Oof. NumaNuma writer hired, then same narrative problems as NumaNuma, the single worst-written RPG game EVAR.
I made the huge mistake of installing and trying to play Numanuma in between Broken Roads sessions, for entirely unrelated reasons, got a massive craving for Dying Earth or so many ages into the future that technology and magic are indistinguishable and thousands of civilizations have come and went, the Gene Wolf sort of thing. Hated pretty much every second of it. The original Torment was a game born from Avellone's frustrations with the genre, and so you played not as a fresh faced adventurer whose foster father/mentor was just killed and village burnt down, but the living corpse of someone that didn't just have a presence in the gameworld, but that had been around for so long and through the ringer so many times he keeps forgetting who he is. So it makes sense that you don't get to create your own character with your own portrait.
In Numanuma I cringed when the introductory sequence started describing me as a Brazilian, and then, while I was given the option of class and all that I didn't even get to pick a portrait, but was stuck with looking like not just a Brazilian troon but one that got into a fight with a hairdresser. I know the general premise of the game from reading about it, and there's no reason to have me play as a static character since I'm supposed to be one of many bodies that some jerk inhabited and he keeps changing them up all the time. Didn't get any better from there, and I only lasted a couple of hours before uninstalling it in disgust.
It's the embodiment of this post in a game format.
A very common phenomenon from creators that are passionate about the medium and sincere but talentless. Works from them just end up reference storm of the great classics without any real attempt to actually walk the talk. The problem isn't about being pretentious because the classics can come off as such too. It is more that they have no understanding of the medium, of the interplay between the audience and creator within the context. Like a storyteller supposed to tell a story but end up reminiscing about his prior experience of hearing a better one and just bore the audience.
That sort of cargo cult game design that misses the point of why certain things were in the game and how they were used. McComb was the creative lead on Numanuma, and the premise could have been fixed into something better by one simple adjustment. Planescape: Torment was Avellone: The Game, and it would have been impossible to copy everything that was good about it for the sequel, but the changes they made in their retread of it entirely destroys the original dynamic and makes the story trivial. Why should you care about some guy that is trying to escape death is out there. There is the vague notion of revenge for abandoning your body as a shell, I suppose, but that's not heavily pushed early on, and there is the entity that is after him and by your relationship to him, also you.
You could make the story have more weight to it, and also become more meaningful, by having the player star in the role of the one in pursuit of immortality. You'd roll up new characters, and since players love doing that, it'd be this feature that you could keep doing that without any of the game integrity breaking meta of having someone reset your stats for you. As your characters outlived their usefulness and you rolled new ones you'd cast them away, and they might come back to bite you in the ass later on. That game breaking OP tank you rolled for that boss battle? After you needed to switch to a thief and abandoned that body, he's now coming after you. Did you let him keep his gear? You're fucked.
It'd also keep the focus on you, the player. Instead of stumbling over your own past self's schemes, paranoid traps, and helpful notes to further selves, you'd be resetting things. That guard that you convinced to let you into the warehouse? He doesn't know it's you anymore. Or maybe you could point out how uncomfortable it makes your companions that you don't have the same body as a week ago, and that that guy/girl that you had something going with is now thinks you're not half as attractive anymore. Those are just some ideas out of many possibilities they could have used to actually make a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. Instead we're stuck with a fixed protagonist even though it doesn't make any sense, and the plot is really about some other guy somewhere else, and whatever he did in the past doesn't matter that much to us. There are no cycles of regret.
I'm already posting a much longer post than I intended to, and this is just the premise of the game and that I got mad there wasn't a proper character creation, I could continue on like this picking the writing apart but I have made my point. Colin McComb was the creative lead on Numanuma and he was a creative lead on Broken Roads, I'm sensing a pattern here. Naturally Craig Ritchie is going to take full responsibility for everything, the entire game was his idea, and at the end of the day he was calling the shots, but there is no way that a guy making
his first video game isn't going to defer to the wisdom and experience of a veteran like McComb. At the very least he'd run things by him. There is no way things could go wrong with someone who worked on the original Planescape: Torment on your team, right?
Well, McComb didn't do much on that game. His Planescape game got binned, which was supposed to be a King's Field ripoff, and if he gets to determine things like genre he'd go for the Todd school of thought every time. This is from an interview with him.
I was not especially thrilled with the way combat felt in the Infinity Engine, but I write this off to my predilection for the immediate rush of first-person shooters, and the fact that the AD&D rules are in themselves a shorthand for that immediacy as well. I have always felt that the biggest problem with tabletop gaming is the pure nitpickery of slogging through combat; entire sessions have been wasted on a single battle. Computer gaming should, in theory, create a seamless flow, allowing action to occur naturally and fluidly. I suppose the Infinity Engine was the closest one could get to such fluid action while still retaining at least the outline of the basic AD&D rules. Essentially, I’m torn between the desire to immerse the player in a combat situation and the desire to make sure even slow-twitchers get something out of a game.
As for what he did after his Playstation action game was cancelled:
Avellone had at least a broad outline of the entire game from start to finish, with all of the major characters sketched out, by the time I’d joined the team. The rest of the design team added minor characters, stuff not exactly crucial to the main quest, and other fun stuff, and fleshed out the stuff he couldn’t get to. Avellone is a madman, I’ll tell you that – it was only with the greatest regret that he passed off Fhjull and Trias to me, and I heard him weeping bitter and solitary tears in his office when he assigned the Brothel to Dave Maldonado.
Avellone had written out a draft for almost all of the dialogue in the game before the game left pre-production while being on drugs, since he was working on Fallout 2 at the same time and overworked himself into an early burnout. McCollin came to the project late and did... Curst, fleshing out Avellone's drafts. Maybe Craig should have gotten Avellone onboard instead.