TORMENT update: Rothfuss and Avellone in

The Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera is roughly halfway done, with 14 days to go before the end of the appeal. However, the game is already funded: having asked for $900,000, inXile Studios have actually received $2.9 million. The game is now deep into what Kickstarter calls, 'stretch goals', that is additional incentives for people to keep funding in the form of added content to the game.

First up, if the game hits $3.25 million then the writing team will be expanded to include bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man's Fear). Rothfuss will be adding about 10,000 words of content to the game in the form of dialogue and characters. He won't be doing any more because of his commitments to finishing off The Doors of Stone, the third and concluding volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Much more enticing (to this blogger, anyway) is that at $3.5 million, inXile will add Chris Avellone to the writing time. Avellone was the primary writer and designer of the original Planescape: Torment (to which Numenera is the spiritual successor), as well as Fallout 2, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and the forthcoming Project: Eternity. He also worked on Icewind Dale and its sequel; Fallout: New Vegas (including leading the design of several of its DLC episodes); and Alpha Protocol. He has also done some writing for inXile's previous Kickstarter game project, Wasteland 2. He is often cited as the finest writer of Western CRPGs. Exactly why Avellone still hasn't written a novel, I don't know, as I suspect it would be awesome. Avellone will be creating a new NPC character for the game and writing their dialogue, but will also be serving as an editor and a fresh pair of eyes on the work of the rest of the team as well.

With still two weeks to go, I suspect this Kickstarter will breeze past both targets and probably end up somewhere on the other side of $4 million when all is said and done. It's shaping up to be a very interesting game.

More detailed plans for PLANESCAPE: TORMENT successor emerge

InXile Studios may be hard at work on Wasteland 2, the crowd-funded sequel to the seminal 1988 computer RPG Wasteland, but they have already announced their next project. With most of the writing and concept art completed for Wasteland 2, those teams have started work on a game that may be called Numenera: Torment. This game will be a spiritual sequel to the classic 1999 RPG Planescape: Torment, widely-regarded as the finest (and most literate) computer roleplaying game ever made.

The new game will not involve any of the characters or situations from Planescape: Torment (which is copyrighted by Atari and Wizards of the Coast), but will share a similar focus on characterisation and philosophical matters, such as the nature of life, death and consciousness. The setting will be Numenera, a new roleplaying setting created by Monte Cook. Cook is a highly respected RPG game designer and worked extensively on the original Planescape setting for the Dungeons and Dragons game in the 1990s.

The game itself is being worked on by Colin McComb, one of the main designers on the original Planescape pen-and-paper setting and a key creative force on Planescape: Torment. The director of the game is Kevin Saunders, who has joined the team from Obsidian, where he led the Mask of the Betrayer team. Also on board are Torment designer Adam Heine and Dana Knutson, the concept artist whose work on Torment was crucial.

The game will use all-new rules for skills, character creation and combat. Full-scale work on the game will begin after Wasteland 2's planned release date (still scheduled for October 2013). There will be another Kickstarter campaign further down the line to help fund the game ahead of time.

Since Planescape: Torment is one of my favourite RPGs of all time (the computer game equivalent of Gene Wolfe), this is a project that I'll be watching with great interest.

Creators of the greatest RPGs of all time collaborate on new game

Obsidian Entertainment have announced their next big RPG: a fantasy game called Project Eternity (working title). This game will be an isometric, old-school RPG that draws heavily on their old D&D games using the Infinity Engine (the Icewind Dale series and the legendary Planescape: Torment).

However, tired of working for publishers who either don't do proper Q&A on their games (resulting in the bug-filled mess of Alpha Protocol), rush them out in an incomplete state (Knights of the Old Republic II) or refuse to pay them a bonus by failing to hit a ludicrously arbitrary Metacritic score by one point despite selling millions of copies (Fallout: New Vegas), Obsidian have decided to take this one to the fans. Via Kickstarter, Obsidian are asking for $1.1 million to help fund the game. They're already at $300,000 less than a day after starting the project.

The creative forces behind the game include Chris Avellone, the writer of Planescape: Torment; Tim Cain, the creator of the Fallout franchise; and Josh Sawyer, the project lead on the excellent New Vegas (who infamously disapproved of the game being somewhat 'softened' for console players and released his own, more hardcore mod for the PC version of the game). They hope to release the game in early 2014.

Kotaku interview Avellone here about the project, whilst GameBanshee talk to Obsidian studio head Feargus Urquhart here.

UPDATE: As of 24 hours later, the amount raised stands at $1,083,000, and should hit the target within a few hours (with 31 days still to go). Obsidian have already said that any money they make over the $1.1 million will go to making the game even more impressive, and some projections are now suggesting they could make upwards of four times the amount they asked for.

Chris Avellone details ideas for a TORMENT successor

In December 1999, Black Isle released what continues to be widely regarded as the greatest CRPG of all time: Planescape: Torment. It was only a modest hit, especially compared to its fellow games using the Infinity Engine (the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series), but a critical success, appearing on numerous 'best games evaaah' lists up to this very day.

Your party at this point in the game consists of an animated suit of armour, a floating skull, a man permanently on fire and a steampunk robot. Plus yourself, an immortal, intelligent zombie (sort of).

The chances of a sequel ever appearing are pretty much zero, since Wizards of the Coast shut down the Planescape D&D setting shortly after the game was released and have subsequently heavily retconned elements of the setting in the 3rd and 4th editions of the game. In addition, with the D&D rights lying with Wizards and the Torment rights lying with Interplay, navigating the legal minefield to be able to make the game in the first place would likely be time-consuming and complex.

For this reason, Torment's lead writer, Chris Avellone, has been musing on the idea of doing a 'spiritual successor' to the game, but not an actual sequel, for a while. He's told Kotaku about some of the ideas he and his company, Obsidian (the successor to Black Isle), have been kicking around. This includes maintaining a non-traditional fantasy setting (no elves, dwarves etc), having a small, focused cast of supporting characters and bringing back an overhead, isometric viewpoint.

Avellone, whose other credits include Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol, is currently working on Wasteland 2.