Torment: Tides of Numenera Update #60: Closer to Release, New Novellas

The latest Kickstarter update for Torment: Tides of Numenera invites the last 5% of backers to join inXile’s internal portal for pledge finalization and highlights the two class trailers we’ve already covered, but that’s not the important stuff. What’s most important is that the team is getting closer and closer to having a Gold build for the game (with a new beta update also planned), and that two new novellas (one from Tony Evans and one from Mur Lafferty) have been released.

On the game’s status:

Path to Gold

Phew! It’s been a busy month. The Torment team has been hustling hard to get the game polished for release. The game is nearly ready, which means we’re now doing all that “boring” stuff that gets Torment ready for you to play.

What does that include? Well, Jeremy, Evan and other members of the design team have been working away on balancing to make sure our Crisis encounters are as entertaining as can be, and that things like loot distribution, economy and character progression are playing well. A lot of number tweaking! Those on the writing and area design side have been playing through the game and fixing any remaining quest, story and content issues. Our engineers Steve, Jesse, Dan and more have been hammering hard on performance optimization and pesky bugs to make sure everything runs better, faster, stronger, better. Meanwhile, we’ve got our artists, scripters and more devoted to further polish and cleaning up animations, character rigs, and textures.

Fortunately, things are looking really good, so we’ve been able to divert more folk’s time toward playing the game, finding bugs, identifying balance and progression issues, and tying up any loose ends in quests. It might sound like a strange thing to say, but sometimes for developers, simply finding the time to sit back and enjoy our own games is a luxury, so we’ve been doing that too.

We also wouldn’t be complete rounding up our recent progress without giving another shout-out to the QA teams at Testronic and Techland, plus our external localization partners. Those teams have all been putting in huge amounts of hours and Torment is very much improved thanks to them.

All of this work is bringing us closer and closer to a release-to-manufacturing build of the game. We’ve been directing our efforts towards that milestone, and when that happens, it will mean Torment is effectively a finished, complete game we can all be proud of. You can rest assured we’ll be hammering away as long as we can to give you the best possible experience upon release early next year.

Last, in the previous update we hinted that we’ll have a new beta update for Torment coming, and that’s still the plan. This will have many of the refinements we’ve mentioned above, plus new features like the ability to switch between mouse/keyboard and controller versions of the interface. We’ll keep you all posted!