Game News Tower of Time, Early Access Release

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Event Horizon; Tower of Time

Event Horizon, a small Indie developer from Poland (the land that gave us Mirek Klose and The Witcher) released their game Tower of Time on Steam Early Access.

Tower of Time is a classic RPG with a unique real-time combat system where tactics are as important as equipment. Explore the Tower, buried underground for millennia, and uncover the history of times long gone and the mystery of why your land is dying.​

Here's the trailer:

​

The game has orsum graffix and some additional features:

• Engaging story – set in a world where technology met magic with devastating consequences. Hundreds of lore books and scattered pieces of information slowly reveal the history of Artara as the protagonist approaches his fate.
• Find secret locations, cleverly hidden in the environment. Travel through hand-crafted levels where every single place is carefully designed. Discover forgotten scrolls and guess their powers based on the cryptic description. Meet various NPCs, some native to the world and some coming from… strange places.
• Advanced combat system – unique real-time action with a slow-time feature, where each match is played on one of many separate tactical maps and where even most powerful champions can fail without refined tactics. Plan ahead and position your party accordingly. Use slow-time to react to new threats or negate enemy skills. Converse your magic energy and survive all enemy waves. No two encounters are ever the same.
• There are seven classes to choose from, and your party can be adjusted at will and anytime, depending on the challenges you face. Each champion has unique skills that can be upgraded and re-trained at will. Those upgrades often change the nature of the skills. For example, your Summon Elemental skill can either be a durable melee Ent with high health and armor or a fragile Water Elemental with devastating range attack. (In Early Access six champions are available, as the seventh joins your party at lower levels).
• New character progression system: there is no experience to gain. Instead, discover ancient knowledge to unlock new skills and carefully design your characters. Each character could be turned into a powerful and durable attacker or a skill-based champion.
• Defeat powerful elite enemies wielding diverse skills and spells. Assess their strengths and weaknesses carefully to succeed. Complete combat challenges for item rewards and unique enchanting recipes, or just to test your new party setup.
• Gather crafting crystals of various types to create items of different power. Discover ancient enchanting recipes that, while very expensive, can change the nature of the combat, granting regeneration aura or immunity to special effects.
• Upgrade your city as the main training/equipment hub and repository of all the lore you find.

Thanks, Goral.

 

[Goral]

This guy has posted about 10h of gameplay on YouTube.

Tower of Time is one these rare indie games that has amazing graphics, music and story that I feel is on par with some of the larger companies. Each floor of the tower has a theme to it, and that, mixed with the music makes the game feel very atmospheric. The story is one of the strongest aspects of this game and you will get most of it through the main play but will find little extra tidbits of story hidden throughout each floor of the tower. There are more than just story hidden around the tower though, there are also hidden treasure stashes and some secrets to uncover.

Combat in this game is much more than just using the best spells and blowing your oppenents away. There are tactics that should be considered on each group of enemies and different enemies have different weaknesses. It will take more than just the best gear to overcome each encounter. You have to plan out how to get the most out of each spell/skill you have at your disposal. I feel this kind of combat is rare in most RPGs and I like how challenging some of the fights can be. But even if you fail the game lets you restart that fight again without having to go back to the last time you saved.

There is also a crafting system in the game that is simple but effective for gearing out your champions. You will get gear drops from treasure chests and encounters. You will also get crafting crystals which can be used to craft more gear. Old gear you no longer want can be disassebled to gain more crafting crystals to make more gear.

Overall this game is really good and I am looking forward to seeing it through to completion.

If you would like to see gameplay of this game I have a full playthrough playlist on YouTube that you can check out here

On the other hand Pretty refunded it after 20 minutes but maybe he just doesn't like hack'n'slash games.

 

[Darth Roxor]

POLAND!!!!

 

[mindfields]

RTWP trash.

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

Is there going to be c&c in it?

 

[Drowed]

I doubt it.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

It looks like a H&S game. Sorry, will pass.

 

[luj1]

Perhaps core mechanics are good. But the art direction is too colorful and infantile for my refined taste.

 

[Jarmaro]

Won a free key so I can give you my impressions from 5h

- Story indeed is interesting, although dialogs are weak, characters say obvious stuff and repeat themselves many times
- Locations seems nice, but you can see it's low budget game
- Leveling up by paying for training, beceause as our champions are best in the lands experience won't make them better... Why training does it then, is unknown to me.
- To train them, we must find blueprints to upgrade buildings in city outside the tower.
- I am not experienced in party rpgs, but 4 attributes system (might,speed,mastery,life) seems too simplistic.
- Skills are weird too, our first champion is a warrior but we cannot "build" him to be fighter as none of his skills do dmg.
- Strange diffrences in difficulity, first floor was so fucking easy that at some point I just gathered my champions at one place and went hanging laundry. No need for me. On the second floor however I could barely make it.
- All boss fights are: There's on tough guy, trash mobs will spawn till you kill him. So I basically just point every one to attack him and don't give a fuck about anything. Easy
- You are exploring tower normally on map, you fight by walking to monsters standing on the map(like in old final fantasy). Well, actaully if you walk close enough then they are approaching you and you can't move. Then you get fight map.
- You can choose where you want your party to be before fight starts but so far it seemed pointless as there were no real advantage by using enviroment.
- Then the Tower Defence starts. It's literally it. Waves of trash mobs spawn from ~3 portals in number of 2-4 units. To win you have to to kill around 30. Amount, not quality. It's so fucking boring. I'd prefer to just explore tower.
- UI in combat is bad. Hard time clicking on champions and enemies. I discovered by accident that you can use q w e r to use skills, for some reason it doesn't appear on skill portrait.
- YOU CAN'T SELECT ALL CHAMPIONS BY CLICKING MOUSE AND THEN SELECTING THEM ALL. YOU NEED TO CLICK AND MOVE EVERY ONE MANUALY. LIKE IN FUCKING WARCRAFT 1. IT'S 2017 FFS.
- On the exploration map if you move mouse around enviroments sometimes you get "treausre" text. Nothing highlights. Only a text. If you click you get 4-9 gold. Sometimes rare crystal. There are dozens of such "treasures". Weird.
- You learn story by reading journals.... or by cutscenes. God I missed cutscenes in gaming. The real ones, animated movies with voiced dialogs(well, artworks with dialogs but still)

Of course it's only Early Acces, but many of these things most probably won't change and will be implemented into final version of the game.

 

[holla_cabezas_de_mierda]

RTWP trash.

It's not even RTWP, there's no pause. Only a slowdown.

I am a hater of rt games for the most part, but I gave another game 'Red Soltice' which has a slow down feature and I actually like it. It slows it down enough that you can make actual choices with all your characters, this looks similar so I think I will give it a try.


edit: after reading jamaro's review I dont think I will be trying it after all.

The tower defense mechanic (and I can see in the preview where it shows % of monsters killed) is lame, the character system sounds too simplistic and boss fights and re-spawning stuff sounds bad too...these core mechanics are unlikely to change much, so I doubt I will be trying it out unless people start praising it after release enough for me to take notice.

 

[Goral]

I am not experienced in party rpgs, but 4 attributes system (might,speed,mastery,life) seems too simplistic.

That's how it is in Diablo.

 

[Jarmaro]

Oh, I forgot to mention that this game despite being polish doesn't have polish language. I didn't expect them to make polsih voices, but there should be polish subtitles at least.
Have to say somethign about game's optimalization too, game doesn't look even slightly good enough to have such requirements, my computer runs many games without problems, but there I barely get 45~ fps on Very Low settings. Hope this will change before release.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

No TB. No Buy.
Sorry Potatoes.

 

[toweroftime]

Hello All. This is dev - i will not counter anything said, we are quite small studio, graphics is not AAA - we never pretended to be one.

However, when you comment on combat system we have - at least watch a vid posted on steam page - we didn't do a shining trailer - instead asked one of the streamers who bought the game at the moment of launch and that we observed to get real player experience - to record one of his combat challenge and send it to us.

it is real-time with slow. Slow - doesn't kill the dynamism of the combat as pause does.
Skills - well, watch the vid. There is no single build - the guy in the vid used traps creatively. You can go for summons. Or melee aoe (cleave), or hard cc.
If you have problems with difficulty - just change it, we have five levels - from story to epic. We don't want to do another button smasher, but do a game where epic difficulty is what it says: epic.
So far, player's reception has been very positive - again, check for yourself.

Anyway, I will stop from time to time, so if you have any questions, I'll be happy to clarify why we did the game in this way, instead of just doing another divine divinity clone on low budget.

Cheers, Dev

 

[Goral]

So far, player's reception has been very positive

Not from all: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/tower-of-time.117040/#post-5204301

 

[toweroftime]

So far, player's reception has been very positive

Not from all: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/tower-of-time.117040/#post-5204301

Yes, I know, I have read the comments.

I am talking about those who purchased the game and gave us a review on steam. Again, I don't want to argue with anyone here - everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion. You don't think our new class progression and class development is attractive, as it does not follow genre-standards: sure - cannot argue with that.

I just ask people interested to spend a little time and to to check how actual players play combat.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

that game of thrones rpg also had slow instead of pause, can't say i liked that too much

 

[ERYFKRAD]

that game of thrones rpg also had slow instead of pause, can't say i liked that too much

It worked ok, though the dual wielding class was op as fuck.

 

[imweasel]

This looks quite interesting. I might buy it.

(Our Polish friends also deserve some potato for resisting Merkel's insanity and the Marxist EU)

 

[PrettyDeadman]

See, that's something that matters a lot to you but not to me. It's not like everyone has the same tastes, or that gaming is a popularity contest.

Give the guy a break.

 

[toweroftime]

Just to be clear - we do not argue with the feedback but accept it - and we will do what we can do improve the game based on players's experience.
We just released our first major patch - where a lot of the comments regarding combat were addressed - from one of the posts above and also shared with other players via our in-game tool.

 

[Darkforge]

Toweroftime

You are generally going to have a rough time around here promoting your game, because anything that's not turn based is almost universally reviled. (when it comes to RPG's of this nature I number among them as well)
Personally for myself however at this point as long as it's not RTWP a game-play style I have grown to loathe. I might give it a chance. Slow motion at least peaks my interest enough to see how it's been executed.