And our writers had a great time writing for this game. If the writer is having fun, the player probably will too. I’m a big believer in the relationship between the writer’s fun and the player’s entertainment. Torment is a lot more fun to read than many other games and it seems like it was more fun to write as well. Not so in Torment where you talk to a random guy who, apropos of nothing obvious, tells you about the bizarre reproductive practices of his species. Oft times all this talking to NPCs doesn't amount to much. Murnane: “Talk to everyone because they may have something important to tell you” is RPG boilerplate.
Our setting put almost no limits on our creativity, so every character has their own bizarre story to explore. We found ways to fit them seamlessly into our world, expanded upon the lore and personalities provided by the backers, and weaved stories and secrets into their dialogues for players to discover. Then I turned the content over to the writers and area designers, who further developed the characters and locations, giving them their own unique twists, and enhancing the strangeness of everything.Īmong our favorite sources of inspiration were the backer NPCs (characters created by backers of our Kickstarter campaign who contributed a certain amount of money). To take the example of Sagus Cliffs (the first city in the game), I wrote an initial design document that defined the major quests, characters and locations. Ziets: Designers and writers were given a lot of freedom to develop weird and unusual characters, encounters, relics, and more. Were the writers allowed more leeway to add things like this than they normally would? Torment’s world seems ideal for this sort of thing. Murnane: Sometimes you find little, tucked away places in games where it seems like the writers or artists were given freedom to do whatever they liked without the need to contribute directly to gameplay as long as it worked within the game design. We loved the result so much that we wrote a special dialogue in which the player can interact with the object in different ways and see what happens. In my original level map, it was labeled as “weird numenera object,” and I left the details to the artists. One example of the latter – in the Underbelly district of Sagus Cliffs, you’ll find a green obelisk covered in dark, blinking spheres. They could also add visual elements to the levels, and those were often so cool that we ended up incorporating them into quests or writing new dialogues around them. But apart from that, they could indulge their imaginations and make things as wild and interesting as they liked. Our artists knew the general flavor of the level – I’d provide a paragraph or so of description to set the stage – and they knew the most important features that had to be there. At that point, we’d pass the level to the art team. They’d block out the level in our tool – literally “block out” with vague shapes like cubes and cones to represent buildings, obelisks, etc. Then I’d sketch out a rough, top-down map on graph paper and hand that to a level designer. For a zone like Sagus Cliffs, I would figure out what levels we needed and determine the characters and objects that would be present in each one. I’ll give a quick description of how our level design process worked. Ziets: Yes – especially with the level artists. Did this affect the richness of the collaborative interaction among the teams that made the game? Torment’s world provides great opportunities for imaginative creativity. Murnane: In an earlier part of this interview you spoke of how collaboration with artists, level designers, animators and others can enhance the writer’s contribution (and vice versa).
TORMENT TIDES OF NUMENERA BETA FULL
The content currently playable in this version is the same as in the beta that was made available to Kickstarter backers earlier in the month, covering "the game's introductory sequence as well as most of the first major location of the game, Sagus Cliffs."Īs one of the Kickstarter games that's excited me the most over the past few years, I'm interested in checking this out, but I think I'm gonna hold off until the full game is available, it sounds like we're already getting a fairly substantial chunk of the game, but if this is as enthralling as 'Wasteland 2' turned out to ultimately be, it's the kind of game I'd rather burn through over a couple of days instead of waiting until the full game is made available.Torment: Tides of Numenera. The game is considered a spiritual successor to the classic 'Planescape: Torment', and was developed with the input of several of that game's original team such as Chirs Avellone, Colin McComb, and Mark Morgan. InXile's highly anticipated RPG 'Torment: Tides of Numenara' is now out on Steam Early Access for $45. The intriguing RPG gets ever closer to completion.
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