Torment: Tides of Numenera project lead departs, game delayed again

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By Sherif Saed VG247

Torment: Tides of Numenera, inXile’s crowd-funded homage to Planescape: Torment, has lost its project lead. In a lengthy new update on the game’s Kickstarter page, Kevin Saunders announced his departure and gave an overview of the current build.

According to Saunders, the recent alpha test was very helpful to the devs in getting player feedback on the game’s Crisis system – shown for the first time publicly. In addition, as the team continues to work on UI, the “majority” of environment art has been completed.


“As with any product launch, there will be the inevitable challenges to overcome, but like a finely tuned engine, things are humming along,” said Saunders. “I’m proud to have played a part in creating and tuning that engine, which is where my unique experience and skills were most beneficial to the game.

“With the major creative and production decisions now resolved, and the team charging full speed toward completing the game, inXile and I have decided it is time for me to depart from the studio. I am proud of the project that I’m leaving in capable hands, and while I do not know what I’ll do next, I look forward to new challenges and opportunities.”

Chris Keenan, former project lead on Wasteland 2, will be assuming Saunders’ former duties. As a result, the game has now been delayed to 2016, with a beta release expected before the year’s end.

 

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The Torment: Tides of Numenera beta has been delayed

InXile Entertainment said in early November that Torment: Tides of Numenera, the long-awaited spiritual successor to the inexplicably-unsequelized Black Isle RPG Planescape: Torment, would hopefully be out in 2016, and that the beta test release would go out "before the end of this year." But today the studio announced that there's been a slight change in that schedule.

"Torment is in that exciting stage where things are coming together rapidly, and it's been amazing over the last few months to see so many elements of the game take shape," inXile's Chris Keenan said in the most recent Kickstarter update. "We want to continue cleaning up some rough edges so that you can have the best experience possible. For that reason, we are planning to release the Torment Beta Test early next year so we can deliver a more polished and complete Beta Test."

The good news is that the beta will be a "legitimate hands-on," Keenan said, with more than ten hours of gameplay "on a normal playthrough," whatever that is. He also posted a new screen showing off the headquarters of the Order of Truth, one of the factions in Sagus Cliffs, an area similar to the Hive in Planescape.

"The Order of Truth is dedicated to the study of numenera—artifacts of long-dead civilizations that inhabited Earth millions of years ago. Its adherents, known as Aeon Priests, have established enclaves throughout much of the known world. In the city of Sagus Cliffs, far from the lands where the Order arose, the Aeon Priests are few, and not all of them share the high principles of their distant brethren," designer George Ziets explained. "Fortunately for them, Sagus Cliffs sits atop a massive trove of numenera, layer upon layer of ancient cities and long-forgotten technologies, waiting to be unearthed. The local headquarters of the Order is inside an ancient starship, abandoned countless millennia in the past and locked in the accumulated sediments of the ages."

The update also contains some insights into how the developers went about incorporating backer-created content—items, monuments, and NPCs—into the game, as well as a bit on forum badges for backers, as well as "general news," which is basically that inXile has opened a new studio in New Orleans.