Torment: Tides of Numenera Cut Content

For a couple of days now, I’ve been seeing various posts and articles pop up all over the place talking about the troubled development of InXile Entertainment’s Torment: Tides of Numenera. These looked dubious and unsubstantiated at first but now there’s an extensive thread over at RPG Codex confirming that some content, promised in the Kickstarter campaign, has been cut from the game during development.

Among other things, the thread aggregates developer posts talking about what exactly didn’t make the final cut. In short and without spoiling much, certain companions have been dropped, some areas got expanded beyond expectations which led to the promised second major city getting reduced in scope, crafting is gone(as someone who opposes crafting in RPGs, can’t say that I’m too sad about this one, but I certainly understand the frustration there), and the Italian localization has been canceled.

Here are a few developer posts from InXile’s official forums:

Hi guys,

The companion roster has been slightly reduced from our initial plans. Throughout development on Torment, our philosophy has always emphasized depth and reactivity in our storyline and in our characters. We know you would not be satisfied with anything else. During development, we found that the more far reaching and reactive our companions were, the better they felt and the more justice it did to the original Planescape: Torment. This trade-off meant we were able to add more companion conversations, banter, voice-over, quests, and story endings. We did not want to leave some companions feeling shallow, with storylines that felt incomplete, or be forced to shove them into the late game.

That said, we certainly haven’t shut the door on Torment’s development. We still have a lot of early work done on other companions and are open to continuing to work on the game. We can say that any DLCs or expansions that we put out will always be free to our backers of that game, so there is no need to worry about paying for any additional content in Torment.

[…]

Hey everyone. The Oasis is still represented in the game, and as some of you have pointed out, we’ve shown it several times before in screenshots and media.

You may have noticed we’ve been showing off the Bloom a lot lately, and that’s no coincidence. Despite being one of the earliest locations we showed, the Bloom was originally intended to be smaller than it ended up being. Though we initially planned for the Oasis to be our second major story hub, over time our fascination with the Bloom’s darker, more Tormenty feel, led to it being recast as the game’s second major city hub instead. We felt creatively this was the right thing to do, and the change did not shorten the gameplay experience.

As a result, the Oasis ended up taking on a smaller role, but you will still be able to visit it during the game.

What has to be mentioned here, is that going by the recent previews, the game itself looks pretty solid and these cuts are not a sign of the end times. Still, if anything, this is a cautionary tale for those participating in crowdfunding.