Players who discover those edge cases will feel like they’ve found a secret known only to a few. Some will be experienced by very few players, but we wanted to reward all the player’s choices, even the most unlikely ones. Then we did our best to account for all the edge cases. But because the world of Numenera is so unusual, and because we created so many strange artifacts with powerful abilities, we had to account for all the unexpected ways players might try to resolve a situation.ĭesigners and writers are usually too close to their own creations to provide truly objective feedback, so we relied on other team members – and our external testing team – to play the quests and dialogues and find all the possibilities we may have missed. We gave players multiple ways to solve every problem, and we provided unique and interesting consequences whenever possible. We committed to a lot of reactivity on Torment. Did this provide special challenges for handling the need to accommodate player agency in telling Torment’s story? Murnane : Torment’s world is outside the box which can encourage players to think outside the box as they immerse themselves in the game. If players can connect with characters on an emotional level, they’ll usually embrace the setting, no matter how unfamiliar it seems. They might be living in the guts of a giant amoeboid monster (the Bloom), but their core hopes and desires are still emotionally believable to players. Most of them are aware that the player is newly born, and they interject with their opinions about the world and its inhabitants.Īnother important strategy when working in an unfamiliar setting is to make sure that characters have believable human motivations. Thus, it makes perfect sense for the player to be asking basic questions of NPCs, and we provide many opportunities to explore and understand the world. Even though their body has been occupied by someone else for a number of years, the main character’s consciousness is born at the start of the game, and they don’t know much about the setting.

Ziets: One thing we did was to make the main character a newborn being. Murnane: How do you ground the player in enough that is familiar so that he or she can identify with the game's main character, the Last Castoff, in such an unfamiliar world? We made additional changes to other systems so that they’d work better in a video game and feel a little more familiar to most gamers. For example, we added the health bar, which doesn’t exist in the tabletop game. We also altered the Numenera rules to make things feel a little more familiar. We wanted to leave questions about the world unanswered at the beginning to give the player mysteries to investigate. Once the player enters the city, they’ll encounter more unusual characters and technology, and they can ask questions and gradually find out more about the setting. It’s a wild profusion of weird artifacts and technology from different eras, designed to show the extent of the strangeness in this world. The player’s first real look at the world of Numenera is the Reef of Fallen Worlds, a reef of ancient structures that surrounds the starting city. So we dialed it back, removing almost all the background about the world and focusing on the most important elements of the player’s story instead.Īs for easing the player into the world – we decided to let that proceed more organically. After testing it internally, we realized that it was just too much. Our earliest versions of the introduction dropped a ton of information about the world and the story on players. We iterated quite a bit to find the best way to introduce them all…without overwhelming the player. When players enter our world, a lot of elements will be unfamiliar – the setting, the story and even parts of the gameplay system.

Is this something the writing team was aware of, and if so, how did you go about easing the new player into the game? Murnane : Torment’s world is fascinating but it can also be overwhelming, at least initially, because very little is familiar.

Torment tides of numenera foci