Two TToN interviews have appeared on the Internet recently.
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.
I knew it!
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: 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: 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.
grimuar.pl: 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?
George Ziets: 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.
grimuar.pl: 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?
George Ziets: 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.
grimuar.pl: Do you know if there’s any chance that Torment or Pillars could feature ambitious, morally ambiguous and existential dialogues like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp6F5Bk8mB8 In other words, to what extent will the character’s intelligence level affect their dialogue options?
George Ziets: 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.
Pillars of Eternity actually has a hell of a lot more Planescape: Torment in it than I originally anticipated. Tides of Numenera has alot to live up to, both from the past and the present. I hope they can pull off quarter 4 this year, though I have my doubts. I'll pick it up on day one however.
They appear to be running on the exact same engine, which is good news in my book. We had the Infinity Engine era, maybe in 15 years we'll look back with fondness on the Unity Engine era as well.
I'm actually thrilled about the delay. I have enough games on the docket for 2015 and beyond, and more development time is a good thing. 2016 sounds perfect to me!
"<...> As we enter the valley, a huge sphere has landed in the stream. It is made of some strange, alien material: silvery, with no visible seams or joins. Worryingly, it's surrounded by dead fish, sloshing about in the water.
Dead fish? One of the classic calls to adventure. Clearly we're all ichth-ing to investigate, but we have to wait a few minutes. On the other side of the valley, we hear the sounds of an approaching party. A group of cultists, with a child they appear to have kidnapped. We opt not to fight them - this is more the indecision of a new group of role-players rather than much in the way of strategy - and before long, they've muttered incantations, as cultists are wont to do, and have disappeared inside the sphere.
We rush over to inspect the huge object. After all, I can't wait to find out how much it weighs! It's off the scale, sadly, and that's my one contribution to the party completely blown. Sadder still, as we stand around arguing about how we might get in, it starts to hum and then vanish. Within seconds it's gone.
The cultists have left a bag behind, though. They are also wont to do this sort of thing, and with the stuff it contains we're soon hot on their trail again. The trail leads through a village, where we stop to have a rest and pick up quests. As luck would have it, all the local children have gone missing, and there's a monster that's been sighted in the nearby lake. Coincidence? Nothing is a coincidence in a game that has to wrap up in an hour - particularly when we have yet to fight anything.
The fight that ensues is amazing, as pen and paper RPG fights often are. It's also a reminder, though, that you can't really gain too much of an insight into a video game by playing with the entirely social, consensual storytelling ruleset it's based on. In the lake, we find a single enemy: a crab sort of thing with tendrils that have childrens' heads attached. That sure wraps up the mystery of the missing kids! Sadly, beneath the tendrils is an armoured carapace and a bunch of pincers.
It is a monster to take down, particularly since we barely have any health and weapons to share between us. One wrong move and it grabs you and shakes you around and drops you. Most of the gear we have just bounces off it. Eventually, though, its carapace starts to shatter, and Bertie, who is astonishingly unlucky with the dice today, gets to hit it with the shocker. He cooks the thing, but not before it's pretty much ripped our party to pieces. The townsfolk appear, sobbing, and I limp off to the tube station.
In a video game, something like that will be a boss fight. I can almost picture it: ducking between the swipes, the panic when you've been grabbed and have to endure ten seconds of unblockable damage. Slowly, the model starts to update as you crack the armour. You root through your inventory for something handy to equip. You can't believe how many misses you're getting on standard attacks.
Played around a table, though, it dodges the easy classification of a boss fight - a term that brings so many standardised expectations with it. Battling the crab becomes something horrible that is happening to you right now, and that you need to get past no matter how you do it. The dice rolls - Bertie's persistent failure to get anything above a 6 - were met with groans, protracted theatrical groans from a group of men, some of whom had only really just met each other. Missing was thrilling, as was seeing your health reduced to the point where you were bleeding out on the grass, as was the prospect of wiping entirely and seeing the monster slink back into the sea undefeated.
A video game can't do that. It can't use the people around you to make an old idea fresh. What does make me very excited about the new Torment, though, is not so much that it's based on the clever, engaging, melancholic world of Numenera, but that our guide through the pen and paper game will also be our guide through the video game. It will be fascinating to see how much of McComb's sense of easy wonder survives, how much of his reactive elegance he can get into the code. When that crab beast died, he mimed the tendrils going limp with his fingers, each one shuddering and then falling away from his palm: it was comic, but also wonderfully evocative of a beast coughing its last.
Is Torment going to be / has Torment been developed with Unity 5 in mind?
It turns out this was a more complicated question than one would think. We're planning to move to Unity 5, but we weren't sure about that for a long time (and even now, there's still a fair amount of work to do before the move is official).
Further details from our illustrious wizard/programmer, Steve Dobos:
We started work on Torment before Unity 5’s full feature set was announced. By the time Unity 5 became a known quantity, we had already done much work on the engine for Unity 4. So the benefit of a move to Unity 5 will be limited for Torment. The primary justification for a move to Unity 5 is the new Mecanim system. We’ve put much effort in to the animation of our characters, and the Mecanim upgrades will help organize our complex animation trees.
Unfortunately, all of the cool Deferred Shading tech they released in Unity 5 doesn’t function with an orthographic camera, which Torment uses. So while we're doing some interesting things graphically, largely thanks to the Pillars of Eternity technology, Torment won't really benefit from Unity's graphical enhancements. Sadness.
Agreed, but it could also be argued that Pillars of Eternity is a sort of amalgamation of all the Infinity Engine games. It's plot and scope is generally similar to that of BG1, though it has some epic dungeons and moments that reveal a distinct BG2 influence. You can use NPCs, but are also able to create your own party like IWD, and combat is generally more tactical in the vein of those games as well. Finally, the writing and storyline takes on the serious approach and dialog choice and consequence of Torment.
BG1 is the template, and they also managed to sprinkle in elements of the 4 games that came after it. Truly a great love letter to a golden age of gaming.
"I like good VO, but when there is either descriptive text interspersed or else a lot of spoken text, I start to wish it weren’t there so I could just read.
For TTON, we have always said we wouldn’t do full VO. We will likely only voice key lines for key characters (the way PST generally did).
Also, we already have conventions in place that voiced nodes should be relatively short and include little or no descriptive text. Alternatively, if only part of the node will be voiced, it will always be the first sentence or two of spoken text (and the node will include no descriptive text until after the voiced portion)."
"Combat isn't the primary focus of this game and leveling and crafting is very different from what you'll find in a "typical" RPG.
However, we very much share your concerns about this being a good GAME.
"Combat isn't our primary focus" is our way of saying "if we had to fail at either dialogue/story/reactivity versus combat, then we will choose to fail at combat." But we very much want the whole game to be good. Some of our efforts to that end include:
Focusing on quality combat encounters rather than quantity. There will be no trash mobs in Torment (though that means fewer encounters overall). Making each combat encounter fun, narratively important, and tactical. This is our Crisis system which I'm sure someone can link you to. Giving the player a wide variety of tactical choices in each encounter. Cover is on our radar as one of these choices, but no telling yet if we'll have time to put it in and make it great. Whether cover's in or not, the player will have a variety of tactics to choose from. (The Corebook is mostly silent on such matters, but it does touch on them in Chapter 9, particularly the Using Miniatures section. Note that, because this is a CRPG, we are by default "using miniatures" to represent combat ). Making progression through the game fun. MReed is absolutely right in his assessment of progression in the tabletop game. In a CRPG, however, level progression becomes more important. I've made a disgusting number of calculations and spreadsheets to determine where the character will likely be at different points in the game, what their characters will play like, and what they will be capable of. It's not exactly flat. Crafting is fun and serves the rest of the game. I can't hunt for the link right now, but I've spoken at length on crafting in one of our Kickstarter updates. Short version: it's not a recipe-based, collection mechanic. I tend to skip crafting in most RPGs as well, so I wanted to design something that was different: fun, simple, and that fits the flavor of Numenera as much as possible. It'll be a while before we can implement it to see if we succeeded, but everyone seems pretty happy with the design .
Fortunately, it's not entirely an either/or question with regards to dialogue vs. combat. For a few members of our team, making Crises functional and then great is their main goal. Keep watching. We'll have things to show you on that front in the months to come.
Torment isn't about the combat, but it's still a game. We want to make it the best one we can."
"Scenes that contain Crises are designed to the needs of the Crisis. It is thus easier for us to avoid combat visibility issues because we know exactly where these combat situations would occur.
We have tentative plans for Tussles, which are more limited than Crises. These are smaller combat encounters that can arise in some situations. These are still few in number and hand-placed, so we should be able to avoid/minimize visibility issues for them as well.
(Our camera angle is very similar, if not exactly the same as, that of Pillars of Eternity.)"
a) we can detect player actions, but we can't detect motivation. We wanted to avoid the frustration that would result from us inevitably miscategorizing a player's intentions. Especially since the Tides are new and unfamiliar (and deliberately involved), preventing this frustration is a challenge even when it is based upon the actions.
b) a person's legacy is based upon how they were perceived, which is arguably more based upon their actions (which could include their stated motivations), not their true internal motivations. (To that end, in cases where the player explicitly declares their motivations, it's treated as an action, albeit a fairly minor one. 2. We are undecided on how transparent Tide changes should be to players. Fortunately, this should be easy to adjust as we develop and play through more content (which is why we haven't prioritized answering this particular question). A player option is a possibility, but not a certainty yet.
3. In general, we have found the Tides' complexity and nuances to be challenging to navigate. We recognized and accepted this challenge from the start and haven't been disappointed. (This is a reason, for example, that some of our earliest work was on the five novellas that explore the nature of each Tide.) We see risk in how well we'll be able to both clearly communicate to players about the Tides as well as how fully we can realize their potential. It's been going reasonably well, and I think many players will find it interesting, but there are still weaknesses and I'm not sure yet how close we will get to "amazing." In any case, the Tides are by no means an afterthought and they receive considerable attention because we strive for "amazing."
4. This may seem contrary to my "by no means an afterthought" comment above, but most of our reactivity is focused first on the characters and the situations. We rarely structure conversations for the Tides. This was deliberate because we don't want to warp the content to serve the Tides. And if the Tides can reasonably accomplish what we're asking of them, then they can be somewhat unobtrusive. (There are some cases where the Tides are more front and center, but more often the part they play is more supportive than driving.)
5. Yes, an action can increase more than one Tide (or none of them). We try to avoid having an action that seems appropriate for more than two Tides, however, though part of this is in iteration. The Tides are not in direct conflict with each other.
6. Yes, it is possible for the PC to be balanced in the Tides such that they have no dominant one. We aren't approaching this (or any of the Tides, really) as an explicit philosophy or such, but we are accounting for this possibility. (I.e., you shouldn't expect explicit conversations debating the value of one Tide vs. another - any comparison will be more subtle than that and they aren't really things to compare. They aren't exactly an alignment system in the flavor of D&D's.)"
"I like good VO, but when there is either descriptive text interspersed or else a lot of spoken text, I start to wish it weren’t there so I could just read."
Thank you! I think I said this exact thing in one of the PoE threads. The combo of dialog and descriptive texts is pretty great IMO, but combining with voice overs doesn't work well, and is one thing in PoE I find a little distracting.
"...here is one of our companions. Her name is Matkina, and she’s an assassin. Her original inspiration was Angelina DiGriz, the utterly amoral mastermind who was the foil for Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” and later his wife. She was originally going to have a name that was evocative of the word “mask”, and this would have been a clue to her true identity. The storyline changed, and she no longer needed to fit the function of a betrayer, but her personality had stuck with me, and I began to wonder what was at the core of her character. Was she truly amoral, or had she buried the part of herself that cried out against the deeds she’d done? What brought her to that state? How could you help her redeem herself, and what would it mean to do so?
Answering these questions in the context of the overall story has made her character branch in some very interesting ways, such as… well, I don’t want to spoil it."
"One of the most important parts of this kind of game is the companions you can choose to join your quest. They are your mirrors on the world, the human touches that provide an instant reaction. If they’re tremendous jerks and they nod approvingly at your actions, you can be sure that you’ve just done something terrible.
In some senses, they require more careful planning than the protagonist. They must have believable motivations. They need to have utility for your adventure, or barring that, such an overwhelmingly cool story that you just have to see it through to the end. Ideally, they’ll have both.
But they also react to your choices. You can help them by completing their quests, by treating them well, by allying with them against their own enemies… or you can abuse them by ignoring their quests, destroying their hopes, and negating them as people. Sometimes you might need to abuse them in order to get ahead; other times you might find that helping them is bad for the world at large. Weighing choices for your companions is a crucial part of determining your legacy."
"Now that the video is out I feel like I should assure you that much of what is in the video is work in progress. The underlying technology for the animation system has undergone a lot of overhaul past few months and I am still working on bringing it all together.
Now, for all my animation fans lets break the vid down a bit. For the purpose of pacing in the video, editing occurred that if your watching the animation it affected speed and cut off or sped up transitions. Cloaks physics are not working in the video. The swimming is actually very cool in game when moving your guys around, you barely saw anything here. The next shot of the PC stopping, Im not sure what happened here looks like a bug. The generic walk animation is not playing smoothly on the npcs, that will improve. The shot of the guy transitioning into the water, transition into the water looks good right?, however in here you also see some old mostly broken movement of the companions. I am currently working on a follow system for the companions.
OK now the combat... This is very early stuff and was highly affected by editing. Im not sure how well the video demonstrates this but Im trying to do something a bit different with the animations. Combat is very similar in many respects to wasteland in terms of flow from my perspective. What I have done to try and give this a different look is basically give everything a facing direction For example: When executing an attack the attack animation has the rotation of facing your target built in so you turn to face your target and attack all in one motion. This allows me to add some variety to the attacks as an attack to the left is different than to the right or behind. Damages also follow this rule as well as deaths, so if your attacked from behind or killed the reaction is directional. Damages or hit reactions also have the victim turn to face the attacker. Its a technique that admittedly adds a ton of complexity and increases the difficulty of mechanical construction of the animations. The timing and use of connecting transitions is something that is missing in combat which makes it feel abrupt visually too, but we still have to balance for gameplay I dont want anyone being annoyed by the animation timing."
Also, PC Invasion interviewed Colin McComb And Kevin Saunders (available in both audio and text formats):
"‘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."
"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."
"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."
Comments
Two TToN interviews have appeared on the Internet recently.
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.
I knew it!
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: 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: 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.
http://www.gamewatcher.com/interviews/torment-tides-of-numenera-interview/12186
grimuar.pl: 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?
George Ziets: 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.
grimuar.pl: 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?
George Ziets: 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.
grimuar.pl: 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?
George Ziets: 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.
http://grimuar.pl/interview/george-ziets
"Do you know me?" Aligern grabs your collar. "Look me in the eye! Do. You. Know. Me?"
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."
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts/1178961
Dead fish? One of the classic calls to adventure. Clearly we're all ichth-ing to investigate, but we have to wait a few minutes. On the other side of the valley, we hear the sounds of an approaching party. A group of cultists, with a child they appear to have kidnapped. We opt not to fight them - this is more the indecision of a new group of role-players rather than much in the way of strategy - and before long, they've muttered incantations, as cultists are wont to do, and have disappeared inside the sphere.
We rush over to inspect the huge object. After all, I can't wait to find out how much it weighs! It's off the scale, sadly, and that's my one contribution to the party completely blown. Sadder still, as we stand around arguing about how we might get in, it starts to hum and then vanish. Within seconds it's gone.
The cultists have left a bag behind, though. They are also wont to do this sort of thing, and with the stuff it contains we're soon hot on their trail again. The trail leads through a village, where we stop to have a rest and pick up quests. As luck would have it, all the local children have gone missing, and there's a monster that's been sighted in the nearby lake. Coincidence? Nothing is a coincidence in a game that has to wrap up in an hour - particularly when we have yet to fight anything.
The fight that ensues is amazing, as pen and paper RPG fights often are. It's also a reminder, though, that you can't really gain too much of an insight into a video game by playing with the entirely social, consensual storytelling ruleset it's based on. In the lake, we find a single enemy: a crab sort of thing with tendrils that have childrens' heads attached. That sure wraps up the mystery of the missing kids! Sadly, beneath the tendrils is an armoured carapace and a bunch of pincers.
It is a monster to take down, particularly since we barely have any health and weapons to share between us. One wrong move and it grabs you and shakes you around and drops you. Most of the gear we have just bounces off it. Eventually, though, its carapace starts to shatter, and Bertie, who is astonishingly unlucky with the dice today, gets to hit it with the shocker. He cooks the thing, but not before it's pretty much ripped our party to pieces. The townsfolk appear, sobbing, and I limp off to the tube station.
In a video game, something like that will be a boss fight. I can almost picture it: ducking between the swipes, the panic when you've been grabbed and have to endure ten seconds of unblockable damage. Slowly, the model starts to update as you crack the armour. You root through your inventory for something handy to equip. You can't believe how many misses you're getting on standard attacks.
Played around a table, though, it dodges the easy classification of a boss fight - a term that brings so many standardised expectations with it. Battling the crab becomes something horrible that is happening to you right now, and that you need to get past no matter how you do it. The dice rolls - Bertie's persistent failure to get anything above a 6 - were met with groans, protracted theatrical groans from a group of men, some of whom had only really just met each other. Missing was thrilling, as was seeing your health reduced to the point where you were bleeding out on the grass, as was the prospect of wiping entirely and seeing the monster slink back into the sea undefeated.
A video game can't do that. It can't use the people around you to make an old idea fresh. What does make me very excited about the new Torment, though, is not so much that it's based on the clever, engaging, melancholic world of Numenera, but that our guide through the pen and paper game will also be our guide through the video game. It will be fascinating to see how much of McComb's sense of easy wonder survives, how much of his reactive elegance he can get into the code. When that crab beast died, he mimed the tendrils going limp with his fingers, each one shuddering and then falling away from his palm: it was comic, but also wonderfully evocative of a beast coughing its last.
If we get some of that in the final game - not the fingers, but the understanding of how to create the right effect - we're in for a good time." Indeed! http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-04-12-an-afternoon-with-torment-tides-of-numeneras-dm
Before that, Adam Heine said:
Is Torment going to be / has Torment been developed with Unity 5 in mind?
It turns out this was a more complicated question than one would think. We're planning to move to Unity 5, but we weren't sure about that for a long time (and even now, there's still a fair amount of work to do before the move is official).
Further details from our illustrious wizard/programmer, Steve Dobos:
We started work on Torment before Unity 5’s full feature set was announced. By the time Unity 5 became a known quantity, we had already done much work on the engine for Unity 4. So the benefit of a move to Unity 5 will be limited for Torment. The primary justification for a move to Unity 5 is the new Mecanim system. We’ve put much effort in to the animation of our characters, and the Mecanim upgrades will help organize our complex animation trees.
Unfortunately, all of the cool Deferred Shading tech they released in Unity 5 doesn’t function with an orthographic camera, which Torment uses. So while we're doing some interesting things graphically, largely thanks to the Pillars of Eternity technology, Torment won't really benefit from Unity's graphical enhancements. Sadness.
http://www.adamheine.com/2015/03/q-will-torment-use-unity-5.html
With the Unity 5, there will be more possibilities to tweaking and modding the game.
@Messi good point! Do you think they will call it poe2? (I hope not)
BG1 is the template, and they also managed to sprinkle in elements of the 4 games that came after it. Truly a great love letter to a golden age of gaming.
Design Lead Adam Heine commented on the Voice Acting in TToN:
"I like good VO, but when there is either descriptive text interspersed or else a lot of spoken text, I start to wish it weren’t there so I could just read.
For TTON, we have always said we wouldn’t do full VO. We will likely only voice key lines for key characters (the way PST generally did).
Also, we already have conventions in place that voiced nodes should be relatively short and include little or no descriptive text. Alternatively, if only part of the node will be voiced, it will always be the first sentence or two of spoken text (and the node will include no descriptive text until after the voiced portion)."
Also, he's shared the ideas behind the "Combat isn't our primary focus" slogan:
"Combat isn't the primary focus of this game and leveling and crafting is very different from what you'll find in a "typical" RPG.
However, we very much share your concerns about this being a good GAME.
"Combat isn't our primary focus" is our way of saying "if we had to fail at either dialogue/story/reactivity versus combat, then we will choose to fail at combat." But we very much want the whole game to be good. Some of our efforts to that end include:
Focusing on quality combat encounters rather than quantity. There will be no trash mobs in Torment (though that means fewer encounters overall).
Making each combat encounter fun, narratively important, and tactical. This is our Crisis system which I'm sure someone can link you to.
Giving the player a wide variety of tactical choices in each encounter. Cover is on our radar as one of these choices, but no telling yet if we'll have time to put it in and make it great. Whether cover's in or not, the player will have a variety of tactics to choose from. (The Corebook is mostly silent on such matters, but it does touch on them in Chapter 9, particularly the Using Miniatures section. Note that, because this is a CRPG, we are by default "using miniatures" to represent combat
Making progression through the game fun. MReed is absolutely right in his assessment of progression in the tabletop game. In a CRPG, however, level progression becomes more important. I've made a disgusting number of calculations and spreadsheets to determine where the character will likely be at different points in the game, what their characters will play like, and what they will be capable of. It's not exactly flat.
Crafting is fun and serves the rest of the game. I can't hunt for the link right now, but I've spoken at length on crafting in one of our Kickstarter updates. Short version: it's not a recipe-based, collection mechanic. I tend to skip crafting in most RPGs as well, so I wanted to design something that was different: fun, simple, and that fits the flavor of Numenera as much as possible. It'll be a while before we can implement it to see if we succeeded, but everyone seems pretty happy with the design
Fortunately, it's not entirely an either/or question with regards to dialogue vs. combat. For a few members of our team, making Crises functional and then great is their main goal. Keep watching. We'll have things to show you on that front in the months to come.
Torment isn't about the combat, but it's still a game. We want to make it the best one we can."
Project Lead Kevin Saunders described the camera angle in the game:
"Scenes that contain Crises are designed to the needs of the Crisis. It is thus easier for us to avoid combat visibility issues because we know exactly where these combat situations would occur.
We have tentative plans for Tussles, which are more limited than Crises. These are smaller combat encounters that can arise in some situations. These are still few in number and hand-placed, so we should be able to avoid/minimize visibility issues for them as well.
(Our camera angle is very similar, if not exactly the same as, that of Pillars of Eternity.)"
He also mentioned "Tides" and explained them a bit:
"1. The Tides focus on actions for two reasons:
a) we can detect player actions, but we can't detect motivation. We wanted to avoid the frustration that would result from us inevitably miscategorizing a player's intentions. Especially since the Tides are new and unfamiliar (and deliberately involved), preventing this frustration is a challenge even when it is based upon the actions.
b) a person's legacy is based upon how they were perceived, which is arguably more based upon their actions (which could include their stated motivations), not their true internal motivations. (To that end, in cases where the player explicitly declares their motivations, it's treated as an action, albeit a fairly minor one.
2. We are undecided on how transparent Tide changes should be to players. Fortunately, this should be easy to adjust as we develop and play through more content (which is why we haven't prioritized answering this particular question). A player option is a possibility, but not a certainty yet.
3. In general, we have found the Tides' complexity and nuances to be challenging to navigate. We recognized and accepted this challenge from the start and haven't been disappointed. (This is a reason, for example, that some of our earliest work was on the five novellas that explore the nature of each Tide.) We see risk in how well we'll be able to both clearly communicate to players about the Tides as well as how fully we can realize their potential. It's been going reasonably well, and I think many players will find it interesting, but there are still weaknesses and I'm not sure yet how close we will get to "amazing." In any case, the Tides are by no means an afterthought and they receive considerable attention because we strive for "amazing."
4. This may seem contrary to my "by no means an afterthought" comment above, but most of our reactivity is focused first on the characters and the situations. We rarely structure conversations for the Tides. This was deliberate because we don't want to warp the content to serve the Tides. And if the Tides can reasonably accomplish what we're asking of them, then they can be somewhat unobtrusive. (There are some cases where the Tides are more front and center, but more often the part they play is more supportive than driving.)
5. Yes, an action can increase more than one Tide (or none of them). We try to avoid having an action that seems appropriate for more than two Tides, however, though part of this is in iteration. The Tides are not in direct conflict with each other.
6. Yes, it is possible for the PC to be balanced in the Tides such that they have no dominant one. We aren't approaching this (or any of the Tides, really) as an explicit philosophy or such, but we are accounting for this possibility. (I.e., you shouldn't expect explicit conversations debating the value of one Tide vs. another - any comparison will be more subtle than that and they aren't really things to compare. They aren't exactly an alignment system in the flavor of D&D's.)"
Thank you! I think I said this exact thing in one of the PoE threads. The combo of dialog and descriptive texts is pretty great IMO, but combining with voice overs doesn't work well, and is one thing in PoE I find a little distracting.
The full transcript has been posted on Colin's website:
http://colinmccomb.com/?p=235
It deserves to be read fully.
"...here is one of our companions. Her name is Matkina, and she’s an assassin. Her original inspiration was Angelina DiGriz, the utterly amoral mastermind who was the foil for Harry Harrison’s “Stainless Steel Rat” and later his wife. She was originally going to have a name that was evocative of the word “mask”, and this would have been a clue to her true identity. The storyline changed, and she no longer needed to fit the function of a betrayer, but her personality had stuck with me, and I began to wonder what was at the core of her character. Was she truly amoral, or had she buried the part of herself that cried out against the deeds she’d done? What brought her to that state? How could you help her redeem herself, and what would it mean to do so?
Answering these questions in the context of the overall story has made her character branch in some very interesting ways, such as… well, I don’t want to spoil it."
"One of the most important parts of this kind of game is the companions you can choose to join your quest. They are your mirrors on the world, the human touches that provide an instant reaction. If they’re tremendous jerks and they nod approvingly at your actions, you can be sure that you’ve just done something terrible.
In some senses, they require more careful planning than the protagonist. They must have believable motivations. They need to have utility for your adventure, or barring that, such an overwhelmingly cool story that you just have to see it through to the end. Ideally, they’ll have both.
But they also react to your choices. You can help them by completing their quests, by treating them well, by allying with them against their own enemies… or you can abuse them by ignoring their quests, destroying their hopes, and negating them as people. Sometimes you might need to abuse them in order to get ahead; other times you might find that helping them is bad for the world at large. Weighing choices for your companions is a crucial part of determining your legacy."
Nerdgasm incoming in three... two... one...
OH YEAH~!
"Now that the video is out I feel like I should assure you that much of what is in the video is work in progress.
The underlying technology for the animation system has undergone a lot of overhaul past few months and I am still working on bringing it all together.
Now, for all my animation fans lets break the vid down a bit.
For the purpose of pacing in the video, editing occurred that if your watching the animation it affected speed and cut off or sped up transitions.
Cloaks physics are not working in the video.
The swimming is actually very cool in game when moving your guys around, you barely saw anything here.
The next shot of the PC stopping, Im not sure what happened here looks like a bug.
The generic walk animation is not playing smoothly on the npcs, that will improve.
The shot of the guy transitioning into the water, transition into the water looks good right?, however in here you also see some old mostly broken movement of the companions. I am currently working on a follow system for the companions.
OK now the combat...
This is very early stuff and was highly affected by editing.
Im not sure how well the video demonstrates this but Im trying to do something a bit different with the animations.
Combat is very similar in many respects to wasteland in terms of flow from my perspective.
What I have done to try and give this a different look is basically give everything a facing direction
For example:
When executing an attack the attack animation has the rotation of facing your target built in so you turn to face your target and attack all in one motion. This allows me to add some variety to the attacks as an attack to the left is different than to the right or behind. Damages also follow this rule as well as deaths, so if your attacked from behind or killed the reaction is directional. Damages or hit reactions also have the victim turn to face the attacker.
Its a technique that admittedly adds a ton of complexity and increases the difficulty of mechanical construction of the animations.
The timing and use of connecting transitions is something that is missing in combat which makes it feel abrupt visually too, but we still have to balance for gameplay I dont want anyone being annoyed by the animation timing."
This seems like the new golden age for the CRPGs. I can't complain.
Simply. Stunning.
https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/game/media/wallpapers
Also, PC Invasion interviewed Colin McComb And Kevin Saunders (available in both audio and text formats):
"‘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."
"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."
"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."
Ohh, go and read the full interview already, before I paste it all here. It's a must-read! http://www.pcinvasion.com/torment-tides-of-numenera-interview-with-colin-mccomb-and-keven-saunders