Torment: Tides of Numenera Interview

For me personally, it was recapturing the exuberant weirdness of Planescape: Torment. That’s what I loved most about the game, and that’s what I still remember now, more than fifteen years after I first played it. In PST, I could remove my own eyeball, carry around my intestines, learn to understand the language of creatures who spoke in rebuses, engage in philosophical discussion with giant golems. Nearly every NPC was strange and memorable, with a unique voice that sounded different from everyone else. (At the time, as someone who was just getting started in game writing, this was a revelation to me, and it inspired me to be a better, more flexible writer.)

It was clear to me that the Planescape design team wasn’t worried about conforming to expectations or being too different from the usual fantasy fare – they were letting their imaginations run wild.

I wanted to do the same in TTON. Fortunately, we had the benefit of the Numenera setting, which encourages imagination. It’s a setting with a billion years of history and technology behind it, and literally anything can happen. We also had the benefit of some excellent, highly creative writers. When I was designing areas and coming up with strange NPCs and circumstances for the player to encounter, it was always a pleasant surprise to see how the writers fleshed out the characters and made them even more interesting than they’d been in the design documents.

Based on my playthroughs of our first zone, Sagus Cliffs, I think we’ve succeeded in creating a highly imaginative world for players to explore. If anything, some of the later content feels more “Tormenty” than Sagus Cliffs – it keeps the weirdness, but it gets a little darker and feels even more like the original game.

First and foremost are the Numenera sourcebooks. When we first started the project, the only book that had been written was the corebook, so most of our Ninth World source material is drawn from there. The Bestiary was released around the time we started full production, so you’ll see some creatures from that book. Most of the later books (e.g., Into the Night) came out after design on Torment was essentially complete, so we weren’t able incorporate that material (though I wish we’d been able to – there’s some interesting stuff in the recent books).

I’d say that our most significant outside inspiration is Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series. You’ll see influences of those books throughout the game, along with a few homages (like the “green man” NPC in Circus Minor and the tendency of people to understand space travel in sailing terms). One of the other worlds that players can visit via the Bloom (a zone later in the game) was loosely inspired by the space travelers who are depicted in the last of the New Sun books. The Dendra O’hur cult, which plays a fairly prominent role in Sagus Cliffs, is a tribute to the anthropophages in the New Sun books.

Dan Simmons’ Hyperion books were another influence for both Colin McComb (our creative lead) and me. Colin also cites Moorcock’s “Dancers at the End of Time,” Zelazny’s Lord of Light, M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, Peter Watts’s Firefall series, and the movie Heavy Metal.

This was a conscious attempt to follow the example of Planescape: Torment, which pushed the limits of what could be done in written text. For us, the best part is that our writers aren’t limited to what we can afford to portray through animations, unique models, and visual effects. They’re allowed to describe characters in far greater detail than our character assets depict, portray physical action in descriptive text, and even kill characters in dialogue. (We do impose some limits. Any action that can’t be performed while standing still – e.g., walking to another location – is typically animated in a cutscene. And our art director, Charlie Bloomer, is pushing hard to include as many custom animations and visual effects that he and his team can generate to support our narrative text.)

Of course, it takes a certain kind of player to accompany us on a journey that requires so much reading. We are catering to a niche audience that loves this sort of thing as much as we do. Fortunately, there were enough of these players to fund our game, and our goal is to give them more of the same kind of experience they had in the original Torment.

In our game, the player is being dropped into the shoes of a specific character (much as the player took the role of the Nameless One in PST). In this case, that character is the Last Castoff, the most recently vacated body of the Changing God. It’s important to our narrative that the character have, for example, a specific and recognizable tattoo, and that his or her head is scarred from the fall to earth that begins the story.

One notable change from Planescape: Torment is that your clothing won’t be limited to a single outfit. You’ll be able to wear a variety of armors, which range from the mundane (plate or brigandine) to the Numenera-exotic (living exoskeletons, synth armor from previous worlds, or even animate Bloom-flesh).

I can’t reveal much about characters beyond the first zone of our game, but team favorites in zone A include Varrenoth, who appears to be a warrior woman but is actually a flesh-and-blood construct, controlled remotely by a little girl, and the nychthemeron, a floating techno-octopus that is being displayed in the middle of Circus Minor. Personally, I’m also a big fan of Imbitu (leader of the Dendra O’hur faction of corpse eaters), the Genocide (last of a warrior-race that tried to conquer Sagus Cliffs), Jernaugh (proprietor of the chiurgical parlor in Cliff’s Edge), and the psychic war veterans in the Fifth Eye tavern.

Note that both Varrenoth and Jernaugh are backer NPCs, though their excellent dialogue was written by Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie. Our goal with backer NPCs is to fully integrate them into our content so that players will never know the difference between backer-created characters and those we created ourselves.

One of my favorite characters from later in the game is our Numenera version of a pez dispenser, but you’ll have to play the game to find out what I mean.

In our Early Access build, we have four companions. Aligern and Callistege are the two nanos (i.e., techno-wizards) who witness your fall to earth and join you while exploring the Reef of Fallen Worlds. Unfortunately, they can’t stand each other, and you ultimately have to pick one or the other. You can always swap them out, but they’ll never again travel in the party at the same time. Tybir is a charismatic – and somewhat shady - jack (i.e., jack-of-all-trades) who you’ll meet in Circus Minor. If you’re willing to help his friend escape a rather unusual (and disgusting) execution, he’ll join your party. Matkina, the “cold, calculating jack,” is a castoff like you, and you’ll be sent to find her as part of the main story path in Sagus Cliffs.

As for the remaining companions… we want them to remain a surprise, so I’m not allowed to talk about them yet.

Choosing one companion over another will flavor your experience of the world, and it will sometimes affect how a quest plays out, what information you are given by NPCs, or what options are available to resolve a situation. For example, Tybir will sometimes jump in to help you deceive someone, and he also has some friends and acquaintances around Sagus Cliffs who will react differently to your party if he is present. Also, some events and encounters will *only* happen if a particular companion is in the party. Another example – If you solved Tybir’s quest in a particular way, and he’s still in your party when you’re leaving the city, you’ll have an encounter that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Finally, companions will offer quests as you progress through the game – solving them will advance their personal storylines and change their relationship with you, for better or worse. It will also affect how their stories are resolved in the endgame.

Area design doesn’t always follow the same process, but usually I like to start by assembling a list of all the elements that need to be present in the zone. In the case of Sagus Cliffs, that list was… immense, to be honest. It included main story moments and characters, groups we wanted to incorporate (like the Dendra O’hur and the Order of Truth), fun ideas from team members, the portrayal of Sagus Cliffs in Mur Lafferty’s silver novella, and lots of backer NPCs.

Then I brainstormed. For Sagus, I had about a month before I had to write the design document for the zone. During the day, I was working on writing and implementation for the Bloom, but at night, on weekends, and over the holiday break in December 2014, I was jotting down ideas for quests, characters, locations, and ways to tie everything together. Gradually, the zone began to take shape in my notes.

Before writing the design document, I settled on a rough map of the city and the six major districts. It was important to me that Sagus Cliffs feel like the beautiful concept art piece from the Kickstarter – a city built atop a massive crag of rock – so I located each of the districts on the concept piece and used it as inspiration when designing them.

Ideas for a few of the districts (Circus Minor, Cliff’s Edge, Underbelly) were pulled from earlier design documents or Mur’s Silver novella. Caravanserai originated mostly from a visual idea, and from the fact that I didn’t want players to come and go from Sagus Cliffs through a typical city gate. The Reef of Fallen Worlds was inspired by the structures that are peeking out of the water in the concept art. (We also needed a place just outside of town where the player would crash to earth at the start of the game.) Government Square was partly inspired by a design document that Shanna Germain had written for us and by a practical need for a place to interact with officials, Aeon Priests, and highfalutin types.

Concurrent with defining the districts, I plotted the main story path through the city. I wanted the main narrative to take the player to most of the districts. Players wouldn’t be forced to go everywhere, but the main story path would always provide pointers to the side locations.

With the skeleton of the city in place, I delved into the details of each district, starting with the Reef. I mapped it out on graph paper, old-school-GM-style, with a numbered key to represent NPCs, quest locations, and important features. Along the way, I designed some new, smaller locations like the Fifth Eye (our tavern for psychic war veterans) and the Order of Truth. Other planned locations proved unnecessary (or even detrimental to the quest flow) and were cut – for example, the interior of the Clock in Circus Minor.

The design document was only the first step, of course. Once I’d created the maps and written descriptions of everything in each district, we sent the maps off to our concept artist, Daniel Kim, and then to one of our level artists to actually build each district. Along the way, the districts evolved still further – they never end up looking exactly as I initially draw them, and some of the most interesting features sometimes emerge during implementation by the artists. Then we (designers) incorporate that stuff back into our designs. Like everything else in game development, designing a city like Sagus Cliffs is ultimately iterative and highly collaborative.

We had originally planned to let players return to Sagus Cliffs after they completed the Bloom, and I designed some “return content” and reactivity to choices the player made in the Bloom.

For example, while exploring a distant location that is connected to the Bloom, players could help a particular society of people realize that they actually originated in the Ninth World. This society would then vacate the place where the player found them. Unfortunately, the player doesn’t realize that the ancestors of these folks once controlled Sagus Cliffs. So when players returned to the city, they’d find these people laying siege to Government Square, thinking that the current leaders of Sagus were usurpers, and players could try to clean up the mess they’d inadvertently created.

Ultimately, returning to Sagus proved to be out of scope, and the post-Bloom content in the city was cut so that we could focus on delivering a more solid endgame experience for players. This proved to be the right decision for the project, as we want to be sure we provide a strong ending to our narrative, but if we had the time, it’s something I would explore adding back.

We have an ongoing tabletop D&D campaign (3.5 edition), hosted by programmer and sometimes designer Ben Moise. In less busy times, we also have a board gaming group with a few members who play very consistently and others who drop in and out. One recent game was a full campaign of Pandemic Legacy – everyone who played seemed to love it. Other frequent games are WizWar and The Resistance: Avalon.