Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

Didn't realize the guy was such a hipster douche. Explains a lot.

 

The Codex NPC and quest is really good...

 

English isn't my first language and I have to say the game actually helped me learn a lot of new (probably unnecessary) words, but at the same time, I think that the overly descriptive style and supposedly "philosophical" vocabulary were brought into the game to mask the non-sense, superficial writing.

Btw folks, I'm not the video creator, I'm not that smart to make it

 

I've reached the Valley of Dead Heroes/Necropolis and I'm liking the game so far, but I have to say it doesn't draw you in at the level Planescape: Torment does. I hope they patch the party banter soon (ironically enough, broken like PST's originally was) and do something about the character screen's consolitis. The writing is decent and I'm curious to see if it gets to the PST level of excellence, but we'll see. It appears that the Numenera setting is just not thematically consistent (perhaps that is the point) but the game seems to suffer to some degree because of it.

 

Great review, thank you!!

 

He just wanted his setting to have some realism

 

Pretty great review.

 

Without scanning back through the thread, whats the general consensus on this with people who are playing so far?. Comparable to PST?.

 

A true successor

 

We have been comparing it to PS:T, yes.

 

Comparable? Yes. It is unfortunately comparable, much in the same way the economical stability between myself and Bill Gates.

 

Ludo Lense gets it. That's a very good review. I salute his patience for putting this together.

 

Beat the game in 16 hours (fast-forwarded through most dialogues) with a diplomatic character and Matkina, Rhis & Erritis.

The game is thoroughly mediocre in every aspect - graphics, mechanics, story, combat, amount of content, themes, music, pacing, characters and so on.

Enjoyable but unremarkable - 7/10.

 

I thought it was pretty dumb the first time I heard it. It's also a loaded question whereas the one in PST it is not. Feels like the kind of question the developers can use to give you some red tide or whatever if they don't like your answer.

Plus, using such a question as a kind of plot gate made sense in PST, it came from a character infamous for puzzles. Here is just some cunt whose dumb questions you have to answer to continue with your quest. Another one of those things they forced out of PST.

No, really, the whole thing with asking you those questions at that point is so dumb and forced. There's no reason behind it, no feeling, no mystery.

I was pleasantly surprised though when she told me my answer was a boring platitude or something. Did not expect that.

 

"no white skin" is not something you get through mixing, geneticnatural laws don't follow ideology, the only way you can erase the "white skin" trait is by having a maniac dictator executing every baby borned with recessive gene traits like "white skin" and "blue eyes" ! And yet they mention some albinos NPC when "albinism" actually IS a recessive gene trait

one million year in the future wont change the way dna rewrites

 

Ludo Lense nailed!

 

I guess it's supposed the tell a story about the juxtaposition between mortality and immortality and the underlying themes thereof.

The way I interpreted it, had more to do with questions about dealing with death, actually, dealing with the finiteness of life, would immortality really be the answer? - would it make you care more or less? Would it change YOUR nature, your perception of time, of life itself. Also, dealing with the fact, that whatever we as humans do, death is the ultimate outcome, what will we leave behind? Probably nothing, and how does that make you feel?

Despite all these truths, life is, after all, worth living, and each individual life matters in the grander context, because it affects everything and every decision in one way or the other. So I guess the game also wanted to point out the connectness of several lives, even over generations or centuries.

 

Pretty much, though he bashes the setting from a personal distaste. Not really objective. I think it could have been implemented better (like for examples having bigger areas and less numenera around), but this is on the devs not on the settings.

 

Much better than 2rment portraits. Someone should do a replacer mod.

 

Instead of just criticizing a game for having failures, we also need to understand why the game has these failures in the first place. This is a major problem if you consider that the core team of MotB was involved in this game. I think this happened because there was both a change in the development practices adopted, and a lack of passion from the developers involved. The development practices changed since you don’t have the same "get together" organic approach that was present in PS:T (see Guido Henkel interview at Matt Chat). A bunch of people meeting on skype doesn’t come close to the way they developed games in the past. The other problem is that the developers themselves changed for worse in the sense that they are not passionate about games anymore. So just saying that SJW interests have nothing to do with it because you don't have too much agenda quests ignores this point.

It seems that everyone was more involved in ToN than the developers themselves because they have other priorities, like social justice activism, etc. cRPG design is a complex intellectual activity. You need to be fully engaged in order to make it work. Just because you have a know-how of your previous games, doesn’t automatically ensure that you will make a great game now.

 

There is the fairly scary possibility that they actually think what they did is good. Which comes back to what Excidium said: Developers don't play RPGs... or even too many games, really. Otherwise I can't imagine how some things keep showing up in games even though they're universally hated.
So, ignorance is a very possible reason because when you're ignorant about what you're doing you just do it by a checklist.

 

Yes, but the ignorance in this case is caused by their lack of engagement. If a developer is not a gamer, but has a high opinion of his own writing accompanied by demeanor towards his medium, his games will not be good.

 

Ludo's video was nice. The comments, however..

 

Didn't Adam Heine blog about playing all the new RPGs to prepare for Torment?

I recall there were some suckers here who considered that a good thing, as if we were going to get unsullied 1999 again.