Path to Gold
 
Phew! It's been a busy month. The Torment team has been hustling hard to get the game polished for release. The game is nearly ready, which means we're now doing all that "boring" stuff that gets Torment ready for you to play.
 
What does that include? Well, Jeremy, Evan and other members of the design team have been working away on balancing to make sure our Crisis encounters are as entertaining as can be, and that things like loot distribution, economy and character progression are playing well. A lot of number tweaking! Those on the writing and area design side have been playing through the game and fixing any remaining quest, story and content issues. Our engineers Steve, Jesse, Dan and more have been hammering hard on performance optimization and pesky bugs to make sure everything runs better, faster, stronger. Meanwhile, we've got our artists, scripters and more devoted to further polish and cleaning up animations, character rigs, and textures.
 
Fortunately, things are looking really good, so we’ve been able to divert more folk’s time toward playing the game, finding bugs, identifying balance and progression issues, and tying up any loose ends in quests. It might sound like a strange thing to say, but sometimes for developers, simply finding the time to sit back and enjoy our own games is a luxury, so we’ve been doing that too.
 
We also wouldn't be complete rounding up our recent progress without giving another shout-out to the QA teams at Testronic and Techland, plus our external localization partners. Those teams have all been putting in huge amounts of hours and Torment is very much improved thanks to them.
 
All of this work is bringing us closer and closer to a release-to-manufacturing build of the game. We've been directing our efforts towards that milestone, and when that happens, it will mean Torment is effectively a finished, complete game we can all be proud of. You can rest assured we'll be hammering away as long as we can to give you the best possible experience upon release early next year.
 
Last, in the previous update we hinted that we'll have a new beta update for Torment coming, and that's still the plan. This will have many of the refinements we've mentioned above, plus new features like the ability to switch between mouse/keyboard and controller versions of the interface. We'll keep you all posted!

Reward and Pledge Finalization Reminder
 
It's a point of some pride and a little surprise that our pledge claim rates for Torment are extremely high – according to our stats, nearly 95% of you have set up accounts with us on our backer web site and are ready to claim your rewards come release. Of course, we wish those numbers could be 100%, so we'd like to give a reminder on setting up your Torment backer account!
 
Those of you who backed the game via PayPal at a physical pledge level, but never set up a Torment backer account – your time is running out! With Torment releasing early next year, we need to get your rewards as well as your up to date shipping addresses on file so that we have the right reward quantities for manufacturing, as well as the correct address to actually send those rewards to.
 
Techland has been taking point on our media and trailers (like the Nano video above), as well as backer goods, working to ensure a very high level of quality and respect for the Torment and Numenera source material and community. We've been impressed with it and are looking forward to letting you get your hands on those rewards.
 
So, if you backed at a level that includes a boxed copy, please make sure you create a backer account if you don't yet have one. And even if you do have a backer account with us, it would be a good idea for you to visit your rewards page just to make sure your shipping details are correct. A little diligence now means we'll be able to ensure things go more smoothly when rewards are ready to ship!
 
(Those of you who are getting digital-only rewards don't need to confirm your address details.)