#44
A Special Offer, Torment Production, Fettles and Dead Heroes
Posted by inXile entertainment
TL;DR: Special promotion for Torment backers of Bard’s Tale IV; production update; Adam explains Fettles; the lore behind the valley of dead heroes
Thomas here. More on Torment below, but first here are our last words to you on our Kickstarter for The Bard’s Tale IV. Many of you have already pledged for BT, helping it to hit its Kickstarter funding goal. This accomplishment increases the job security and morale of our entire team, and gives us more flexibility going forward. Thank you again for all your support!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVB6dSckvJI
Check out a sneak peak at our plans for the game here in the Bard’s Tale IV in-engine video.
To thank you for your generosity, today we are happy to roll out our inXile
Loyalty Rewards promotion. All backers of The Bard’s Tale IV who backed us before (Torment: Tides of Numenera or Wasteland 2) will get a
FREE bonus reward containing digital items from either Torment, Wasteland 2 or The Bard’s Tale IV! These rewards represent up to $15 in value, with choices that include novella compilations, soundtracks, or concept art books. Additionally, any returning backers that pledge at the $33 tier or higher will receive FREE copies of Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 from GOG.com and our friends at OtherSide Entertainment.
This offer is only available until
June 26th, so hurry! This promotion applies to all of you who have already pledged for BT4, as well as any who decided to do so by the end of this week.
To make use of this offer, simply back The Bard’s Tale IV on Kickstarter using the same account you did previously. We’ll contact you after the Kickstarter campaign concludes so you can make your selection. For full details and the roster of options available, please visit this page.
This backer-only promotion is on top of the great value you’re already getting in this Kickstarter: a discounted price for The Bard’s Tale IV, a free copy of the original The Bard’s Tale I-III Trilogy, and all the extras our community is unlocking through social media achievements. This great value is limited to the Kickstarter, and this extra bonus reward is only for this week, so we wanted to make sure you did not miss it. But we know that you look to read about Torment in these updates and are cognizant of how many emails you get each day, so we will not write you again about The Bard’s Tale IV Kickstarter. Supporting inXile with each of our endeavors allows us to bring you a certain style of RPG that we know you love.
Production Progress
Kevin here, with a brief production update. Progress has been good, and we continue to gain momentum. Thus far, our writers have written, and our designers implemented, over 400K words across more than 200 NPCs and interactions. More than half of those conversations and scripted interactions have already been reviewed/revised at least twice.
Meanwhile, about 1/3 of the Crises are at least partially implemented. We’re now focusing on the first two of them in our efforts to polish the overall system. The various elements of our Crisis UI are undergoing their 2nd (or 3rd) iteration, and we’re to the point where testing out the fledgling Crises are more enjoyable than academic. All features are mostly functional and the variety across playthroughs helps keep it interesting.We’ve also been experimenting with, and developing, many AI types, and are happy with the smart variety we’re seeing emerge in different enemy types.
First Exhibit
The bulk of the content we’ve implemented has been from the middle portion of the game, and more recently we shifted our attention to the beginning. To focus our current efforts, we’ve defined a portion of the game’s content as our “First Exhibit” (abbreviated as 1E). It’s the first part of the game, but absent some some select content and features. For example, 1E includes only four companions, even though all eight companions ultimately will appear in the first quarter of the game. The “stronghold” feature is likewise placeholder for 1E. (the areas from 1E also represent the content that we intend to release to those of you in the beta test. (And is what we’d include in any subsequent Early Access release.))
We took this approach for a couple reasons. First, we can reduce the number of moving parts we have to finalize before reaching a complete, playable experience. Second, it lets us experience more of the game before finalizing certain features. For example, while we have ideas for how the stronghold should interact with the gameplay and storyline, by playing much of the surrounding content first, we may see ways to iterate on the stronghold’s design before we’ve invested the effort to implement it. (In a future update, we’ll give more specific information about what is included and what’s still to come.)
Alpha Systems Tests
As you may recall we have been planning to run a series of alpha systems tests, contained gameplay portions where you help us iterate on some of our gameplay concepts and implementations. We almost released the first AST several months ago, but the last week or two to finalize it, plus the ongoing iteration we’d want to make to address feedback, looked like it would detract too much from content creation at that time. We were still ramping up new team members who came over from Wasteland 2 and we wanted to keep the team more focused to speed things up. The good news is that the game overall has come a good distance since then, so there’ll be more to see. The very first AST will still be quite directed (i.e., brief), but originally it was going to be simply a conversation and now it’ll cover a bit more.
It will still be a little while before we launch the first one, but it’s on the horizon. (And thanks for your patience.)
Kevin out.
Concept Art for Clocktower in Sagus Cliffs. (artist: Daniel Kim)
Fettles
Adam here.
I want to talk to you about fettles.
"What the hell is a fettle that's not even a word."
Right. See, that's exactly what I said when Kevin suggested 'fettle' as our term for lingering conditions and effects. But yeah, it's totally a word, one perfectly suited to the linguistical atmosphere we're shooting for in Torment.
Fettles are conditions that affect player characters in and out of combat. Some examples that will be immediately familiar to RPG players are things like Poisoned, Bleeding, Slowed, or Hasted. Any condition that has effects beyond the immediate probably qualifies as a fettle.
Being set in the Ninth World, Torment has some stranger fettles as well. A character might be Energized (giving her extra damage and changing all his damage to a specific type, like heat, cold, or gravitic), she might be in Stasis (paralyzed), or even Phased (bonus to defense and protecting her from most physical damage types).
But the beauty of the fettle system is that it's not just about buffs and debuffs. We can use status fettles to keep track of whether a character is Hidden, Knocked Down, in Low Light, or Hovering. We have a Distracted fettle for when a character has too much to keep track of in combat, like if he's flanked by too many enemies or someone successfully Taunts him. And a character that's completely mobbed would be worse than distracted, they'd be Overwhelmed.
These status fettles last only as long as the situation demands, of course. If a character downs one of the enemies flanking him, he'll no longer be Distracted, or if he attacks someone from the shadows, he will no longer be Hidden.
Most other fettles last for a specific duration. But Torment doesn't use a real time clock to keep track of durations, so we have to get more creative with how long fettles last. In combat, that's simple—fettles last for a number of rounds or until combat is over—but what about a Diseased fettle that lasts after the Crisis is over, or a character has been Dismayed by an ancient, mental booby trap? In these cases, we use the rest system.
I talked about the rest system some on the forums, but in short each character gets a limited number of rests per day to recover some of their Stat Pool. They will also get a single Sleep that acts as a rest, restores all their other rests, and counts as a "day" for the purposes of time passing.
For fettles outside of combat, then, we specify the duration as "until next rest" or "until next Sleep." In this way, the player controls how fast time passes—whether they want to spend some of their Stat Pool to heal right away, or else Sleep and risk things changing (or coming after you) by passing time. This is just one of the systems we're implementing to make combat (and non-combat) more tactical, and to put the power of choice into the player's hands.
Adam out.
Lore: Valley of Dead Heroes
Colin here, back with a fresh lore update!
About fifty kilometers to the northeast of Sagus Cliffs and its lurking parasite, the Bloom, a pair of mountain ranges marks the beginning of the strangeness of the Verxulian Waste. Between the two parallel chains of peaks lies a long, dry pass. The length of the pass from end to end is a mere 150 kilometers, but it represents millions of years in time to a sojourner who passes through.
Despite its antiquity, it remains frozen in time. Its sere ground and rocky walls are dry, utterly and perpetually devoid of native life. Rain-laden storms swerve away from the pass, spilling no moisture. Clouds part around it, as if breaking on an invisible barrier. Even the roaming nanite disaster called the Iron Wind gives the valley a wide berth. Nothing grows here, and the small streams that tumble down its steep mountainsides soon slow to a trickle and then perish utterly. No animal makes its home in this land, and none ever stay for longer than a few days should they mistakenly enter. Most humans, mutants, and visitants who travel through the valley make the best time they can, except for those who choose to prolong their stays, and some (notably a faction called the Memorialists) make this a permanent home – seemingly immune to the life-scouring effects of the Valley. A few alkaline fountains bubble water up from unknown aquifers under the valley floor, providing nourishment that is barely potable and occasionally hallucinogenic.
One thing has become abundantly clear: Some ancient civilization sterilized the valley thoroughly, down to the smallest microbe. Perhaps they sterilized the valley for some greater reason – as a training ground for military exercises, as an experiment in environmental control, to exterminate a deadly and infectious disease – none can say truly how or why the valley became what it is, only that within its borders no life can thrive.
It may truly be that this civilization cleared the valley in order to ensure that their dead would merely desiccate, rather than decompose. The site has served as a burial ground to dozens of lost civilizations, and the wisest of the Aeon Priests cannot truly say how many generations nor how many races have interred their dead here. Oddly, it seems that not a single people has ever dug a grave into the ground or carved a tomb into the cliff walls, although statues, obelisks, monuments, empty sepulchers, and shrines spanning many prior worlds litter the floor of the valley in vast thoroughfares and twisted alleys. Treasure hunters and those who seek the knowledge of the dead find themselves thwarted with every memorial they enter. At least so far, none holds more than dust and air. Even the wind does not rest here; it whispers through the landscape just above the threshold of hearing or howls through the shrines like a lament.
Some of the shrines here were clearly built by inhuman hands, and even the most durable of materials on some of these most ancient memorials have been so wind-scoured that the inscriptions and the languages on them have vanished from the face of the world. Others are more recent, even from the Ninth World, proving that the tradition of sending the dead here for their final rest carries on.
The staggering profusion of these memorial edifices has inspired some to make this place a home (though they need to carry in their own food and eke out a living through donations and subsistence farming outside the valley). These individuals and families study the dead, and memorialize those who have passed.
Generations of their kind have made a profession of knowing the histories of those remembered in the Valley; some are paid from estates or trusts to sing the praises of the dead, while others are true historians who wish to keep the light of human accomplishment alive in the Ninth World. They pass along the knowledge to those who come to pay their respects to the dead, and to the tourists and travelers who come to see one of the great mausoleums of the world. Airships from Sagus Cliffs fly here, ferrying the curious to the site, or delivering the dead and dying to their final resting places. The practice of burial in the Valley of Dead Heroes has fallen in popularity in Sagus Cliffs over the last couple of generations, and its status as an attraction has likewise slipped. Since it is primarily the wealthy of the city who can afford the costs associated with such burials – transport; a tithe to historians, mourners, or the Memorialists; food and drink along the way; and more – traffic has dropped precipitously.
As noted above, some of the professional mourners are of the Memorialist faction, who believe the Ninth World is the afterlife, and the tombs in the Valley of Dead Heroes are the graves of everyone “alive” today. They seek to maintain the graves so that no name is forgotten, and no monument is lost. If everyone was to “remember themselves” by finding the grave that was their own, then the Ninth World would become the paradise that the afterlife was meant to be. But if everyone forgets, the Ninth World will become a Hell. (Many Memorialists think they have discovered the ancient hero that they were in life, and they take particular care with that grave.)
The Memorialists dwell in the Valley of Dead Heroes and tend to the graves and tombs as best they can, though their numbers (never large) are diminishing. They fear that the graves will ultimately be abandoned and forgotten, and all hope for the Ninth World will be lost.
But where are the dead? Of all the civilizations that have made use of the valley, each seems drawn by some knowledge, tradition, or compulsion to the enormous Necropolis that lies in a vast underground cavern beneath the entirety of the floor of the Valley of Dead Heroes. It is a place artificially carved from the bedrock and sealed in pulsating energies that exist just beyond sight. For millennia (at least) the Necropolis has been used as a storehouse for the dead. Treasures of lost worlds are buried here, items of incalculable power and beauty. But to find them, one must know the secrets of the valley… and to learn these secrets, one must study with the Memorialists, to learn the lives of the dead, and to join with them in remembrance. Without this knowledge, the treasures that remain are hidden or protected by deadly traps, fatal puzzles that serve to add more bodies to the collection beneath the Valley of Dead Heroes.
Colin out.
Miscellaneous
Thomas again. Last update we wanted to give a shoutout to the Pillars of Eternity Lords of the Eastern Reach card game, made by Chris Taylor (Fallout Lead Designer) and Scott Everts (Planescape: Torment Designer) and based on Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity. However, the links we provided for the Kickstarter were incorrect and by the time we noticed the editing window for updates had closed. So: with a bit more than a week left in their Kickstarter and more great stretch goals beckoning us on, give their Kickstarter a look!
There are also more interviews with the team available from the press. Colin and Kevin did an interview with PC Invasion available in both audio and text, covering a variety of topics on the game. Rock, Paper, Shotgun talked to Colin and Thomas Beekers a while back, this interview focused primarily on how to adapt Numenera into a cRPG.
The July Issue of Game Informer has a two-page article with some new screenshots and thoughts from design lead Adam Heine. And Adam has also responded to some more fan questions on his blog and our forums.
Thank you,
Thomas Beekers
Associate Producer
