Sorry, should've quoted just the actually interesting part:
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This or maybe something based on an IP from the Interplay back catalog (Stonekeep, Neuromancer)?
Wouldn't be too keen on another Bard's Tale to be honest.
Wouldn't be too keen on another Bard's Tale to be honest.
Yeah I wasn't never really that blown away by it mesen, first one was good. Second one with Lagoth Zanta was a bit crap, and it just fell behind the times after that if you ask me. Ah well old Fargo's got a big enough back catalogue.
The whole update: tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/104770261045/updated-our-journal-37-together-againNew Team Members
Kevin here. Over the last couple months, our highest priority has been ramping up Torment’s new team members and welcoming them over from their duties on Wasteland 2. While both games are single-player RPGs and built in Unity, there are major differences between them in all facets: animation, art, design, programming, sound, visual effects, and even elements of the production process. So while moving ahead creating content, we are taking some time to cross-train, acclimating our team with Numenera and the Torment project, while also infusing Torment with expertise gained throughout the development of Wasteland 2.
While we’re still keeping inXile a small and focused company, we’ve staffed up a bit to better meet the requirements for Torment and our planned future endeavors. Two new environment artists have joined us, and the Torment team. The first is Damien Evans, who actually began his game industry career in Quality Assurance at Interplay, where he was a QA lead on Planescape: Torment. InXile gave Damien his first art-related position many years ago, and we’re thrilled we’ve been able to lure him back with Torment.
After receiving a paintover pass, this 2D render (artist: Damien Evans) will serve as the background for an in-game Scene, where visual effects and possibly 3D props would be added.
The second, Paul Fish, joins us at the end of this month, driven by his love for Planescape: Torment and his excitement about the Numenera setting. Aaron Meyers, Torment’s Lead Artist, had the honor of extending Paul’s first game industry job to him about 7 years ago, and since that time Paul has mostly worked at Obsidian Entertainment, where his efforts included some of the Pillars of Eternity environment art. Although we’ve adjusted some aspects of the environment art pipeline we’ve licensed from the PoE team, enough is the same that Paul will be able to hit the ground running.
If you are interested in more details related to our production, you might check out our official Torment forums. One of our environment artists, Jon Gwyn, and Josh Jertberg, our Lead Animator, both have threads there in which they discuss and occasionally give updates on those aspects of the game.
Alpha Systems Test
Early-ish next year, we intend to have the first alpha systems test (AST). These are not exactly a common part of current game development, so I wanted to explain them a bit. Each AST will be a very limited build (version of the game) that highlights particular elements and is released to our alpha systems testers for their feedback. For example, the first one will likely focus on the Conversation UI. It won’t include any actual game world or characters. What it will have is a reasonably complete implementation of the Conversation UI, along with a single conversation that will be fairly involved, but still only take a couple minutes to play through.
The ASTs will hopefully be interesting for the testers, but they are by no means game demos or beta tests. To be blunt, these ASTs are for the benefit of the game, not those who play it. Alpha systems testers should expect them to be be ugly (or, more accurately, bland), with clearly placeholder graphics for anything that’s not central to the AST. (For example, the Conversation UI AST will have candidate final art for that interface, since its aesthetics contribute to the overall conversation gameplay experience.) They may have some bugs, though in general we’re looking more for the alpha systems testers to be providing feedback, not finding bugs.
Because of the development goals of the ASTs, we’re not planning to announce them in advance – while we have our own internal deadlines for these things, I don’t want the team to feel compelled to make compromises to meet publicly announced expectations or deadlines. I want the ASTs to be whatever they should be, whenever they should be, as will be best for Torment. Also, while we’ll be mentioning the ASTs a bit in these Kickstarter Updates, we will generally communicate more about them through Tumblr and directly to the eligible backers (i.e., those whose tier included AST access (Artifact Collector and higher Tiers), or who chose it as an add-on).
Lore Update: Oasis of M’ra Jolios
Adam here! For once, I’m going to tell you about something other than game mechanics: the history of the Oasis of M’ra Jolios.
Well, not the whole history. The underwater city of M’ra Jolios has existed since the beginning of recorded time, and possibly much longer than that—but no one knows who built it or why.
It is home to the Ghibra Ny’kul, the collective name for a variety of water-breathing races from all over the Ninth World. The Ghibra believe M’ra Jolios was created by their god, and that they were placed in the Ninth World to bring “water and life” to the Ninth World. It was this worldview that guided their meeting with the first Jerboans hundreds of years ago.
Concept art of the Ghibra (artist: Rebecca On)
The Jerboans were (and mostly still are) humans, refugees from the surrounding lands. The Tabaht still held sway in much of that region, enslaving some and driving many from their homes. Hundreds crossed the mountains into a vast desert valley with a sparkling dome at its center (its exact center, by the way, which is a point of interest among those who study M’ra Jolios). Thinking it to be an oasis, and having nowhere else to turn, these refugees hazarded the enormous wasteland in hopes of a safe haven.
Most of these migrants were never heard from again. The wasteland surrounding M’ra Jolios is called the Lost Sea for a reason. It’s more than just an enormous desert; ripples in space-time make it nearly impossible to traverse. You could walk in a straight line for weeks on end and find that you were still exactly where you started. Or you might end up on the other side of the valley without ever having gone near M’ra Jolios. Or you could wake up every morning in a different place than where you slept, never able to escape even if you went back the way you came. But with the right numenera (or a lot of luck), people could sometimes get through. That’s how the first Jerboans arrived at M’ra Jolios.
Some say the Ghibra greeted the weary travelers and helped them establish the air-breather town outside the Oasis. Others say a man, who somehow lived among the Ghibra, welcomed the refugees and helped them survive with the aid of the Oasis. Still others suggest the founding Jerboans themselves taught the Ghibra about the world outside their bubble and proposed an alliance.
Regardless, the two towns—Jerboa and M’ra Jolios—have grown together for centuries. More refugees from other conflicts and disasters have come to Jerboa Town since, growing Jerboa’s population much faster than M’ra Jolios, and as different methods have been found to safely traverse the Lost Sea, they have attracted a strong tourist trade. M’ra Jolios has grown more slowly, protecting their culture by controlling traffic into their environment. They also provide Jerboa with potable water, without which, the Jerboans would perish.
Today, most Jerboans view their relationship with the Oasis as a symbiotic one. The Ghibra give the Jerboans the means to survive—literally giving them water and life—but the Jerboans bring significant trade and tourism to the Oasis, making the Ghibra exceedingly wealthy. Many in M’ra Jolios agree that their relationship is mutually beneficial, and though the Ghibra are leery about giving Jerboans permanent access to their waters, they have come to Jerboa’s defense on more than one occasion over the centuries.
But as the Jerboans bring more and more attention to the Oasis, the air-breathers are becoming increasingly discontent with being forced to live outside in the hot desert, allowed to enter the Oasis only with a guide holding their hand. The Ghibra are mixed in response to this, and there are rumors the Oasis hides an éminence grise, a shadowy figure who works behind the scenes to maintain M’ra Jolios’s seclusion for his own purposes.
The tranquility of this desert paradise is wavering, and in the brewing storms are opportunities for the daring (or devious) to exploit the conflict for their benefit.
Denizens of the Oasis (artist: Rebecca On)
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Nice to see an exotic and unusual world brought to life for once in an RPG, think I might enjoy the Ninth World of Numenera.
pcgamer.com/uk/
A novel roleplaying system makes the transition from tabletop to desktop.
When I first spoke to InXile about Torment: Tides of Numenera, both the game and its setting were at the beginning of their lives. This spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment was successfully Kickstarted in March 2013, and laid its foundations in a new, crowdfunded tabletop roleplaying game called Numenera later that year.
Numenera is set a billion years in Earth’s future, during the Ninth World – a thousand-year-old, medieval-esque civilisation built on the bones of what came before. It presents science fiction and fantasy as ends of a sliding scale, and allows individual writers and gamemasters to figure out where exactly on that scale they want to end up. Fluidity is the rule: a single, catch-all dice system is used to resolve the outcome of any difficult task, and its flexibility is such that it can be matched to any action the player can come up with. This promotes an unusual degree of improvisation when it comes to problemsolving: the players come up with ideas and the GM finds a way of making them work.
Tides of Numenera occupies the ‘fantasy’ end of the scale, telling a story about the legacy of a body-swapping immortal called The Changing God. You’re the Last Castoff, one of the God’s previous forms, attempting to determine your place in the world and fleeing the cosmic comeuppance that’s hunting your creator down. Despite sketching out its own take on the setting, however, InXile is trying to replicate Numenera’s sense of freedom and versatility. There are limits on how the game’s improvisational fluidity can be applied to a computer RPG, where player action almost always boils down to picking items from a list. InXile accepts this restriction, but is also finding ways to give itself – and players – more options. The most basic of these is the conversation system, which in Torment is expanded to include complex interactions with objects as well as people.
“You’ll have ‘conversations’ with objects in the environment,” says InXile designer Adam Heine. “This gives you options, and gives us a lot more freedom to decide what those options are and iterate on them.”
InXile values plurality of choice over the detail with which those actions are represented. Games are traditionally limited by their animation budgets, but Torment’s developers are willing to allow the player’s imagination to fill in a couple of gaps. “We’ve said up front to our designers that it’s OK if we can’t depict what is being described,” says project manager Kevin Saunders. “They can just be creative.”
Think of it as a gentle merging of the isometric RPG’s sense of place with the detail and freedom of choice afforded by a text-based adventure. That sense of freedom is particularly important in a new Torment game, given its predecessor’s preoccupation with philosophical questions about agency and choice.
Tides of Numenera’s driving question, ‘What does one life matter?’, is, like Planescape: Torment’s ‘What can change the nature of a man?’, concerned with the impact of your decisions. For the new game, however, InXile is experimenting with ways to present choice to the player. A dramatic example of this is the ‘crisis’ system. At set plot-related points in the game, the player will take part in complex encounters involving physical danger and, potentially, combat. Unlike the rest of the game, these crises will be turn-based and will operate against a time limit, evolving and escalating both in response to and in defiance of the player’s will.
“The main criterion for a crisis is some kind of time pressure,” says Saunders. “This is the main part of our combat system. We’re expanding what combat means, trying to move towards the tabletop notion of an ‘encounter’, where there’s a lot more going on.”
You might be tasked with surviving a bandit raid or rescuing survivors from a monster-besieged building, but these won’t boil down to brawls or boss fights as they might in another game. How and when you choose to act will be based on a complex web of skills and interactable objects, emulating some of the freedom of tabletop roleplaying within the parameters of what a computer game can achieve. Time restriction provides a sense of pressure, and emphasises the importance of your choices.
“We’re not afraid to have content that some players won’t see,” Saunders says. “Another aspect of this is that we want failure to be more entertaining. Not getting the ‘good outcome’ doesn’t mean playing it again to get it right.” In Tides of Numenera, you’ll be encouraged to live with your choices as you would in a tabletop game. A crisis isn’t a puzzle to be solved, but an event to live through. This is a distinction that computer games have traditionally struggled with, and it’s great – and appropriate – that Tides of Numenera is attempting to solve one of RPG design’s fundamental weaknesses with a tabletop system designed to do exactly that.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/109421244870/updated-our-journal-38-art-tools-and-talesJournal Update 38: Art, Tools, and Tales:
TL; DR: Production continues; added visual effects artists to the team; a look at conversation editing tools; Bard's Tale IV announced as inXile’s next RPG after Torment; Paizo publishes Adam’s Pathfinder story, “The Patch Man”
Hello,
Kevin here. I hope the new year has been treating you all well. 2015 should be a very exciting year for us! There’s still much to do and the team is cruising along on multiple fronts now.
Art-wise, we’re building three Scenes in parallel (by “Scene,” we mean area or level – the environment through which you navigate your PC), taking them to a point where all of the geometry and texturing is complete. Final rendering, lighting, visual effects, and paintover happens at a later stage. We’re leaving most Scenes in this rougher state, getting only an initial render into the game – the art work that remains isn’t very risky and delaying area finalization gives us greater flexibility to make changes if needed.
But in some cases we’re still doing some research and experimentation so we are taking the area closer to a final state. For example, Damien Evans recently finished the initial environment art for our first underwater area. We’ll be bringing this area further because we have more technical questions to answer and our findings could help us when we create the other underwater Scenes. Here is Daniel Kim’s concept for this Scene:
Visual Effects Artists Found
I’m pleased to announce that we’ve found not one, but two talented visual effects artists who have joined TTON. Visual effects is an aspect of game development where I feel even just a little extra firepower can go a long way in terms of improving game quality. So we’ve been keen on expanding our VFX team to enhance our presentation of the Ninth World.
To that end, Chris Felts joined us earlier this month. Chris is a 15-year game industry veteran who was referred to me by Jay Bakke (one of the visual effects artists on Mask of the Betrayer, currently at Bungie). The video game industry is a small world, and it turns out that Chris had also worked with inXile environment artist Jon Gwyn and art director Charlie Bloomer at Shiny Entertainment as well as designer/programmer Ben Moise and designer Jeremy Kopman at Seven Studios. Chris brings a wealth of VFX experience and skills, which frees up more of Charlie’s time to provide art direction and also allows more research into new VFX.
And joining us just last week is John Winocur, a rising star whom Charlie met earlier this year at a Gnomon event. John made a strong impression at that time, demonstrating a wide array of technical knowledge and inventiveness. He fairly recently completed his degree and we lured him into video games with Torment and the exciting visual effects challenges offered by our unusual blend of 2D prerendered environments with 3D models and VFX. You’ll see some of their work in the months to come.
Conversation Authoring
Beekers here.
A few visits ago I took a moment between a dense schedule of meetings to sit down with Adam Heine and learn how to use one of the key tools we've been using for a long time on this project: Obsidian's conversation editing tools. These are especially a blessing for people like me (with no programming skills). I can write and structure a dialogue in that tool, sync it up to our project and it’s immediately part of our Unity build. By running the game and the tool simultaneously, I can even make changes to a conversation in real-time, seeing my changes by just talking to the NPC again without having to restart the game.
For a dialogue-heavy game like Torment, a good conversation editor tool is one of the most important things we have. Figuring out our conversation standards and improving upon Obsidian's already great conversation editor was one of our first priorities in preproduction. I’d like to take you through some of the basics so you'll know what we're talking about when it comes up in the future.
The two most important concepts are nodes and links. Nodes contain the text you see in the game, and they form a structure by way of one node being linked to (usually multiple) child nodes.
So far, so simple. Here's an overview of a dialogue from the game by the hand of Colin McComb. This conversation is with the patchwork man Jont, and the parts we'll be showing are relatively light on spoilers:
At the start of the conversation, the player will see the non-player character's (NPC’s) talk node (red) and each of the player character's (PC’s) possible responses or follow-up questions (blue).
The writer can lock or unlock conversation nodes based on whether the PC meets certain requirements. This is done with Conditionals that can check for a variety of values such as whether the party is carrying a certain item, whether someone is in the party, whether the PC has spoken to this NPC before, etc. Using global flags, we can create conditionals for virtually any circumstance we want. For example a conditional might check if the PC has read a note that provided a piece of information that he can then confront an NPC with, or a conditional can check whether the PC was nice to the NPC's father way back in the beginning of the game, or (to give an example from this conversation a conditional Colin created here) tracks how much the PC knows about different aspects of the Bloom. It can also track the PC's motivations when we provide two responses with the same text, but with one a “(Lie)” and the other “(Truth).”
Because conversation reactivity is such a high priority in TTON, conditionals are one of the most important functions in the Obsidian conversation editor. They can check for an absolutely massive amount of pre-set scripts which can be found with a very simple search function; from checking for gender to attribute scores to skill scores to – of course – Tide values, added for Torment.
Nodes can also be grouped together within a bank node. Each node within a bank has a conditional, and then the bank node determines which nodes inside it will display. There are two basic types of bank nodes: one might play the first node within it whose conditional is true, while another might play ALL such nodes.
Additionally, we've created special bank node types just for Torment. One is called an addendum node. It plays all nodes inside it whose conditionals are true, but instead of playing them one node at a time (and requiring the player to click CONTINUE between each node), it displays all of the nodes appended together as if it were a single node's text. The result is that a node's text can be customized based on PC skills, items or global flags, without requiring us to duplicate nodes that have minor differences between them.
For example, Colin used an addendum bank node to give the player more information on Jont, depending upon the PC’s visual perception skill. If the PC has the requisite skill level, the lines from Node 23 will appear in addition to those from Node 1:
Another special bank node checks if the PC has already asked a question and, if so, it changes the question and response. We call these follow-up nodes. They mostly serve to liven up conversation and make it feel more organic, as well as signaling to the player which questions he has already asked in a more natural way.
In the example below, the player will see Node 42 the first time, and when he asks it he will see Node 45. On subsequent run-throughs, he will see 43 instead and be given the answer in 46. The longer description of 45 would seem a strange response to one who had already heard it, while 46 sounds more natural for someone repeating themselves. (Note that players can always look at the conversation log if they do wish to review exactly what was said before).
The conversation tool already had the functionality to accomplish follow-up questions without requiring special nodes for it, but by creating a special node we make it trivial for writers to use them everywhere. This helps us to create more consistent conversations much more quickly. Addendum and follow-up nodes are added features to Obsidian's tool from our talented programmer Paola Rizzo.
The last feature I want to talk about for now is skill checks — known as Tasks in the Numenera tabletop game, and Difficult Tasks (DTs) in Torment. DTs were explained in-depth in Update 27, and you'll recall that, unlike in some game systems, anyone can attempt a DT — having relevant skills (or items or other situational factors) increases the likelihood of success, but is not required to try. The difficulty can be mitigated (or exacerbated) by many factors, including: previous choices, equipment, fettles, party members' skill values, or investing Effort from the relevant stat pool.
The writer simply assigns the “Perform Task” script to the node, selects a difficulty (using an abstracted value to aid in balancing later), the attribute from which Effort can be spent, and any skills that will make the task easier. The tool then marks the subsequent nodes as success, failure, critical success, and critical failure:
The writer adds text for each node and defines their results: advancing to another quest state (including completing a quest), setting a global variable, giving the PC unique rewards for critical rolls, or even causing self-inflicted injuries for critical failures (as currently laid out this conversation has only cosmetic reactivity for critical rolls; this may change in later revisions, hence the designer note in the Critical Fail node). But failures and critical failures aren't always bad, sometimes they are just unexpected outcomes that change the way the situation plays out.
What's to stop the player from just spamming the Task until she succeeds? A writer defines a node's "Persistence" in its properties. Many nodes – including some tasks – are “once ever,” meaning they only show up once and are never again an option. Another possibility for Tasks is "none" persistence, which means they will always exist, so the player can try again if they failed. However, if you try a Task you’ve already failed, you have to pay a Retry Cost (in Effort). This gives the player decisions about when to spend their valuable Effort pool.
The Jont conversation is a fairly standard one for a relatively minor NPC that happens to cover a few of these core concepts, but conversations can range from very simple barks to very involved, complex trees with hundreds of nodes. If you’re interested, in a future update, we’ll say more about conversation design and our tools and processes. In the meantime, here's one more "overview" shot of a conversation my colleagues have written:
Thomas out.
A Tale to Tell: the Bard's Tale IV is coming
As you may remember from Torment's funding, inXile operates on a 1.5 team system, where one team is fully dedicated to our main ongoing project (Torment) and a smaller team is working both on continued support of existing titles (Wasteland 2) and prepping the very early pre-production of our next title. At PAX South last weekend, Brian Fargo announced our next venture beyond Torment: The Bard's Tale IV, a direct sequel to the classic trilogy from the 80s! See more details in coverage from IGN or Game Informer, among others.
Just as Torment's preproduction had no impact on Wasteland 2, this project has no influence on Torment's production because different people are involved. The Bard's Tale IV is in its very early stages, with some technical research being performed along with early design work on things like the storyline, combat system, dungeon design, etc. We won't be talking about BT4 in detail for a long time yet, but we are very interested to hear your thoughts, so please share them on our forums and/or follow us on Facebook.
It's looking to be another very strong year for video games on Kickstarter. Harebrained Schemes launched a Kickstarter for their next Shadowrun title, Shadowrun: Hong Kong and it has been going very strong, already raising $700K and well on its way to its impressive one million dollar stretch goal, which will add a free expansion for all backers. And this Kickstarter will be closely followed by another exciting one, as Paul Neurath and OtherSide Entertainment recently announced the crowdfunding campaign for the Ultima Underworld spiritual successor Underworld Ascendant. We’re looking forward to this campaign, which launches February 4th.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/109500221660/jon-on-art-kevin-on-writing
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eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-18-getting-re-excited-for-torment-tides-of-numenera
How about renaming the thread to something more appropriate like 'Torment: Tides of Numenera', by the way?
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I'm sorry but that Eurogamer article sounds like the writer never played Torment, dismissing Sigil and the Multiverse as not important and a background detail is simply bollocks, they were drenched so deep in the gameplay and what you did that you really felt like you were treading the planes. Also to say that D&D weighed down Torment, once again crap, along with Athas and Ravenloft, Planescape was the AD&D developers trying to expand the hobby beyond the dull settings such as the Realms. It broke ground and went in interesting new directions, it very much inspired Torment, not held it back in any way.
At least if they're going to write about a game bloody play it, sounds as inane as that idiot who kept on giving his authorative opinion about the original Witcher who had never fucking played it.
At least if they're going to write about a game bloody play it, sounds as inane as that idiot who kept on giving his authorative opinion about the original Witcher who had never fucking played it.
Well, at least we got some bits and bobs of new'ish information out of it.
---------- Updated at 12:27 AM ----------
I particularly liked McComb mentioning and putting emphasis on 'really deep reactivity'.
---------- Updated at 12:27 AM ----------
I particularly liked McComb mentioning and putting emphasis on 'really deep reactivity'.
http://www.urbangamingelite.com/features/articles/torment-tides-of-numenera-interview/
Spotted at Codex, all hail and whatnot.
Spotted at Codex, all hail and whatnot.
"Why? And is there any chance we are going see parts of the Steadfast/Beyond in TON?
You won’t see any places from the Corebook,"
And now, now I am sad.
The new Guidebook for Numenera just came out. Planning to pick it up. I can always hope something from that is in there?
This gives me hope:
"so we all thought it would be better if we built out beyond the Beyond and we could integrate the two areas later."
Also, "Our cold, calculating jack’s name is Matkina. Her original conception was the stainless steel jack, a nod to Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat”, and her character arc originated there. It’s changed significantly since then, but the deadly confidence, careful thought, and occasional impulsiveness colored her initial narrative portrait. "
Jim DiGriz is badASS. They'll be hard put to get anyone half that awesome in the game, frankly.
You won’t see any places from the Corebook,"
And now, now I am sad.
The new Guidebook for Numenera just came out. Planning to pick it up. I can always hope something from that is in there?
This gives me hope:
"so we all thought it would be better if we built out beyond the Beyond and we could integrate the two areas later."
Also, "Our cold, calculating jack’s name is Matkina. Her original conception was the stainless steel jack, a nod to Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat”, and her character arc originated there. It’s changed significantly since then, but the deadly confidence, careful thought, and occasional impulsiveness colored her initial narrative portrait. "
Jim DiGriz is badASS. They'll be hard put to get anyone half that awesome in the game, frankly.
Yeah brings back memories reading about old slippery Jim, though personally I feel that he would fit much better in Cyberpunk.
Though I suppose the ninth world has gone through so many ages that nothing is out of bounds.
Though I suppose the ninth world has gone through so many ages that nothing is out of bounds.
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/112079625210/updated-our-journal-39-elucidating-effortJournal Update 39: Elucidating Effort Efficiently:
TL; DR: Sunken Market WIP Render, Adam on Effort, Kickstarters for Numenera: Strand and Underworld Ascendant, Job Openings, Colin at Rezzed
Hello Tormented Ones,
Thomas here. Today we want to talk about Effort, a key mechanic in Numenera and Torment that we have talked about before as part of our Difficult Task system. Additionally, there are a lot of interviews and posts with different Torment developers for you to dig in to.
But first, if you read our previous update, you may remember we showed a concept art piece by Daniel Kim, showing the Sunken Market in the Oasis area. We thought it’d be interesting to show you the same area again, but this time as an early render:
Handling Effort
Adam here.
In the Torment forums, MReed asked some great questions about how we're handling the Numenera concept of Effort, specifically the UI for such a thing and how it will play.
First, a refresher for those unfamiliar with Numenera. In the tabletop game, nearly every task a character attempts is comprised of:
(1) A Task Difficulty determined by the GM. This is a number ranging from 0 to 10, where zero is an automatic success (no roll). All other Difficulties, 1 to 10, are multiplied by 3, and the player must roll a d20 to try to beat that number in order to succeed. This means that any Difficulty of 7 or higher is impossible without help.
(2) Possible Skills or external Assets the PC can apply to the task. These can lower the Difficulty by a maximum of 4 (two for skills, two for assets). This is enough to make easy tasks routine and impossible tasks possible, but just barely.
(3) An applicable Stat (Might, Speed, or Intellect). The player can lower the Difficulty even further by applying levels of Effort to the task. Each level of Effort deducts points from the applicable Stat Pool and then lowers the task's Difficulty by one. PCs can apply a number of Effort levels more or less equal to their Tier—so from 1 to 6.
So for example, the player might come across a devilish system of living wires that have embedded themselves into the flesh of a poor creature, and he wants to remove them without harming the creature. The GM decides that this is an Intimidating task (Difficulty 6), so the player must roll 18 or higher to succeed. However, the player's character is trained in healing and quick fingers, both of which (the GM rules) are applicable to the task, lowering the difficulty to 4. Now he only needs to roll a 12 or higher to succeed.
The player also decides that he really, really doesn't want to accidentally kill this poor creature, so he spends four levels of Effort on the task (costing him 9 Speed—we'll talk about how that is calculated later). In doing so, he reduces the difficulty of the task to zero, and so he automatically succeeds (no roll).
It doesn't take careful analysis to see that Effort quickly becomes more important than skills in terms of succeeding at difficult tasks (though skills allow a player to succeed at certain kinds of tasks more often). Not only does this system allow any character to attempt any task, but Effort also allows players to choose which tasks are most important to them and which tasks they're more willing to gamble on.
In TTON, we handle tasks with an Effort dialog. Because Effort is a new mechanic—and a key mechanic at that—we decided to display the Effort dialog every time the player attempts a Difficult Task.
"What?!" I hear you say. "You're telling me I have to click away this annoying pop-up every time I try anything?" Yes, that's what I'm telling you. But it's not annoying at all—the opposite, actually. Part of that is there aren't as many Difficult Tasks as you might think. Each task is uniquely crafted (that is, you won't be picking twenty generic locks in a row), so when there is a difficult task, the Effort dialog adds import to it, making every task a potentially significant event. You don't click the pop-up away. You make a real decision, every time.
("But can't I just reload until I beat the task without Effort?" You could, but in some cases you'd be missing out on content that is only available when
you fail some tasks. And anyway, as I've said in the past, savescumming isn't technically any easier, it's just a different way to play.)
What do you see when the Effort dialog appears? This:
The difficulty of the task. By default, this difficulty appears as one of eleven abstract labels (e.g. Routine, Challenging, Impossible, etc.), but you'll be able to change this in the Game Options to show the actual target number (i.e. the Task Difficulty multiplied by 3) or to not show any difficulty at all.
The adjusted difficulty of the task. If you have any skills or assets that apply to the task, then the initial difficulty will be visible but crossed out, and the actual difficulty (what you're trying to beat) will appear beneath it. Note that it's possible to have penalties, such that a task is harder than the base difficulty for some characters. That will be reflected here as well.
When you mouse over the difficulties, a tooltip will display showing you what skills and assets you have that are adjusting the difficulty (if any). This way, we don't have to clutter the dialog with a bunch of text, but you can have access to all the information if you want it.
An icon conveying which stat applies to this task. This determines which Stat Pool the Effort cost comes out of. Most tasks will only allow one stat: Might, Speed, or Intellect. In special cases (usually when the PC has certain abilities), a PC might be able to choose to replace the original Stat Pool with a different one. For example, a Jack with the Brute Finesse ability can choose to apply either Speed or Might to non-combat Speed tasks.
An Effort slider. This allows the player to choose how many levels of Effort he will apply to the task. As he increases the slider, the Effort dialog will show him how much Stat Pool will be deducted and the adjusted difficulty will change to reflect the Effort he's applying.
Sidebar refresher: The first level of Effort costs 3 from the applicable Stat Pool. Every level of Effort thereafter costs an additional 2. If the PC has any Edge in the applicable Stat Pool (another thing you gain each Tier), then his Edge is subtracted from the overall Effort cost. So if a player has 1 Might Edge and purchases two levels of Effort, it will cost him 4 Might (3 for the first level + 2 for the second level – 1 for his Might Edge).
If the PC has 3 or more Edge in the applicable Stat, then the Effort slider will automatically be set to however many levels of Effort that PC can get for free.
What about combat (I hear you say)? Aren't there a LOT more difficult tasks in that?
There are. In the tabletop, Effort can be applied to every roll—and the player always makes every roll. That means Numenera players can opt to apply Effort to attack and defense.
In TTON, the Effort dialog will appear for every attack you make. Our design calls for tactical combat, so each attack decision is already significant. And just like tasks outside of combat, the choice of whether to invest Effort adds to the significance of those decisions.
Defense is different, however. The player is not deciding to be attacked, and the party will likely be attacked several times in a row. We didn't think the Effort dialog would be much fun in that case, turn-based combat or not.
Instead, we're treating Effort on Defense as something you can set (or not) on your turn—a kind of defensive ability that every PC can use. Since most attacks are against Speed Defense, that will be the default Stat Pool used for Effort on Defense, but the player can optionally choose to apply Effort to Might or Intellect Defense instead.
If a PC is using Effort on Defense, the cost will not be deducted unless they are attacked that round and it will be deducted only on the first attack. So you don't have to worry about what might happen if you apply one level of Defensive Effort only to get attacked by a swarm of steel spiders and lose all your Speed even though none of them actually hit.
And of course, if a PC has enough Edge to get a free level of Defensive Effort, they will get that Effort all the time.
Keep in mind that there is still a LOT of playtesting to be done, especially with combat. So the details of all this are still subject to change. But this is how we're thinking of it right now. So far, it's working pretty well.
Adam out.
Our Kickstarting Compatriots: Strand, a Numenera Short Film
Valdes/Eriksdotter, with the support of Monte Cook Games, is raising money for Numenera: Strand, a short film set in the Ninth World. This project is a cool example of fan passion, as it was already being worked on by a filmmaker inspired by the unique setting of Numenera, before they and Monte Cook found each other and combined forces. The Kickstarter monies will go to VFX, post-production and longer scenes, looking to raise a fairly modest 290,000 Swedish krona (about 35K USD), but they still have a ways to go in their final week. This one is close enough that your pledges could well make the difference!
Job Openings
We are looking to add to our ranks and have listed a few more job postings on our official website: an Area Designer to implement and design exploration and Crisis content, an Environment Prop Artist to create 3D assets from which parts of our 2D backgrounds are generated and an Animation Programmer to assist with our root motion approach to character navigation. All positions are on-site. We always love to have passionate and talented fans join our team, so if you are qualified don’t hesitate to contact us!
Colin at Rezzed, Interviews and More
Colin McComb will be speaking at EGX Rezzed about Torment: Tides of Numenera, focusing on developing narrative and the right word choices for the best player experience. If you’re at Rezzed in London, he’ll be speaking at 1pm on Saturday March 14th!
Eurogamer interviewed Colin in anticipation of that talk, focusing on setting, story and reactivity.
Urban Gaming Elite has a very indepth, 2-page interview with Colin, Adam, George Ziets and Jeremy Kopman, covering every type of topic from setting to story to Crises.
The Italian Torment tumblr also interviewed Colin, with a focus on the story and themes.
The official Torment forums have seen some questions asked and answered. For instance, environment artist Jon Gwyn talking on the state of art matters a few weeks ago. Kevin and Adam went indepth about the truth/lie system in dialog, and Adam talked about action and rests systems in the game.
And finally, we thought we’d share this cool fanart based on the first novella we released (From the Depths: Gold by Adam Heine): Ama, seeker of the Golden Tide by Michael Malkin aka Ronamis.
Thomas Beekers
Line Producer
Looking quite good already:
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gamewatcher.com/interviews/torment-tides-of-numenera-interview/12186What does one life matter? Chris Capel discusses this with InXile's Colin McComb and Thomas Beekers
With InXile having shipped Wasteland 2 at the end of 2014 and The Bard’s Tale IV still not even at the Kickstarter campaign stage they are now full speed ahead with Torment: Tides of Numenera, their spiritual successor to the classic Black Isle RPG Planescape: Torment. While we’ve only seen a few moments of gameplay footage, InXile have done many really cool Kickstarter updates that clearly show that the game is coming together well. We caught up with two key members of the team, writer and creative lead Colin McComb and associate producer Thomas Beekers, at the EGX Rezzed event to chat with them about how Torment is progressing.
GameWatcher: Okay, let’s start with the introductions!
Colin McComb: I’m Colin McComb and I’m the Creative Lead on Torment: Tides of Numenera, and with me is Thomas Beekers who’s our Associate Producer.
Thomas Beekers: Hi there!
GameWatcher: Okay, to start us off: how’s the game coming along?
Colin McComb: Very well! We’ve got a lot of really good stuff going and George [Ziets] is wrapping up the design of a new area and we are doing a new milestone tomorrow. We should have a fully complete playable area for this zone. It’ll be totally underpolished obviously, but it’ll be completely playable which we’re excited about because it’ll prove that our process works, and then we’ll have two more zones that’ll just explode with joy!
GameWatcher: Obviously InXile are finished with Wasteland 2 now… [I’m about to correct our choice of words then Thomas does it for us].
Thomas Beekers: We’re not quite finished with Wasteland 2. We’ve got a console port now to Xbox One and we’re upgrading the engine to Unity 5. We’re not a “release and forget” company, we’ll keep patching it and supporting it until we’re fine to go “right, now it’s really good!”.
Colin McComb: Brian [Fargo] already announced The Bard’s Tale IV and a part of the core Wasteland 2 team have moved over to start that, but all of the artists, programmers and developers who are not part of that core team have moved to support Torment now.
Thomas Beekers: This is the same logic we used when we Kickstarted Torment while Wasteland 2 was still in production. We like to work with kind of a one-and-a-half team system, so there’s a main team that works on the main game which is Torment right now, and other people who aren’t full time on that do support for previous InXile games and prep for the next game.
GameWatcher: Is Bard’s Tale IV going to be a Kickstarter then?
Thomas Beekers: Yes!
Colin McComb: I’m sure it will, Brian [Fargo] loves Kickstarter!
GameWatcher: Yeah, it’s worked out well for you guys.
Colin McComb: (understated) Yeah, it’s alright!
Thomas Beekers: It’s not just the money from it, that helps of course but we really like the process of involving our backers, getting feedback from them, getting the game in their hands and seeing if they like it. It’s really worked immensely with Wasteland 2 and no doubt will with Torment again.
Colin McComb: Wasteland 2 was in the top 20 of Steam games played last year, right?
Thomas Beekers: It was something like 12 million total hours played.
GameWatcher: Of course Torment has been very successful on Kickstarter, is it still the best funded one?
Colin McComb: As far as videogames go, yeah. Veronica Mars came along a week later and ruined our record…
GameWatcher: [laughs] Ignore them, they don’t count.
Colin McComb: Yeah! And Exploding Kittens has beaten us now as well. But for videogames, we’re still number one!
Thomas Beekers: And that’s just for Kickstarter of course, with crowdfunding in general no one can catch up to Star Citizen.
GameWatcher: Of course, yeah.
Colin McComb: I’m looking forward to playing that… someday.
GameWatcher: How involved are you personally in the day-to-day of Torment?
Colin McComb: Heavily! I’m generally putting in 10-12 hour days.
GameWatcher: Mostly on the writing side?
Colin McComb: Yeah, and implementation of the dialogue tool which was in one of our recent Kickstarter updates. I’m writing directly into that and doing some of our scripting and laying stuff out with that. As far as programming or placing things in Unity, I’m just the word guy!
GameWatcher: Remind me what other games you’ve worked on before this?
Colin McComb: I’ve been on Wasteland 2 of course, and before that I’ve worked on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment.
GameWatcher: How well do you know Monte Cook, the creator of Numenera?
Colin McComb: I actually met Monte at [Dungeons & Dragons publisher] TSR in the early ’90s and he and I worked on the Planescape campaign setting pretty extensively there. I then went to Black Isle where I worked on a cancelled PlayStation Planescape game before moving over to the Torment team. Monte went to Wizards of the Coast where he did the 3rd Edition of D&D before leaving and starting his own company Malhavoc Press, and later Kickstarted the Numenera tabletop RPG.
GameWatcher: Numenera seems to have really kicked off; the game, tabletop RPG, books, there’s even a film being Kickstarted. Is InXile working with all these different guys?
Colin McComb: We’re pretty separate. We do our thing and we’ll just ask Monte a question and he’ll shout back the answer. A recent one was “is there chocolate in the 9th World?” and the answer was “ehh, not really”. The same way there’s not really rats or dogs or deer there. There can be animals that are close enough to say “that’s a dog” about without correctly saying “that’s an Arbellian Yefhound”!
GameWatcher: So what’s the chocolate?
Colin McComb: They just say “chocolate” (we laugh). It’s “Xacolotl”, it’s a throwback Mayan thing.
GameWatcher: (I laugh again, even though in hindsight I have no idea if Colin’s joking or not) How much of Wasteland 2’s release have you learned from? Any lessons?
Thomas Beekers: There are a few, certainly. Wasteland 2 came at a point where InXile had to put a group together again and for a lot of people it was their first hardcore RPG, so it was a learning experience for a lot of folks involved. There have been a lot of lessons learned, such as UI design and how you balance combat encounters, from Wasteland 2.
Colin McComb: We’re a pretty distributed team as well. The Wasteland team was pretty much based in the offices in California, but as George [Ziets] pointed out to me the other day “the sun never sets on the Torment team”! (we laugh) We’ve got Thomas in the Netherlands, me in Detroit, InXile in California and our design lead’s in Thailand! We have to communicate a lot by email and video chat and it’s occasionally difficult to set up a time when we’re in the same brain space! But on the other hand we’ve all been working together so well for so long that getting in to that brain space is real easy.
Thomas Beekers: It helps to get a team that has worked together before as well. Adam [Heine] and Colin both worked on Planescape: Torment…
Colin McComb: And Kevin [Saunders] has been bringing a lot of people in who he worked with at Obsidian, like George and Jesse Farrell, one of our general designers, he’s been great. We’ve got a team that knows each other really well, and one of the great things about them is that nobody really has an ego. All of us are just there to make the project better.
GameWatcher: Now there was a bit of controversy regarding the choice of combat style…
Colin McComb: Yes…
GameWatcher: Turn-Based versus Real-Time With Pause, with the community vote split nearly half and half and InXile choosing Turn-Based similar to Wasteland 2. It definitely got a strong reaction from people.
Colin McComb: Yeah, I just hope everyone will give us a chance to prove that we can do it. They trusted us with their money to tell a thematically engaging story in this fantastically weird setting, and I don’t want anyone to get hung up on a single system. Trust us!
GameWatcher: This is a common question, but with the combat change some people wondered how this is still a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment?
Colin McComb: Well it’s a “successor” rather than a sequel, because we don’t have the rights to use the Planescape setting and we don’t want the pants sued off us! But we want people to have the same sort of intellectually engaging game that helps explore questions in their own minds, which is what resonated for a lot of people with Planescape: Torment with its question of “what can change the nature of a man?” Hopefully we can do the same thing with “what does one life matter?”. I’ve been reading a lot of Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon Tales which are essentially books about the wars that made England, and just looking down on the English fields from the plane on the way over here from Detroit I thought “so many people have died for this”. How much does one life matter against all that?
GameWatcher: They certainly are deeper questions than people usually experience from videogames.
Thomas Beekers: That also hooks into the combat question. If you identify what people actually really loved about Planescape: Torment no one will say “combat”. It was chaotic and weird, and it had good elements but it was not a good system at its core. We really wanted to do that better. We could have done better Real-Time, but Turn-Based both won the community poll (although it was pretty tight) but it was our preference because it fit within our Crisis system, which is our expansion of combat where we add elements of dialogue, puzzles, and other challenges to make a broader encounter. You can more carefully plan and do that in Turn-Based combat.
Colin McComb: We get to build each one of those up individually with those super-cool elements.
Thomas Beekers: You can pick your fights but not with just anyone, unlike Wasteland 2.
Colin McComb: A lot of these things start with dialogue though, so if you insult somebody or crossed a line with them they might say “that’s it” and attack!
GameWatcher: What made you want to go with a more traditional 2D background rather than the 3D environments of Wasteland 2?
Colin McComb: Part of it was that we’ve been licensing a lot of the background technology from Obsidian with Pillars of Eternity, but we wanted to go along with them and be an Infinity Engine-style game with a very painterly art style.
GameWatcher: The thing with the Numenera world is that it’s Earth but billions of years in the future. Is it hard to put yourself in the head-space of a civilization so different from ours?
Colin McComb: No. Like I said, I live in Detroit so I can see civilization falling around me already!
GameWatcher: (laughs)
Colin McComb: And coming from Wasteland 2 helped as well, watching civilization try to rebuild itself there. Civilizations accrete on top of other civilizations. It’s about repurposing everyday things, and when you look at the modern world you have to think about what someone from medieval times would think if they saw us? And if we all disappeared but left our computers running, what would the next species to find them think? Or a telephone and talking to someone a thousand miles away, that’d seem like witchcraft!
Thomas Beekers: I will say one thing about Numenera. I do some design work and the nice thing is that anything goes. You can have any wild idea, but you do have to make it work in the setting with technology so advanced that it’s like magic but the background is that it’s a technology rather than something mystical. That openness just allows us to do pretty much anything as far as your imagination takes you.
GameWatcher: What sort of research have you done, or what has inspired Torment’s world?
Colin McComb: As far as inspiration goes we’ve looked at Gene Wolfe’s Books of the Long Sun, Michael Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium especially. Even if you look at the Man of Steel movie and Krypton with all the cool technology they’ve got going there, we got some great ideas out of that. As far as research goes we get to be geeks!
GameWatcher: Have you done any real-life research about how civilizations have risen and fallen?
Colin McComb: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been reading a lot about the Roman Empire falling and what came in their place. Civilization up until now is essentially blood and sperm. People come in, spread their seed everywhere and cut down anyone who disagrees with them.
Thomas Beekers: One tricky thing with Numenera though is while we can look at these processes and base our work on them, one key thing is that we cannot have anything recognisable from our time. You can’t have an old Volvo there, it’s a billion years in the future, it would have evaporated into dust.
Colin McComb: For perspective, a billion years ago in our past was when multicellular life first appeared on Earth. Head out a billion years in the future with all the stuff in between, and humans have only returned to Earth in the last 900 years and nobody knows where they came from and why. It’s never going to be explained.
GameWatcher: What’s the general story setup? We’ve heard a lot about the world and setting but not much about the story.
Colin McComb: We’ve been trying to keep it a secret. Essentially the setup is that there was a Nano, a powerful wizard-scientist, who wanted to escape death. After much experimentation he found a way to create new bodies and cast his consciousness entirely into those bodies, and he would jump between those bodies then go off and live his new life. Because he could do this people called him the Changing God. What he didn’t know was that every time he did this a new consciousness would appear in that body, with powers and abilities of its own. He also didn’t know that his experiments awoke a creature called The Sorrow, a spectre of death that’s been pursuing him across the centuries. At the beginning of Torment the Sorrow has finally caught up to him in his own biological moon floating over the Earth. He flees in an escape pod but the Sorrow attacks so his consciousness leaves its body, and you are born inside this body, plummeting to Earth in a disintegrating pod. The first bit of the game is making your player choices as the planet rushes up to greet you. From there the game is about finding answers, finding your sire, and stopping the Sorrow before it wipes you out too.
GameWatcher: How big a part will companions be in the game?
Colin McComb: You can have three companions with you at a time. We’re discussing the pacing of these guys so that if a new companion comes in after you’ve got a full party that new companion better be awesome.
GameWatcher: What sort of skills will they have? Are there still stereotypical classes like Rogue, Wizard etc?
Colin McComb: Numenera has essentially three character classes, which are Nano (wizard), Jack (jack of all trades) and Glaive (warrior). The way you build a character is with sentences. For example Thomas here would be “a cunning line producer who dodges questions and argues intensively”.
Thomas Beekers: That’s fair enough!
Colin McComb: The “cunning” part is his descriptor, which provides him bonuses to certain skills and bumps up bits of his stat pool. “Line producer” is his character class, which in the game is out of the three main classes. The final bit is Focus, which is the “massive power” that you get like “rides the lightning” or “bears a halo of fire”.
Thomas Beekers: And that’s where the really interesting stuff comes in. Numenera is built on a system where when it comes to skills or building weapons anyone can try to do anything. The Focus is what really defines you.
Colin McComb: Yeah, if you bear a halo of fire maybe you can set your sword on fire or cast fire “spells” (or “manipulating the ever-present nanites in the air” more accurately). The companions will also have really neat powers too.
GameWatcher: It does all sound very fun to work with!
Colin McComb: It’s been a dream job! I love the team, I love working on the story, even when they shoot my ideas down I love them still! It’s pretty much just laughing all day long!
GameWatcher: Go on, give us a example of an idea that’s been shot down.
Colin McComb: Oh Jesus, we’ve gone through about four iterations of the story already. People can say “right, this is cool, but it’s broken”, I’ll say “fine, can we do this instead” and they reply “but then it’ll break this other thing”. So I fix all that up, come back to InXile a couple of months later and present them with the new story and they go “that’s great but what about this?” and I go “goddammit, leave me alone!” (we laugh) But everyone is focused on making the best possible game and it’s really exciting and refreshing to be on a team where everyone is doing that as opposed to “this is my game and I am the lead”. It’s a team of really smart, passionate people who want to make Torment the best game we can.
GameWatcher: Excellent, that seems a perfect place to end things. Thank you for your time guys!
I want to thank Colin McComb and Thomas Beekers for taking the time to talk to me (especially as this was immediately after they arrived in London and so they were severely jetlagged!) and to the EGX Rezzed team for putting on a cool, relaxed show this year. InXile are targeting late 2015 for Torment: Tides of Numenera, although Colin reminded me to emphasize the word “targeting”, adding “you know how development works”. So with that in mind, Torment: Tides of Numenera will be coming to PC in 2016. Thanks for reading!
tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/114513501925/adam-on-writing-games-that-influenced-torment
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