Last week, we had the opportunity to chat to Colin McComb and Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie, writers who worked on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Our conversation soon turned to development and potential problems that developers can run into when creating a story-driven CRPG.
With regards to the early days of creating Torment: Tides of Numenera, time appears to have been the biggest worry for developer, inXile Entertainment, as work on their previous title (Wasteland 2) ran later than expected.
“Wasteland ran a little bit longer in development than we wanted it to so that pushed our [Torment] schedule out… That was a bit of a difficulty which was just overcome with time”, said Colin McComb.
With over a million written words featuring in Torment’s story, the writing itself also proved to be challenging at times. However, working within a small team proved to be more valuable to McComb and Jurgens-Fyhrie in the long-term.
“In the last year or so… Between the two of us, we wrote 200,000-300,000 words. We ran into some pretty heavy scheduling near the end but I think it basically set us up to understand the style of design much better than we would have if we had an entire team of writers to work with. We had to develop our systems so that it became easier for us and it set us up for Wasteland 3, which has the same dialogue system… I think both Colin and I got mad if we felt like we had to cut something that we wanted from a conversation, so we made sure that we had time to do it. When it came down to it, we always tried to add an extra level of reactivity and quality for that matter, to a conversation without cutting something out”, said Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie.
As Jurgens-Fyhrie rightfully put it, “game development is just difficult across the board” and managing a project as large as Torment must have been exceedingly challenging at times. Luckily we won’t have to wait too long to see the finished product as Torment: Tides of Numenera releases on February 28th 2017.
