inXile Interview on RPGCodex

[PlanHex]

This week in "PlanHex reposts stuff he found on the Codex", the RPGCodex sent a hapless fellow to inXile Entertainment to talk with Brian Fargo, Colin McComb and George Zeits.
The primary goal for both parties seems to be mending the relationship after a misconception caused a big falling out between inXile and the Codex by giving them a big interview that they were promised last year, but never took place, about Torment: Tides of Numenera.

If you're interested you should probably just go read it right now, though the post-mortem of T:ToN on Eurogamer last month should perhaps be read / listened to as well if you haven't already done so, since the Codex crowd-sourced its interview questions afterwards and was made with the information from the post-mortem in mind.

If you're not interested in T:ToN or the drama, then there's also a few tidbits about Bard's Tale IV and Wasteland 3 at the beginning and the end.
This was especially interesting:

Brian: Well, specific to Wasteland 3, I think if you liked Wasteland 2, you’re going to love Wasteland 3. It’s just as deep, just as morally nuanced, combat system is the same, it’s party-based. The visual improvement – we know we always have to constantly improve visuals. One of the things we hear from RPG websites is that visuals don’t matter, but they really do at the end of the day. We have people complaining about the visuals in Torment, or in Wasteland 2, or in Pillars of Eternity. We always have to keep working on our visuals, but better graphics, hopefully mean better immersion. Wasteland 3 is just as deep as Wasteland 2, it’s not simplified.

George: We are not abandoning things like choices and consequences and the things we love to do. We are improving some things on the graphical side, we are talking about having the close up conversations for important NPCs, which is to give more character to the NPCs and make them a more impactful experience. But we are not giving up on interesting story - that was literally the first thing I did on Wasteland 3, which was to write the story for it. We are not giving up on choices and consequences. If anything, we’re trying to make those more impactful and less subtle.

Brian: One of the things we need to do a better job of is better selling our cause and effect mechanics. We tend to put it so deep and so nuanced that you’d need to play the game two or three times, or to be told about it, practically. We need to better telegraph it, that’s one of the things with Torment – it’s incredibly reactive, that’s why there’s so many words, but it’s really hard for you to understand unless you knew what was supposed to happen, and that’s what we need to improve on because I think we’re doing more depth than just about anybody but it’s not being recognized because we’re being too subtle about it.

 

[Mr Fish]

Subtle? I feel like the choice and consequence they had in Wasteland 2 smacked you square in the face in how blatantly obvious it was.

 

[PlanHex]

Might be more in reference to Torment, where you can go through the whole game without realizing that your tides actually affect the content, like opening up new dialogues and stuff like that. In fact, it was a common complaint that tides seemed to do nothing, because it's mostly not obvious.
My guess is that they're gonna make sure everyone knows with [your skill/stat/rep made a thing happen] tags from now on.

 

[Mr Fish]

That sounds awful...
I can understand wanting to know when the skill or stat or whatever you've put effort into is used so you know how useful it is but at the same time it often comes across as a win button and by not having any sort of [Speech] thingamajig at least it might make people a bit more careful with what dialogue to choose instead of just going "well, that's the win button cause it got that bracket".

 

[PlanHex]

Example:

What happened to the Tides in the name of the game? The player barely uses them and the quest to obtain access seemed like an afterthought. You said they were supposed to be central to the game & were supposed to hurt your companions while helping you. How come these mechanics didn't make it into the game?

George: There’s a few things going on there. One of them is what Brian said earlier about subtlety. There’s a lot of cases where the Tides actually do affect a lot of things. Just to confirm: we did a search through the game on the other day and found tons of cases in which your Tides were being checked. The problem is we’re not very good at telegraphing that to the player. There will be a lot of cases in which a character is reacting to you differently and you wouldn’t even know it was because of your Tides.

An example of this is in the Wayward Son quest, if you were Silver tide dominant, you could tell Piquo “you shouldn’t go off and get yourself fixed up; what you should do instead is join my cult and give me all your money; and he’d actually join your cult.”

People didn't know those options were even there and didn't notice the flavour text that reacted to your tides and such.
I assume they're gonna do like what Pillars of Eternity did with the reputation/class/race checks. Not necessarily win buttons.

 

[0wing]

People didn't know those options were even there and didn't notice the flavour text that reacted to your tides and such.

That's because flavor text doesn't have any meaningful function built into the game (char's tide/alignment doesn't have any function in gameplay either, yo), there's no anything, no dialogue, no quest relying on flavor text, i.e. there's no GAMEPLAY. That's what happens when you're McComb and you want game to be something else, i.e. interactive fiction. You accidently the _game_, and therefore the _interactive_ part, rendering T:ToN a really poor fiction with pretty (but still terrible) backgrounds. Text-based L.A. Noir-style detective quest, how legit groundbreaking! Nah, eat you PS:T references and be happy.

 

[PlanHex]

That's because flavor text doesn't have any meaningful function built into the game (char's tide/alignment doesn't have any function in gameplay either, yo), there's no anything, no dialogue, no quest relying on flavor text, i.e. there's no GAMEPLAY. That's what happens when you're McComb and you want game to be something else, i.e. interactive fiction. You accidently the _game_, and therefore the _interactive_ part, rendering T:ToN a really poor fiction with pretty (but still terrible) backgrounds. Text-based L.A. Noir-style detective quest, how legit groundbreaking! Nah, eat you PS:T references and be happy.

Maybe you should try reading that quote again, specifically the part at the end where he mentions a resolution to a side-quest based on tides that's not otherwise available.
I'd agree that I didn't notice these at all, but dunno how much of it is that they're just not there or that they're not labelled as such.

 

[The_Proletarian]

That Codex interviewer is a douche! I can't believe how open Brian and peers are.

However, the interview is a great read!