Torment: Tides of Numenera Sales "Disappointing"
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“I would honestly say that Torment has been disappointing sales-wise,” Fargo tells us. “There are some reasons for that, some of which are our fault, and others... let’s just say that a game with a lot of reading is not very much fun to watch on Twitch. I’m not laying it just on that. There are a lot of different dynamics at work… [but] that is an important medium for getting the word out.”
In our review, I wondered whether Torment: Tides of Numenera had a pacing problem. It was a game that finally fulfilled the RPG genre’s promise of making combat wholly optional. But in doing so, it broke a traditional loop: one that intersperses dense chunks of storytelling with fighting and derring-do. Torment’s writing, sublime though it was, taxed the imagination - and offered very little else as respite.
“I believe the combat system was not fulfilling enough, that core loop,” Fargo says. “Reading cannot be the core loop, and that ended up being what that was.”
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“Planescape: Torment wasn’t a huge hit either,” Fargo recalls. He should know: he ran the publisher that bore the brunt of its lacklustre sales. And the release of Beamdog’s Enhanced Edition in April this year proved a timely reminder.
“That didn’t exactly light up the charts, and that was a great title,” Fargo says. “Planescape: Torment has a 91% Metacritic, but it didn’t sell a ton of units - not what it deserved to. I think there’s something to that.”
