Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[J_C]

TheSixthAxis 5/10 (somebody's not getting a review copy of BT4)

What’s Bad:

• Framerate drops and stuttering
• A number of crashes and freezing
• Opposing characters are slow in battle
• The Last Castoff’s voicework is poor

Wow, so nothing gamebraking, and the first two is probably not a general problem just happens for some people. Yet it's 5/10.

however, it’s a game that is currently fundamentally broken on consoles.

Oh... I'm sorry, please continue.

 

[Infinitron]

Gaming Respawn 85/100
SA Gamer 9.4/10

 

[Jarpie]

Most of the reviews seems to be very positive, I wonder how much of it is "I gotta give this a good review not to look dumb or unsophisticated", like many film critics giving high praises to films like The Artist because the film is black & white silent film made in modern times.

 

[Infinitron]

Here's a short interview I missed: http://www.rpgsite.net/feature/5339...ra-interview-developing-a-modern-cult-classic

Torment: Tides of Numenera Interview: Developing a Modern Cult Classic
by Bryan Vitale , 27 February, 2017

Originally expected to deliver in February 2014, Torment: Tides of Numenera has been a long time coming. The spiritual successor to 1999's Planescape: Torment has a tough billing to live up to. We talked to Creative Lead Colin McComb and Designer Thomas Beekers about the history of developing Tides of Numenera and a few things fans should expect from the long awaited followup.

How was the idea of following up on Planescape: Torment born and when was it first apparent that it would be possible using a tool like kickstarter?

[Colin] After the success of the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter, Chris Avellone, Steve Dengler, and I had talked about trying to license Planescape to make a new game back in 2012. Unfortunately (I thought at the time) it didn’t happen. Still, I held out hope. After I started working on Wasteland 2, Brian called me and said he’d registered the Torment trademark, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in helping lead that. I told him the greatest concern I had was that I wouldn’t be equal to making something anywhere close to Planescape: Torment.

After some thought, though, I realized it was something I really, really wanted to do. From there, it was a matter of assembling the early team (Adam Heine, Kevin Saunders, Thomas Beekers, and me), and getting our materials ready for the Kickstarter.



How was it decided that you would use Monte Cook's Numenera universe for the game?

[Colin] I’ve known Monte for well over two decades now, starting from when we worked together at TSR Inc. He asked me to be a part of his alpha testing group for Numenera, and I had a great time. After Brian asked me to be a part of Torment, Adam Heine and I started talking about various story and world ideas, and while our ideas were cool, the direction we were taking was not just an epic world-saving story, but an epic creation-saving story.

We scrapped that and started talking about different worlds we could build, and that’s when I realized that we didn’t need to build our own world. I asked Monte if he’d be interested in licensing, put him in touch with Brian Fargo, and the rest was history.

What would you say sets apart Torment: ToN from other similar titles like Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, and Divinity Original Sin?

[Thomas] You’re definitely right that there’s a lot tying these games together. Torment is even on the same engine as Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny! There’s a few things that make Torment unique: for one, it’s set on Earth a billion years in the future. It’s a science-fantasy setting where technology replaces the magic of the other games.

And like Planescape: Torment before it, Torment: Tides of Numenera has a unique focus on narrative and literary quality, with a team of talented writers crafting a story of over 1.2 million words. And finally, our approach to combat is also different. We decided to go for fewer combat encounters, but to carefully hand-craft each to be a unique encounter, where players can take very different approaches to them.

Do you feel any sort of extra pressure following up on a cult classic like Planescape: Torment?

[Colin] Oh, naturally. You always want to be respectful when addressing a classic, and if I didn’t think we could have done the original justice with this Torment, I would have withdrawn from the project. We looked at PST carefully to identify what gave it such a strong following, and from that analysis we created the four pillars we used to design the rest of the game around.

What's one hint would you give someone not familiar with Torment or this style of RPGS if they were interested in playing this?

[Thomas] Just one? I guess the main thing would be: don’t instantly reload on failure. One of our design mantras was “Make failure interesting.” Torment accounts for failure in different ways, and sometimes failing or even dying can open up a new path for the player, rather than just be a Call to reload.



How did the decision to release the title on consoles come about? We've seen similar games like Divinity get ported to consoles but Pillars of Eternity (and obviously, Planescape: Torment) are PC exclusive.

[Thomas] It was a decision that came fairly late in the development process – all throughout pre-production and most of production we developed Torment as a PC game. But deep in our development cycle we partnered with Techland Publishing. With their help we made the decision to port the game to Xbox One and PlayStation 4. At that point our production timeline was pretty set, but we also knew localization for the PC game would take months and months, meaning we could work on the console ports while that work was ongoing. It didn’t end up affecting our timeline or development cycle, which was very fortuitous!

Who's was your favorite companion to write, is it the same as your favorite companion to use in game?

[Colin] As a father, I have experience answering this question! I love them all equally, just in different ways. Aligern is the grouchy dad, Matkina is the damaged young adult, Callistege is the groundbreaking explorer, Tybir the suave speaker, Rhin the cautious, questionable child, and Erritis the brash and impulsive youth… they all have their charms, depending on my mood, and they all offer different tactics in game.

 

[Lady_Error]

TheSixthAxis 5/10 (somebody's not getting a review copy of BT4)

What’s Good:

• The lore and world are interesting
• The Bloom is a really unique location
• A load of quests have good stories
• Battle system is decent

What’s Bad:

• Framerate drops and stuttering
• A number of crashes and freezing
• Opposing characters are slow in battle
• The Last Castoff’s voicework is poor

Despite all of the good work done with the game’s characters, lore, gameplay and artwork, it is also a game that’s mired in technical issues on PS4 and in our brief testing on Xbox One.

 

[Excidium II]

Most of the reviews seems to be very positive, I wonder how much of it is "I gotta give this a good review not to look dumb or unsophisticated", like many film critics giving high praises to films like The Artist because the film is black & white silent film made in modern times.

probably most of them

 

[Infinitron]

Game Informer 8.5/10
CGMagazine 9.5/10

Current Metacritic is 87 but many reviews have yet to be added: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/torment-tides-of-numenera

 

[TT1]

Wow, Rock, Paper, Shotgun did a lot of reviews: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/02/28/torment-tides-of-numenera-review/

 

[veevoir]

Doesn't work good on consoles?

Feel the pain of shitty ports, peasants!

Also may mean not a lot of resources were wasted on ports - or at least not as much as codex have feared

 

[Infinitron]

And the one you've all been waiting for:

Rock Paper Shotgun

Wot I Think – Torment: Tides Of Numenera (for Planescape veterans)
Alec Meer on February 28th, 2017 at 8:00 am.

You know Planescape: Torment well, and chose to hear whether Torment: Tides of Numenera will betray your trust or not rather than to have its nature defined first.

Please note that certain key elements of the game are skipped over here, which is because they are covered in more detail in the Torment newcomers review here. I did not wish to repeat myself unduly in an already long article. If you are a Planescape veteran, I do encourage reading both pieces. After all, you rather like reading, don’t you?

We expect certain things of a game with ‘Torment’ in the title – expectations that have mounted rather than faded over the years.

We expect striking, sinister architecture and weird creatures of uncertain intent.

We expect extensive excavation of moral grey areas.

We expect decisions to agonise over.

We expect to barely raise a fist in anger, unless it is our specific choice to.

We expect words, not spectacle, to do the heaviest lifting.

We expect a mystery that unfurls into existential questioning rather than neat resolution.

We expect to feel that we have barely scratched the surface of possibility, and to find that our journey is fascinatingly, unpredictably different when we start it over.

We expect to end the tale with mingled satisfaction and despair.

We expect Adahn.

We expect what, more or less, Torment: Tides of Numenera gives us.

By which I mean: relax, it’s good news.

I should say first that Numenera feels more constructed than did Planescape. It is very clearly created to give fans exactly what they demand. Because of this there is a palpable sense, at times, that its creators carefully reverse-engineered its revered 1999 predecessor, perhaps even working from an inviolable set of commandments about what makes a Torment game a Torment game.

Sometimes this does robe Numenera in a certain scent of artificiality, where by contrast Planescape felt organic, this shiny new mind unexpectedly breaking through the confines of the roleplaying game structures of the time. Only a little, though. Though once in a while there’s a slight clunk as it blatantly reaches to hit expected beats, in the main Numenera is exactly the game it needed to be.

Steam tells me one playthrough took me 36 hours, but at least some of those was spent reloading savegames to explore alternative outcomes for the sake of this review. If you plan to play this as a conversation- rather than action-led character, as I did, teasing out every thread you can find, as I did, expect to end up with something similarly.

However, I am relatively certain that one could blow through the campaign in a third of that time if side-quests were neglected and violence favoured. I recommend against this, not from a pacifistic point of view, but because Numenera is such a deft cat’s cradle, with even some of its most seemingly irrelevant fetch quests and favours containing ties to the bigger picture. In some cases this means more insight into how this place works and who your character may or may not be; in others there are moving or harrowing unexpected consequences that only reveal themselves in the long-term.

It is those consequences, more so than the central story (or, more specifically, it is those consequeces’ ties to the central story) that achieve the most emotional clout. Take your time here. Explore everything. Do nothing thoughtlessly. Know that your actions will be rewarded, or punished as the case may be, and anticipate that more than you do the conclusion per se. When the final act arrives, it does so somewhat abruptly and introduced by an oddly weak twist – my chief disappointment with the storytelling.

There is a faint sense that, perhaps, Numenera is one area shorter than it needs be. I do not know if something was left on the cutting room floor or if it is simply a wobble in execution, but I did feel suddenly railroaded into climactic events before certain strands of the story and world (both deeply intertwined) had seemed fully teased out. This is not to say the absolute conclusion is weak – quite the opposite in fact, due to its remarkably thoughtful links to your choices across the course of the game, and it has scope to play out significantly differently because of that – but rather that the moment of movement into the final phase is a little jarring.

The other disappointment (I’ll move back to praise shortly, fear not) for me was the central character. It is here that I proved most unable to push Planescape memories and attendant expectations aside. Its protagonist, The Nameless One, was immediately memorable, both in his forlorn yet determined nature and his half-monstrous, half-tragic appearance. He was walking sadness with a something deeply dangerous bubbling just underneath his scarred, grey-blue hide, and this concept of his being the risen dead, immortal despite his better wishes, spoke to true weirdness. He himself made it clear that we had side-stepped into a different reality of roleplaying games.

Numenera’s The Last Castoff, by contrast, is rather a more conventional figure, despite having, if anything, a more thorough and extensive backstory with profound and strange links to almost every aspect of the world they find themselves in. Though their story spirals off into singular places, in appearance, essence and even treatment by others they cleave closer to the sort of character one might find in a Dragon Age or, to be carefully specific about how this shakes out, Baldur’s Gate II.

My suspicion here is that more thought has been put into the Last Castoff’s story than has his or her personality. Clearly, a keystone of a Torment game is that the player can impress their own beliefs and attitudes into the tabula rasa that is their character, but even so – The Nameless One was very much The Nameless One. The Last Castoff could be anyone.

This story-over-personality issue is particular apparent during Numenera’s first and weakest couple of hours, which suffer from an overload of both lore and terminology (specifically, rules from the pen and paper Numenera RPG setting this game is based upon). My heart sank as I felt as though any possible points of connection with this world were being drowned out by someone’s uncensored fiction and presumed knowledge about an external game from a different medium. There were walls everywhere I turned, and I felt exhausted by the huge array of new NPCs waiting to gabble lore at me in every new area or building I entered.

My fear was that the whole game would be like this – that the successful Kickstarter had given the writers a blank cheque to do anything they wanted, unfiltered, uncensored, unedited, and it had resulted in wearying drone of Ideas.

Fortunately, this was resolved by a combination of Torment narrowing its focus to characters rather than high concepts and simple perseverance enabling me to reach through the initial babble and find the threads that mattered. Those threads are long, enmeshed with the very essence of Torment’s setting, and spin off in unexpected directions, regularly causing me to question my own actions even though I largely stuck to a philanthropic, empathetic path.

Depending on the choices you make – some moral, some a matter of effort and determination – seemingly inconsequential events explode into later significance. Though the Last Castoff themselves never touched or broke my heart, a couple of the characters they came into contact with did. I can say no more, you understand. Against this, other characters – by which I mean possible party members – did feel as though they were short story first, personality second, and I left them benched unless a specific situation seemed to call for them.

A couple of companions here (and one in particular, but I shall write about them separately, later) are fit for a place in the halls of honour, but others failed to be as memorable as the cast of grotesques and unfortunates in Planescape: Torment. Everyone I met seemed to be, to all intents and purposes, a human with a tragic backstory, not the alien oddities or malevolent powderkegs of Planescape. There is no Ignus here and, most noticeably, no Morte either.

Two things here, mind you. One is that I was younger, more impressionable, more patient, more willing to be overcome when I played Torment. Characters that might seem less compelling now, after these tired eyes have seen, heard and read so much, were fresh and exciting then. The other is that, of course, I cannot say with any certainty that I have not missed something – someone. I look forwards to secrets I had not even guessed at being revealed.

When I hear about those secrets, they will doubtless turn out to be new vertebrae along Numenera’s long and twisting backbone, not diversions off to one side. The dawning realisation, as I played, of how precise this initially random-seeming weave was, is why I am in awe of what has been accomplished here.

The central reason for Tides of Numenera’s being is a riposte to RPG convention – that this should be a game where story, and exploration of what that story means, is of infinitely greater importance than spectacle and action. Not for this the lurid sex scene, the legendary weapon or the explosive magical lightshow. Plenty of combat (turn-based and party-based) is available if you so wish, though I found it to be rather functional and with far less fascinating consequences than talking my way out of or into trouble.

That is because Torments spends the bulk of its energies instead on connection and on meaning. I am avoiding details of the story, for that should be discovered for yourself, but suffice it to say there are many commonalities with the themes explored by Planescape. However, the question is not ‘what can change the nature of the man?’ but rather ‘what can change the nature of a world?’

The answer, of course, is ‘you.’

This is an uncommonly elaborate act of videogame storytelling. At times, it leans very close to interactive fiction, while at others it carefully explores the talk down or fight formula that characterises many latter-day RPGs. I engaged in very few battles, always preferring to find a peaceable solution – if anything, Numenera is a little too built for this, and it’s too easy to become a god of conversation. By the midpoint of the game, it was a foregone conclusion that I could succeed in any conversational gambit I chose – the question was of the consequence of that choice, not whether I could pull it off in the first place. Planescape felt like a constant gamble by contrast.

I suppose what I’m saying is that pouring all my level-up points into cerebral skills never felt like a compromise. I am broadly happy with this, because that is the game I wanted to play, and I appreciate how finely Numenera is balanced to be a game of talking and reading rather than necessarily one of violence, but I would have felt more pull to immediately play it again had there been a more palpable sense that I had missed out on things by not choosing aggression. I may be wrong there – there may be whole strands as yet unexplored. It did not feel like it, but felt instead that I would be shutting down rather than opening up possibilities. I may be wrong.

Let us talk, finally, of writing and of presentation. It is a well-written game, yes – often, the quality of the words, the play of their language, the ludicrously careful interplay of their themes, filled me with both awe and envy. Other times, it all seemed flabby, too caught up in showing off ideas and colour to find the truth of its message and the heart of its characters. While once I believed that there was no greater accomplishment for a game than to contain a novel’s worth of words, these days I respect the editor’s knife almost more than I do the writer’s pen. I would prefer Numenera shorter rather than longer.

(He says, guiltily eyeing the ‘word count: 1871’ notification below this, and conscious that he has three other sections of this ‘review’ still to write).

Nonetheless, this is a triumphant achievement in (near)mainstream games writing, and of taking fantasy themes and transforming them into the meaningfully human rather than the merely mythic. A little more small-c conservatism would have been a boon, and it takes a little too long to reach its focus, but when it does it puts most everything else in the shade.

It is frequently a beautiful game too, as should be expected. Technologically, it’s a few years behind the RPG pack, but I’ll take simplistic character models and 2D backdrops any day when they have this degree of fidelity. Though mostly static, the environments are huge and lavish, filled with beauty, oddity and sometimes gruesomeness. My chief excitement on progressing to a new section of the game is about what sights will sprawl across my screen. Once in a while, it even achieves relatively spectacular setpiece.

There is, throughout, a slight air of artificiality to Torment: Tides of Numenera. It has been made to please a specific crowd, and sometimes that shows; sometimes that comes at the expense of what matters most. This is outweighed entirely by the scale of this accomplishment. Torment is the weird, wordy, wise and wicked roleplaying game we’ve so desired during these long years of heightened spectacle. Not a total triumph, no, but close enough.

Our expectations have been met.

Torment: Tides of Numenera is released today for Windows, Mac and Linux, via Steam, GOG or direct from the devs.

 

[Tigranes]

Surprising, because the game screams "DESIGNED FOR CONSOLES" from the first minute (in terms of UI and such - can't tell yet for actual content).

Stopped for now, just wanted to check the game works properly. Beautiful room once you exit the intro sequence.

 

[veevoir]

Also, for the people eternally butthurt about crisis objctives being shown (and I am one of them) - the game options

Spoiler

 

[Alienman]

Looking forward to the Codex review

 

[Infinitron]

GameCritics
God is a Geek 9/10

 

[Excidium II]

Looking forward to the Codex review

Nobody wants to review it though.

 

[Infinitron]

There appears to be no launch trailer. Techland did so many trailers but not that? I guess the Story Trailer is the launch trailer.

 

[Mustawd]

Why such fervid interest? Torment: Tides of Numenera is the spiritual successor to the renowned 1999 role-playing game Planescape: Torment, which, alongside other classics like Baldur’s Gate, helped redefine the genre

God almighty please let this meme die. FFS...

 

[Prime Junta]

Looking forward to the Codex review

Nobody wants to review it though.

I have volunteered. If I can suffer through it. Which is something of a big if.

Spoiler

cue thunderous applause

 

[Infinitron]

Critical Hit 8.5/10
Ragequit.gr 6/10 (this one looks like it was written by a Codexer)

 

[TT1]

I have to say that Planescape Torment have a very special place in my heart. This is the game that gave me my nickname, my first tattoo and put me in a drama that no other game did. I actually LOVE this game. It changed my life.

So, I really hope that inxile has delivered a game that does justice to the original. I'm going to play this game from start to finish, give myself emotionally and give that last vote of confidence, although I already have a bad impression. I really would like to come back here and leave a good review.

 

[Alienman]

Anyone know if the retail version of the game for pc comes for Steam, or is it DRM free?

 

[Haba]

Ragequit.gr 6/10 (this one looks like it was written by a Codexer)

Outing bros on public threads? BANISH THE JEW!

• This is not Torment by any stretch of the imagination. Just comparing itself to the 1999 masterpiece, is anathema.
• Extremely poor audio-visual presentation, even by indie game standards. For a 4.5 million dollar Kickstarter, this is a disgrace.
• In spite of its rich world and lore, it utterly fails to create an emotional connection with the player or make us care about anything going on in the Last Castoff's story.
• RPG mechanisms, character development, inventory acquisition and management are at amateur levels.
• Meres and their sad, sad implementation. It would have been preferable to save some face and not include them at all.
• The bitter aftertaste in players' mouths, that this was merely a tech demo for selling the Numenera world to prospective publishers for future projects. There is no game here.
• The silently cut stretch goals of the Kickstarter campaign. In light of the project's extremely poor quality, the argument of "We wanted to focus on polish" seems even weaker. High tier backers should be furious.

Oh my, actual informed review. How can this be.

 

[Goral]

You have light brown skin

SJW detected, 1/10, time to uninstall.

 

[Infinitron]

GameWatcher 9/10
MonsterVine 3/5

 

[Infinitron]

The guy who's reviewing the game for the greek site I write in