#torment beta

Gameplay

Fix to allow non-singular amounts of items to be added to an inventory simultaneously.

GridNodeFilter_WillBeFlanked was improperly if the user would be flanked.

CombatantSCorer_CanFlank should now calculate Flanking properly

Various AI bug fixes and updates/optimizations.

Many miscellaneous bug fixes and tweaks to abilities.

Many miscellaneous bug fixes and tweaks to items (especially Cyphers).

Tweaked items throughout game scenes, including more Shins placed in containers so players wouldn't find themselves running out so easily and unable to pick certain quest options.

Fixes to tooltips on Skill and Ability descriptions.

Fixed an issue in the Sticha Lair with stray colliders blocking doors.

Increase minimum bonus regained from Resting.

Unarmed attacks now treated as Light Bashing type.

Added Devourer of Wrongs to Dendra O'hur Cave.

Added Sir Arthour.

Balance pass to slightly reduce armor and HP across all enemies.

Issue with movement getting stuck on scene transition should no longer occur.

Quests & Dialog

Numerous miscellaneous scripting and dialog fixes and updates.

Updated Peliai to resolve her quest on all cutscene exits, many paths didn't resolve.

Updated Tybir to only trigger warnings about Ris' quest if Ris is still set to be executed.

Updated the steel hands in the Reef so that the Smashing skill applies to the task to break off the Eight-fingered Mace.

Updated the scripting of Aidan Sitabo so that LCO dies when defeated by Aidan in the final challenge of his duel.

Updated Tranquility's conversation to start the cutscene of Tranquility hypnotizing LCO into the Calm to occur in the onEnter of a Script Node rather than the OnExit.

Fixed an exploit allowing players to get a quest reward from Fulsome infinite times.

Updated Jernaugh's conversation to only allow LCO to mention Piquo when the player has learned of Piquo's indecision

Updated Jherem to move Jherem near his parents after LCO tells him the horrible truth and disable the bark triggers near the merchants he normally visits. Updated Circus Minor to auto-move Jherem to the spot under the right conditions to help offset any weirdness with him getting pushed or doing something bizarre AI-wise

Players were able to tell Piquo about Qeek being dead even though they had never talked to Piquo about her. Added a conditional to prevent this.

Prevented Qeek from talking about Piquo unless Wayward Son is active.

Removed "take me to egg chamber" option from conversation if the Sticha have relocated.

Simplified Callistege's "What should I do next?" responses.

Added a non-quest critical option to check Imbitu's alibi with Fulsome without accusing him first.

Updates to the Reef obelisk, including cutscenes.

Added more "opinions of CNPC" lines with party member reactions.

Graphics

Body piece alternate materials now function properly.

Numerous miscellaneous VFX, models, background art, textures and character graphics updates.

Updates to Inventory paperdoll rendering and lighting. Should make them look much closer to in-world view.

Allowing Buzzer and Crossbow projectile with new tech to originate from the actual weapon and fixing the buzzer prefab while also reworking the projectile slightly.

Updates to portrait artwork.

User Interface

Cyphers can now be dragged to other characters.

Added a check (and set a prefab flag) to avoid clicking on interactable objects through UI.

Minor art updates throughout the interface and HUD.

Tooltips and extra information added for the left-hand stats panel in the Inventory and Character screens, and lots of formatting improvements.

Fixed incorrect portrait on offscreen character indicator for male Last Castoff.

The end turn button should now be re-enabled if the party element is hidden and re-enabled within a Crisis.

Mousing over a mob in the turn order bar now shows their stats on the left.

Clicking on a mob in the turn order bar now "locks" their stats on the left.

If a hostile mob is in range its selection circle will slowly pulse. If a hostile mob is targeted, its selection circle will rapidly pulse.

Added a Shins (currency) display to the Inventory screen.

Added a placeholder sliced frame sprite.

Fixed an issue that was causing text in the character sheet to vanish.

Added a function to retrieve the style setting defined color for a given stat.

Null ref check to avoid error spam on levels without maps set up.

Tier 0 abilities will now show up in Tier 1 to make sure special Class and Focus abilities show up.

Fixed vanishing free abilities in Tier increase window.

Updated stat display icon names to match the new all-lowercase naming convention.

The free advancement popup should appear directly after changing Descriptor.

Load screen art updates.

Fix for inventory UI keeping references to old Cyphers.

Updates to Mere artwork and text.

Added hotkey support to the interface.

Hotkey input should be blocked when any windows are open.

All scroll view positions on the Inventory screen should be reset when it is opened.

The Options menu should now accept hotkey input.

The camera should no longer pan while a menu is open.

The Last Castoff should start selected in the Loot window, so Take All sends items to LCO instead of companions.

Conversation window sets itself inactive after sliding out of view to prevent issues where it could remain active even when not visible.

Updates to Fettle tooltips. They now auto-generate information on their effects instead of needing it typed in manually.

Fix for bark strings handling *, also removes the " at the start and end of a bark string.

Combat movement circles will now draw past valid movement range. Fixes rare wrong color in circles when there's a valid path at maximum movement range.

Added info button art to the temp Effort window.

Adjusting temp art with improvements to help usability: added in depth to images to improve readability.

Quest entry title labels are now tinted based on whether they are main quests or not.

Added a close button and the Main Menu VFX to the Credits window.

Save/Load

Added Autosave functionality with three rotating slots.

MapData now saves scene name. Fixes the bug whereby users could not leave Fathom 1 after being sent there from the real world, saving, and loading in Fathom 1.

Save files can now have spaces in their names.

Fixed Cypher Sickness not saving properly.

Fettles, Abilities, and Progressions now do the same thing as Items: newly-created instances have their templates pulled from the respective manager class to ensure reference equality persists across save/load, and the various Get methods do the same.

Quest item display should now be updated correctly after loading a saved game.

Fixed combat freeze-ups that could occur with repeat save/loads.

Sound

Updated title music with loop.

New intro SFX for Fathom 1, new charge SFX for Sorrow Fragments.

Sound hookups for Spend XP window, Inventory window, and Journal window.

Many miscellaneous SFX updates and additions.

Misc.

Manifold miscellaneous optimizations to performance.

Disabled Unity Shadows on backgrounds (we aren't using them at all) for a performance increase.

Optimizing to reduce some created garbage.

Added functionality to override camera fades when leaving scenes.

The camera should no longer pan while a menu is open.

Misc. combat camera updates/fixes.

Companions won't immediately resurrect on combat end when it is triggered by LCO death. They'll wait until pre-transition-save to do that.

Fixed a bug where AI characters would sometimes try to path through player characters.

Reworked resolution switching slightly to make it actually work. Mostly. Refresh rate is broken thanks to a Unity bug.

If you pledged at a level which comes with beta test access, you can get your Steam key by logging in with your Torment account, visiting the Rewards page, and clicking the "Manage Keys" button you see there.

While your beta test downloads, please be sure to check out our Beta Release Notes, which covers some known issues and contains notes on a few game features. And remember, the Beta Test Access add-on is still available to all backers who want to join in and experience the game first-hand before final release.

A Free Gift for Beta Backers

You may remember that acclaimed author Pat Rothfuss offered to write a Torment comic book. We are happy to announce that not only is it finished, but we are also making it available free to all of our previous Torment beta backers at no additional charge. You can check out yourRewards page on the Torment backer web site to download it right now (click the "Downloads" button on your reward that includes your beta key).

Note: If you are a backer who pledged separately to get the Pat Rothfuss comic as an add-on, you can use the "Remove Reward" button on the add-on to get your pledge value back and use it towards other add-ons of your choice. 

Introducing… the Companions

One of the defining elements in the original Planescape: Torment wasn't just its weird and wondrous world, but also its characters. Players remember many of the game's companions today for good reason, and with Torment: Tides of Numenera we are hoping to create deep, nuanced and interesting characters who you will be able to connect with, and in some cases, change.

Previously, we have been a little quiet on sharing our characters with you, in large part to avoid spoiling them. However, with the beta release now available, we thought it was an ideal time to introduce a few.

I'll be turning things over to Colin to give you a quick bio on some of the fine folks you can expect to journey with while exploring Sagus Cliffs. Of course, this isn't a full list of companions in the final game – it's not even a full list of companions in the beta.

As a warning, there are spoilers contained below, but nothing that will go beyond what you will see in the beta.

Aligern

Aligern is one of the first companions the Last Castoff will meet. He's a snappish, world-weary nano who doesn't suffer fools or waste time on matters he considers trivial. Despite this rough exterior, Aligern has a deep moral core, and his innate sense of right and wrong guides every decision – and he's not shy about letting others know when they've stepped out of line.

Aligern wears a long, dark coat and rugged traveling boots that have worn countless miles under their soles. As a nano, he's got extensive experience with the numenera. He wears a lattice of moving tattoos across his forearms that shift and weave around each other, which he can use to attack his enemies or to defend himself against attacks. Unlike some other nanos, he's not afraid to get his hands bloody, wading into melee combining useful esoteries with his trusty mace.

Callistege

As the Last Castoff wakes to consciousness, Callistege is there, watching, calculating. She's an associate of the Order of Truth, and she holds the accruement of knowledge as one of the paramount pursuits. She is known to be amoral, calculating, and manipulative, and she has cultivated a reputation for incisive brutality. Those who know her do not cross her, and some have suggested that this is precisely the outcome she was aiming to achieve. She is morally flexible in her pursuit of hidden truth.

And she does seem to have found secrets better left hidden. She is multi-dimensional... literally. Echoes of her flicker in and out of reality around her. Each of these "sisters" wears her signature elaborate dress, mirroring her actions, deviating in ways both subtle and obvious. In battle, she fights with a mix of nano abilities and ranged attacks, and is able to use her sisters to "teleport" herself from place to place to avoid taking damage.

Callistege's response to the Last Castoff is more outwardly sympathetic, encouraging the Last Castoff to experience and learn from the world... but those who know her would suspect her all the more because of this. What are her motives?

Tybir

Tybir is a glad-handing and garrulous old mercenary, quick with a joke and an offer to buy the next round. He has stories to tell, having served as both soldier and gallowglass, and he's frequently the life of the party. He's always looking for fresh opportunities for profit, fame, and fun... not necessarily in that order.

Tybir wears the practical clothes of a soldier, but in garish colors – a long leather coat, baggy pants, open shirt and belted equipment, all with a casual flair. He's handsome, and many have found him charming, but now that he's older, more dissipated, and thicker around the waist, his charm seems to be slipping away from him. He favors the simpler tools of a soldier in combat, but he's never far from using a dirty trick or insult to even the odds.

With the Last Castoff, Tybir is friendly, outgoing, and eager to please. This might have something to do with the imminent execution of Tybir's most recent associate...

Colin out.

5 Million Dollars, IGN Streams Torment & Hero's Song

Interest in Torment's beta test has been huge, and we have now crested $5 million in pledges! Seeing that was a big moment for us, and a fresh reminder that we could never do this without your support along the way. Thank you once again!

Next, for those of you who are holding off on the beta, IGN was kind enough to sit down with Brian and George yesterday afternoon to demo the first hour of the game.

This video is not spoiler-free, but gives you a good idea of what you can expect to see out of the beta content.

Last, we'd be remiss without giving a quick shout-out to the new Kickstarter title Hero's Song. Developed by Pixelmage Games, a veteran team with experience on several RPGs including EverQuest and Shadowrun, Hero's Song is a hardcore action-RPG with pixel-style graphics. Importantly, the award-winning author Patrick Rothfuss is lending his considerable talents to Hero's Song (in addition to his work on Torment, of course). They are just out of the gate and could use the help reaching their $800,000 goal.

Once again, thank you for joining us and for helping make Torment possible. Your group of game developers on the Torment team have poured the last few years of their lives into creating an incredibly special and memorable world for you to explore. The passion exhibited along the way can be felt in the characters, the setting, and the overall experience.

And it's only going to get better from here…

We'll see you next time!

Our collaboration with Mark has produced some amazing music which maintains, but also matures the spirit of Torment, and today we want to debut a brand-new song from him, which you will hear as you explore the exterior environments of Sagus Cliffs.

A Look at Circus Minor

Adam here. As we mentioned in our last update, the city of Sagus Cliffs is divided up into districts. The first one that you will come across is called Circus Minor.

Circus Minor is the vibrant heart of Sagus Cliffs, a bustling combination of festival and marketplace. When public events (or executions) are held, they always take place among the crowds and merchant stalls for all to see. Circus Minor is essentially a middle-class district, but all the classes mingle here, along with artists, performers, visitants, and other strange characters.

Circus Minor is a lively place, with merchant stalls, tents and caravans lining its streets, and banners floating in the breeze above. Greenery is more commonplace here than in the other districts.

Yet there is mystery to be found. Pieces of ancient numenera jutting out from the ground are decorated and repurposed by the inhabitants. Some serve as streetlights, others have been turned to other uses, but the original functions of all these ancient constructions are now long-forgotten. And all of these are dominated by the Clock, a giant numenera artifact towering above the district, endlessly ticking away, existing within different dimensions and time periods simultaneously.

Circus Minor serves as an introduction to Sagus Cliffs, and as such, it is a relatively non-hostile place, with many interesting characters to speak to and strange and wonderful things to find. Many important quests and details about the world can be found here, and the Last Castoff will return to it plenty of times while exploring Sagus Cliffs' other districts.

Adam out.

Shout-Outs & News

We've got a new Kickstarter project we'd like to highlight for you this week. Titled Project Resurgence, and labeled as a "new old school cRPG", the game claims to draw many links with top-down classics like Arcanum, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate and more. The team has experience working on many golden-age RPGs, and has some old Interplay alumni on board (along with fresh talent). If that sounds up your alley, we invite you to take a look – they have only just launched but are already well on their way to their $160,000 goal.

Second, Adam Heine and Colin McComb were featured for a Torment-themed interview in the latest issue of CypherCaster Magazine. If you are interested in this Cypher System-oriented mag, you can find that issue here.

Thank you for joining us. We'll be back soon with more as we continue to put the finishing touches on the Torment Beta Test!

The Unusual Items of the Ninth World

Thomas here.

Numenera is a setting known for its incredibly strange, quirky, and interesting items, which are a perfect fit for Torment. So when I was offered the chance to take ownership of item design, I jumped to it. For most items, I come up with the concept, determine what exactly it should do gameplay-wise, implement them into the game, write descriptions, work with scripters on any custom events that might be required, and coordinate with our art team on the icon, animation, visual, and finally work to layer in any sound effect needs. While a number of items come from level designers or the suggestions of writers, some were directly from backers, and many others I designed from scratch.

For inspiration, I turn primarily to the Numenera Corebook and Technology Compendium, but most importantly I take time out weekly to play Planescape: Torment and pore over that game's item lists. Even to this day, PS:T stands out to me as a game with great itemization due to how memorable even the most mundane of items was, and this is something we hope to recreate in Torment: Tides of Numenera. Of course, I'm also constantly jotting down ideas as I consume science fiction or fantasy novels and films. The Numenera setting has the flexibility to allow for many different types of items, from the organic, to the "magical", to the impossibly high tech, a latitude we are fully exploring in the game.

As a quick refresher: items are split into ordinary items – swords, armor, and things people can craft with a medieval level of technology; and Numenera – remnants of the prior civilizations, technology so advanced as to seem like magic. These numenera are further split into Oddities, Artifacts, or Cyphers.

Oddities have no apparent practical use, but their uniqueness and rarity make them valuable. Examples: A goblet that appears empty even when it has a liquid in it; a synth flower that blooms only in total darkness; a squirming fishlike creature that gibbers constantly in an indecipherable foreign tongue. From a gameplay perspective, most of these exist to be sold to merchants as a source of income, but the Numenera setting allows for us to give them a much more unique and interesting flavor. And some of them can be useful in the right situation.

Artifacts, on the other hand, are numenera objects that do have an use and can typically be held onto permanently. These uses can range from minor boons to major powers. Examples: A cloak made of golden feathers that stiffens to offer protection when struck; a ring that acts as a transdimensional conduit to strike enemies with various damage types; a device that compresses some of an opponent's blood into a projectile which is then sucked out of the target and into the device. These are very rare and valuable, and from a gameplay perspective serve as the equivalent of magic equipment in a more typical fantasy setting.

Cyphers, however, are one of the most unique elements of the item system in Torment. These have no real equivalent in other games, and offer the most interesting design opportunities and challenges. Put simply, Cyphers are one-time-use numenera, somewhat similar to consumable potions, charms and so on in other games. However, Cyphers are also very powerful, and tend to be somewhat unstable as a result, especially when large numbers of them are carried together. Carry a Cypher around by itself and you'll be fine, but if you start taking too many with you, you will run into side-effects that provide negative Fettles (or status effects) on your characters.

As a result, Cyphers are best used quickly, and because they are relatively abundant, you will always be finding new ones throughout the game. By their very nature, Cyphers counter the hoarding instincts that cRPGs have built up over the years. This requires us to communicate the positives and negatives of Cyphers to players, to make sure that that they are interesting enough for players to want to use, and that the density and distribution of Cyphers throughout the game makes players feel like they're getting them at just the right rate. We don't want Cypher limits to feel like an annoyance, but rather to provide a natural flow for the player to experiment with and use them, and keep the progression of items interesting throughout the game.

Cyphers are extremely varied and interesting. A few examples: a detonation device that increases gravity in a confined area, pinning your enemies down; a sentient spike that burrows deeper into any target it hits; a thick red grub that when consumed will greatly enhance your ability to perform certain tasks while inhibiting others; a foam that makes your enemy's armor brittle as glass; a statuette that when pried open releases an entity that is unseen yet provides a tangible presence, healing injuries and alleviating fatigue before phasing into another reality.

As you can probably tell, there is not a lot limiting the nature of Cyphers. They can be consumed to give a passive bonus to a number of skills or stats, such as Might/Speed/Intellect Pools, attack damage, speech skills, armor values versus a variety of damage types, etc. They can be projectiles thrown at enemies or allies for various effects. They can have instant one-time effects or last until the player next rests. They can even be set to trigger themselves when certain conditions are met. They can target one or many characters, or have an area of effect. Their usefulness isn't limited to combat either: though some can only be used in combat, others can be used during exploration and dialog, and some can even be used in both.

From a design perspective, the challenge of crafting numenera is one all too common: it's not hard to have plenty of crazy ideas, but the real work happens in determining what ideas work for this setting and this game. It is important to give each item enough character to stand out while not making them so unique that you create a crowded field of The One True Item. The templates set up by our programmers allow for a very wide variety of interesting items, and our excellent combat designers Jeremy Kopman and Evan Hill can help me with any custom scripting needed.

But the most important step of all happens once the items exist in the game – testing, polish and endless iteration to get them perfect for our backers. The Beta Test won't feature every last item in Sagus Cliffs – we're still working on the game after all – but it will contain a great cross-section of mundane items, Oddities, Artifacts and Cyphers for you to use and experiment with. We look forward to seeing your feedback once you get a chance to try them out.

Shout-Outs

As usual, we want to highlight a few more ongoing crowdfunding projects.

First up, you should check out the big news from Lone Shark Games and Monte Cook Games.The Ninth World: A Skillbuilding Game for Numenera is a brand new board game from the designers that brought folks the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Smash Up, and other fantastic games. This is a new type of game that's one part deckbuilder, one part Eurogame, and one part RPG, all set a billion years in the future. You can play Jacks, Nanos, and Glaives all competing to see who can be the boldest adventurer in the strangest world. The game has already met its funding goal, but you can help get cool new locations to adventure, new characters, and new components. The Kickstarter ends January 15th, so hop on it!

Next, our buddies at Double Fine are back to crowdfunding with a long anticipated title:Psychonauts 2. It's been ten years since the original unique platform-adventure cult hit, and people have been clamoring for a sequel. Now with all our help they can finally deliver! They are raising funds on Fig (where Brian is a part of the advisory board), meaning you can support as an investor or as a backer. As of this writing they're tantalizingly close (97%) to hitting their goal, we're hoping to see them run past it in their final week.

We're now entering what's promising to be a very exciting year for Torment and inXile. We were honored to see our game listed on the most anticipated crowdfunded titles on Red Bull, as well as Rock Paper Shotgun's most exciting RPGs of 2016 and USgamer's top games they are looking forward to in 2016. The Torment Beta Test will be our first step towards hitting these high expectations, we hope you'll be there with us for the ride!

From George Ziets:

The Order of Truth is dedicated to the study of numenera – artifacts of long-dead civilizations that inhabited Earth millions of years ago. Its adherents, known as Aeon Priests, have established enclaves throughout much of the known world. In the city of Sagus Cliffs, far from the lands where the Order arose, the Aeon Priests are few, and not all of them share the high principles of their distant brethren.

Fortunately for them, Sagus Cliffs sits atop a massive trove of numenera, layer upon layer of ancient cities and long-forgotten technologies, waiting to be unearthed. The local headquarters of the Order is inside an ancient starship, abandoned countless millennia in the past and locked in the accumulated sediments of the ages.

Backer NPCs

Ziets here. As backers of our Kickstarter campaign, you probably know that certain pledge levels unlocked the ability to design content for our game – an item (or item description), a monument, or an NPC. In this update, I'm going to talk about the NPCs that were created by our backers... and how we integrated them into our world.

So what does it mean to create a backer NPC for TTON? If you pledged at the backer NPC level, we asked you to provide a name and description for your character, as well as a preference as to where your NPC should appear in the game (e.g., Sagus Cliffs, the Bloom) and what role they should fill (e.g., merchant, cultist, traveler). As TTON has some rather dark moments, we also asked whether you'd mind if we did terrible things to your NPC. Some of our backers provided that basic information and nothing more, while others took advantage of our "Additional Notes" section to tell us about their characters' backstory, motivations, or the reasons their character was important to them. By the time we hit the submission deadline, we'd received about 55 backer NPCs.

Incorporating 55 backer-created NPCs into the game was a challenge, especially because we set high standards for ourselves. It was important to us that backer NPCs feel indistinguishable from other NPCs in the game and be integrated seamlessly into our quest and exploration content. (The quality of NPC submissions was high, which helped a lot. Backers clearly put a great deal of effort into making their NPCs feel creative, weird, and "Tormenty," so most of them fit easily into our setting.)

As I designed Sagus Cliffs, I kept a list of the backer NPCs for that zone close at hand. When I devised a quest and needed characters to fill important roles, I took a look at the list. Sometimes I wouldn't find any backer NPCs that would suit my needs, but often I did.

For example, early in the game, one way of solving a quest results in an optional combat with a rather powerful creature. Players can try to defeat the creature alone, but that will be extremely challenging, so an alternative is to find a few NPC allies in town who'd be up for a fight... and convince them to help. I'd originally planned to create these NPCs myself, but I then found three excellent backer NPCs to fill the roles instead. One of these potential recruits is Aidan Sitabo, a mysterious martial artist, capable of moving at speeds that defy human capability. Players can convince this man to assist them in their fight against the creature. They can also attempt to match their abilities against his and discover the secret of how he gained his abilities. His dialogue (written by Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie) is pretty entertaining, and even if players don't choose to ask for his help, they can still gain interesting insights and rewards by talking to him.

Other times, when I was designing a particularly weird place, I'd look through the list of backer NPCs for characters who fit the general tone of the location, and I'd add them as one-off characters. Such characters provide some interesting dialogue, usually a reward or two that can be gained by uncovering their secrets, and sometimes a significant (or horrific) choice the player can make. In the Fifth Eye, a tavern that draws powerful psychics and interdimensional travelers like a lodestone, one example of a backer NPC is Almas the Soul Keeper, the last survivor of an interdimensional race who carries the souls of his entire species in his mind.

In a few cases, a backer NPC's story lent itself so well to a quest that I ended up designing a side quest around them. This was a boon to the overall design, as most scenes can always profit from an extra quest or two. For example, one backer sent us an NPC called Omahdon, an enigmatic traveler with considerable knowledge of the numenera who is on a search for his missing "one true love." This seemed an obvious seed for a quest, so I placed him in the Caravanserai district of Sagus Cliffs, and linked his quest to another important NPC in that scene. I was also able to connect his story to the Valley of Dead Heroes, and to use his quest to augment some of the other content in Caravanserai.

These backer NPCs – and all the rest of them – should feel like a natural part of the game, and we hope that you don't even notice a difference between them and the NPCs that we've created ourselves. I think they've enriched our world, and I hope you enjoy them.

Ziets out.

Backer Forum Badge

We always love to give back to our backers and fans who make this all possible, and today we'd like to highlight a new bonus reward that everyone who backed Torment can get. Now, all backers who get the game with their pledge also receive an exclusive Torment backer forum badge for use on our message boards.

To get your forum badge, please log in with your Torment backer account, then visit the Rewards page and click the "Badge" button that appears on the bottom-right corner of your reward selection. If you need more detailed instructions, you can check here. Of course, if you haven't signed up for a forum account yet, now's a great time to do so, as we're always looking for interesting feedback and input from you.

General News

We also have some big company-related news to announce. For over a decade, we have operated out of Newport Beach, CA. Now, we are pleased to announce our first expansion – we are opening a brand-new sister studio in New Orleans! You can read more about it in this Bard's Tale IV update, as well as in this recent Fortune article which has a few comments from Brian, and discusses some of our plans for the studio going forward. This is an exciting step forward for us as a company. While some of the team is moving to New Orleans, Torment will remain in full production in the Newport Beach office, just as it always has, though it will benefit from some of the NOLA team's work, such as in-house QA and playtesting.

You may be wondering why we chose New Orleans, and there are several great reasons. By going to NOLA, we are receiving benefits from the Louisiana state government, and we also lower our operating costs so that we can add additional months of production to our games. Meanwhile, we are also helping to grow the local games and tech industry and leveraging the top east coast talent that we have been missing out on up until now. In the end, this will make for bigger and better games and let us deliver more titles for you to enjoy in the long run. We consider this the next step in our journey and are thankful for you helping to make it happen.

In other news, our very own Design Lead Adam Heine has a short story in a new Cthulhu sci-fi anthology called Tomorrow's Cthulhu. Read his thoughts on this here, and consider preordering here.

To save the best for last, RPGNuke has an interview with Torment associate producer & designer Thomas Beekers, talking about his winding path into and through the game industry. It could eventually be turned into a short story (or a Lifetime original movie), but for the time being, you can read about Mr. Beekers' journey as a brief interview.