TIDES OF TORMENT
It has been four years since the Torment: Tides of Numenera kickstarter was successfully completed. At the time the kickstarter was a record, achieving the highest pledged amount of any videogame. It also achieved its initial pledge goal in a little under six hours, so there’s that too. Now this month after a slight delay - the game was originally slated for December 2014 - Torment has finally been released. It’s another of what I like to call AAA Indie games. Games that, whilst not having the cultural ubiquity of some AAA franchises, are still covered in the same manner as those with a big studio, budget and publisher behind them.
AAA titles are going nowhere, of course. Next month we’ll be review Ghost Recon: Wildlands, Nier: Automata and more big budget titles, but going forward these AAA indies and the studios that create them are going to become a far bigger factor in the industry than they are now. In February, Ghost Story, a new AAA indie studio set up by former members of Irrational Games announced their goal to create both mechanically and narratively challenging games and said they were actively prototyping their first game. Harebrained Schemes is currently working hard on Battletech. InXile have Wasteland 3 and Pillars of Eternity 2 on the boil. There’s Lord British’s long in gestation opus Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues (if it is released before the inevitable heat death of the universe), Divinity: Original Sin 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, much of Devolver Digital’s stable, like Absolver and Ruiner, and a whole heap more on the way this year and the next.
It’s an exciting time to be a PC gamer. More and more experienced development teams are starting to step outside the studio system and look to crowdfunding or alternate investment structures to create games that they are driven to make. While there are still the usual concerns about revenue in these studios, the smaller teams and lower budgets for games allow them to take risks that AAA dev studios could not. Think of it this way - do you think Activision, Bethesda, Ubisoft, Namco Bandai or any of the other big publishers would back a game set in a deliberately strange world that has a script totalling around 1.2 million words with a fixed isometric
perspective over pre-rendered backgrounds?