Game News "What can change the nature of a game?" - Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter is LIVE

[Zed]

have the kid from the pitch video narrate the game. I bet he'd do it for a cola and a snickers.

 

[Jaesun]

Will this game even use a narrator though? Maybe in the beginning possibly.

 

[tuluse]

tragedies

Have you ever played the Lucas Arts adventure game Loom?

The main motivation your character has for doing anything is just trying to get back to his tribe, and while you get wrapped up in a plot to take over the world it has one of the grimdarkest endings I've ever seen in something designed for children.

Spoiler

You can't beat the big bad, and you just literally cut reality in half so he can't come through, leaving behind everything you've known to the big bad's machinations.

 

[jewboy]

I just know that I tend to find sad stories more dramatic and intense than happy or uplifting ones. Nothing is more boring to read about than happy characters with no problems. There should be problems. They should be serious. And there should be no guarantee that things end well for said character. Of course you also have to care about the character. Hurting or killing characters that the reader never cared about in the first place is pointless. A tragic story may not have to end in tragedy to benefit from the greater drama of tragic events over happy ones, but it seems to help.

 

[Black]

Wow, I wake up and it's 1.5 already.
Maybe I should go to sleep again.

 

[Jaesun]

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Brother None can you convince the boys to make one of the castoff's masks be "The Face That Never Remembered"?

 

[Brayko]

Jeebus, Brian really is a master of this Kickstarter business, for I find my credit card hopping right out of my wallet to pledge.

 

[Brother None]

Brother None can you convince the boys to make one of the castoff's masks be "The Face That Never Remembered"?

Had to google this. That is...actually a pretty disturbing mask. ... tempting!

 

[Stabwound]

Edit: oh goddammit we're at 1.4M fffffff we're about to pass yet another stretch goal without having even announced it

A good problem to have.

Also, @ thread . . . full voice acting . . . yeah, I can so see that in a Torment successor. Let's get James Earl Fucking Jones to narrate the piles of non-NPC dialog.

Maybe if it was Avellone.

Full voice acting in a text-heavy game would be absurdly expensive. The best approach is the IE approach where important NPCs narrate their first few lines of dialogue so you can get a mental image of what they're like, and the rest is just text.

 

[Groghunter]

created an account just to say: There's only one rule for voice acting: no-one is allowed to say "Waterdavian Creatures." Seriously, loved that game, but every five seconds, someone's yelling at you about those... things.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

That is...actually a pretty disturbing mask

Yes.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

I agree that tragedies are underused in games. Saving the world stories were really never a good idea. I think intensely personal stories that end badly are definitely the way to go.

It doesn't even have to 'end badly' as such - 'tragedy' in its classic sense didn't always do that, and I think the association of tragedy with it's non-literary meaning of 'a bad ending' is part of the reason it fell out of favour after 1930. Ultimately, it means that the story is one where the hero doesn't get to save EVERYTHING and put everything right, but people get their come-uppance in a personal or psychological way. Great Expectations doesn't end with Pip being ruined or psychologically crushed - it ends with his reconcilliation with the love of his life, combined with the realisation that they're both too damaged by now to be anything but close friends. It's a sweet ending, in some ways more romantic than if they had actually got together.

Heart of Darkness ends with Marlowe 'almost' taking the step over the edge into madness, but stepping back at the last minute and realising that there IS a difference between him and Kurtz - that while Kurtz was pure idealism and hence had nothing left to anchor him when his idealism crumbled, Marlowe (once stripped of idealism) is still grounded in the everyday work of running a ship and it saves him. It's a tragedy because of what it says about the human condition, but the 'good guy' still wins.

Hamlet gets his justice. McDuff - as morally ambiguous and dangerous as he is by the end - gets his revenge. The protagonists in the Revenger's Tragedy are happy to wear their death sentences because they killed the assholes who murdered their family and raped their women - they see it as a victory, and they never expected NOT to hang.

Hell, some people list Camus' 'The Plague' as a tragedy, and that's one of the most uplifting books ever written. Unlike Sartre (who I despise both as an academic philosopher - he took all his premises from Nietzche but still wanted to keep HIS morality while shitting on everyone elses - and as an author), Camus saw something beautiful in the fact that we can't justify why we help others, but we do it anyway. The Plague is described as a tragedy because you have a set of characters who set about trying to combat a seemingly unstoppable plague in a town that's been locked off due to quarantine. Some do it for charity (the priest, the doctor), some for selfish reasons (the lover), some for duty. It's a tragedy because of what it says about the human condition - as the plague goes on, they all slowly realise that all of their motivations for helping others and putting themselves in danger are ultimately meaningless. But whereas Sartre shits on that sort of thing and would call them all fools, Camus finds something beautiful in that - the characters KNOW that they can't justify why they are endangering themselves to help others, but they also know that they can't stop - something in them, something that they can't understand or justify, leads them to make that sacrifice. Okay, it's not a crpg plot, but it's a good example of how 'tragedy' in the literary sense is to do with the human condition - you can have an absolutely uplifting book like The Plague, and it can still be a tragedy because of what it says about people (even if what it says is ultimately positive).

In the literary sense, tragedy doesn't have to mean 'everything ends up fucked'.

For a more topical example, you can completely defeat the spirit eater curse in MotB if you find and assemble all the mask pieces.

 

[Brother None]

Second update is up. Appreciative bonus, stretch goals, housekeeping.

$1.2 million was the "gender choice at character creation". We passed it!

 

[Jaesun]

ZIETS!

 

[Black]

Second update is up. Appreciative bonus, stretch goals, housekeeping.

$1.25 million was the "gender choice at character creation". We passed it!

Oh no!
Maybe 1.5 million is "male main character only".

 

[BobtheTree]

If even the Kickstarter page of this game is exceeding the character limit, I think we can expect a deep, dense story from the game.

 

[Gozma]

I'm kinda hopin' they employ Zeits outside of the stretch goal thing, I imagine it would be kinda butthurty for other the other writer-designers to have Ziets get special billing on two different Kickstarters

 

[superdeluxe]

Really like that retrospective!

 

[Jaesun]

I'm kinda hopin' they employ Zeits outside of the stretch goal thing, I imagine it would be kinda butthurty for other the other writer-designers to have Ziets get special billing on two different Kickstarters

Nothing. NOTHING in videogame history will ever fucking top his Myrkul conversation that he wrote.

If he can add that to this game and his own insights, we all win.

 

[jewboy]

Wow. Those stretch goals are really underwhelming. Tony Evans did some writing for MoTB. Fine. Good. I can accept that. But where is Ziets? Maybe he couldn't commit the time that Fargo wanted because of his gig with Obsidian? And who's the chick? Mur? A writer for WoW? Seriously? Maybe she's meant to write the romances. The one's we're all hoping won't be in.

At 1.5 mil in less than 24 hours the 2 mil goal is almost certainly going to be reached. I'll admit that using 'grey goo' aka some kind of nanotech thingy for an NPC, if that is what it is, is pretty cool and clever although surely a nightmare for the artists. Moar Mark Morgan is always a good thing and FLAC should have been the default digital distribution format in the first place if only because it means you can convert it to whatever lossy format you want. Surely moar Monty Cook is also a good thing. So some decent additions at 2 mil, but nothing that really seems all that motivating for people to spend more. Maybe he'll have thought up some cool goodies for 2.5 or 3 mil.

 

[FrancoTAU]

I'm guessing the first couple stretch goals weren't supposed to be that sexy since they figured to hit them early on in the campaign. Still, that's a lot of extra writers which might squeeze out any of the names being mentioned in this thread.

 

[Zeriel]

I think it's cute how they think going up to the 2M stretchgoal is going to last them until tomorrow morning. We're going to be nearing the 2.5M at that point. I honestly just wish they'd publish all the stretch goals at once, especially if the later ones are particularly juicy (still no mention of 2D > ), but what can you do, I imagine a lot of this stuff is pure social engineering so I suppose holding things back makes sense to keep people checking back.

 

[Esquilax]

I think it's cute how they think going up to the 2M stretchgoal is going to last them until tomorrow morning. We're going to be nearing the 2.5M at that point. I honestly just wish they'd publish all the stretch goals at once, especially if the later ones are particularly juicy (still no mention of 2D > ), but what can you do, I imagine a lot of this stuff is pure social engineering so I suppose holding things back makes sense to keep people checking back.

I expected them to reach the goal quickly, but I didn't expect it to be this much faster than Project Eternity. This is going to get some insane funding, definitely over $5 million, possibly $6 million. Having that kind of money combined with creative freedom is going to be something we haven't seen in a long, long time, possibly ever.

You're right that it seems that they threw the stretch goals together to keep the momentum going. After all, look at the end of the update:

What’s Next?

Over the next days, we have more updates planned in which, besides any news related to the Kickstarter, will be providing some more details about our plans for Torment, building upon the information from our initial Kickstarter page. Some of these details will be explained through video updates from members of the Torment team, so you’ll get to learn both about the game and about the people who are (or will be) working on it.

Thank you all so much for an exciting first day. Words cannot expr

Sincerely,
Kevin Saunders
Project Director

 

[Zeriel]

Pretty sure the cutting off thing was a joke referencing the main page thing being unable to go beyond certain number of characters like they said. But yeah... I am surprised to see no mention of system improvements like 2D, though, as that is a pretty major draw. Then again, I suppose when you're still sucking up 1,000 dollars a minute, you may not feel it's a good idea to deploy new attention-getters. Maybe they're waiting for funding to drop off before throwing out the really cool stretch goals. This thing here's a marathon, not a sprinting race.