Monte Cook, Brian Fargo, Colin McComb, and Kevin Saunders, the creators of Torment: Tides of Numenera recently participated in an AMA on Reddit. They were also joined by superfan Steve Dengler.
One of the more humorous parts of the Kickstarter from the inXile Kickstarter projects has been the “kid publisher” interactions. Fargo says that while it’s obviously not a one-to-one recreation of what happened, its based on real conversations.
“Pretty much all of my talks with the kid publisher are steeped in reality,” said Fargo. “Yes I did have publishers that offered to spend marketing dollars for me so they could have the publishing rights for Wasteland 2. I explained that we had a killer sales force of RPG players and didn’t need what they were offering.”
“And it is often expected that you should just wind your team down at the end of each game and that is a crime,” he added. “It is bad for the brain trust and horrible for the families. There were many people that questioned my decision to start another KS campaign before the first one was complete but I had a logical reason and a method I used for years. I figured I would state my case to the backers and let them decide. And thankfully they agreed.”
Dengler answered a question on why Torment was worth $100,000 to him instead of, say $20 or $1000. “Technically $110,000, since I also pledged at the $10k level,” he noted. “The short answer is that I wanted to help make a spiritual successor to something I consider to be one of the greatest games ever made. I see Torment as a great work of literature, just expressed as a game. People spend huge amounts of money on works of art all the time and then hide them away in their houses. This will be a great work of art that will be open to anyone that wants to engage with it. And that is pretty awesome.”
“Also, remember that nobody was sure that the game would hit its goal, let alone go on to push $3 million. At $3 million, the extra $100k is not a major factor. But if the game had just barely hit its goal, the extra money from me and Brian would have made a very substantial difference in the final quality of the game. It would have been the difference between ‘pretty good’ and ‘great’. Now the game is going to be simply amazing. Legendary.”
McComb also revealed the history of why Torment was the new title for inXile and it all began with a retrospective on Eurogamer. “It actually started with a PST retrospective on Eurogamer. Bertie Purchese asked some PST team members to be on the show for a podcast, and we spent some time reminiscing,” described McComb. “When it concluded, I told Mr. Avellone that he should tell Brian that I would totally be available for writing WL2. Brian apparently liked my work on that enough that he thought I’d be a good bet to lead a new Torment creatively. At the same time, Chris introduced Kevin to Brian, and I (being a total prima donna ;)) insisted that Adam Heine be on the team because Adam said he would love to do it. Then it was just a matter of getting Numenera licensed, and here we are.”
When Fargo was asked if a studio could be sustained long term by Kickstarter, Fargo responded, “I do think it can be a valid long term strategy so long as you can prove that you can deliver the goods and have an open communication about things. No doubt the dynamics will continue to change but crowd funding is here to stay.”
To find out more about Torment, read the exclusive interview with Fargo here.
