Torment: Tides of Numenera was crowdfunded on Kickstarter a while back, and this included a number of stretch goals. However, time has gone on and updates on progress have been made. One user on the r/Games Reddit took to compiling a bunch of those posts together to show that actually a few of those stretch goals aren’t actually going to make it to the game’s final release.

SnakesPaw put together a list of posts from both the InXile and the RPG Codex forums that confirm what is being dropped. These include two of the companions, the crafting system and the game’s Italian localisation. There had previous calls from fans for InXile to release a list of stretch goals that wouldn’t be met, but were told simply that “seen many of our stretch goals so far” and that promised goals like “the Ascension, the Labyrinth and its added elements, expanded epilogues, deeper companions” would feature in the final game.

The game was meant to contain nine unique companions to recruit, but when a trophy list of the game was leaked online two of those promised companions seemed to be missing from the list. These two companions were a character called Riastrad, as well as a ‘living ball of goo’ companion known simply as the Toy – added at the $2 million mark of the campaign. After questions and multiple threads, line producer Eric Schwarz of InXile Entertainment eventually made a statement that confirmed that the companion roster had been “slightly reduced” from the team’s initial plans. This was apparently to ensure that they had the time and space to concentrate more on the other seven companions’ stories to allow them to feel fleshed out so no one felt “incomplete”.

The crafting system cut had certainly already been confirmed as cut, as Schwarz said that the system just wasn’t meshing with the design of the game, “everything ended up feeling like an MMO-style system, and that just didn’t fit Torment’s gameplay.” Assets from this have now been purposed into other areas of the game, like Cyphers, Artifacts and companion armour upgrades among other things.

As for the cut localisation, InXile have said that the “costs for Italian localization would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and our stats and sales of prior RPGs showed the number of Italian backers and sales we could look forward to were too low to support those efforts.” Italian backers are now able to contact the InXile support team to request of refund of their money if they should so wish.

Just goes to show, even the most well-funded games sometimes run into troubles.