Today we’d like to break from Star Citizen news for a moment to talk about another Kickstarter: InXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera project, a CRPG and spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment. Brian Fargo and the team at InXile are doing a very interesting thing: building two crowd-funded games simultaneously. This may seem excessive to the casual observer, but it’s actually a very positive sign for the future. The nearly three million dollars that Torment has already raised is a strong argument that crowdfunding isn’t just another fad: entire development studios can now be funded this way, allowing ever more complex projects that stay true to an artistic vision rather than the demands of a publisher.

The truth is that most game developers know what they’re doing. The teams behind games like Dead Space 3 are full of skilled artists who understand what makes a great game… but the fact that they’re beholden to publishers and stockholders means that they have to ship their games early with features dictated by marketing departments rather than designers. The ability for increasing numbers of developers to step away from that production model is incredible; it’s a return to the sort of innovative game development that built the industry twenty years ago.

As such, we encourage you to check out Torment, and if it’s something you’re interested in, back it; a victory for this game is a victory for smaller developers everywhere… and for consumers who appreciate titles that break ground rather than try to appeal to a publisher’s market research! The team at Cloud Imperium strongly believes that crowdfunded projects should support each other whenever possible; companies like InXile, Double Fine, Obsidian, Frontier Developments, 22 Cans, Red Thread Games, Portalarium or even smaller but interesting projects like Limit Theory from Josh Parnell will best succeed if we stand together to pioneer this new kind of game development! You can pledge for Torment:Tides of Numenera here.

The team at InXile has kindly sent over a piece of game music to share with the Star Citizen community. It’s called “Mysteries of the Bloom” and goes along with the concept art seen above. The Bloom is an in-game area described as “a vast, semi-sentient predator, a monstrous, organic creation that extends its tendrils through the folds of reality. Its pathways, nooks, and crannies conceal terrors and wonders alike, and for those daring or desperate souls who are forced to find refuge here, any step has the potential to send them to another world. It’s a hub, a center of commerce for those who trade in the relics of other worlds.” Sounds sort of like the pirate-infested systems on the fringes of the UEE!