GOG.com
Donate to Codex
Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games

Torment Kickstarter Update #66: Post-Release Plans

Click here and disable ads!

Torment Kickstarter Update #66: Post-Release Plans

Game News - posted by Infinitron on Fri 10 March 2017, 01:30:47

Tags: Chris Keenan; inXile Entertainment; Torment: Tides of Numenera

Ten days have passed since the release of Torment: Tides of Numenera. While the game did quite well with professional reviewers, actual gamers appear to feel otherwise. Its Steam user review score is at 69% and falling, sales seem underwhelming, and the Codex thread is exploding. It's increasingly clear that inXile have a bit of a fiasco on their hands, and many people including myself were expecting them to cut their losses and move on to Wasteland 3 post-haste. However, the latest Kickstarter update proves that they're not quite ready to do that. Though not before some slightly too anxious self-congratulation:

We are now a little over one week after the release of Torment! It's been amazing to see the reception that the game received. The game has been an extremely strong success critically, with praise, awards and even several perfect scores along the way. If you want to read some of the reviews, we’ve done a pair of roundups that you can find here and here, as well as an accolades trailer. More importantly, we've been seeing your feedback throughout the forums, comments and social media.

We've heard from hundreds of you who have reached out to say that that Torment: Tides of Numenera is a worthy successor to Planescape: Torment, and that is something we are extremely pleased and humbled to hear. We'd love for you to get out there and keep spreading the word, leaving reviews, posting comments, sharing your experiences, and more. There’s a lot to discover in this game, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all discuss the story and events of the game for years to come!

When we came to you on Kickstarter, you gave us an incredible opportunity to make a game that would never have happened otherwise. It's through your continued support that these kinds of games will continue to get made. You have our everlasting thanks for providing us the ability to bring these type of games back.

What Comes Next?

Since release, we have been tirelessly reading your feedback, comments, and reports, and using that to plan a few patches for the near future. These will be primarily focused on fixing some pesky bugs that some of our players have encountered, as well as performance and stability optimizations, both on PC as well as on consoles. You can expect to see our first patch coming in the next couple of weeks.

But, we also want to address the longer term. Four years is an extended development timeline for an RPG, and it is a hallmark of our ambition for the game. Torment has the longest script we've ever produced at over 1.2 million words, and provides more nuanced reactivity and more complicated quests and stories than we have ever done before.

Despite that, there were some features we wanted to include in the game that we weren’t able to finish in time for release. Companions, in particular, were a big production trade-off. Not only does a single companion take many months of work from writers, scripters, designers, and artists. Because we wanted companions to interact and react to the game world and conversations in a deep way, their implementation needed to happen later in the development process, when quests and area design were mostly complete. As we were iterating on the companions, we felt the time was best spent building them out deeper as opposed to slamming in a few more on a surface level. These development decisions are never black and white, but we always approach it from a position of what we truly believe is best for the game. As we addressed in a previous update, reducing their number was a necessary trade-off to hit the level of quality we wanted.

But, there's a saying that no work of art is ever truly complete. We certainly know that many of you were looking forward to some of the things we couldn't squeeze into our release build, and it just didn't sit well with us leaving those behind. Now that we have had a time to see your feedback on the game, we also have a better sense of where we can focus our resources to improve.

To that end, we are pleased to announce that we will be working on additional content and updates for Torment post-release. These updates will include:
  • Oom ("The Toy" companion).
  • Voluminous Codex.
  • Crisis system improvements.
Our initial updates to the game will focused on bug fixes, optimizations, and other improvements, while the content additions will come later down the line. Both the patches and content updates will, of course, be completely free for all Torment owners, including backers, PC buyers, and console players. We will have more news on these in the coming weeks and months!
Well then, Torment Director's Cut, here we come. I wonder if the Voluminous Codex is still planned to be outside of the game...

There are 73 comments on Torment Kickstarter Update #66: Post-Release Plans

Site hosted by Sorcerer's Place Link us!
Codex definition, a book manuscript.
eXTReMe Tracker
rpgcodex.net RSS Feed
This page was created in 0.06020188331604 seconds