Get ready to be Tormented —

InXile sets Kickstarter record with Torment: Tides of Numenera

Spiritual successor to Planescape raises $1 million in eight hours.

When game designer Chris McComb announced last December that he was starting work on a sequel to PC RPG classic Planescape: Torment, we knew interest in the project would be pretty strong. Now that the project has launched on Kickstarter, we've learned that the level of interest was actually record-setting.

Torment: Tides of Numenera raised $1 million in crowdfunding in just under eight hours, surpassing the previous funding-speed record set by Ouya last year. As of this writing, the funding level sits at just above $1.75 million from over 32,000 backers, including seven that pledged over $10,000 to enjoy a bevy of perks including a trip to an exclusive launch party with the development team.

Executive Producer Brian Fargo and the team at InXile are raising money for their next project even though work is still continuing on Wasteland 2, which raised nearly $3 million on Kickstarter just under a year ago. The overlapping projects are an effort to keep the InXile team together without layoffs and to create some productive work for the writers and concept artists who have already finished their portion of Wasteland 2 development.

"Kickstarter has been a godsend for mid-sized developers like InXile," Fargo tells potential backers in a Kickstarter video. "It allows us to get back to making the kind of games that we've always wanted to make... I'm not trying to monetize anyone and I'm not trying to reach some mythical mass market. We are making the kind of games we like to play and we're making the kind of games for you, the people who put their faith and trust into us."

Numenera is being created "in the tradition of Planescape: Torment" according to its creators, but it won't use the original Planescape setting, which is controlled by Wizards of the Coast. Instead, it's set in the world of Monte Cook's Numenera tabletop role-playing game, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter last year. In the Kickstarter video, McComb describes it as "a world covered with the ruins of great empires, crushed by the weight of time."

While the setting is new, McComb says the same kind of complex moral issues that characterized the first Torment game will carry over into Numenera. "What does one life matter? What legacy do you leave? What is the cost to your friends, to your heart, to your conscience? These are the kinds of questions we hope to explore... These decisions aren't as simple as good versus evil. This is a more complex, nuanced morality."

The new project comes with the blessing of Chris Avellone, who worked as lead designer on the original Torment (he is currently working with Obsidian Entertainment on Project Eternity). "I believe [the InXile team] will do Torment with the right aesthetic and justice it deserves," Avellone writes on the Kickstarter page.

Channel Ars Technica