The George Ziets Interview Part 3: Writing For 'Torment: Tides Of Numenera', Engaging The Player
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
George Ziets is the Lead Area Designer for InXile's RPG
Torment:Tides of Numenera. He graciously consented to devote a good deal of his time to this four-part interview about the video game writer's job and the special challenges and opportunities of writing
Torment. The interview took place through email and has been edited for comprehension.
Ziets received a Masters degree in Cognitive Psychology with an emphasis on Human-Computer Interaction in 1999. (Disclosure. I was a member of his thesis committee.) In 2001 he took a job writing dialog for the MMO
Earth & Beyond. Since then he has held various positions as a writer, designer or creative lead on games such as
Lord of the Rings Online,
Dungeons & Dragons Online,
Neverwinter Nights 2,
Elder Scrolls Online,
Dungeon Siege 3,
Fallout: New Vegas and
Torment among others.
Minor spoilers follow.
Kevin Murnane: Torment:Tides of Numenera takes place in a strange and mysterious world that is unlike anything seen in video games since the original Planescape: Torment. Did this place more of an emphasis on writing during game development because of the need to make such a different world understandable and interesting to the player?
George Ziets: The focus on writing was a major feature of
Torment from the start. Our Kickstarter backers supported our crowd-funding campaign because they loved the writing in the original game. No matter what setting we chose, we wanted great writing to take center stage.
If anything, we chose the Numenera setting because it makes an ideal showcase for the writing. It was developed by Monte Cook Games as a setting where players could focus more on narrative and less on complicated game mechanics. Additionally, the setting is full of strange and unusual things. It takes place a billion years in the future, where countless civilizations have risen and fallen, leaving behind their wildly advanced technology. This meant that nothing was off-limits, and every character could be unique, bizarre, and memorable. As writers, we loved it. We got to indulge our imaginations and explore the wildest frontiers of science fantasy.
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
Murnane: Torment’s world is fascinating but it can also be overwhelming, at least initially, because very little is familiar. Is this something the writing team was aware of, and if so, how did you go about easing the new player into the game?
Ziets: This was definitely a challenge. When players enter our world, a lot of elements will be unfamiliar – the setting, the story, and even parts of the gameplay system. We iterated quite a bit to find the best way to introduce them all… without overwhelming the player.
Our earliest versions of the introduction dropped a ton of information about the world and the story on players. After testing it internally, we realized that it was just too much. So we dialed it back, removing almost all the background about the world and focusing on the most important elements of the player’s story instead.
As for easing the player into the world – we decided to let that proceed more organically. The player’s first real look at the world of Numenera is the Reef of Fallen Worlds, a reef of ancient structures that surrounds the starting city. It’s a wild profusion of weird artifacts and technology from different eras, designed to show the extent of the strangeness in this world. Once the player enters the city, they’ll encounter more unusual characters and technology, and they can ask questions and gradually find out more about the setting. We wanted to leave questions about the world unanswered at the beginning to give the player mysteries to investigate.
We also altered the Numenera rules to make things feel a little more familiar. For example, we added the health bar, which doesn’t exist in the tabletop game. We made additional changes to other systems so that they’d work better in a video game and feel a little more familiar to most gamers.
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
Murnane: How do you ground the player in enough that is familiar so that he or she can identify with the game's main character, the Last Castoff, in such an unfamiliar world?
Ziets: One thing we did was to make the main character a newborn being. Even though their body has been occupied by someone else for a number of years, the main character’s consciousness is born at the start of the game, and they don’t know much about the setting. Thus, it makes perfect sense for the player to be asking basic questions of NPCs, and we provide many opportunities to explore and understand the world. The player’s companions help too. Most of them are aware that the player is newly born, and they interject with their opinions about the world and its inhabitants.
Another important strategy when working in an unfamiliar setting is to make sure that characters have believable human motivations. They might be living in the guts of a giant amoeboid monster (the Bloom), but their core hopes and desires are still emotionally believable to players. If players can connect with characters on an emotional level, they’ll usually embrace the setting, no matter how unfamiliar it seems.
Torment: Tides of Numenera. Credit: InXile
Murnane: Torment’s world is outside the box which can encourage players to think outside the box as they immerse themselves in the game. Did this provide special challenges for handling the need to accommodate player agency in telling Torment’s story?
Ziets: It sure did. We committed to a lot of reactivity on
Torment. We gave players multiple ways to solve every problem, and we provided unique and interesting consequences whenever possible. But because the world of Numenera is so unusual, and because we created so many strange artifacts with powerful abilities, we had to account for all the unexpected ways players might try to resolve a situation.
Designers and writers are usually too close to their own creations to provide truly objective feedback, so we relied on other team members – and our external testing team – to play the quests and dialogues and find all the possibilities we may have missed. Then we did our best to account for all the edge cases. Some will be experienced by very few players, but we wanted to reward all the player’s choices, even the most unlikely ones. Players who discover those edge cases will feel like they’ve found a secret known only to a few.
[We made a strong] commitment to giving the player lots of choices and consequences. We embraced branching and interconnected quests to an extent that the vast majority of games wouldn't, so we had to account for many more paths through the content, which was a challenge... but well worth the effort for this kind of game, I think.
This is the third of a four-part interview
Torment: Tides of Numenera releases on PC, PS4 and Xbox One on Tuesday, February 28.
