Torment: Tides of Numenera Interviews

We have rounded up a couple of recent interviews centered around Torment: Tides of Numenera, which should tide you over until the new update for its Kickstarter gets released.

First The Penny Arcade Report has two pieces on Torment, the first covering Kevin Saunders and Colin McComb’s contributions to the project and the second covering character creation, gender and same-sex relationships:

(As with the original Torment we are telling a specific story, and that requires a specific character. The player will have a choice of genders in the game, and it will have some impact in the reactivity of the world,) McComb explained. (This is a billion years in the future, so I don’t think there will be much reactivity of people saying that you’re a woman, and you’re not capable of. there’s a billion years of gender equality.)

Outside of the choice of gender, which will change the game in certain ways, you’ll not be able to make your own, personal character. (We’re not going to customize the looks. This is primarily an internal journey. It’s not dress-up,) McComb said.

This leads to an interesting question: If we’re billions of years in the future, with all the social change that goes along with it, will the game support same-sex couples? When I asked this there was a long pause.

(We do plan to have relationships in the game. I don’t know if we’re necessarily approaching romance, at least not in the way it’s been explored in games recently. There’s a lot more to the word love than simple flesh coupling,) McComb explained. (That’s frankly the aspect of it that’s least interesting when you get right down to it. It’s the interpersonal intimacy. It’s learning the depth and turmoil of another person that I think is more fascinating. That’s the aspect we want to explore with relationships with people.)

Meanwhile, the [a]list daily chatted with Brian Fargo who seems to be as enthusiastic as ever, although the subject is more the Kickstarter campaign rather than the game proper:

[a]list: Do you have the IP rights to the original Torment or is branching it into Numenera a way to reprise it as a new property?

Brian Fargo: The original Torment game was based in the Planescape universe from TSR. That particular game represented a certain style and verve that we all wanted to recreate, and we didn’t feel that it was necessarily tied to that one universe. Of course it just seemed perfect that Monte Cook, who was one of the co-creators of Planescape – along with Zeb Cook and Colin McComb while at TSR – created a new setting called Numenera that fit perfect within the vision of what we wanted to do. The stars really lined up for this one.

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[a]list: Will inXile ramp up staff now that your second Kickstarter is successful?

Brian Fargo: We only need to ramp up slightly on the producing side since we have to manage a writing and concept art team now. The key part of our messaging was we did not want to start a second production team but instead wanted to make sure our core group would roll onto a second game once Wasteland 2 was complete. And this means you need to have the pre-production fully complete if you want to be working efficiently and on a design that has been thoroughly pored over.