InXile Entertainment's Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera has been rolling along quite steadily since its launch last month. This spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment hit its $900,000 goal in six hours, and to date has surpassed $3.3 million. There are still three days to go for the Kickstarter, yet inXile is giving everyone a teaser today by way of the game's first screenshot.
Now, the screenshot is a pre-rendered environment set within The Bloom. By using pre-rendered environments for much of the game's assets, inXile is able "to strike a distinct style while achieving levels of detail often difficult to present in 3D game space with a small team."
Torment isn't a 2D or 3D game though; it's more of a 2.5D game, where a part of the art production is 2D while characters are all 3D. It's basically going to be like Obsidian's Project: Eternity, which is mentioned in the most recent post on Torment's Kickstarter page. Think of it as an evolution of the classic RPGs, just powered by the Unity Engine to allow for even more fantastic games.
The developer has become pretty comfortable with the Unity Engine from working on Wasteland 2, which is why an early look at the new game is possible now instead of waiting until Torment's pre-production stage. Things can most certainly change along the way, so how the environment looks now could be different by the time the game's alpha rolls around. Much of the team is wrapping up work on Wasteland 2 as well, so when that's finished then work can begin in earnest on Torment.
Excellent! The red-blooded RPGs will live on, without needing clowns like BioWare and Bethesda and their constant excuses for dumbing down, actioning down, and quietly killing off RPG mechanics in their latest cinematic console adventures.
The only comment I'd make is that I hope the team is very open about the development process as time goes on. I suspect that won't be a problem with this team, but just making the comment as some crowd funded games have really suffered because they were not as communicative as they could have been with their backers, whereas others are very open and honest and I think that pays dividends in keeping the community engaged. The Chris Roberts model with Star Citizen is perhaps a bit too much; I feel info overload from him sometimes, but still err on the side of too much communication.