Torment: Tides of Numenera Interview

VG247 has published its full interview with inXile’s Colin McComb and Kevin Saunders on Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is currently steadily moving towards its $2.5 million stretch goal. Here’s a snippet:

First, McComb wanted to make clear that the project wouldn’t exist without Kickstarter, the blessing of Obsidian’s Chris Avellone and the support of gamers, (Chris and I have talked over the years about wanting to do this, and it started last year after the success of our Wasteland 2 Kickstarter.

(We said, ‘˜You know what? We could use Kickstarter to make a new Torment’, because publishers were not interested in it.

(Other developers might have been interested in it, but it was not at the time a hugely best-selling game, so people chose to take their dollars and invest them elsewhere. We thought that because crowd-funding was available, maybe this is something people would actually like to get involved in.)

Once the base concept was in place, Avellone and McComb approached Wizards of the Coast and asked them what it would take to get the Planescape license. They didn’t get very far, but with Avellone’s blessing inXile decided to take an in-house approach instead.

McComb approached his long-time friend and legendary table-top RPG designer Monte Cook, and asked if the studio could adapt his Kickstarter funded pen-and-paper game Numenera. Naturally, he agreed and Torment: Tides of Numenera was born.

Like Cook’s tabletop RPG, inXile’s game is set billions of years in a future, spanning multiple dimensions and realities. It’s a world where ancient ruins hold forgotten technological marvels. In typical fantasy RPGs, ruins would play home to demons or skeletons, here they are guarded by rogue AI and unexplained anomalies.