Gamereactor recently got to speak with Colin McComb, creative lead on Torment: Tides of Numenera, to learn more about the role companions play in the game and the options for interacting with them.
Tides of Numenera, although drawing inspiration from the original, is defiantly looking to reinvigorate it. One of the more interesting aspects of the new Torment game is the way party members are utilised and how this slightly differs from similar titles such as Pillars of Eternity, which lets you play multiple characters.
With quite an open ended design Tides of Numenera tries to give the player freedom. The player can use that freedom to do right or wrong as they see fit, but McComb stressed that neither traditional moral ideal was particularly enforced.
"We don't want to tell the player what to do, we believe that the best game is a game where the player gets to pick what they want to do without being railroaded into their choices, so we will let you do what you want to do in this game, but you will pay the consequences for what you have done," said McComb.
Interestingly the game will have no alignment system. Instead it will have a set of five psychic energies called the Tides, which are not necessarily opposed to each other, which means there will not specifically be the usual good, neutral or evil based choices players are used to.
This ideology also carries over to the player's interaction with party members, with the game giving you the freedom to treat them as you please. McComb had this to say in relation to the games methodology when it comes to companions;
"We want to treat them like real people" Said McComb. "You can abuse them so much that they will leave your party, you can sell them, you can feed them to the Bloom...you can make them love you as well, you can help them as much as you can, you can turn them from the bitter broken people that they are."
Although you have an endless amount of options when it comes to interaction with party members McComb wanted to reiterate that you will not have romance opportunities with companions saying: "We have no romance in this game, you will not be having sex with your companions."
Tides of Numenera will release in 2016 for Linux, Mac, PC, PS4 and Xbox One.