Torment: Tides of Numenera

During T:ToN, the player will be hunted by the ‘Angel of Entropy’. Many games settle for conveying a sense of urgency by faking an antagonist’s pursuit via scripted sequences - no matter how tardy the Nameless One is, he’s never going to be caught by the Shadows in the Mortuary or in the Buried Village - but you’ve stated on Reddit that “there will be some pressure from behind”. Should we expect time-limits, a la Fallout, or do you have other plans for giving the game’s adversaries a sense of involvement in the story?

We’re still talking about how exactly to implement this, and I don’t want to give away too much too early, but we’re designing at a system in which you’ll know that it’s time to move on. It’s not that you’ll always be looking over your shoulder, but if you spend too much time in an area without forward progression, the sense of menace increases until the menace actually arrives.

Again, I want to stress that we do want to keep the pressure on without making you feel like you’ve lost agency or that you have to save at critical junctures so you can go back and experience the game. We intend for this game to be deep and heavily replayable. We understand the tension between providing a sense of realism and urgency, and the desire not to create a frustrating, over-tense game experience. Developing this is part of our early process, and it’s an issue we’re looking at closely.

It’s possible that others you’ve managed to antagonize or cross in some other way pursue you or lay traps for you. It’s a dangerous world, and you’re most definitely not the most dangerous thing in it. We’ve had many new ideas since the Kickstarter and we may have played up our depiction of the Angel, but we will try to achieve that sense of urgency, yes. It won’t be faked urgency – we have no qualms about the outcome of the player’s choices resulting in Game Over. We’re not going to push you into game-ending states at every opportunity, but we’re not going to go out of our way to make sure they never happen, either.

This requirement of a pre-generated character doesn’t mean player-choice is removed. Having this choice and the resulting reactivity was one of the team’s earliest stretch goals. From a gameplay systems perspective, players will have many choices regarding how their character evolves, and though the game’s reactivity means that the selection of hair color, body type and other appearance-based attributes won’t be provided, players will be allowed to create both male and female characters. The primary difference is that players will choose a specific individual to role-play.

“We’ll have some reactivity based around the character’s sex (for instance, you may be able to join a secret society of female assassins),” McComb says. “[A]nd there will be isolated communities that may have different reactions based on males or females possessing certain types of powers or items. The Ninth World (the setting in which Numenera is based) is a far different place societally speaking, though, so seeing outright sexism–at least in the form we know it–will be a deep exception, rather than the rule.”

“Planescape is about belief, spirit, and will,” McComb says. “Numenera is about exploring, understanding, and developing knowledge. Or as (Numenera creator) Monte [Cook] said, “Planescape is about what you believe. Numenera is about what you do.” Planescape dealt with the nature of faith, with souls and spirits, and with mythology in its many forms. Numenera is about abandonment, about the unknown, about finding cool things and discovering awesome secrets; it draws from a more futuristic vision, and generally doesn’t approach the issue of soul and mortality. They both share the sense of awe and wonder and the idea that there’s something bigger and cooler around us if we just take the time to learn how to see it.”