Torment: Tides of Numenera Interview

The folks at gry-online, a Polish video game website, have interviewed the Torment: Tides of Numenera developers, and luckily for us the original English text of the interview is available. Here’s a few snippet on difficulty settings, the game’s length and mods:

What about game difficulty? Are you planning to escalate it somehow? If so what will change at ‘žhard) in comparison to ‘žnormal)? And if not how do you want to reconcile the expectations and needs of hardcore RPG gamers and casual ones?

Kevin Saunders: We do plan to have difficulty settings, but aren’t yet prepared to discuss the details of how we’ll approach this feature. In general, we aren’t targeting super casual players, but we are using best practices for UI design and game design to make the game accessible rather than arcane. The quests, storyline, etc. typically don’t take well to different difficulty levels and we aren’t planning much, if anything, there. Meanwhile, because the Crises are hand-crafted experiences, and fairly few in number, we hope we can be somewhat sophisticated in how we alter them based on difficulty.

So as to not fully evade your question, here are a few specific examples (or counter examples):

Opponents: On harder difficulty settings, we may add additional enemies that create more tactically challenging encounters.

Difficult Tasks (DT): If we do make DTs harder at higher difficulties, it won’t be by much. This method of difficulty scaling fundamentally alters too much of the gameplay, making many Skills less useful, which disrupts the balance of a variety of things.

Friendly fire: We will likely have friendly fire active in all difficulty modes and not something that changes due to the difficulty setting. With the turn-based combat, making your party immune to friendly area of effect abilities would fundamentally alter the nature of those abilities and undermine the tactics.

Resting: You may get more (rests) at easier difficulty levels, allowing you to be a little less discerning about when to spend Effort.

Randomness: Not really a difficulty thing, but another axis we’ve toyed with as a game option is the degree of randomness. We are planning for randomness to play a factor in some aspects of gameplay and not others, but might let the player adjust some of this. For example, in Numenera weapons typically inflict a fixed amount of damage, which affects the flavor of combat compared to random damage.

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Even though there is still a lot of work to do, the core of the story is probably already finished. How much time will it take to complete the game? Planescape: Torment provided from 40 to 50 hours of pure gameplay in addition to almost 800 000 words to read. Can we expect similar numbers in Torment: Tides of Numenera?

Kevin Saunders: Yes, the core of the story is finished (though elements of it will be iterated upon through to the end). We don’t want to make guesses as to what the final gameplay length will be, but I expect we’ll be somewhat shorter than PST, though no less dense. In part this is because we won’t have the dungeon crawling sections that PST did. We will definitely have a lot of words, be they dialogue or descriptions. (We’ve written/implemented over 50,000 dialogue words already and we’re not yet in full production.)

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Are you planning to make Torment: Tides of Numenera mod-friendly? A lot of modern RPGs clearly benefit from allowing its fans to create their own adventures will you do the same?

Kevin Saunders: We won’t do things to specifically preclude mod development, but it’s not a priority for TTON. It’s not part of what we presented to the backers and we don’t want to distract from the core game. Anything we did do would be post-release in any event.

Be sure to check out the full interview, given it’s particularly dense and full of interesting snippets.