grimuar.pl/interview/george-zietsThe Man Behind the Mask ‒ an interview with George Ziets
Few cRPGs are awaited with such high expectations as the upcoming spiritual successor of Planescape: Torment. Set in the Ninth World of Numenera, Torment: Tides of Numenera was backed by more than 80,000 fans worldwide. One of the designers who have taken upon themselves the task of reviving the legacy of Torment is George Ziets, the Creative Lead of Mask of the Betrayer.
In an extensive interview, George tells us about his sources of inspiration and his work on Torment: Tides of Numenera, Pillars of Eternity and Mask of the Betrayer. He also shares his opinion on various subjects related to narrative design.
Grimuar: Hello George! Thank you for finding the time to answer our questions. Using the opportunity, we’d like to congratulate you on the successful funding of your own dark corner of the Bloom! You’ve been involved in several projects lately ‒ what has been taking most of your time in the recent months? Could you tell us more about the development of the Gullet?
George Ziets: Thanks! Since May of 2014, I’ve been a full-time employee at InXile, focused almost entirely upon Torment. As Lead Area Designer, I’m designing two of our zones (the Bloom and Sagus Cliffs), overseeing the work of our other area designers, writing some dialogue, and working with the artists to develop character concepts, models, and level art. I’ve also contributed to story discussions and revisions, but the main narrative is mostly the province of our creative lead, Colin McComb.
The Gullet was a part of my initial design for the Bloom, located deep in the creature’s guts. I intended it as Torment’s version of dungeon content, focused primarily on exploration and combat. In the original Planescape: Torment, I enjoyed the catacombs sequence that followed the Buried Village (including the Drowned Nations, the various crypts, and the Nameless One’s Tomb) because it contrasted with the heavily dialogue-driven gameplay that preceded and followed it and broke up the pacing of the game. I thought that the Gullet could serve a similar purpose in the Bloom, albeit on a smaller scale. It could also provide some fun reactivity to the player’s choices earlier in the zone – for example, if your actions caused the Bloom to feed upon certain people, you might encounter them again in the depths (or an echo of them, anyway).But when we initially prioritized our scenes for the Bloom, we realized that the main narrative of the Bloom could function without the Gullet. Since our resources are limited on Torment, the Gullet became C priority, and it appeared likely that it would be cut. Thankfully, our Kickstarter backers stepped in and changed all that.
So now the Gullet is alive and well (and satisfying disturbing, I might add). Area designer Joby Bednar and I updated my original design and expanded some elements, and Joby is currently developing the level in Unity.
We start every interview with a question about the things that inspire our guest’s creative work. Could you list a few sources of inspiration ‒ games, music, books etc. ‒ which have helped to shape your own imagination and style?
I think the answer to this question varies by project. My tendency is to immerse myself in source material that inspires me for each game… to the extent that I almost avoid reading, playing, and watching things that will take me out of the appropriate mindset. When I’m in the design phase of a project, part of my thought process is always focused on the game, and I’m often jotting down ideas all day long. Books and movies and games that evoke the right tone or mood are like fuel to keep that process going.
On Torment, the biggest influences have been the original game, which I sometimes play in brief spurts before writing dialogue or thinking about an area design, the Numenera sourcebooks and published adventures, and Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books. I find that whenever I read a chapter of those novels, it indirectly sparks a few more ideas I can use in the game.
On a more general level, I was heavily influenced by the D&D campaigns I ran every weekend from age 9 to 17, and also by the rudimentary RPGs I built for my friends with Adventure Construction Set (on the Apple IIe!). Those experiences got me thinking of storytelling as a collaborative endeavor, and watching / adapting to the responses of my players was perfect training for game design. In my younger years (the 80s – early 90s), I was inspired by Greek mythology, which I read voraciously after being awed by the original Clash of the Titans movie, as well as movies like Dune, Labyrinth, Flash Gordon, and nearly all of Terry Gilliam’s films. More recently, I’ve been inspired by many of Miyazaki’s animated films and a few anime series like Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. On the video game side, my most significant influences were probably the Ultima series (especially 4 and 5), early open-world, player-driven games like the original Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Seven Cities of Gold, and the Infinity Engine games. Picking out specific books is difficult because I devoured so many fantasy novels as a kid, most of which… weren’t very good… and it’s hard to remember the most influential ones. Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn stands out – it had a dark and unforgiving tone that I found appealing, and it depicted “elves” in a way that I found more interesting than in Tolkien’s work. And I can’t forget to mention the Fighting Fantasy series (the four Sorcery books, Deathtrap Dungeon, and Citadel of Chaos were probably my favorites), which were dark and chaotic and imaginative – those made an impression too.
You mentioned once that you’d be interested in creating a hard science-fiction RPG. While Numenera can be loosely classified as such, were you ever thinking about different sci-fi settings? What themes would you like to explore?
Yes! Numenera is a lot of fun, but it’s more of a far future, science fantasy setting. I’d be interested in developing a nearer-future setting with technologies that can be realistically predicted by present-day science. I’d also want to get away from Earth – too many science fiction settings today are post-apocalyptic futures. I’d rather visit our solar system in about 300 to 500 years when humanity has expanded beyond the home planet, established dozens of semi-autonomous colonies, and begun to modify ourselves and other life forms to survive on Mars, in the clouds above Venus, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I think that particular future would be a wild and chaotic place with unregulated technology of all kinds and hundreds of competing interests… which is a great, conflict-rich setup for storytelling.
Thematically, one idea that interests me is fragmentation - what will it mean for humanity to branch out into the solar system, gradually forming new societies that are separated by vast distances? The early European colonies in the Americas were founded by all sorts of different groups - what sorts of people from our present-day world would choose to leave the home planet and establish new societies throughout the solar system? How would those nascent societies evolve and grow apart? When we’re no longer stuck on the same planet together, can (and should) humanity still remain a coherent whole?
I’m also interested in the creative instinct – the human drive to change and manipulate everything around us. I think this tendency could become even more pronounced as we move into the future – for example, modifying biological life forms to serve human needs in other worlds and environments… or manipulating the intellectual capacities of other species, as in David Brin’s Uplift series… or even modifying ourselves into entirely new forms, as with the Ousters in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books. Exploring the implications of such major changes could be really interesting.
Most role playing games based on the popular “reactivity and choices” don’t really prove to a player that there can be “middle ground”. We’re stuck with ending each conflict either as heroes or villains. Do you have any ideas for introducing more neutrality while keeping the choices meaningful and rewarding?
One way is to create adversaries who aren’t stereotypically evil. If the player comes face-to-face with an enemy who turns out to have good reasons for what he did, it’s going to be harder for a “hero” player to slay him and happily walk away. The same goes for allies – the player’s friends need not always be helpless, virtuous peasants – they should be complicated, imperfect characters too, and if you make the wrong decisions (from their point of view), they might turn against you. Creating adversaries and allies who are multi-dimensional – not entirely good or bad, just like real people – can complicate the player’s decisions and make them feel a lot more interesting.
Sometimes the problem is the morality system that’s built into the game. For example, if your game is explicitly tracking good-evil (as in D&D) or light side-dark side (KOTOR), then you’re encouraging designers to engineer choices along the stereotypical hero-villain divide. If instead you design a morality system that focuses on a different set of distinctions (as we did with the Tides in Torment) then you’re forcing designers to think about moral choices in a different way, which will discourage hero vs. villain thinking and help avoid the classic trap.
Choices in the real world can almost never be reduced to good vs. evil, so if I’m ever stuck trying to think of a more interesting sort of choice, I usually think about conflicts I’ve witnessed, read about, or heard in the news, which can provide good inspiration. (Of course, sometimes it’s fun to give players an outrageously evil option too, even if you know most people won’t pick it – we are making video games, after all.)
In one of our interviews Colin McComb stated that “writing goodness without being boring is *hard*”. Would you agree on that? Do you have any thoughts on how to approach “good” themes without being too idealistic or monotonous?
I addressed this to some extent in the previous question, but I think the best way to avoid “good” options that are boring is by dropping the player into realistic situations where the morally good path is not obvious. Put complicated characters on all sides of a conflict so that the villain is not necessarily evil, and the player’s allies are not entirely good. Introduce significant negative repercussions to seemingly “good” actions. Give the player multiple, competing visions of what it is to be good in a particular situation, so that the player has to choose among them.
Writing the stereotypical version of good is nearly always boring. But writing “good” in the complicated world of real life can be much more interesting. It’s just a matter of where we, as game designers, draw our inspiration from.
As a designer for the upcoming Torment game, you deal with the Numenera system on a daily basis. Which elements of the Ninth World do you find the most interesting?
I love the intentional weirdness of the Ninth World. The setting actively encourages us to indulge our crazy ideas and depart from the usual fantasy conventions. We can draw upon nearly any subgenre of fantasy or science fiction, as long as it’s presented in a way that feels consistent with the rest of the world. In order to do good creative work, it helps to have a setting that feels fresh and new and lets us combine elements from a variety of sources, and the Ninth World is perfect for that. (In that sense, it reminds me of some of my other favorite settings, like Planescape and Dark Sun.)
I also love the fact that it’s a world that rewards players for making discoveries. Player-characters can fight monsters and save villages if they want, but it’s no accident that the PCs are called “explorers” instead of “adventurers.” The real objective is to discover new places, creatures, and artifacts, experiment with the numenera, and investigate ancient mysteries. The world is layered with the detritus of countless civilizations and technologies, and it’s up to the player to make sense of it as well as they can.
On a related note, I think the concept of “oddities” is great too. Instead of generic gems and jewelry, the Ninth World has these weird objects from previous worlds. They usually don’t have any practical purpose, but they can lead to a fun or bizarre interaction if the player chooses to experiment with them.
There are many interesting similarities between Planescape: Torment and its spiritual successor ‒ from eternal conflicts (the Endless Battle and the Blood War) to the player’s maze, a mysterious enemy chasing the protagonist, Sigil/Bloom bizarreness etc. Can you share with us any other links to PST that we did not mention?
Sure, here are a few:
Uncovering the past. In our case, it’s the past of the Changing God, the other castoffs, and your companions. In PST, the Nameless One gradually learned about his own previous incarnations, the important people in his past, and the deeper stories of Morte, Dak’kon, etc.
Factions with competing philosophies. These played a big role in Sigil, so we wanted to be sure we had some joinable factions in our main city of Sagus Cliffs. Just as in PST, the player can try out more than one faction, but they can only be a member of a single faction at a time.
Solving problems through dialogue instead of combat. In this, we’re attempting to go even further than PST did. If we’re successful, your character should be able to avoid combat entirely (and not just by running past enemies), though it will be challenging to do so.
Death. Just like PST, death won’t end your game (most of the time). When you die, you’ll be sent to the Castoff’s Labyrinth, which will give you access to Reflections (echoes of people your character knows in the “real world”) and Fathoms (strange places to explore in the depths of your own mind). In some cases, dying may provide access to “real world” content you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.
When you employ such links 15 years after the original game’s release, does it feel like re-telling certain elements of PST in an updated, perhaps more mature way? Is it a way to explore some areas which may not have been given enough spotlight in the first game? Or are those similarities simply a “wink” to the players familiar with the original?
All of the above. I think PST was a pretty mature game, but we are certainly exploring some elements in our own way and taking them in a somewhat different direction that resonates better with our team. Our themes, in particular, feel like they’re coming from a more mature and experienced point of view, probably because the average age of our team is greater than it was for PST. (Colin has mentioned a few times that mortality and legacy resonate more strongly to him now than they did when he was in his 20s.)
We’re also attempting to take some concepts from PST even farther than the original game did. For example, PST broke the rule that death is a bad thing and requires the player to reload. We’re applying that concept more broadly to other sorts of “failure.”
Thus, failing at Difficult Tasks or being defeated in combat won’t always mean you have to try it again. Sometimes failure will have interesting consequences that will change your experience but won’t block you from proceeding. In fact, you may discover that you actually prefer the outcome of a failure state – it may not be exactly what you wanted when you attempted a task, but you may find it to be more interesting.
Like its predecessor, TTON will feature mature themes, such as one’s legacy. Are you planning to explore some other themes connected to the nature and state of humanity (such as indifference, struggle for power, slavery, poverty or addiction)? Do such themes prove to be still valid in a world set a billion years in the future? Should we prepare for new major issues which may seem alien to our contemporary mentalities?
In addition to legacy, we’ll be exploring the theme of abandonment, which resonates strongly in the Numenera world (where the remnants of countless civilizations have been abandoned and forgotten over the millennia) and in the player’s story (where you and your siblings have been abandoned by your sire, the Changing God). You’ll encounter many other instances of this theme throughout the game.
Likewise, slavery, poverty, and addiction all appear in the Ninth World, and you’ll encounter them in TTON too. We’re not avoiding dark thematic content, though we never tell the player what to think about these issues, and you can react to them in a variety of ways.
For the most part, I think these themes are universal human issues – they’re as valid today as they were in ancient times, and they’ll probably be just as valid in the far future. How they are expressed will differ, though, based on changes in technology and culture… and that’s what you’ll see in TTON. The themes will be recognizable, but in many cases, their specific manifestations will be unique to the Ninth World and the player’s unusual narrative.
I can’t think of any themes that will be entirely alien to the contemporary audience… but that’s mostly intentional. We want the Ninth World to be fun and weird, but we also want our players to identify and sympathize with the characters in the game.
Do you know if there’s any chance that Torment or Pillars could feature ambitious, morally ambiguous and existential dialogues like this? In other words, to what extent will the character’s intelligence level affect their dialogue options?
In Torment, the player’s Intellect pool won’t affect their response options. Partly that’s because of the nature of the Numenera ruleset – the player’s Intellect pool represents a lot more than just intelligence (it also represents willpower, wisdom, charm, likability) and it rises and falls as the player uses skills and is damaged in certain combat situations. Some response options will be based on the player’s lore skills, though.
As far as I know, Pillars isn’t going to have special response options for “dumb” characters either.
You have been a Pillars of Eternity stretch goal ‒ however, we feel you haven’t had too many chances to introduce your work on the project. We remember you writing interesting stuff about Woedica, one of Eora’s deities. Could you elaborate a bit on your work on PoE?
I was involved in the early narrative and world-building work on PoE, when the team only consisted of Josh and a few other people. It was a fun phase of the project – I love world-building, and Eora (which didn’t even have a name at the time) was almost a blank slate, except for the player races, the map, the focus on souls, and a few lore elements that Josh wrote during the Kickstarter campaign.
First I came up with a bunch of deities, which made good sense to me as an initial step. (It seems like a society would use gods to represent things that are important to them, so defining the deities was a good way to get to know the people of the Dyrwood and their neighbors.) Then I wrote a lot of lore about cities, dungeons, prominent people, organizations, and important places in the region, including a detailed breakdown of Defiance Bay. I think the team has expanded the city a lot since I worked on it, but some of my neighborhoods are still present (e.g., Brackenbury, Ondra’s Gift), and it sounds like they’ve retained some of the other lore too.
In appx. March of 2013, when more people started to roll onto the project, a number of us (Josh, Chris Avellone, Eric Fenstermaker, Jorge Salgado, me) wrote up ideas for a main storyline. Then Eric and I spent a couple weeks on Skype (he was in California, I was in Ohio) synthesizing many of those ideas into an initial draft. During that time, I also assisted with some writing on their vertical slice (Dyrford), though I don’t know if any of my dialogue is still in the game.
Around May of 2013, I shifted my focus over to Torment during a lull in my PoE work, but my role on Torment quickly expanded, and InXile ultimately offered me a full-time position. That turned out to be a good fit – the only downside is that I never had a chance to do any additional work on PoE.
The plot of Mask of the Betrayer focuses on the Wall of the Faithless, a controversial and rather grim concept. At one stage of the game, we get to visit the remains of the dead God of Death. As for the characters themselves, they represent extremely differentiated views in matters of faith. What inspired you to take on such ambitious and original themes?
At the time, I didn’t really think of our content in those terms… they were just elements that I found personally interesting.
When Chris Avellone offered me the role of Creative Lead on the expansion, I had a lot of flexibility as to what the story could be about and where in the Realms we could go. I also had a few months (while NWN2 finished up) to brainstorm, so I read all the Forgotten Realms material I could get my hands on. The elements that stood out were things like the Wall of the Faithless and the afterlife, the dream-theft of night hags, the spirits and witches of Rashemen, the nature of Faerun’s gods, and the idea of “death” for a god. The Wall of the Faithless was definitely my favorite, and I wanted it to play a central role, but I set out to craft a story that united all the elements I liked. The themes arose naturally from the narrative, and I didn’t know what the game would be about, from a thematic perspective, until I had a solid draft of the story and main characters.
In retrospect, I’ve always found religion and mythology to be interesting topics, so it’s probably no accident that MotB’s themes veered in that direction.
Psychological depth and originality of the characters of Mask of the Betrayer really attract attention. One of Many, composed of mass consciousness of all sorts of criminals, and Okku the Bear God are especially unusual companions. How did you come up with such vivid characters?
On Mask, my goal was to make the companions feel unusual and different, partly to reinforce the player’s impression of being a stranger in a strange land. Okku was mostly inspired by the giant animal gods in Princess Mononoke. When I first saw that movie in the early 2000s, I wanted to *be* one of those guys in a game… or failing that, I wanted to travel with one. I also loved the idea of a companion with the truly massive, overwhelming physical strength of a bear. So Okku was one of the first companion concepts I developed (right after Safiya, who arose naturally from the main narrative).
One of Many was the last companion to be fully developed. When I was conceptualizing the companions, I knew I wanted some sort of undead companion that players could somehow shape themselves. (I think that idea arose indirectly from some characters I wrote on NWN2 – the Silken Sisters, whose souls had been smashed together by the King of Shadows.) But beyond that, I didn’t know what this undead companion would be. The idea of him being an amalgam of murdered criminals and psychopaths came later, when I was finalizing the main story draft and needed more details about the companions. It seemed like a recipe for the most evil and psychologically disturbed companion I could imagine… which was perfect for that character. But I didn’t know exactly how the player would create One of Many until I started designing the Death God’s Vault.
(Side note: One of Many’s name was suggested by Tony Evans, who ultimately wrote the character’s excellent dialogue.)
Mask of the Betrayer spoilers
[highlight]You supposedly managed to include Kaelyn as a companion at the last moment. Did you have to give up completely on introducing certain story arcs?
Not really. Most of our planned content for Mask got into the game, and the things that were cut generally made the game stronger. For example, we originally had another whole module that took place on Myrkul’s floating “island” in the Astral Plane, but we cut it down to a single scene, which worked a lot better for pacing.
We did cut a planned romance with Kaelyn. That made me a little sad, but she’s still my favorite MotB companion, and having no romance with her makes sense for the character.
We also did a poor (i.e., rushed) job of concluding Kaelyn’s arc if you chose to fight against her in the City of Judgment. In that case, her grandfather is supposed to appear to save her, and the player can either allow him to take her away or try to kill him. Originally, all four of her siblings were also meant to be there, but we weren’t able to get them all in. The player would have a chance to kill all of them in front of Kaelyn (and then leave her for the demons or just kill her) – a really horrible ending for her, but appropriate for evil PCs. Avellone wrote a great scene with her grandfather, and I think it plays sometimes, but the game scripting is buggy and the scene doesn’t always get triggered.
(The same thing happened with Kazimika the witch, who is supposed to ambush you outside Mulsantir if you devour the Wood Man, giving players who hated her the chance to exact revenge. I don’t think that was fully implemented, but I’m pretty sure the dialogue exists.)[/highlight]
End of spoilers
There is an ongoing discussion whether or not games should (can?) be considered to be works of art. If the artist of the past heard of a tool that would let them connect theatre, music, literature and make the spectator live and breathe in their interactive world, they’d consider it a gift from the heavens. What is your personal opinion on this matter?
Games can absolutely be works of art… but most of them are not. For a game to be a work of art, I think it needs a unified vision that is reinforced by every element (gameplay, story, level design, music, art, etc.). When so many disciplines are involved in building a game, it’s incredibly difficult to achieve that level of synchrony – on big projects with enormous teams, I’d say it’s virtually impossible. Smaller games with a strong central vision are more likely to succeed as works of art, in my opinion – with a smaller team, there’s a better chance that all the team members will understand the artistic vision and work toward it. So I’d say that we’re more likely to find “games as art” amongst indie titles.
Probably the “biggest” game that I’d consider a work of art is Planescape: Torment. The most recent game I played that I’d classify as a work of art is To The Moon. I’m sure there are others, but I don’t get to play as many indie games as I’d like.
Do you often read reviews of the games that you work on? If so, what has been the toughest criticism you faced? Do you regret any choices or design decisions you had made in the past?
Yes, I always read reviews – both official reviews and user reviews are interesting and instructive. Even the angriest rants have some nuggets of truth at their core, and a game developer can learn a lot from them. Possibly the most valuable lesson is in seeing which elements of a game garner the most passion from fans – sometimes those elements are not the ones we assumed would be most important.
I don’t have many regrets about specific design decisions on other projects, especially if they were made for good reasons at the time and I learned something from them. In the case of Dungeon Siege, I think my biggest regret was not pushing harder against some of the narrative goals and constraints that I didn’t agree with… and which ultimately led to a bland experience, in my opinion.The toughest criticism I’ve faced was on Dungeon Siege 3, which wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped. Many players found the narrative (which was my focus as Creative Lead) to be a disappointment. Even though I knew why the narrative didn’t meet these players’ expectations, and I agreed with most of the criticisms, it was disappointing to have spent two years on a project that didn’t excite our fans.
Throne of Bhall, MotB and New Vegas spoilers
[highlight]What are your favourite gaming moments, story-wise? (We’ll warn about spoilers, so feel free to mention anything that comes to mind.)
[/highlight][highlight]
My favorite moments are almost always the ones when I get to make interesting decisions. These aren’t even confined to RPGs. A really old-school example is an Interplay game, Castles, that occasionally confronted the player with decisions to make as a ruler. The consequences were not always monumental – sometimes I’d get more of a resource, sometimes I’d get an extra knight in my army – but the decisions themselves were excellent for immersion. Like real-world choices, they weren’t structured around abstract notions of good or evil, and they were effective in making me *feel* like I was playing the role of a medieval king.
I’m also a fan of decision moments when the player gets to do something that’s completely unexpected and surprising. (Oftentimes these are “evil” options, like the bad ending for Kaelyn in MotB, but not always.) One example is from KOTOR, when a dark-side player can command the wookiee companion, Zaalbar, to kill his best friend Mission Vao… and the wookiee actually does it. It’s a really dark option that surprised me when I saw it.
A few other moments that I’ve enjoyed…
All the interactions with Deionarra in Planescape: Torment (tragic characters are my favorite), including her great sensory stone dialogue.
The ending of BG2: Throne of Bhaal, where I can choose to embrace my heritage and become a god (and leave behind my companions and love interest) or remain a mortal ‒ a satisfying capstone to the whole experience of that series.
The ending of To The Moon was fantastic – not especially reactive to player actions, but emotionally one of the most powerful moments I’ve seen in a game.
Any moment that makes me truly hate an antagonist, like the moment in Lonesome Road (Fallout New Vegas DLC) when Ulysses steals the robot companion I’ve come to like and rely upon.
Any interesting or dramatic opening to a game, like the plane crash in Bioshock. I thought the opening “growing up” sequence of Fallout 3 was clever, too.[/highlight]
End of spoilers
Thank you for your time and effort, George. This year might bring some memories back with both Torment and Pillars hitting the shelves (well, hopefully). We sincerely wish you to keep up the good work and remain creative.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/114678237705/updated-our-journal-40-in-good-company-pillarsUpdated Our Journal (40): In Good Company: Pillars of Eternity Launched!
TL; DR: Pillars of Eternity launched; Nathan on companion design; Colin talk from London
Hello,
Kevin here. Before we talk about Torment, we are excited to give our warm congratulations to our friends at Obsidian Entertainment, who today released their Kickstarted RPG Pillars of Eternity, available on Steam, GOG.com and elsewhere!
Pillars of Eternity is a party-based, real-time-with-pause fantasy role-playing game, inspired by the Infinity Engine games of old, like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. With the help of their backers, Obsidian has lovingly crafted a great game, and we admire and are inspired by their accomplishment — Pillars of Eternity is another victory for crowdfunded game development, demonstrating what’s possible when developers and gamers join forces. The devs at Obsidian have been great colleagues to us and we salute them for their terrific work on Pillars of Eternity.
As a personal aside, it was actually the Project Eternity Kickstarter campaign that led to my involvement with Torment. I had left the entertainment games industry in 2009, switching to serious games development. I saw an announcement of the Project Eternity Kickstarter on its launch day in September 2012, on Blues News. Having worked at Obsidian for five years, and knowing the people there and what they were capable of, I immediately signed up for Kickstarter to pledge. When the game funded the next day, I wrote Chris Avellone to ask him to pass on my congratulations to the team. This exchange led to Chris asking me if I’d consider joining Brian Fargo at inXile to work on a new project.
Like many others, I’m excited about Pillars of Eternity due to my high regard for Obsidian’s creativity and RPG expertise. I hold it in extra regard because I’m not sure I’d be working on Torment today were it not for their ambitious effort. Thank you, Obsidian.
On Companion Design
Hi, I'm Nathan Long, lead writer on Wasteland 2 and one of the writers on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Kevin has asked me to talk a little bit about how we develop the companions that can come along with your journey through the Ninth World, so let's begin, shall we?
The goal for the companions is to give them each their own distinct personalities, voices, character arcs, and lots and lots of reactivity - which of course means lots and lots of writing. Lots.
So where do we start?
Well, though I had the honor of developing one of the companions from scratch, more than half of them were created by our fearless leader, Colin McComb, who wrote up a series of what we are calling CDCs, Companion Design Constraint documents. CDCs are bare-bones descriptions of the characters and what role they are supposed to play in the story and the party. They are two or three pages at the most, with a paragraph each for appearance, personality, history, motivation, a few sample lines to get the feel for the character's voice, and a brief outline of their arc and how it hooks into the Last Castoff's story.
Aligern is one of the companions Colin came up with - a crusty old Aeon Priest weighed down with guilt, who uses the tattoos that cover his body to power devastating attacks and daunting defenses - and a few weeks ago Colin asked me to flesh him out and start writing the barks, banters, and dialogs that he'll have throughout the game.
My first step was to read carefully through Aligern's CDC and then expand it into a CB, otherwise known as a Companion Brief, a ten to fifteen page document that goes into more detail about Aligern's back-story, his goals and personality, and gets specific about where and when in the game the Last Castoff will meet him, at what locations his story will advance, and how many different possible endings he will have. Most of these things had been figured out in the abstract long ago, but I fleshed out the details.
Once I put together something I thought felt pretty solid, I showed it to Colin, Kevin, George, and Adam, who gave me a raft - several rafts actually - of notes, and we had a flurry of email and Skype conversations as we discussed their suggestions and the best ways to implement them.
After several revisions and reviews, Colin and the others gave me the okay to take Aligern to the next step, the Companion Design Document - or CDD for short - which I've never ever confused with the CDC or the CB. Never! (We also have ZDCs, ZBs, ZDDs for Zones and MDCs, MBs, MDDs for Meres. Is your head spinning yet?)
The CDD is a 50 to 70 page behemoth of a document where the character's back-story, personality, and story arc are finally turned into actual dialog. Within it are endless lists of situations that the character will be able to react to in the game, from the moment they first meet the Last Castoff:
POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
[highlight]"Do you know me?" Aligern grabs your collar. "Look me in the eye! Do. You. Know. Me?"[/highlight][highlight]
To battle cries:
"Let's get this over with."
To threats:
"Never cross a man with nothing left to lose."
To reacting to the environment:
"That orifice is... looking at me."
To banter with the other companions:
Aligern - "How many have you killed, assassin?"
Matkina - "Who keeps track?"
Aligern - "Does it weigh on you, their deaths?"
Matkina - "I'm not you, old man. I never killed anyone by mistake."
To moments of revelation:
"You're lying. I refuse to believe he meant it innocently. It's impossible!"
To moments of treachery:
"You'd give me to these butchers without my consent? If I ever had any doubt about who you are, I don’t now."
To leaving the party:
"I'll see you, castoff. Though you might not see me."[/highlight]
And normal dialog is just one way you can interact with your companions. There are also the companion's Reflections, who you can meet in the Labyrinth, and who may tell you secrets about them their real-world selves won't.
Filling in the CDD takes a while, but once it's done and reviewed to make sure I've captured Aligern's voice and kept it consistent, I move on to the last step of the process: creating Aligern's Global Dialog. Some of the companion writers, such as Chris Avellone and Patrick Rothfuss, don't continue on to the Global Dialog creation. We don’t need them to become experts at the conversation editor, and a full time designer can use their CDD to implement the dialog. (Though the original writer later does a pass on the implemented content to make sure it stayed true to their voice.)
The Global Dialog for each companion is typically a massive dialog tree, into which go the conversations that companions can have with the Last Castoff throughout the course of the game. To include the degree of reactivity we want in Torment, we decided to break up these Global Dialogs across the game’s major story points. Even so, these tend to have more than 150 nodes each (though some of these nodes are duplicates, or at least similar, throughout the game). For Aligern, these include heart-to-hearts about his story, reactions to significant events in the Last Castoff's story, reactions to things that recently happened to the party, and reactions to things the Last Castoff asked Aligern to do for him, or did to him. This dialog is where some of the deepest, meatiest, most heartfelt - and sometimes painful - conversations in the game are found.
Consequently, it’s also the dialog I enjoy writing the most, really get to stretch my creativity and breathe life into the character. Of course, that also means it’s the most spoileriffic dialog, and the hardest to show you a sample of without ruining important moments of the game, but let's see what I can find.
Here is a sample of his global conversation, POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
So, there you have it. That's how we expand a character like Aligern from a two page idea to a 50 page character design document, and then to the actual dialog that you will read and hear in the game. It's a long and challenging process, but it's fun, and hopefully the results will allow you to get to know, love, or hate the people you're traveling with, and to immerse yourself even more deeply into the world and the story of Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Nathan out.
Colin Talks And More
Our Creative Lead Colin McComb is back from his trip to London for EGX Rezzed, where he had a talk on narrative design and Torment: Tides of Numenera. He spoke on the pillars of our game, some key characters, dialog design and how to tell a good, reactive story. This talk is now available on EGX Rezzed YouTube, 40 minutes long for the talk and Q&A.
While in London, Colin also took some time out to sit down with GameWatcher to talk about Torment, joined by Thomas Beekers.
Our Polish friends from Grimuar Sferowca interviewed Lead Area Designer George Ziets, with a focus on Torment: Tides of Numenera's design and setting, but also covering his career and prior games.
Meanwhile, Adam Heine has been answering more questions from our fans on his own blog. You can read his thoughts on Torment’s rest mechanics, writing samples for video games and if one can tell who wrote what in a video game.
Kevin Saunders
Project Lead
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eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-25-planescape-playstation-black-isle-kings-field-from-softwareThe story behind Black Isle's cancelled PlayStation Planescape game
The From Software effect, generations before Bloodborne.
The Souls effect will reach fever pitch this week with the release of Bloodborne, and very important gaming people at lunch around the world will wonder how they can copy it. Feels like a recent thing, given that Dark Souls appeared in 2011 to really kick it all off. But as I discovered, in something of a crypt in London recently, the Souls effect was felt a long, long time ago.
It's 1996 and Super Mario 64 has come out, Quake has come out, Tomb Raider has come out. The Spice Girls are only just coming out (I could have worded that differently). Meanwhile, over in America, Colin McComb writes Planescape campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons. But he wants to go to California because there's this girl there. Then he sees his chance.
"Come on out and be the lead designer of this PlayStation game that we're doing with the Planescape licence," a company offers him.
The company turns out to be Interplay, a games company in full bloom; the man offering him a job is Feargus Urquhart, head of subsidiary studio Black Isle (now in charge of Obsidian Entertainment). What Urquhart wanted Colin McComb to make was something a lot like 1994 PS1 game King's Field. You know, King's Field made by From Software. You know, the King's Field series that would inspire Demon's Souls.
"Have you played King's Field?" Urquhart asks McComb in his first briefing. "And I said, 'I have not,'" McComb tells me. "And he said, 'Your first task is to play King's Field.' So they dropped me into an office with a PlayStation and King's Field and then said, 'Get going.'"
King's Field was dark, grim and ruthlessly difficult. But more than that it respected players, treated them like grown-ups who could figure things out for themselves. John Teti had much more to say about the game in our King's Field retrospective.
Brief in hand, McComb got going. It was just him and a programmer in a small office for weeks, months even. He hadn't made a computer game before, only tabletop games, but gradually ideas began to form, and the project known as Planescape PSX was born.
He can only remember so much, nearly 20 years later, but he does manage to dig out an old vision document for me. McComb isn't sure who wrote it but seems fairly sure it wasn't him.
"The goals of Planescape PSX are to immerse the player in an interesting and stunningly distinct fully-3D gaming world; constantly provide the player with interesting and rewarding activity; and to make players feel like their characters are in a real fantasy world."
Remember, it is 1996.
"Players will find themselves in amazing places, face-to-face with creatures both bizarre and frightening, unlike anything seen before in a console [role-playing game]. Combat in Planescape will not simply be a matter of holding down the fire button and being quick to dodge. Players will be buffeted by a Githyanki's long sword as it crashes against their shield or be knocked to the ground by the mad rush of a dying Wererat. "
It was going to be a first-person "running through a crypt type thing", McComb summarises - with branching dialogue! It would have real-time combat and, of course, be based in the weird and wonderful Planescape setting of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
"Planescape PSX is, at its heart, an RPG. Players will create their characters - warriors, thieves, magicians and clerics - and take them out adventuring. Players will be able to tailor their characters to suit their own play styles ... and adventure in several districts of Sigil, the City of Doors and beyond, to Baator and the gate town of Ribcage."
You were going to be able to climb, swim, float or fly to achieve mission goals - even pass through walls. "Warriors," on the other hand, "may simply choose the direct approach and try to kick the s*** out of whatever stands in their way".
Spells and items and powers taken directly from Advanced Dungeon & Dragons would open up to you as you play.
The story would cast you as a lowly enforcer for the Harmonium, the law-people of Sigil, "the guys who believed in order and goodness and tried to keep everybody on the straight and narrow", adds McComb. Sigil is the city connecting all the multiple planes, from which the weird and wonderful come. It's a dirty and dangerous hotpot constantly close to boiling point.
You, as the Harmonium recruit, would go to break up a routine riot in the slums. It's there you'd uncover the deeper threads of a bigger conspiracy. "It turns out this conspiracy led all the way to the upper-planes and the lower-planes," adds McComb, "because there were people in the upper-planes selling weapons to keep the Blood War going.
He adds: "We realised it was total fantasy and there was no way that could ever happen in real life!"
Above all else, Planescape PSX was going to be tough.
"Unlike Doom where you get armoured up like a crab and go toe-to-toe with everything until they are all dead, things in Planescape can make you dead very easily, especially if you're unprepared. Until he knows the lay of the land the player will do more running than fighting. Exploring does not mean finding strange new places and depopulating them. It means the player will learn what he can and can not tackle, where he should and should not go and be compelled to sharpen his skills, wits, and weapons to explore the game further."
"Players will learn things the hard way in Planescape," it concludes, like a marketing slogan. "Planescape PSX will hit back."
Six months of work went into it. There was even talk of a sequel.
"If this game does well and there's demand for a sequel, we can create a method whereby the players will be able to transport their characters from saved games in this edition to begin the sequel with slightly better abilities and attributes than they might otherwise have begun."
But before anyone would get the chance to make more than a design document, Planescape PlayStation was scrapped.
"At some point somebody in Mahogany Row said, 'Holy s***! We've got three Planescape games going on,'" McComb recalls. "'This does not make good sense. So let's axe this one and then... We need to do another Stone Keep game so we'll turn the Planescape PC game into Stone Keep, and then this other one we'll just move Colin onto that.'"
I'd have been thoroughly cheesed off. But he wasn't. "Keep in mind that a lot of that time was playing King's Field..." he reminds me with a smile. Also, you know, perspective: "I had other news on that day as well, which was my Granddad had died, and my car was also dead, so I was like, 'OK, well my project is... whatever.'"
The three games Black Isle had in development were Planescape PSX, Planescape PC and Planescape: Last Rites. Planescape PC was being made by Zeb Cook who invented Planescape. Planescape: Last Rites, on the other hand, was being made by Chris Avellone. Ever heard of him?
If you're reading an article with Planescape in the title then of course you've heard of Chris Avellone. He was the lead designer of the Planescape computer game - Planescape: Torment. It was a philosophically deep adventure that still lingers in people's minds 16 years later. And it was Planescape: Last Rites that would become Planescape: Torment - Colin McComb joined Avellone on the project as his number two.
Chris Avellone helped me track Colin McComb down in 2012. I'd connected with Avellone to try and get the old team together for a Planescape: Torment post-mortem podcast, which you should listen to if you haven't - I don't think many people did. Inadvertently, however, I'd set bigger cogs in motion.
After the podcast, Chris Avellone told Colin McComb about a writing job at inXile working on Wasteland 2. That's how, more than a decade later, McComb would find himself working at another company owned by Brian Fargo, who once ran Interplay. That's also, more importantly, how he'd find himself working on another Torment game - Torment: Tides of Numenera.
It's for that new Torment game that Colin McComb is in London, at EGX Rezzed, where we meet. That's the indie-flavoured game show organised by Eurogamer's parent company Gamer Network. If you haven't seen the talk he gave about Torment: Tides of Numenera yet and you're interested in the game - or you like a bit of philosophy and story design - then you should watch the embedded recording of it below. Bet they couldn't do that in 1996.
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twitter.com/SaundersKevin/status/587997126929420289Kevin Saunders said:
More up to date physics support, new types of shaders, more parallelism and optimizations and etc.. Global illumination was also a highly requested feature: http://unity3d.com/unity/whats-new/unity-5.0
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OK so essentially nicer graphics and better performance. Can't complain really.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/117690685205/adam-and-kevin-on-various-topics
In other news, Brian Fargo will be in Witcher Country towards the end of May, attending this years Digital Dragons as a lecturer.
digitaldragons.pl/en/conference/programme-2015
Including a first look at the turn based combat. And cube-shaped bubbles.
Oh, and some more of this of course:
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pcinvasion.com/torment-tides-of-numenera-interview-with-colin-mccomb-and-kevin-saundersTorment: Tides of Numenera Interview with Colin McComb and Kevin Saunders
Propelled from the most funded videogame Kickstarter ever, Torment: Tides of Numenera is the upcoming story-driven isometric CRPG which seeks to transpose the ideologies and game design philosophies of Planescape: Torment into a new universe. Much like its inspiration, Tides of Numenera aims to be full of thought-provoking dialogues, settings which verge on the bizarre, intricately designed NPCs, and reams and reams of descriptive text.
The game focuses on a newly awakened consciousness of a body left by the changing god – a powerful being who is able to cheat death by leaping from body to body. Unlike other castoffs, you’re able to cast your consciousness into the bodies of others left behind by this being, allowing you to explore not only your own history, but those of the characters who have been lived in and left behind by the changing god.
We had questions. Project Director Kevin Saunders and Creative Lead Colin McComb took some time out to fill in the blanks.
The interview is available in audio (intro music from Torment: Tides of Numenera and outro from Planescape: Torment), or highlights below.
Download
PC Invasion: What are the similarities and differences between the settings Planescape and Numenera?
Colin McComb: They’re both incredibly imaginative and extraordinarily cool. Neither of them are about killing the monster and taking its treasure; they’re both about trying to understand your place in the world as you comprehend it at that point.
The main difference is that Planescape is built more around belief, and wisdom, and the exploration for answers regarding the soul; whereas Numenera is more around exploring the world around us as it is. They both have room for philosophical exploration but one of them is more about doing and the other one is more about contemplating.
PCI: How does the design approach to the title compare to Planescape: Torment?
CM: The experience we’re going for with our Torment is less of the everything-is-rusty-and-falling-apart kind of thing; and we’re going more for a “check this out, isn’t this super cool bright and colourful?” kind of thing. We don’t want to solely do the dark, grim, crushing experience that a lot of Planescape was, but at the same time we also want to convey the sense of incredible age.
While our colours are going to be bright and evocative for many of our areas, we’re also targeting to develop the same sort of continuity of experience that Planescape had; in that we want to have incredibly weird and varied stuff that people will go “holy crap! I never would’ve imagined that.”
Kevin Saunders: The content is fairly dark a lot of the time, in general. But when you have the combination of the strangeness of the world, the technology, and people living at roughly a medieval level of their own native technology, there’s a lot of grim things that can occur and we explore them.
In terms of the gameplay, we’ve probably gone for even more of a literary approach than Planescape was.
CM: We want our players to be active participants in this game, and thinking about it, and figuring out what it is that they’re pulling away from the game, and building in little verbal puzzles as well.
Not puzzles in the sense of “you need to solve this” but in the sense of “there’s a greater mystery behind this” that someone who’s playing casually might miss, but someone who’s playing carefully will say, “hey wow! I figured that out.”
PCI: Will the weirdness of the world extend to the items you can find, much as it did in Planescape?
KS: Actually, ‘Numenera’ is a word in the game world which refers to all the technology from the past civilizations, and by civilizations we don’t mean like the Egyptians, we mean a billion years or so of history. All of mankind as we know today would be less accomplished than just one of the eight worlds preceding the ninth world, which is where we are in Numenera. So, the game is named after all these items which can range from nano-bots to large devices.
One type of items are ciphers which are one-use items; like scrolls from D&D. But the catch with them is that they don’t behave well if you have a lot of them, which prevents hoarding.
Another type of item are oddities. They, by design, don’t really do anything; they’re just sort of interesting. You might find an oddity where you use it and you have a vision which shows you using it and you see little creatures tinkering and playing around you. You can hear and touch them but no one else can see them. It doesn’t do anything and doesn’t kill any monsters etc. but it’s just interesting.
Some of them will just be interesting and others may have some information you can gleam.
In terms of weapons, there’s a lot of variety there to. There’s one ranged weapon which, instead of shooting a projectile, what it does is compresses some of your blood or internal organs into a projective and then sucks it out of the victim. So, it’s sort of a backwards gun, visually.
We want the items to capture the setting as Colin was talking about earlier.
PCI: How have you tried to design the world, NPCs and so on, in the way you envision?
CM: We wanted to make a measurable philosophical metre, that’s what we’re using the tides for. They’re essentially a physical and psychic force which allows us to track what the player says and does, and follow that throughout the game so that people will be able to react to the player’s tide and choices.
KS: They are essentially a measure of one’s legacy. The five different tides cover different aspects that Adam, Colin and I identified before the Kickstarter – what sort of things people are known for. It’s our way of trying to quantify that in ways to have an effect on the gameplay but also to help direct the player’s journey through it.
PCI: They’re kind of in place an alignment system?
KS: Right, but there’s no good or evil in there.
CM: We don’t want to make a value judgement as to what is good or bad, that’s something the player’s going to have to decide on their own.
KS: Another important thing about it is that, with the tides, we don’t care about the player’s intent, only the actions. It’s like if someone were an independent observer, which is like what the tides are, and they were to witness an event and outcome, how they would view the person who did it and what they would attribute to that person’s legacy.
PCI: Will this be used to provide some closure at the end of the game on things the player has done throughout. Much like the text epilogue in Fallout 2?
KS: Yes, we’re planning something like that; but it won’t just be about the tides.
We don’t write with the tides in mind, we write situations and afterwards assess them from the perspective of the tides. That helps it so that the situations themselves aren’t contrived.
In terms of an epilogue, it’ll be focused on all your choices throughout the game.
PCI: The combat was decided to be turn-based, with a Kickstarter backer vote on the subject split down the middle. How’s the combat working out?
KS: It was a very close vote, statistically it was probably a tie; but it was never intended to be a democracy it was about what’s best for the game.
I’m very happy that we made the decision we did. It’s allowed us to bring more of the narrative into what we do and make that part of the combat.
CM: A lot of the encounters are handcrafted set pieces; they’re planned out.
There will also be what we call tussles which are smaller fights you fall in to. For example, by pissing people off.
KS: Those are almost like a failure state. Well… not exactly, but you don’t wander through an area that’s a dungeon crawl and there’s a whole bunch of these encounters. They’re more that there’s a situation where it doesn’t make sense to prevent you getting into a fight. As in, it would feel off from a narrative perspective if there is no aggressive possibility.
CM: Not everything you do in these combats is sticking a sword in someone. We’re planning on having things like fixing an item, building a machine or protecting yourself from alien bombardment; things like that. It’s not necessarily going in, going toe to toe with someone and swinging until the loot drops.
The experience you get from it isn’t for killing someone it’s for overcoming the challenge.
PCI: Have you taken the same kind of approach with NPCs as in Planescape: Torment, as in having deep characters which play an intricate part of the story and so on?
CM: Absolutely. We want to make sure our characters are loveable, but also hateable. We want to build strong commitment directions between you and your party members in a way which makes them memorable when you finish the game.
Some of them kind of hate each other, will interact with each other, and er… I don’t want to spoil anything.
They have a full contribution to dialogs, the party, and interactions with other NPCs as well.
PCI: Are you thinking about early access for this title, as inXile did with Wasteland 2?
KS: Yeah, it’s something we’re strongly considering for Torment as well. We’ve got something called alpha systems tests; that’s like a segment of gameplay, which might only be 5 minutes, that’s on a specific game system and then we’ll ask for feedback on that. Some of our backers will have access to that. Our focus right now is getting those things into backers’ hands and that’ll give us a lot of insight into what to focus on next.
One of the advantages to the crowd funding approach as opposed to the developer/publisher model is that we have a lot of flexibility to change the plan as we go forward. There’s no date when we have to deliver some milestone.
We keep the backers informed as to what’s going on and we do what’s best for the game. We look at the final outcome.
PCI: How have you found the community?
KS: The vast majority of backers just want the best game. It’s not about immediate gratification, it’s about investing in a future experience. We don’t want to disappoint anyone, we want to exceed their expectations.
I see it as a priority to be honestly communicating; if we’re not making the game they want then better that we don’t have their support.
CM: When we put out Kickstarter updates they’re dense with information and it’s the information we want to put out. We don’t want to overpromise, because that leads to disappointment.
PCI: Anything final to add?
CM: I just want to tell everyone who’s reading that we’ve been working hard on this and that all the people who’ve played it, so far, in house have found it universally cool and awesome and we hope that you all will as well.
Torment: Tides of Numenera is currently expected around Q4 2015 or early 2016.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/121115558750/adam-answers-fan-questions
rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/10/numenera-pc-game/Torment: Tides Of Numenera
How inXile Are Bringing Pen-and-Paper To PC
I’m interested in Torment: Tides of Numenera [official site], but not for the typical reason around these parts – I’ve only ever played the first two hours of Planescape: Torment, to which the game is a spiritual successor. Instead, my interest is the result of playing the game’s other source material: Numenera, a pen-and-paper roleplaying game set a billion years in the future, which throws out much of the levelling, stats and combat of D&D-derived games in favour of a streamlined system that favours storytelling and improvisation above numbers and hard rules.
Curious about how many of the pen-and-papers unusual systems were being translated to a computer RPG, I spoke to inXile’s Colin McComb and Thomas Beeker – creative lead and associate producer, respectively – about bringing effort, cyphers, GM intrusions and backstories to the PC.
RPS: What made you choose Numenera as the base for a new Torment game – was it the story and world, or the mechanics?
Colin McComb: It was mostly based on the world. I did get to do some of the playtesting when Monte [Cook, the designer of the pen-and-paper Numenera] was developing the cypher system, but it was… When we were developing the idea for Torment at the very beginning, Adam and I defined four pillars of what would be necessary to make a Torment game, and one of those was a world that’s unlike any other, and Numenera’s got that in spades. I don’t think there’s any game out there right now that does anything anywhere near it. We saw that and Adam and I were like, ‘We gotta take that one.’ If possible, if Monte would licence it to us. It turned out he was pretty excited about it.
RPS: What’s your favourite thing about the setting?
McComb: Well, I’m a big Gene Wolfe nerd. The whole Book of the New Sun has been a huge literary influence. Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, that whole series. I just love the idea of thinking about what it is that humans are going to become, what the world is going to become after we’re all dust. It ties in really well with our legacy question, too – what does one life matter? When you’re talking a billion years in the future, none of this is going to matter, that made it a natural fit as well.
But of the setting itself, just the fact that it’s so weirdly evocative and imaginative and cool.
RPS: What stuff are you lifting mechanically from Numenera?
McComb: Everything. We’re doing Effort, we’re doing the three pools, we’re doing cypher poisoning. We’re basically trying to make it as closely representative of the Numenera tabletop experience as possible.
Beekers: We have freedom to adapt it, because not everything makes as much sense. The focus of Numenera, a lot of it is on simplicity, which makes sense for pen-and-paper because it keeps the flow going. That’s not as big an issue for us, so we’re all choose to make things more complex in underlying mechanics but still keep the same flow going.
RPS: Can you give an example of an area where you’ve added complexity?
McComb: Obviously random number generation, any of the complex rolls that we’re doing, I don’t think we’re just going with a straight d20 under the hood. Then there’s the random encounter generation; we’re not doing a lot of that, but. Anything involving rolls.
Thomas Beekers: Just the way Effort works is a good example, because you kind of have to back and forth on it with a videogame, and we can do a lot of that quite easily in computer games. So we can throw little things out there to make it work for us, but I would say everything works essentially like the pen-and-paper.
RPS: Are you doing stuff with GM intrusions?
McComb: Yes, we are.
RPS: How does that work when there’s no GM?
McComb: That’s a randomised thing that’s going to depend on the number of sleeps you have, the… I’m trying to think of what things effect that without giving away any spoilers… There are things that are going to happen in crises – the encounters and the battles that you’ll have – where suddenly things will take a turn for the worse and you can choose to accept that or reject it and get the XP for it.
Beekers: But it does work differently. That’s a system that works very well in pen-and-paper and you really have to just make it work on computer, so we’re doing something similar but it’s different. We’re at the stage now where this is something you have to play to see how it works, so anything we say right now will be a bit up in the air because we’re going to have to play it and see how it works and then adjust it to make it work.
McComb: We don’t want to make any promises. We’ve learned a lesson on that.
RPS: Do you link character progression to backstory development in the same way as Numenera – that thing of, if you want to give yourself a particular skill, you come up with a backstory for your character to justify how you know it?
McComb: I think that’s currently the plan, yeah. We want to make sure that we have a good story reason for everything so it seems seamless, and interactive as opposed to just, ‘Woop, you hit a tier, and now you can cast a fireball!’. Because that makes it feel like, ‘But what did I do to get that?’ I’ve been designing games for twenty years and I still don’t know how to cast a fireball, so maybe I just haven’t hit the right level yet.
RPS: Given the Effort system, does that radically change how you balance the game over the course of it? Because the Effort system allows you to make certain tasks trivial for your character if you’re actually good at it.
McComb: But it’s depleting your pools.
Beekers: The question for balance is not the Effort itself, it’s the depletion of pools and how you recharge it. So when we’re looking at Effort we’re mostly looking at management of pools and estimating how many points someone has to spend, and how many rest opportunities we want to give them, because you cannot rest anywhere in the game. You cannot be constantly recharging your pools, because that would make everything free, but we have our methods of limiting that.
McComb: Yeah, we’ve got an urgency mechanic that we’re trying out that we want to make sure works and that it’s not just annoying.
RPS: So that’s changing the rest system from the thing of–
McComb: Oh, you still get the four rests – I still get the instantaneous, the ten minute, the one hour, and the overnight – and it’s the hour and overnight that we’re trying to rope in. But each of those things increments the urgency, and if you do that too many times it’s possible that it’ll trigger a GM intrusion essentially.
RPS: That’s interesting.
Beekers: That’s sort of the same mechanic in Numenera where a GM would say, ‘But you can’t really rest right now.’ It’s the same logic, we just have to figure out a good pacing and presentation for it that doesn’t feel annoying to the player.
McComb: Right, like Mask of the Betrayer had the spirit-eating and even George said that it annoyed him. Our lead area designer is George Ziets and he was the creative lead on Obsidian’s Mask of the Betrayer, and he said that he just found it really frustrating and annoying and he wishes he hadn’t included it, so we want to make sure that our urgency mechanic is not annoying.
RPS: Most computer RPGs are based on the D&D model of combat and stats and progression. Does making it more based on something like Numenera, which is less well-known because it doesn’t have that history, does it make it harder to get players to understand or relate to it?
McComb: I don’t think so. It’s going to depend on the tutorialisation that we do in the early part of the game, but from what we have developed right now it seems like we’ve got a pretty good natural progression of accreting these skills so they’ll feel natural to the player.
Beekers: But I think we do have an awareness that we have to tutorialise, not necessarily more, but be aware of the fact that some of these systems are not going to be intuitive. Some of these concepts like not getting XP for a kill is something that we have to present in a way that does make sense to the player. It’s new enough that you just have to tutorialise it better, whereas with a D&D game you can just be like, ‘ach, everyone already knows how this works anyway.’
RPS: Similar to the XP thing: cyphers appear really special but most computer RPGs throw loot at you all the time. Do you expand the loot system so… will I be raking through bins like a binraker, picking up loafs of bread?
McComb: Everyone on the design team has expressed great distaste for the ‘Why would somebody hide something like this?’. Why are they going to be hiding their loot bag inside a barrel of ale?
Beekers: That’s not going to happen. But that’s actually the good with Numenera, because cyphers are not necessarily things that you pick up that someone dropped there. It’s part of a machine that you cobbled together into a tool, and that’s how we present it at times as well.
McComb: Yeah, and I don’t think we’re going to have totally destructible environments where you just go through and smash everything in a pottery shop and he just stands there and watches.
Beekers: I think the interesting challenge of cyphers for us is going to be because– I do the item design for the game, it’s good and fun to come up with unique cyphers, but the angle is so different because usually the player’s instinct is, ‘I’m going to hoard all this stuff and keep it for a big boss,’ but we have to make players understand that you get cyphers all the time and you have to use them all the time. At first opportunity.
McComb: Have you guys done cypher poisoning yet in your game?
RPS: No.
McComb: You’ve got a cypher limit, essentially. If you start carrying more than that, the chance of something really bad happening – explosions, mutations, you know.
Beekers: It’s not a hard limit [on how many you can carry], but the things that will happen are so bad that it might as well be. Really nasty things can happen.
But if you’ve played the Numenera pen-and-paper you’ve probably felt how different that feels and your instinct adapting and being more open to just using the item right away. I think that will actually be really cool in Torment, if we do it right.
McComb: Monte is always saying that the cyphers are essentially one-shot special powers. Think of it as potions, but even accumulated faster than potions, so it’s something that you’re always finding and always using.
RPS: You mentioned taking pieces of machinery. How does that crafting system work relative to other computer games?
Beekers: It’s a bit closer to modifying and cobbling together weapons than…
McComb: It’s not like Minecraft. Each item is going to have slots essentially that you can attach stuff to, to create like magnetic effects or fire effects or gravity effects. So suddenly you’ve got a gravity-disrupting sword and you hit someone with it and weird things happen… I don’t know that we have gravity in the game.
RPS: Does Monte play games of it and give feedback?
McComb: Right now it’s mostly describing things to him. We’ve got some builds out, but I don’t know that he’s actually played them.
Beekers: I know that we’ve provided them to Monte Cook Games, but it’s kind of in that stage where it’s not that useful yet to play. It needs to hit a certain point and then we’ll probably ask him to play it for at least a few hours to give us feedback, but he’s not constantly playing rough versions and giving feedback. That’s one of the reasons we like working with him, he’s not like a hands-on license holder, he’s not constantly in our stuff reviewing everything.
McComb: I think he’s pretty confident that we’re respectful of his license and his ideas… The fool. [laughs]
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tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/123747668980/updated-our-journal-44-george-ziets-joshUpdate #45
TL; DR: live streaming Torment talk; Asylum art; progress on physical map
Thomas here.
Our creative lead Colin McComb was in the office again in the flesh (he is always with us in spirit, of course). You may have seen this amusing photo from a Sagus Cliffs story session or his cameo at the end of the Bard’s Tale IV infomercial. But fist-bumps aside, it was a very productive visit as we continue to make great progress on our number one focus, the opening areas of the game.
This evening we’re doing an all studio party to celebrate our recent successes in crowdfunding and production as Torment is making great progress, Bard’s Tale IV achieved its funding goal, and the Wasteland 2 Director’s Cut is in a good state to hit its late summer release. We’ll be streaming this party live from 4pm to 6pm Pacific on the Twitch channel of famous streamer Quill. As part of the stream we wanted to present our fans with more on our ongoing projects Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut and Torment: Tides of Numenera. The Director’s Cut will be live-streamed for the first time!
As for Torment, Lead Area Designer George Ziets, our Lead Animator Josh Jertberg (both also in the fist-bump photo above) and our Crisis Design Lead Jeremy Kopman will each talk during this live stream. We won’t be showing the game in action but George will share some about Sagus Cliffs (minor spoilers), Josh will talk about our root motion animation, and Jeremy will talk systems design. So be sure to tune in about three hours from now!
Asylum by Chang Yuan
Physical Progress
While the game is being crafted, we are of course also working on the creation and delivery processes for physical goods. One of the things we really hope to knock out of the park was the cloth map, taking lessons from recent cloth maps from other games. We had Numenera mapmaker Christopher West draw out the map based on our design, and we are scouting for materials and printing processes that would get the best results. Here is a glimpse of the world map, work-in-progress:
In the News
And finally, we have one interview to share: Kevin Saunders and Adam Heine talked to Red Bull Games, discussing a wide variety of topics including the setting, Tides, Crises, skill system and more.
Thank you,
Thomas Beekers
Associate Producer
[video=youtube;E1V4us-yw8w]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1V4us-yw8w[/video]
It's also good that the combat is turn-based, makes more sense to my limited mind than Real-Time with Pause. The big problem is that the Dice Gods are a fickle bunch and will gladly screw up your rolls! :lol:
That's why your plan must include the estimation of risk. You *try* to do things, and they don't always work as expected. If anything this adds variability and tactical value. You should have bonuses that bias the dice rolls, so it's not all just "luck". That's the way I see it. If your strategy fails because of simple dice roll, it wasn't a good strategy to begin with
In any case, I see why these encounters are called "crisis" and not just "combat". Why did it take so long for someone to make a game like this?
That would be because big companies think that all gamers are stupid and we wouldn't be able to handle such things as a turn-based dice system. So they don't make them. Or maybe it's they themselves are just stupid, who knows what goes on behind the scenes?
One cannot speak ill of the Dice Gods until one has encountered Nuffle's wrath. Or "malicious joy in having people get maimed while trying to do easy stuff with a ball" is probably the more accurate description than "wrath".