Another important element when creating the prison are the prisoners themselves. It's a little bit of a let down to break into a huge prison and only have a few prisoners held within. Not only is Torcastra filled with a veritable honeycomb of prison cells, but those cells are also filled with prisoners. The missions were designed to flow from one into another, so once a player completes a mission which reveals the two codes needed to open the cell blocks, there's something very satisfying about seeing the prisoners run out as a mob and head for the hills. Many times in games things will happen that aren't very realistic and you dismiss it because it's a game and not reality. It would have been easier for me to leave those guys in the cells and just open the door and fictionally say they're free and good job, soldier. However, if that were me, I would have made a b-line out the door as well, so that's exactly what I made the mob of prisoners do.

The climax of the instance comes when you receive the word about Airman Hamilton, an AFS soldier being held by the Bane in Torcastra. This mission presents players with one of many moral dilemmas and story arc missions that exist in the game. The difficult issue I had with this mission is that I wanted to give the players a choice on what to do that didn't involve a text decision. As a result, once you uncover Airman Hamilton in his state amongst the experimental equipment, the player is told to either put him out of his misery (at his request) or to turn him over the AFS as they were originally commanded to do. In this case, the question becomes, do you do the "humane" thing and kill him or do you decide that you're not an executioner and potentially subject him to becoming AFS high command's guinea pig? Each decision has its own morally grey area to explore, and, on top of that, the decision will affect a series of missions that are available to from that point.

Ultimately, the goal was to make sure that Torcastra feels like a dangerous place where players get a taste of the horrible things that the Bane are doing to the AFS soldiers they capture. If the Bane are experimenting on Humans on Divide, one can only imagine what is happening in other parts of the Tabula Rasa universe. It only gets worse from here, and only the player can help the AFS save other victims of the Bane.

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