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Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter by InXile [Complete; $4.3 million funded]

G

Grym

Member
$25K to go.

Just finished Adam Heine's novella. I really like the sense of the unknown and mysteriousness the setting and numenera provide. It really left me wanting to read more about these people and the world more generally. Makes the long wait for the game even more difficult imo
 
A

Arulan

Member
Grym said:
$25K to go.

Just finished Adam Heine's novella. I really like the sense of the unknown and mysteriousness the setting and numenera provide. It really left me wanting to read more about these people and the world more generally. Makes the long wait for the game even more difficult imo
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I just finished the novella as well. I agree, it was a great small glimpse into the world. I'm eagerly looking forward to the next one.
 
K

Keasar

Member
Grym said:
$25K to go.

Just finished Adam Heine's novella. I really like the sense of the unknown and mysteriousness the setting and numenera provide. It really left me wanting to read more about these people and the world more generally. Makes the long wait for the game even more difficult imo
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I recommend getting the core rulebook for Numenera. Beautiful and a fantastic read.

PDF version here: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/114133/Numenera but I recommend the physical book more if affordable.
 
K

Kieli

Member
Hope this game doesn't get bogged down with throwaway 50 hour turn-based battles every 4 steps like Wasteland 2 was.
 
B

Basileus777

Member
Kieli said:
Hope this game doesn't get bogged down with throwaway 50 hour turn-based battles every 4 steps like Wasteland 2 was.
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Yeah, I was on board with turn based battles until I played Wasteland 2 and saw how mediocre the combat is in that game. Maybe I made the wrong choice in that poll.
 
Z

Zeliard

Member
Torment 2 is specifically going to focus less on combat and make each combat encounter meaningful to a degree, at least hypothetically. They're purposefully shying away from sending you into throwaway combat with trash mobs. It has a very different focus to Wasteland 2.
 
G

Grayman

Member
Also hypothetically speaking the fantasy setting is going to mean there are more abilities to use in combat than Wasteland 2 has.
 
E

epmode

Member
Leckan said:
So, uh, can you add more funds for rewards without Paypal? Because I don't have a Paypal account.
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PayPal handles the transaction but I'm not sure if you're required to have an account. There's a choice between "Pay with PayPal" and "Pay with a card". Just try it, I guess.
 
L

Labadal

Member
George Ziets spoke a bit about the Gullet.
http://gziets.tumblr.com/post/101107339823/a-few-words-about-the-gullet

A Few Words About the Gullet

So here we are… four days remain on the Gullet stretch goal, with a little under $7000 left to raise. Before the stretch goal ends, I’d been meaning to say more about how the Gullet came to be, so if you’re interested in the realities of area design, read on!
I wrote my design for the Bloom in late 2013. At that point in time, very little work had been done on the content side of our game. All we had was a Mere that consisted of two scenes, and we still had to determine the overall look and feel for Torment. My goal was to give our players an experience that was as close to the original Planescape Torment as possible - I played PST a lot while I was writing the design documents, trying to make sure I hit just the right tone and analyzing what worked and what didn’t.
One element that sometimes worked… and sometimes didn’t… were the dungeons. While PST was primarily a dialogue-driven experience, it included a few dungeons, strategically scattered throughout the game. Some were purely combat-focused, like the mausoleum in the Hive. Others were a mix of combat, exploration, and dialogues, like the catacombs beneath the Buried Village. I thought the latter worked best. Combat wasn’t one of PST’s strengths, but when it was balanced with exploration and a few dialogues, the whole experience was tense, interesting, and fun. It also contrasted nicely with the dialogue-driven gameplay that preceded and followed it.
So when I designed the Bloom, I decided to include something similar (though shorter in length) – a “dungeon” environment that skewed more heavily toward exploration and discovery. And since players would pass through this area on their way into the Bloom’s depths, it would be set toward the end of the zone… a perfect time to pay off on some of the player’s earlier choices.
That’s how the Gullet was born. This was where old and forgotten things would be found, devoured by the Bloom in the distant past, sinking slowly into its guts, finally coming to rest here. Echoes of the Bloom’s victims would wander here too, including victims the player may have “nudged” to their demise. In the end, all things find their way to the Gullet. (Last week, somebody on the team likened it to the Bloom’s liver, which I thought was a particularly apt comparison.)
I drew up a map on graph paper, numbered the encounter areas (old-school D&D-style), and detailed everything that would happen in the Gullet. When the other leads reviewed the design documentation, they seemed to like the Gullet content, and I was pretty excited to include all this weird and horrific stuff in the game. But strictly speaking, the Bloom could function without the Gullet (and its most important content could be relocated somewhere else), so when we realized that we didn’t have the resources to develop all the content I had proposed, the Gullet became [C] priority. I was sad, but such are the realities of game development.
In the old days (by which I mean 2012 or so), a cut was a cut. If we didn’t have the resources to implement everything we had planned, we made the decision to cut something, and that was that. The cut content was forever lost. But now, in the strange world of crowd-funding, the Gullet has a second chance at life. Will we make it to the stretch goal? I hope so. I think it’ll be fun to prototype our version of a PST dungeon, full of exploration and weird discoveries. If you’ve contributed, thanks for getting us this far… and if all goes well, I’ll see you on the other side of the finish line.
Click to expand...
 
G

Grym

Member
Arulan said:
I'm getting a little worried this will just barely not make it. Hopefully four days is enough. The design aspect is interesting, and I'm glad they're sticking to the strengths of Planescape: Torment.
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I think it'll make it. It has been getting around $1.5 - 2k each day - give or take - for awhile now. If that trend continues we're golden
 
L

LiK

Member
phew, glad they alerted people to verify emails for rewards. their new rewards page didn't have my name in the credits section as original inputted last year. Fixed that asap.
 
S

Stimpack

Member
Zeliard said:
Torment 2 is specifically going to focus less on combat and make each combat encounter meaningful to a degree, at least hypothetically. They're purposefully shying away from sending you into throwaway combat with trash mobs. It has a very different focus to Wasteland 2.
Click to expand...

Sounds promising to me!
 
G

Grym

Member
It looks like the t-shirt and poster rewards are going away in a couple days. I still haven't pulled the trigger on either.

Has there ever been any update on which art will be on the posters? And the below are the last t-shirt designs I've seen. Has there been any update on that? Anyone know? I can't find anything else...

tumblr_inline_mjnpayeyB81rgj7s2.jpg
 
G

Grym

Member
Haha
Brother None put in the final $3.79. Isn't he a team member or mod of the official forums or somwthing? (I think I've also seen him post here on GAF)
 
L

Labadal

Member
Grym said:
Haha
Brother None put in the final $3.79. Isn't he a team member or mod of the official forums or somwthing? (I think I've also seen him post here on GAF)
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He works for them, but two fo the developers donated $750 each. Not an issue in my opinion. They never hid the fact and you could see their names in the top contributor of the week list. I'm just happy we get more stuff designed by George Ziets.

pzo.gif
 
L

Lime

Member
I really hope this ends up looking better than Wasteland 2. Granted, I only played it before Durante updated GeDoSato to support downsampling in WL2, but I really felt the lighting in the Unity engine is bad and the textures on the character models were piss poor.
 
S

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
Lime said:
I really hope this ends up looking better than Wasteland 2. Granted, I only played it before Durante updated GeDoSato to support downsampling in WL2, but I really felt the lighting in the Unity engine is bad and the textures on the character models were piss poor.
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Well this is using pre-rendered backgrounds with the same tech that Obsidian is using with PoE, so it's definitely going to look better.
 
L

Labadal

Member
Update #38

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”
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This update might not be interesting for everyone but I find this type of update to be very interesting and I appreciate them very, very much. Extremely good read for people who care for this stuff.

ccbc91f635f2cac2989a3a3ca7071ccc_large.jpg

81a0d05d187920e019d25c0443ccabf8_large.png

cef697007e5c8316acd3a4eeaa854266_large.png
 
L

Labadal

Member
Colin McComb at EGX Rezzed 2015
Creative Lead Colin McComb will be at EGX Rezzed to speak about Torment: Tides of Numenera and the art of developing narrative. He’ll be speaking at 1pm on Saturday 14th March.

Eurogamer interviews Colin McComb

Some paragraphs:
"We are not giving experience for killing stuff," McComb says. "Numenera is about exploration, it's not about killing people and taking their stuff. In a game where we say 'what does one life matter?', we actually want to make it matter." Not, "What does one life matter? Well, about 25XP!"

He goes on: "We have Crises and Tussles. A Crisis is a hand-crafted encounter, a major thing - a major set-piece. Then we've got Tussles for when you screw up a dialogue or get caught picking the wrong pocket. I don't want to call it a trash combat because hopefully it's all going to be entertaining and fun."

Character development is different, based around a literary-themed "adjective, noun, verb" idea. Take McComb's sentence, "I am a tough Glaive who bears a halo of fire," as an example.

"The adjective describes what your character does - you could be tough, you could be cunning, you could be cowardly, you could be dastardly. All of these things provide modifiers for your skills and your pools, which are Might, Speed and Intellect.

"Then you've got your noun, which is your class. You've got Glaives, which are like warriors; you've got Nanos, which are wizards, drawing on the powers of the ancients that have been left around the world here; then you've got Jacks, which are sort of a mix between the two. Some people think of them as thieves but they're really more warrior-mages - Jack of all trades.

"Then you've got your verb, which is your super-special cool power. It could be 'bears a halo of fire' or 'rides the lightning' or 'talks to machines'. And all of these things provide different special ways in which you interact with the world, and it's super-cool."
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Found this on rpgcodex.
 
D

duckroll

Member
"We are not giving experience for killing stuff," McComb says. "Numenera is about exploration, it's not about killing people and taking their stuff. In a game where we say 'what does one life matter?', we actually want to make it matter." Not, "What does one life matter? Well, about 25XP!"
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Just like Pillars of Eternity then? I like the trend. :p
 
J

jb1234

Member
I always worry when I hear that battles have no tangible payoff. It would just make me want to dodge them instead. In the case of Numenera, that's probably less of an issue because of the heaps of dialogue but it really hurt games like Paper Mario: Sticker Star.
 
H

HP_Wuvcraft

Banned
duckroll said:
Just like Pillars of Eternity then? I like the trend. :p
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Remains to be seen.

PoE does give Combat EXP now, just not a ton and it is in retrograde with each kill.

We'll know how well it actually works when the game actually launches, because right now, we have a combat-heavy beta where combat doesn't matter.
 
D

dude

dude
jb1234 said:
I always worry when I hear that battles have no tangible payoff. It would just make me want to dodge them instead. In the case of Numenera, that's probably less of an issue because of the heaps of dialogue but it really hurt games like Paper Mario: Sticker Star.
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I don't get this sentiment.
Would you seriously want to dodge all the combat in the game if there is no XP reward? Rather, I'd probably dodge some battles that feel too intimidating and go for others I can reasonably try. I feel like that's how I'm supposed to approach a combat situation - Rather than always rushing in for that extra bit of XP.
There are plenty of incentives to battle in games - The fact that they're fun is enough to make me go at them pretty consistently. Story factors also come into play as well. XP for killing just makes combat slightly better than any other alternative.
 
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