If Kickstarter needs a poster child for the crowd-funded video game development movement, it will find an ideal candidate in Brian Fargo. Fargo and his studio InXile Entertainment helped kick off the crowd-funding boom of 2012, setting out to get $900,000 and raising nearly $3 million to fund the development of Wasteland 2, a sequel to the 1980s roleplaying game that begat Fallout. One year later, and Wasteland 2 is trucking along, on track for an October 2013 release right in the window Fargo promised last year. Now InXile is funding its next project, Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual successor to another Interplay role-playing classing, Planescape: Torment.
InXile’s done it again.
It set out to raise $900,000 on Wednesday, and as of this writing it’s already raised nearly $1.9 million, with more than four weeks of fundraising still to go. We caught up with Fargo to talk Torment.
“I’ve been working on getting a robust team for Torment since September of 2012,” Fargo says, “I’ve been fortunate that there was no rush or financial pressure to assemble this really strong team. And while we don’t have the full team on board we certainly have many of the key players that helped launch either Planescape: Torment or Planescape itself.”
On that staff is Planescape: Torment artist Aaron Meyeres, as well as composer Mark Morgan. Spearheading the project are writers Monte Cook and Colin McComb who were behind the world of the Planescape RPG, and creators of the Numenera world this new game will take place in. But the loss of the Planescape setting isn’t a thorn in the team’s side according to Fargo.
“We are locked and loaded with Monte Cook’s Numenera and are very happy about it,” says the designer, “We love what Monte is doing and we will have greater latitude to do what we want in his universe. I have little concerns about the team’s ability to create a detailed and fantastical world around this new game. Fear not!”
With far more money than the team expected to raise for the game, Fargo is keeping with InXile’s approach to crowdfunding. Every extra dollar is going towards more game features. ”Having the extra funding increases the scope and scale of the game across all fronts. We budget for the game in a modular fashion so that we can create a core experience at the minimum funding level but as the dollars increase we add more locations, more writers, more music, extra novellas and even an orchestra.”
“We don’t look to make any profit from the dollars raised through crowd funding.”
The plan is to have Torment out by the end of 2014, sticking to a similar development cycle as with Wasteland 2.
