Kruger Effect. They both apply so perfectly to the studio.

So now we know why Kevin Saunders was fired, and why the game is so boring.

"The more I learn about people developers, the more I like my dog".
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It's always nice to get a "citation needed" rating from an official Codex purveyor of speculation, who has an ample history of being indiscriminate with respect to the truth and falsehood of the articles he posts. You deserve the participation award for trying to goad Kevin to comment on his departure, but that would really be wishful thinking, I'm afraid.

1: Saunders' role on MOTB was formally lead designer, but he effectively his job description was the one of a project manager
2: MOTB had a limited budget and development time
3: MOTB turned out to be a very good game in design and execution and is probably the best polished Obsidian title (when it comes to bugs)
1+2+3 -> 4: Saunders is a competent project manager who knows how to work within temporal and financial constraints.

It was an expansion pack. You raise your ambitions and try to make a bigger game, you're likely to run into bigger problems.

5: Torment was planned and designed to be a PC game and was pitched as such
6: In the middle of development, Torment was changed to accommodate a console version
7: Dramatically changing a project in the middle of development incurs huge costs and results in an incoherent product
8: Consolization of Torment was ordered by Fargo
5+6+7 + 8 -> 9: Fargo's decision to turn Torment into a console game was irrational

Handwaving. The console port has nothing to do with why people don't like Torment or what makes it "incoherent".

10: Saunders was let go from Inxile in the middle of TTON development
11: Saunders' departure coincided temporally with the consolization of TTON

it_was_aliens.png

I'm sure ksaun would have gladly overseen a console port if he was told to.

12: Colin Mccomb says things like "I can have (and enjoy having!) reasonable and productive discussions with real conservatives - but not with the modern Republican party." on his twitter, i.e. he can have "reasonable and productive discussions" with people, except when they disagree with his views.
11+12 -> 13: Colin Mccomb is a primadonna of a nu-male variety.
14: Primadonnas, especially those of the nu-male variety, don't like to be ordered around and easily become "offended" by it
15: When faced with what they perceive as offensive from someone with authority over them, primadonnas often go straight to the top to whine and complain

Let me get this straight - you think Colin McComb went over Kevin Saunders' head to stop his bad content from being changed? The same Kevin Saunders who lovingly called his team "TToN heroes" after leaving? This is the reason why I tagged him. You're making a pretty inflammatory accusation here.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.gamecrate.com/interview...menera-making-follow-planescape-torment/15709

INTERVIEW: THE TEAM BEHIND TIDES OF NUMENERA ON MAKING A FOLLOW-UP TO PLANESCAPE: TORMENT

Nearly twenty years after the release of cult-classic RPG Planescape: Torment, InXile Entertainment has given the gaming world Torment: Tides of Numenera, an isometric RPG which mixes gameplay elements you'll remember from the classic age of Black Isle RPGs with a game system and setting unlike anything we've seen in games before.

We spoke to Lead Crisis Designer Jeremy Kopman and Writer Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie of InXile to get some insight into the game's development and what it's like to work on a "spiritual successor" to one of gaming's all-time great RPGs.

GameCrate: What sort of game is Torment: Tides of Numenera?


Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie: Torment: Tides of Numenera is a single player science fantasy role playing game with deep and reactive branching dialogue, set a billion years in the future. This is a game where tiny decisions have big consequences. It’s built for replayability too: there are over 1.2 million words in the game, and it’s impossible to see them all in a single playthrough.

GC: What should players know about the original Torment before playing this game?

GJF: We love the original game, and we more than a few people from the original team worked on Planescape: Torment. If you haven’t played it, we recommend it, as it’s consistently listed as one of the best CRPGs ever made.

That being said, you don’t need to have played Planescape: Torment to get into Torment: Tides of Numenera. It’s a spiritual successor, not a sequel.



GC: How do you balance making a game that's accessible for new players and properly delivering on nostalgia for old-school fans?

Jeremy Kopman: It can be tricky, but a few aspects of the narrative design help out a great deal.

First, almost every quest and storyline offers numerous ways to complete them. That means that if a player isn’t interested in combat or find one too difficult with their current party, they can spend time looking for other solutions.

Second, a good portion of the quests and storylines are entirely optional. They have interesting reactivity throughout the game (and good rewards) if you pursue them, but if you find something too challenging, it’s often possible to just move on without completing it. This also let us tune up the difficulty on the more optional content, so more seasoned players can test their mettle.

Third, death is rarely the end in a Torment game. Often, even falling in combat or failing a check produce interesting results, so “failure” isn’t always a punishment.

GC: What's your favorite sidequest in the game?

GJF: Geez. Hard to say. Our quests are generally monsters of reactivity with multiple solutions and outcomes, and they often affect each other in wonderful/horrific ways. All of the ones I worked on were fun to write.

I’d probably say it’s a tie between Foreman’s Brood and a certain companion’s unannounced quest. The former has a mix of wacky comedy and heart-breaking horror. The latter is a pretty straightforward quest whose outcome depends a LOT on how you’ve gotten along with this companion. The game’s characters are all far more complicated than they look on the surface, and our quests reveal those secrets in (for me, anyway) exciting ways.

JK: I’m a fan of the questlines involving the Lascars in the Bloom. Without giving too much away, the Lascars are a race of space-faring soldiers who have been trapped on their anchorage for generations, tethered to the Bloom by one of its unpredictable portals. Depending on who you talk to and what information you find in the Bloom, you may be able to help them find their way home or steal their most valuable possession. Regardless of what you do, you have to pull off an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist to complete their story. In all situations, what you learn about them is one of the cleverest bits of world-building in the game.

GC: How many hours do you expect a typical player will take to finish Torment: Tides of Numenera?

JK: As I mentioned earlier, a large portion of the game’s content can be completed in multiple ways or are entirely optional. That makes it hard to get an accurate estimate for a “typical” playthrough, but we can confidently say that fans of Planescape: Torment won’t be disappointed.



GC: What's one tip for new players that will make it easier to get started?

JK: Not to be too much of a broken record, but one thing that sets Torment apart from other games is that failure is rarely the end of anything and there’s almost always multiple solutions for any situation. With that in mind, my tip is twofold: First, don’t reload if you fail a task or die in some grisly manner. See what happens next. Second: You won’t be able to do everything in one playthrough. If you encounter a challenge you can’t overcome with a conversation-oriented party, you may need to do another playthrough with the Last Castoff as a Glaive.

Secondary tip: Talk to everyone, everywhere. Worst case you’ll get a fun dialog with a fascinating character; best case you’ll learn an obscure secret that helps you with a quest or gain a powerful artifact.

GC: Why do you think there's still such a desire for "old school" isometric RPGs like Torment and Pillars of Eternity? Do you think there's a future for the genre beyond these titles?

GJF: Man, I hope so. Games like this are a game writer’s dream.

Torment, Pillars, and the games like it cater to people who like worldbuilding, hard choices, and deep reactivity. More modern RPGs are great (I play pretty much everything), but the technology and money involved in making them does limit the amount of flexibility they can offer. They offer things we can’t, and we do things they can’t. There’s room for everyone at the RPG party.

So, yeah. It’s safe to say we want to keep making games with complex, branching storylines, and I hope people keep wanting to play them.
 

Darth Roxor

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5+6+7 + 8 -> 9: Fargo's decision to turn Torment into a console game was irrational

It was rational to make a console port if that was the only way to avoid bankruptcy. Even if it wasn't, it would be rational according to Fargo's twisted logic™

11+12 -> 13: Colin Mccomb is a primadonna of a nu-male variety.

When your opponents no longer believe in fair debate because they think that they must take extreme measures to save Christianity/America/the white race, then such a statement is reasonable.

14: Primadonnas, especially those of the nu-male variety, don't like to be ordered around and easily become "offended" by it

Nobody except for wimps like to be ordered around, some are just better at hiding it than others.
 

janjetina

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Torment: Tides of Numenera
It was an expansion pack. You raise your ambitions and try to make a bigger game, you're likely to run into bigger problems.

The hardest and most expensive (in man-hours) part of game development is engine development. In comparing the requirements for development of two games with complete engines, differences are only quantitative. There is no reason that an experience on MOTB wouldn't scale well for TTON.

Handwaving. The console port has nothing to do with why people don't like Torment or what makes it feel "incoherent".

Have you ever managed a software project (or any project whatsoever) in your life? When you dramatically change the basic requirements in the middle of the project (and support of an additional platform for a piece of software that wasn't designed as multiplatform from the start is a huge change), this has a huge effect on the project organization, task scheduling and morale of the team.
Adding a support for an additional platform takes a large amount of man-hours. Those man-hours have to come from somewhere else, because budget is constrained. Therefore the quality of the product suffers. If Torment stayed a PC game, the man-hours devoted to consolization would have been spent on the core game.

The upshot is: changing the direction of the project and redirecting the resources from gameplay resulted in an inferior and incoherent product. This is software development 101 and claiiming the opposite is extraordinary.

I assure you ksaun would have gladly overseen a console port if he was told to.

In the middle of an ongoing project, like it happened? Then I would question his common sense. You can't manage two large projects at once and be successful at any of them. If console port happened after the PC version was made, then there would be no problem.

Do you really think Colin McComb went over Kevin Saunders' head to stop his content from being changed? The same Kevin Saunders who lovingly called his team "TToN heroes" after leaving?

Over his head and behind his back? I don't know, but I find the speculation on the matter intriguing.
 
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Lurker King

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The newest of those reviews is from 2013. It's not very relevant to crowdfunding-era inXile.

Wasteland 2 kickstarter was launched during march 13, 2012 and the game was released on September 19, 2014. So at least one of these guys was working during the kickstarter era. Managers bad habits don't change. In fact, this would easily explain the constant delays and subpar games that inXile has being delivering.
 

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