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Torment Does anyone here like Numenera?

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Diggfinger

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When I want to read a book, I can just do that. When I play a game, I want it to have gameplay. Tworment makes you go through many hours of reading between moments of actually getting to play the game, and the reading isn't interesting. The setting fails because every square foot of it is screaming "hey look at how weird this thing is", and when everything is weird the weird becomes mundane. It doesn't feel like a world people live in, it feels like a creative writing major has cornered you and is now assaulting you with every idea he's ever come up with.

Most of that holds true for the PS:T too though, right?
So what makes Numera suck? World less interesting?
 

Icewater

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I really enjoyed it. Yeah it had some distinct weaknesses but I liked stats-as-resource-pools and the general lack of that IMO very artificial-feeling distinction between combat and noncombat abilities that exists in a lot of games.
 

Deleted Member 16721

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Most of that holds true for the PS:T too though, right?
So what makes Numera suck? World less interesting?

Nah, the world is very interesting. That's easily the best part of Numenera, exploring the lore, delving in and learning about this really strange place. I said it before and I'll say it again; it's very much like PS:T, almost to a tee. Numenera is even cooler though in that it lets you play with more gadgets and interact with more strange things.
 

Darth Canoli

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Numenera is like a rubber doll of your favorite actress/model/whatever, it's trying hard to look the same but you can tell it's not at the first glance and you really don't want to have anything to do with it.
 

Nifft Batuff

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I hate the infinity engine-like UI in general. In particular if the game contains a lot of text as Numenera. It is infinity-level retarded. However among the IE-like games, Numenera UI is the most interesting (not counting the retarded little-box for the text).
 

luj1

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I wanted to like it. The setting is great. But it's a very poor RPG.

Between Effort and companions, it's nigh impossible to fail skill checks which absolutely butchers character development and sense of accomplishment. That is something which may be enjoyable for children or stunted idiots who want to feel like gods from beginning to end.
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
it was okay. it's not entirely iredeemable shit like the kodex said, some parts are pleasant. the first city have pretty decent content with some decent C&C and quests mainly, and the last 3rd is really good. great location and cast. unfortunately the piss poor combat hurt the game the most. that shitty, slow, confusing combat hurt the game the most. fortunately you can skip most of the combat.

to cite some example, the bar full with magical psionics is a great place, the quest with the ant people also was pretty great and have quite alot of C&C and interesting concept/plot.

the 2nd part of the game is kinda shitty. the writing is inconsistent. some parts are good, some are written like harry potter and if you mix the good and the bad together, logically it become a mediocre slop. for me, i do appreciate the highs and still, the low is unfortunate.
 

Starwars

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I enjoyed it a fair bit. There are good individual setpieces and the pacing is nice *if* you feel like that sort of thing. Parts of the setting are interesting. I loved the text adventure bits.

But it never comes together to anything truly interesting or good. They failed to pull all the story threads together in a compelling way and I think that was the greatest failure for a game that is so storyheavy. It feels too much like walking for setpiece to setpiece.
I replayed PS:T right after I played Numenera and you can really tell the difference when you play them next to each. PS:T is weird, bizarre, lots of words still, but it's focused it builds towards something and the payoff is worth it. Numenera feels too much like it's just flailing around with no real direction.

That said, like I said, I still enjoyed it.
 

taxalot

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Codex 2013 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
Making a post on the Codex asking if people liked something. :M

OP, I haven't played Numenara but if you like it, you do not need further validation.
 

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
I thought the setting had some potential, but Inxile was too hung up on their word count driven gameplay to make it as interesting to play in as it could’ve been.

I don’t ”hate” it, though, or dislike it with as much passion as some others here do.
 

Silva

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Also remember: Numenera is the biggest scam in the history of tabletop RPGs. Kiclstarter sold it as weird mind blowing sci-fantasy. Delivered bland Forgotten Realms-like fantasy in weird coat of paint.
 
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biggestboss

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I enjoyed the game enough to get through the Bloom but unfortunately near the end of that section my save got corrupted. I started a new game afterwards, looked at that intro section where the narrator speaks for 10 minutes, and uninstalled the game.

If you want to enjoy the game, I recommend getting into as much combat as possible and using all the Numanuma consumables as much as you can because otherwise they will do nothing all game.
 

ArchAngel

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I fucking loved it and even consider it superior to the original in many respects. Not joking here. I was even considering making a lengthy thread about it, but I really can't devote that much time to Codex shit anymore.

I think the way Inxile treated the Codex over the Gamescom thing predisposed a lot of Codexers towards not liking the game. It certainly didn't help for the game's reception. Then there was PrimeJunta's overwhelming negative review, which is one of the worst-written reviews on this site.

Nostalgia too, of course.

I also consider New Vegas to be the best Fallout game, not simply the best of the "new generation."
So you are a retard. Noted.
 
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Falksi

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Boring as fuck.

Lots of the right ingredients, very badly peiced together and paced. The amount of shit it throws at you from the off in terms of reading volume & info to take on board is just stupid. It's like starting a song with the solo section of a jazz peice. Yes give me lots of depth, but let me get into the swing of things simply first.
 
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JarlFrank

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It's a decent game but it's in no way comparable to Planescape Torment. The story is a letdown precisely because it tries too hard to ape its source material: the villain is someone who used to be a part of you (or, in this case, someone who used you as a vessel) and the consequences of his past actions are a main theme of the game, just like in PST. Except here it feels way less personal and urgent than in PST. In PST you can die as often as you want but always wake up again, and sometimes you lose your memory and your personality changes. That's a bad thing. You want to find out what's happening to you and how you can stop this from happening.

In Numenera you're a cast-off vessel of some godlike dude. And... now you can pretty much do what you want. You could retire in a nice coastal manor if you wanted and there wouldn't be any major personal consequences for you. Your stakes aren't half as personal as they were in PST.

Essentially the game takes PST's themes and motives but fails to create the same sense of personal connection to the plot.

Also, the writing is ridiculously overwritten. Yes, PST was a very wordy game, but its writing had a good flow to it. It was elegant and often witty. Numenera's writing often reads like it's been sprinkled with fancy adjectives just to look high-brow and complex. And on top of that, a lot of the side quest content is just weird for the sake of weird without tying into any overarching theme. PST was weird too, but most of the sidequests and factions had some relation to the story's or the overall setting's themes. In Planescape, the "rule of three" is a thing and you encounter it in action several times. There's the idea that if enough people believe in something, it becomes real, and that actually happens several times. Planescape is weird but it's consistent in its weirdness.

Meanwhile in Numenera, anything and everything can happen, and there doesn't need to be any real reason for it. There can be cyberpunk elements, biopunk elements, items that work like fantasy magic, items that work like Star Trek technology, etc etc. It doesn't care about consistency, it just throws a lot of weird shit at you. Which isn't a bad approach by itself and would be excellent in an open world game, but it's not an open world game. It's a story focused RPG. And nothing outside of the story really ties into the story or its themes properly, so it just ends up feeling disjointed and like it doesn't know what it wants.

It's not a bad game, but it makes plenty of mistakes and is mediocre as a consequence.
 

Prime Junta

Guest
Fuck.

I'll just summarise my Codex review of it, my feelings haven't changed since.

Yes, it had some good bits. The Bloom in places had promise, there was one pretty competently-written sequence of quests past the mid-game, a few of the companions were decent (notably MCA's), and the Codexian character was funny.

However these were embedded in such a mass of utter garbage that they only served to highlight just how bad the game was. The encounters were physically painful to play through. A few exceptions aside the text was a turgid mass of adjective soup. The Effort mechanic completely trivialised any character-building that might have made it in there. The setting is just steaming hot garbage, an incoherent mess with no rhyme or reason to it.

Worst of all the game is mortally afraid to step out of the shadow of its predecessor and do its own thing. The analogies are painfully obvious, not to mention the constant wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

It is the biggest disappointment of the Kickstarter era. It would have been less disappointing had it failed to have been released at all, at least that way we would have been left with the very cool concept art and a dream.
 

JarlFrank

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Worst of all the game is mortally afraid to step out of the shadow of its predecessor and do its own thing. The analogies are painfully obvious, not to mention the constant wink-wink-nudge-nudge.

Yeah, if you played PST you really notice how Numenera tries to copy PST's structure without actually knowing why it was good. You have plenty of plot points that make you think "This seems pretty similar to what happened in PST", except that it doesn't work in the context of Numenera's story. At some point when playing it I realized that the game is being held back by its attempts at being a spiritual successor to PST and would be much better if it shook off those shackles and tried to be its own thing entirely. But no, they wanted to be a spiritual successor so slavishly that everything about the main plot feels like a cheap copy of PST's plot, except it doesn't work.

PST worked because it was an interesting and personal story in itself. Numenera's doesn't work because it essentially wants to be "PST but different". And all it manages to do is to be PST but less good.

Ironically, it could have been a much better game if they hadn't tried so hard to be a spiritual successor.
 

Mortmal

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It is the biggest disappointment of the Kickstarter era. It would have been less disappointing had it failed to have been released at all, at least that way we would have been left with the very cool concept art and a dream.
No , underworld ascendant was a LOT more disappointing, also backed godus... that was something too. POE was highly disappointing as well, enough said about it.

To go back to fluent question, yes i quite liked it but not as much as a top classic , i dont remember so much about it anymore already, the graphic environment yes but i cant remember any companions, while i'll always remember BG2 and planescape, that lack of some emotional engagement i guess. Good setting but a bit too pretentious and overwritten ,turn based combat had no depth and no challenge .Still it's taking risks, try something new and worth playing just for that. In no way a bad game or an abomination like underworld, just not a top classic.
 

Daidre

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It surprised me quite a bit how game dumps all this info about a faceless god, being castoff and even potential godhood in the literary game's first dialogue that is not hallucination. TNO's story was picking pace quite a bit later in the game and grants player at least some joy of discovery, when Numanuma tries to show how weird and cool it is right off the bat.

I never hated this game, had not expected much to begin with, but abandoned it after ~3 hours. I do not like pointless exposition in general but Torment is absolutely, helplessly, brutally purple. It awakens my long forgotten editorial reflex and only thing I could think about when I read dialogues was how I'd cut all this 0-info sentences and excessive words.

Ugly, ugly, ugly half-bald female portrait with afro-asian looks is a cherry on top.
 
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HoboForEternity

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It surprised me quite a bit how game dumps all this info about a faceless god, being castoff and even potential godhood in the literary game's first dialogue that is not hallucination. TNO's story was picking pace quite a bit later in the game and grants player at least some joy of discovery, when Numanuma tries to show how weird and cool it is right off the bat.

I never hated this game, had not expected much to begin with, but abandoned it after ~3 hours. I do not like pointless exposition in general but Torment is absolutely, helplessly, brutally purple. It awakens my long forgotten editorial reflex and only thing I could think about when I read dialogues was how I'd cut all this 0-info sentences and excessive words.

Ugly, ugly, ugly half-bald female portrait is a cherry on top.
i don't know what ushered the trend long useless words, analogies, prose = good writing. planescape torment i guess, was pretty prosey, but at least they were decently executed.
 

luj1

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Ironically, it could have been a much better game if they hadn't tried so hard to be a spiritual successor.

Simply removing Effort and companion rolls would dramatically improve the game. Lore dumps aren't the biggest offense here but anti-RPG core mechanics.
 

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