Torment: Tides of Numenera is a game set in the world of Monte Cook’s new tabletop RPG setting, Numenera. Torment continues the thematic legacy of Planescape: Torment, a critically acclaimed role-playing game from 1999 that's considered by many to be a hallmark for storytelling in computer RPGs. With Torment, we're striving to create a rich role-playing experience that explores similar deep, personal themes. Here's the scoop:

• Torment is a single-player, isometric role-playing game.
• You will play a single, specific character, though you will encounter optional NPC companions you may choose to include in your party.
• The story-driven game will have a rich dialogue system and approach similar to that of Planescape: Torment.
• The game will be developed in the Unity engine for PC (Windows), Mac, and Linuxplatforms.
• The game will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian,Spanish.
• The game will be distributed DRM-free. (You’ll be able to get it from Steam, and other DRM-free download options will be made available.)

Torment is being developed by inXile entertainment, a mid-sized independent game developer located in Newport Beach, CA. inXile was founded by Brian Fargo in 2002 and is best known for its action-RPG The Bard’s Tale. The Android version of that game was released in fall 2012, topping the charts and winning several awards. 

With inXile, Brian has embraced the crowdfunding approach. He is a vocal advocate of circumventing the traditional publisher-developer business model, with developers instead communicating and working directly with the players. 

With Torment, if we reach the $900,000 goal but fall short of a million, Brian will personally fund the remaining amount to reach $1 million total for development.  If funding beats $1 million, he will instead contribute 10 cents from every $1 pledged from the $1 million to $2 million mark.  

He launched the Kicking It Forward initiative – a pledge to donate 5% of a crowdfunded project’s profits (to be clear, this is post launch profits, not money pledged towards development of this product) to support other crowdfunding efforts. Over 200 other successfully funded Kickstarter projects have embraced Brian’s Kicking It Forward promise. In February, inXile revealed a first look at Wasteland 2’s gameplay to a very positive response by the project’s backers.

Brian Fargo (Executive Producer) has worked in the video game industry since its infancy, having founded Interplay Entertainment in 1983. Interplay became a top five PC games publisher in the mid-1990s, producing some of the biggest RPGs. These include the classic The Bard’s Tale series, Wasteland, Fallout and Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, andPlanescape: Torment. Interplay also helped to launch some of the biggest developers, such as Blizzard, Bioware, and Treyarch. Brian founded inXile in 2002 and is the executive producer for Wasteland 2.

Colin McComb (Creative Lead) was a key designer for TSR’s Planescape setting and wrote many products for the Dungeons & Dragons franchise (including the award-winning Birthright Campaign Setting) and Paizo's Pathfinder setting. He worked as a designer onFallout 2 and Planescape: Torment and was a writer for Wasteland 2. Colin’s self-published work includes the first two books in his Oathbreaker series.

Monte Cook (Numenera Creator) has been a tabletop RPG designer since 1988, with his many works including D&D 3rd Edition, Ptolus, and Arcana Evolved. With Colin, he was responsible for much of the Planescape setting. His newest creation, Numenera, was crowdfunded through Kickstarter in September 2012, raising more than 2,500% of its target funding goal.

Kevin Saunders (Project Director) has been developing video games since 1998 and worked for five years on RPGs at Obsidian Entertainment. He was the lead designer and producer for Shattered Galaxy, the critically acclaimed massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game, as well as Mask of the Betrayer, considered by many RPG fans to be the game closest to Planescape: Torment (so far). One of Kevin’s specialties is game interface design, and last year he published the second edition of his book on the topic.

Mark Morgan (Composer) has composed music for film, television, and video games, including Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, and Wasteland 2. He is composing at least 40 minutes of music for Torment, and he composed the music for Torment’s Kickstarter video.

The skilled concept artists involved in Torment include Nils Hamm, Dana Knutson(concept artist for TSR’s Planescape setting), Andree Wallin, and Chang Yuan.

Risks and challengesLearn about accountability on Kickstarter

As you all know, we’re not making widgets—video games are complex projects (not that all widgets are simple). Fortunately, we collectively have more than 80 years of experience in managing them. Given our great progress in developing Wasteland 2, our experience with the technology, and our approach to Torment’s design and production, we are confident in our ability to provide our backers with a quality game deserving of the Torment name.

Torment’s schedule has been designed to maximize both planning (preproduction) and polishing. This extended preproduction period controls costs and increases quality because we’ll have a very well-defined product before production begins. Our target release date of December 2014 allows us 14 months for production and finalization. (In comparison, Wasteland 2 had 12 months, and Mask of the Betrayer had nine.) Furthermore, various systems and tools developed for Wasteland 2 will be used or adapted for Torment, saving development time and budget.

With a longer schedule, you might wonder how we’ll be able to create Torment if it receives less funding than Wasteland 2 did. First, Torment's story is being designed to be highly modular and scalable. This approach not only lets us increase game reactivity and replayability, but it also let us keep the game's scope flexible. At our target funding, we’ll be able to deliver a complete and satisfying game and as funding increases above the target, Torment will continue to grow in depth and size. But, as resources allow – if Wasteland 2 is a commercial success, for example – we are ready to expand the modular story.

Also, inXile has established secondary revenue streams that will bolster Torment’s development budget. For example, last September, The Bard’s Tale was released on Android, winning many awards and selling hundreds of thousands of copies in just a few months. While this doesn’t provide enough money to create a game like Torment, it lets us invest in Wasteland 2 and Torment to improve their quality. Although Torment would not be possible without your support, we are self-funding a portion of the game as well. Just like you, we want Torment to be the best it can be.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera

A "single-player, isometric role-playing game.
Wut?

Perspective like in old RPGs - Planscape Torment, Baldur's Gate, Falloit 1/2....all published by Interplay, whose founder, Brian Fargo, is also founder of inXile who (hopefuly, if goal is reached) will develop this game.

Of course, that particular perspective was popularized way back before that, back in Spectrum ZX days with games like Knight Lore (anyone remembers that one?)

Wow! Can't believe they've already raised so much. That's incredible

Yes

If your reaction to the news about Torment was more like, “inXile, you greedy bastards, why would you launch a Kickstarter before Wasteland 2 is even done!”, then keep reading; we are addressing that point in this update…

 To those outside the industry, it might seem odd to launch another Kickstarter before Wasteland 2 is done. We understand that it raises some questions, and we want our Wasteland 2 backers to understand the decision and to have access to all the information that has led us down this path. The goal of this update is not to convince you to back Torment; the goal of this update is to answer one simple question. Why now? 

One of the keys to success for a small game company is being able to create continuity within the development team. It takes a long time to get a team put together, and it takes an even longer time for a team to settle in to new working relationships, a new engine, new systems, and a new asset creation pipeline. A team’s knowledge and experience grows a lot during a development cycle, and all of that knowledge gained is lost if we let the team break up when a project ships. To address that issue we have developed a very simple strategy that has already worked for us on dozens of titles in the last 25 years. Here is a quick explanation of our development team-structure philosophy:

inXile, with all of our internal employees and outside contractors, consists of enough people to be considered about the size of a team and a half. This is by design. We always want a small and efficient team (the “half team”) to design both our product and our product development plan. This is called pre-production. It is the most important time in a project’s life cycle. This is the time when we want to make sure we slow down and get it right. During this phase we don't need all the engineers and 3D Artists on the project, it is mostly concept art, design and dialog writing. When this process is completed and we are ready to roll into full production we want to have a large team of people ready to make the game. If the planning was done well during the pre-production phase we can be very efficient during production and leave ourselves with plenty of time to iterate and make amazing games. If there is no pre-production done, and the full team is trying to create the design and development plan as they go, months, if not years, are wasted. Having a full team try to start a project when the pre-production has not been completed is like stacking up a giant pile of money and lighting it on fire. This same philosophy served us quite well at Interplay in creating some of the best RPGs of all time.

The “half team” in our team and a half model consists of writers and artists as well as designers and a producer. They are the ones that define the game design, write the dialog, define the combat, the UI, the missions, and even parts of the level design. We spent about 6 months working on this pre-production for Wasteland 2 and we would like to spend even longer doing it on Torment. For inXile, this “half team” that did the pre-production for Wasteland is done, their work on Wasteland 2 is completely finished. We want to get this group into pre-production on Torment to keep them working together on a project we are all passionate about.

Currently, Wasteland 2 is in full production with a team of 15+ people cranking away on it. This is the full team that consists of engineers, scripters, character modelers, environment artists, and animators. This team is implementing the plan created during the Wasteland 2 pre-production cycle. When this full team rolls off of Wasteland 2 at the end of the year, they will need something else to do. Having a complete pre-production plan at that time allows us to roll the entire team onto a finely honed game design. Team continuity is maintained, and efficient production can begin. In a traditional publisher model, now is the time in the project life cycle where we would start to try and sign the next big contract. The best tool we have to get that done is to go back to our new publisher, you, and explain that now is the best time to start the next project.

Our “half team” is ready to start the pre-production for Torment now. They need about 8 months to get this pre-production work done. In an amazing coincidence, in about 8 months I will have a full team that is ready to take that pre-production plan and create a game. The alternative, starting pre-production on Torment after Wasteland 2 is done, increases the cost of Torment production greatly and requires us to reduce our headcount during the process.

Staggering projects like we are doing with Wasteland 2 and Torment is the best tool a single-team company like inXile has to be successful. It has the triple value of making us more efficient, giving us a better game design and making sure we keep our design and art talent working with us.

To make everything as clear as we can regarding the Torment Kickstarter and what it means for Wasteland 2, I will attempt to answer some other questions you might have:

• We do want to be abundantly clear that no Wasteland money is to be spent developing Torment. No Torment money is being spent on Wasteland 2. That said, lots of tools, plug-ins and pipeline processes that have taken man months to create will be shared between the projects if we can keep team continuity.

• The pre-production of Torment is not going to hinder the development of Wasteland in any way. As explained above, they are different teams during the pre-production.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/420739?ref=email&show_token=792895577b0aceb4

It is indeed incredible, I'm glad there is still lot of people remembering golden RPG days of Interplay. There's so much to look forward to in next couple of years, considering amount of old-school cRPGs being Kickstarted, and what's more, by the very same people that made those old classics back in days.

The whole 'inspired by Planescape: Torment' thing makes this almost painful. I loved Torment, it was an amazing game for its time and was way ahead of the curve. They couldn't get the rights to actually do it, but all this does is show, quite well, that the old game will never have anything more than sitting on Good Old Games for purchase.

They'll do fine and they'll get their money, but there are a lot of Planescape: Torment fans who are going to end up disappointed when they play this and realize, "Oh...not really the same." They might have more or less the same people making it, but something that isn't IN that Planescape world and dealing with Sigil just isn't going to feel right for the old guys 14 years back.

Onward and upward, I suppose. I feel old now. heh

Wow, almost a million dollars in 6 hours. Shit, man...

Chris Avellone isn't doing anything with this correct, just project eternity?

I think you're right up to a point - Chris is not involved, and there will probably be lot of folks that expect Planescape: Torment sequel (though they are clearly stating they are not making one), and we will most likely get pretty different game. But I don't think it's bad thing they took Torment as influence or that they are not making true sequel if they manage to recreate same overal feel of original - from what I've seen so far on their page, as well as back last year when Numenera was Kickstarted, it's very interesting universe with lot of potential for making great games.

Still, I must say that I'm expecting much more from Project Eternity, Obsidian proved that they can deliver superb narrative (plus that's where original Black Isle folks are), but I'm still very excited for both Wasteland 2 and Torment, as crucial parts of this cRPG revival that we are witnessing.