Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[The_Mask]

The OST sucks.

I mean, that's... like... your opinion, man.

I liked it.

 

[True Ukrainian]

The game is not bad per se. Its well polished and inoffensive. It does not take much effort to complete. Its a good choice if you just want to switch off in front of your PC.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The game is not bad per se. Its well polished and inoffensive. It does not take much effort to complete. Its a good choice if you just want to switch off in front of your PC.

I disagree on all counts

 

[MRY]

The game is not bad per se. Its well polished and inoffensive. It does not take much effort to complete. Its a good choice if you just want to switch off in front of your PC.

I disagree on all counts

It's certainly not a take on the game I've seen before -- in some ways, a sadder one than the most vehement negative Codexian reactions.

 

[BING XI LAO]

The game is not bad per se. Its well polished and inoffensive. It does not take much effort to complete. Its a good choice if you just want to switch off in front of your PC.

I disagree on all counts

It's certainly not a take on the game I've seen before -- in some ways, a sadder one than the most vehement negative Codexian reactions.

I'm definitely vehement about this game, it's been two and a half years and I'm still very butthurt about it.
I remember liking the parallel dimension with the demons - I later heard you wrote that part?. I'm not trying to be mean... not to you anyway. If not for the tantalising tidbits of quality the game has, I would have quit it early out of boredom. Instead I played through till the end of the penultimate act and then ragequit because I realised the ending had obviously been butchered by cuts. By then I'd formed an abiding hatred for almost every part of the game - the flat lighting, the excruciatingly slow combat, the way every party member had a similar backstory of being fairly ordinary before some lost tech messed them up (played before Goo was added), the excessive word count (I am a very fast reader but there needs to be an eventual point to things) etc.

What I dislike most of all is the setting, how atomised everything is. There is so much randomness to everything, and most things are completely unrelated to one another. The Bloom, which most people compliment, only pisses me off by literally embodying this problem. When things don't have consistent relations with each other, you don't have a setting - you have a mess, and it doesn't help the plot either.

The absolute first things I would do if writing for the Numenera setting would be:
-deciding what the numenera from each of the prior Nine Worlds generally looks like and does, per specific World by number. Perhaps the sixth world was the most sophisticated, perhaps there are still isolationist holdouts from the seventh, etc.
-what the legends are surrounding the society, religion and eventual doom of each of the Nine Worlds, and how the different Worlds and their remnants compare to each other.
-Which places Earth trades with through space travel

Instead, there is ZERO description of the Nine Worlds as nine distinct prior civilisations and eras. The trade center shown in the game is the Bloom, which trades with different places and times (!) completely at random. I have a deep and abiding hatred for the way the setting was dealt with. If I was religious I would call such a total rejection of all order Satanic. Instead I guess I'll call it postmodern and throw in some grumbling about SJWs or something.

 

[MRY]

Sorry, I meant daveyarsegallant's reaction (which reminds me a bit of the marvelous ending to The Demon Princes: "Deflated, perhaps. My enemies have deserted me. The affair is over. I am done."), not yours. His reaction was basically the game had nothing to engage with at all, and was just a polished nothing. To me, that's much worse than what I understood to be the main knock on it, which was that it was extremely rough and uneven, extremely dense and impenetrable, but occasionally good.

I did write the Inifere character and his quests, but I didn't design the overall demon dimension (I'm blanking on its name now -- the Endless Gate?) itself.

I haven't played the game enough to know if the criticisms are right, but I did have a similar reaction. I guess the way I would put it is that the weirdness was in perpetual ALL CAPS. There wasn't enough normalcy for the capitalization to enhance meaning and reader reaction; instead, it reduced meaning and flattened reader reaction. "The man's fingernail had the curious characteristic of photosensitive cells, a kind of primitive eye on his fingertip, though of course each finger had two tips, not one, and there were eleven fingers on each hand, and several hands on the arm (there was only one), and indeed this was no a man, properly speaking, but simply an arm emerging, tongue-like, from a giant mouth that split an otherwise smooth sphere of flesh, and when the mouth spoke (a tricky affair, for an arm is no tongue), it did so in a language that defied comprehension, and at such an unpleasant volume, that one might have hoped it could communicate with sign language instead -- but sadly its photosensory digits were used only for the occasional suggestive wink."* I mean, it's fun to write silliness like that, but it's only silliness, and if every man you have has some kind of goofy fingers, the joke starts to wear thin. Or, put otherwise, it's more farce/comedy along the lines of Hitchhiker's Guide (even Vance, who is my idol, played it mostly straight) -- it's certainly not uncanniness. The whole thing with Wolfe and Harrison (Viriconium) is that the ornate language is used to conceal normalcy, and the places where things are truly abnormal stand out against a backdrop that is otherwise fairly conventional -- cannibalism shocks in Shadow of the Torturer because while there is some weirdness to the moral dimensions of that universe, they are actually pretty humdrum conventional; if it were a world in which everything is permitted and a guy never just sat down for a roast with his family, the cannibalism wouldn't shock at all.

Anyway, I'm rambling at this point, but mostly just saying I agree with you. But if TTON shot and missed the mark, it must have really missed if what it hit was "inoffensive" and "effortless," since I assume the intention was to challenge the player mentally (with the quantity, style, and content of the writing). The notion of someone breezing through what I wrote as if he were reading Dragonlance is crushing; I'd rather have them throw it away as shitty wannabe Wolfe.

(* This was just stream of consciousness, nothing like that is actually in TTON, as far as I know.)

 

[BEvers]

I don't know if it's lack of engagement, or fatigue, or maybe a high incidence of asocial tendencies among the fanbase, but I've noticed that there isn't a lot of specific discussion of Torment's plot and characters to be found. Perhaps it's hard to fully engage with what is effectively a short story collection (or "long dialogue collection") held together by a bare-bones main plot.

As for myself, I played the game about a year ago and have forgotten nearly everything about it. My most enduring memory is that the modifiers in Inifere's dream interpretation sequence were accidentally reversed, so giving him the obviously wrong and ignorant answers is the only way to persuade him that you truly understand his soul. Maybe the game needed more humor

 

[BING XI LAO]

Now that I think of it - the Numenera setting was not made for T:ToN, but is mainly a tabletop roleplaying game that (IF I remember correctly) avoids detailed, hard explanation of the actual setting because it's supposed to be merely setup for a DM to make stuff up for sessions on the fly. The setting is designed for random encounters. I think? Or maybe the guys that made it also have a bad attitude towards setting-writing.
If so, why on earth did the people in charge of ToN decide to hold true to that lack of concrete setting description and extreme unrelatedness of everything, when they were writing a story-heavy cRPG? It makes sense (though is still not to my taste) for a tabletop game with lots of weird encounters, but it is horribly inappropriate for a single-player story-centric game.

I haven't played the game enough to know if the criticisms are right, but I did have a similar reaction. I guess the way I would put it is that the weirdness was in perpetual ALL CAPS. There wasn't enough normalcy for the capitalization to enhance meaning and reader reaction; instead, it reduced meaning and flattened reader reaction.

Exactly!

The whole thing with Wolfe and Harrison (Viriconium) is that the ornate language is used to conceal normalcy, and the places where things are truly abnormal stand out against a backdrop that is otherwise fairly conventional -- cannibalism shocks in Shadow of the Torturer because while there is some weirdness to the moral dimensions of that universe, they are actually pretty humdrum conventional; if it were a world in which everything is permitted and a guy never just sat down for a roast with his family, the cannibalism wouldn't shock at all.

I read Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series recently, great stuff.
My favourite part was the run-in he has with Typhon the former Autarch. Severian turns against Typhon due to (among other things) Severian being sympathetic to the New Sun and the Conciliator, whereas Typhon mentions that he would seek to enslave both if he could.

Now, the two characters have two things they're both familiar with; the title of Autarch, and the theological concept of the New Sun. If a similar encounter had occured in Numenera, Typhon's title would have been something mentioned perhaps once elsewhere if at all, and their theological views would be unrelated to each other. But at least Piaton, Typhon's second head who speechlessly beseeched Severian to kill them, would still have made it in.

I guess what enrages me about Numenera is - the writers clearly ranged from mediocre to good, but it was all so uncohesive. I think I subconsciously felt as if you writers were all taunting me - saying ''See, we can write interesting stuff, we could write a good setting and a good plot, but instead we've made you wade through hundreds of thousands of overwritten walls-o-text with no payoff. Get trolled xd!"

Anyway, I'm rambling at this point, but mostly just saying I agree with you. But if TTON shot and missed the mark, it must have really missed if what it hit was "inoffensive" and "effortless," since I assume the intention was to challenge the player mentally (with the quantity, style, and content of the writing). The notion of someone breezing through what I wrote as if he were reading Dragonlance is crushing; I'd rather have them throw it away as shitty wannabe Wolfe.

(* This was just stream of consciousness, nothing like that is actually in TTON, as far as I know.)

I suppose daveyarsegallent's indifference (someone remind me how to tag people?) is because of what you said - "There wasn't enough normalcy for the capitalization to enhance meaning and reader reaction; instead, it reduced meaning and flattened reader reaction."

Also, it just struck me how similar Gene Wolfe's Urth is - as a dilapidated world with many hidden mysteries and strange names - to both Numenera and Planescape. I suppose it's a big inspiration for the settings and for writers such as yourself?

 

[The_Mask]

I haven't played the game enough to know if the criticisms are right, but I did have a similar reaction.

You don't strike me as a person that likes to waste his or anyone else's time, so when you say something like this, as a person that worked on it, I can't help but think:

"If he worked on it, and didn't find interest to beat it, then why should I?"

By no means I am blaming you, nor my tone has any lack of appreciation or respect for your work on it, it is just the first thought that I went to - and I am sure I am not the only one.

 

[MRY]

Now that I think of it - the Numenera setting was not made for T:ToN, but is mainly a tabletop roleplaying game that (IF I remember correctly) avoids detailed, hard explanation of the actual setting because it's supposed to be merely setup for a DM to make stuff up for sessions on the fly. The setting is designed for random encounters. I think? Or maybe the guys that made it also have a bad attitude towards setting-writing.

IMO, this is the least of the complaints one could lodge at Numenera as a system. As I mentioned somewhere back earlier in this thread, the bigger problem is that it's a quasi-narrativist design that depends on the DM to make the mechanical rules interesting.

If so, why on earth did the people in charge of ToN decide to hold true to that lack of concrete setting description and extreme unrelatedness of everything, when they were writing a story-heavy cRPG?

There was actually some very admirable loyalty to the setting. Somewhat insanely so, as when an obvious typo in the description of marteling whales became a diktat in my handling of the whale Mere. It's one of my favorite absurdities -- the description says "The largest marteling ever recorded was more than 300 feet (46 m) long from head to its multi-finned tail." AFAIK, Numenera doesn't have a 6.5 feet per meter conversion rate, but if it does, that's about as good an ALLCAPS as you're going to get. But better yet, "Cities of all sorts grow on the backs of martelings." As I pointed out to my handler, nuclear submarines are typically longer than the longest marteling (per this description) and can barely fit 130 people. The Titanic was three times as long, and carried 3,000 (no city, that). But no, I was bound to the measurements. I admire that Vhailorian commitment.

My favourite part was the run-in he has with Typhon the former Autarch.

It's a great scene, but you left out my favorite detail, was that Severian kills the engrafted head with a punch to the face that the body doesn't block because even though the conscious mind of the engrafted head controls the body, the autonomic reactions still belong to the original head. Wonderful touch.

I think I subconsciously felt as if you writers were all taunting me - saying ''See, we can write interesting stuff, we could write a good setting and a good plot, but instead we've made you wade through hundreds of thousands of overwritten walls-o-text with no payoff. Get trolled xd!"

No one was trying to troll you, unless I complete misread people's attitudes. I think there was a tremendous commitment to having a good setting and a good plot, and to have payoff behind the walls of text. Doesn't change the outcome.

Also, it just struck me how similar Gene Wolfe's Urth is - as a dilapidated world with many hidden mysteries and strange names - to both Numenera and Planescape. I suppose it's a big inspiration for the settings and for writers such as yourself?

No, it's not a big inspiration to me, although I adore the books and Wolfe. A much stronger influence to me within TTON was Viriconium. And Vance is a much bigger overall influence on me that Wolfe. I'm not good enough to be Wolfe; I'm not good enough to be Vance or Harrison, either, but when you shoot at those targets and miss, it's not as catastrophic.

 

[MRY]

I haven't played the game enough to know if the criticisms are right, but I did have a similar reaction.

You don't strike me as a person that likes to waste his or anyone else's time, so when you say something like this, as a person that worked on it, I can't help but think:

"If he worked on it, and didn't find interest to beat it, then why should I?"

By no means I am blaming you, nor my tone has any lack of appreciation or respect for your work on it, it is just the first thought that I went to - and I am sure I am not the only one.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think I mentioned earlier in the thread that my computer couldn't run the game at more than a few frames per second, at best, though I could've upgrade my computer. I don't really play games much anymore these days. And, if anything, my having worked on the game was a minus, not a plus: for one, I knew all of the surprises in the plot; for another, it is impossible for me to look at something I created (other than my children) and not focus on the flaws.

 

[BING XI LAO]

My favourite part was the run-in he has with Typhon the former Autarch.

It's a great scene, but you left out my favorite detail, was that Severian kills the engrafted head with a punch to the face that the body doesn't block because even though the conscious mind of the engrafted head controls the body, the autonomic reactions still belong to the original head. Wonderful touch.

It's quibbling, but Typhon does block, being faster and stronger than Severian - but he reflexively protects his own face, not Piaton's. Severian anticipated that and therefore punched Piaton's head instead of Typhon's. But maybe you understood that anyway and I misunderstood.

 

[MRY]

Ah, did I get it backwards? The engrafted head makes the body block the engrafted head, so the body's head gets hit and killed and the body dies? It's been over 20 years since I read it. Shame that I should forget the very detail I purported to like so much...

 

[Kem0sabe]

The most accurate description of this shit is: "limp dick writers trying to group masturbate like John lenon and Paul McCartney but without the imagination necessary to do it without watching porn"

 

[BING XI LAO]

Ah, did I get it backwards? The engrafted head makes the body block the engrafted head, so the body's head gets hit and killed and the body dies? It's been over 20 years since I read it. Shame that I should forget the very detail I purported to like so much...

Yeah, Typhon chooses to block, but he quite understandably protects his own head, not Piaton's; Severian sees this coming and kills them by striking Piaton's head not Typhon's. But either version is very cool, for much the same reasons.

 

[Swigen]

My favourite part was the run-in he has with Typhon the former Autarch.

It's a great scene, but you left out my favorite detail, was that Severian kills the engrafted head with a punch to the face that the body doesn't block because even though the conscious mind of the engrafted head controls the body, the autonomic reactions still belong to the original head. Wonderful touch.

It's quibbling, but Typhon does block, being faster and stronger than Severian - but he reflexively protects his own face, not Piaton's. Severian anticipated that and therefore punched Piaton's head instead of Typhon's. But maybe you understood that anyway and I misunderstood.

But you both left out my favorite part which is Typhon “nursing his erection” whilst conversing with Severian.

 

[MRY]

Well, the meaning actually flips -- in some ways, it's about the elite who in their self-serving arrogance and greed for power ultimately leave themselves defenseless.

 

[MRY]

And with that, Swigen and Kem0sabe unite the strands that were threatening to fray in this thread.

 

[Chippy]

I still haven't played this despite backing it for a considerable amount. I'm afraid playing it might damage my soul.

 

[BEvers]

Most likely it's just going to bore you.

 

[BING XI LAO]

Well, the meaning actually flips -- in some ways, it's about the elite who in their self-serving arrogance and greed for power ultimately leave themselves defenseless.

I am gradually realising what a vulgar person I am. This symbolism didn't occur to me at all - and I found the fifth book, where all the theological/cosmological themes take centre stage, relatively boring.

 

[Mikeal]

The biggest problem with Numa-Numa plot is lack of surprise. Aligern and Callistage plot dump you at the beginning and for the bigger part there is nothing new to learn. I would prefer Rhin to be first companion. Both Valley of the Fallen Heroes and Castoff Sanctuay were short and meaningless and ungly and unimaginatice as hell (well at least Dead Gate Cult quest was pretty good, I also expected CS to be full blown hub not something where I crash for 15 minutes). And finally Sorrow should be something more than

Spoiler

ancient guarding mechanism

, something like living personification of universe reaction to Tides abusement by daddy god and his kiddies. There also should be more Tides mechanics for MC in the game, something like pigments in The Void or souls in MOTB. Hero usage of Tides powers could direct plot and Sorrow behavior, and change monster's stats and possible endings.

 

[UnknownBro]

This game is shit. </Thread>

 

[Life of the Party]

Typhon was a monarch, not an Autarch. The first Autarch was Ymar.

"You think that I am the Autarch? No."

"Yet you are changed from the man I met before."

"You yourself gave me the alzabo, and the life of the Chatelaine Thecla. I loved her. Did you think that to thus ingest her essence would leave me unaffected? She is with me always, so that I am two, in this single body. Yet I am not the Autarch, who in one body is a thousand."

Vodalus answered nothing, but half closed his eyes as though he were afraid I would see their fire. There was no sound but the lapping of the river water and the much-muted voices of the little knot of armed men and women, who talked among themselves a hundred paces off and glanced from time to time at us. A macaw shrieked, fluttering from one tree to another.

"I would still serve you," I told Vodalus, "if you would permit it." I was not certain it was a lie until the words had left my lips, and then I was bewildered in mind, seeking to understand how those words, which would have been true in the past for Thecla and for Severian too, were now false for me.

" 'The Autarch, who in one body is a thousand,' " Vodalus quoted me. "That is correct, but how few of us know it."

The boy carried in my food, saying, "Even if I only heard you once, I learned a lot from you, Severian. I'll be sorry to see you go."

I asked whether I was to be executed.

As he set down my tray, he glanced over his shoulder at the journeyman guard leaning against the wall. "No, it's not that. They're just going to take you somewhere else. A flier's coming for you today, with Praetorians."

"A flier?"

"Because it can fly over the rebel army, I suppose. Have you ever ridden in one? I've only watched them taking off and landing. It must be terrific."

"It is. The first time I flew in one, we were shot down. I've ridden in them often since, and even learned to operate them myself; but the truth is that I've always been terrified.

The boy nodded. "I would be too, but I'd like to try it." Awkwardly, he offered his hand. "Good luck, Severian, wherever they take you."

I clasped it; it was dirty but dry, and seemed very small. "Reechy," I said.

"That's not your real name, is it?"

He grinned. "No. It means I stink."

"Not to my nose."

"It's not cold yet," he explained, "so I can go swimming. In the winter I don't have much chance to wash, and they work me pretty hard."

"Yes, I remember. But your real name is..."

"Ymar." He withdrew his hand. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Because when I touched you, I saw the flash of gems about your head. Ymar, I think I'm beginning to spread out. To spread through time — or rather, to be aware that I am spread through time, since all of us are. How strange that you and I should meet like this."

I hesitated for a moment, my voice bewildered among so many swirling thoughts. "Or perhaps it isn't really strange at all. Something governs our destinies, surely. Something higher even than the Hierogrammates."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ymar, someday you will become the ruler. You'll be the monarch, although I don't think you'll call yourself that. Try to rule for Urth, and not just in Urth's name as so many have. Rule justly, or at least as justly as circumstances permit."

He said, "You're teasing me, aren't you?"

"No," I told him. "Even though I know no more than that you will rule, and someday sit disguised beneath a plane tree. But those things I do know."

 

[Mr. Hiver]

If so, why on earth did the people in charge of ToN decide to hold true to that lack of concrete setting description and extreme unrelatedness of everything, when they were writing a story-heavy cRPG? It makes sense (though is still not to my taste) for a tabletop game with lots of weird encounters, but it is horribly inappropriate for a single-player story-centric game.

I guess what enrages me about Numenera is - the writers clearly ranged from mediocre to good, but it was all so uncohesive. I think I subconsciously felt as if you writers were all taunting me - saying ''See, we can write interesting stuff, we could write a good setting and a good plot, but instead we've made you wade through hundreds of thousands of overwritten walls-o-text with no payoff. Get trolled xd!"

First, sadly its the result of those devs and whoever was "leading them" being convinced that precisely such approach is great as it creates a "mysterious setting with a lot of mysteries and ancient secrets and awesome things that are...err... mysterious!"
Which is the main schtick Numenera pnp setting uses to simply have any fucking thing you want or could ever imagine as a part of it. Its the "everything x everything" setting by itself, which of course only results in making it a nonsensical mess.

Secondly, the lead director was fired midway through for reasons unknown and replaced by a company drone. He was a kind of a guy who maybe could have kept it all coherent at least to some extent. That version was more or less scuttled, with probably some parts stapled into the new version and we got the result.

And of course, resources from kickstarter were diverted into other inxile games.

To me, that's much worse than what I understood to be the main knock on it, which was that it was extremely rough and uneven, extremely dense and impenetrable, but occasionally good.

Dense and impenetrable are descriptors only most dense players could use for it.

It was cheap, nonsensical, badly written and designed incoherent mess. There were some instances of things that looked interesting here and there, but that never really went anywhere except into that overall incoherent mess.
It started with one of the worst intros in history of gaming and pretty much continued like that.