Brian Fargo on Torment, Leading a Team and inXile’s Future Projects

I promise we’re going to eventually run out of things to report from this year’s Gamescom, but for now that’s not the case yet. This time, we have a Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview with Brian Fargo, who talks about his work helping create the best conditions for Torment development, the game’s setting, crowdfunding, his desire to work on more original stuff, and more. Here’s an excerpt:

RPS: And you talk about pushing RPGs forward – is putting writers to the fore part of that, do you think?

Fargo: I try not to put square pegs into round holes. There are some writers who are great writers but their design sensibilities aren’t very good, and there are others who get the mentality of a gamer and understand design sensibilities, but their actual writing isn’t as strong. And then there might be one guy whose dialogue is the best but he doesn’t necessarily understand narrative flow. So to have this palette of people, and understanding everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, and getting them to work together as a unit, relies on a lot of communication and instinct.

RPS: Presumably bringing in a great writer who doesn’t understand game design so well, that’s something that person will start to learn while working with the team?

Fargo: Absolutely. Nathan Long is a good example. He had played the games before but he’d never worked on a game before. We brought him on to Wasteland 2, and we had all these guys who understood writing for games, and he was sucking it all up. He was a writer, and a good one, but we saw promise in him as a writer specifically for games, and he’s becoming that now.

RPS: When you look at some of the individual settings the writers are creating within Torment, do you ever think – “that could have been a full game!”

Fargo: Well, yes. But we never have a lack of ideas for what comes next. It’s not like we go, “oh no, we ran out” (laughs).

RPS: So do you already know what the next project is going to be?

Fargo: I already have them super-excited about working on the next thing. Listen, they love this. but they’ve been on it for three and a half years. They’ve been writing it, thinking about it, talking about it. That’s one thing you’ll notice here – we don’t have handlers for you to talk to, you talk to me, to the writers, to the producers. We don’t have PR and marketing in between us, because we are right there on the nub and we love talking about what we do..

But like I said, they can’t wait to move onto something else now. They’re also looking forward to seeing what people make of what they’ve created though.