Torment Does anyone here like Numenera?

[luj1]

In Numenera you're a cast-off vessel of some godlike dude.

Let me add that that was revealed early in one of the trailers. Another dumb move.

 

[ArchAngel]

I gave this game a good try but it was boring and suffered from many problems people in this topic already talked about. I quit after I went through that Inn where you need to investigate some shit (I never did solve that shit after talking with everyone, but I didn't even care enough to read an online walkthrough). I did do that one Crisis with little bots or something, that shit was also boring and badly done.

I told myself I might revisit the game after all the patches but there is no way I am playing from the start. I need to check if I still got my save.

 

[Saduj]

It was OK. I liked the setting and particularly some areas and quests. I liked some of the companions. But the end was just an annoying slog that I had to force myself to get through. And I fucking hated The Sorrow as a protagonist and the “because reasons” explanation of it all.

I’ve liked games that have that kind of nonsense plot where the thing is interrupting the cosmic flow of chi because reasons and unless the macguffin is brought to the celestial blah blah blah.... But if you are going to have a plot that is just a bunch of nonsense used as an excuse to create a problem that only the PC can solve, less words is better. This game went with more.

Also as others have said the checks were too easy and somewhere after the midway point character building becomes irrelevant.

 

[Commissar Draco]

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.

But that's just the thing - the setting is fantastic, weird, original, CRAZY. Doesn't that inspire some wonder in you? Some excitement? .

My Nigga whats fantastic, weird, original, CRAZY in world where there're no straight men, no white men and no wombyn which you would wish to fuck? Its like visiting any SJW infested place sure it was fun to watch first time but novelty quickly gone. There was too much text too much boring text and not enough gameplay So I abandoned this POS in middle of first town and never looked back. They should make the game based on Max Lars books or Chronicles of New Sun if they did aimed at exploring vierd and fantastic setting and world in very far future.

 

[Terra]

Fell into the same trap as Shadowrun Hong Kong for me but to a much worse extent. Reams of irrelevant diatribes about inconsequential nonsense. Made exploring areas such a chore that I never bothered to finish it. Having lots of interesting, relevant dialogue for important NPCs/companions is good (ideally spaced out across the game's critical path) but I don't need the life story of every random passerby on the street.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

I really liked some ideas, like long boss fights that keep on going in stages and have different junctions depending on choices. Unfortunately, every single boss encounter was a buggy mess. Writing was all over the show.
I liked the concepts though, just shit implementation.

 

[Oreshnik Missile]

I played this game shortly before coming to Codex. Looking back on it, the meme NPC that explicitly references Incline and hopw reowur ne didn't stick out at all. Didn't seem any more lolrandum than anything else in the game.

If you look at the elements of an RPG, you have:

Setting: total failure, Numanuma doesn't even have a setting, just a random shitshow. People compliment the Bloom, but the Bloom embodies exactly why the 'setting' is awful, or doesn't even exist - total randomness. It's a trade hub where instead of trading for such-and-such with such-and-such places, people trade for completely random things from completely random places, through avenues that open and close randomly. They even trade with past and future eras of time, ridiculous.
In comparison the PST setting is actually very ordered and hierarchical, because of things like the planar alignment system and the unchallenged dominance of the Lady of Pain over Sigil.

Party Members: I am still very angry at this shitshow of a game, but the party members are actually good. Erritis, Aligern, Tybir, and that mirror-imaged woman. That I can remember their names after several years demonstrates their quality. There's also that little girl, which is a pleasantly unique concept. On the negative side, all party members have the same theme - depressed because they got fucked up by technology. And it was a bad idea to have all these relatively normal party members in a bizarre setting - wrong way around. I played before the Blob got added.

NPC Characters: I can't remember anything about The First. The guy who makes all the castoffs has a completely lame agenda, of saving his daughter. He does do some pleasantly evil stuff, but doesn't get enough screentime The castoffs in Miel Avest were mostly stagnant and decadent; I even remember persuading one to run instead of letting the Sorrow eat him because he was feeling emo. The Sorrow never gets explained. Who else even is there? I can remember a slaver, the Bloom, a sculptor, an octopus. This game has no Trias the Betrayer, no Mebbeth/Puzzlewell, not that I can recall. Gets 1/5 for massaging a massive alien sphincter before speaking with it, and for that madman in the demon realm of flayed skins.

Quests: This is where the randomness of the setting does pay off a bit. I can still remember stuff about a cannibal cult murder mystery, Aligern's tattoos, and some energy core from a derelict spaceship. The long-running quest to repair the anti-Sorrow gizmo would've also been good if it hadn't been mangled by cuts.

Plot: I ragequit the game before completion when I realised how badly the lategame story had obviously been mangled by cuts, but everything I see online confirms my suspicions. The plot gets absolutely slaughtered by cut content, by the castoff-creator being impotent, and by the Sorrow being left vague. When you write an antagonist, you want to know their origins, the extent of their powers, and what must be done to defeat them. The Sorrow's origins and powers are never explained. How to defeat it is explained, but it's just some gizmo that's pretty much devoid of symbolism. With Planescape you need to either be able to kill yourself, or be strong enough to defeat your mortality in a straight fight. With NumaNuma you need to fix some machine or other. Or do I recall incorrectly, and the Sorrow eventually chooses to bargain with you, despite not really needing to? Either way, it's lame compared to PST, in fact it's not even as good as getting a Demon Slayer sword to kill the big bad demon, or getting Erika to teleport you to Emperor Hawthorne and kill him at the end of Avernum 1. Or any RPG climax really. Lame!

I also have a particular dislike that you can't side with your own creator - if you let him take you over, it's written as a purely bad ending where you get totally cucked and don't like what he does. There really ought've been an ending where you can merge with him, view his agenda as rightful, and believe that a creation owes loyalty to creator. I think the lack of such an ending stinks of l1bruls.

Also, ''what does one life matter'' is a rather boring question. Surely people will just answer ''a lot'' if they're a gay, over-compassionate l1brul, and ''not much unless it's a special person'' otherwise?

Visuals: There's some unfortunately flat lighting and those laughably bad portraits, with more development time it could've been better. But the game is still very good visually.

Music: Pretty solid I guess, but doesn't strike me as a competitor with any of the videogame soundtracks I really like. I guess the discordance reflects the disorganised state of the plot and setting, while the hyperactive violins reflect the overwritten, pretentious prose.

Combat:Combat is obviously mostly bad, but I did have to think about the fight in the demon realm and the fight at the heart of the Bloom. Also, party members perform very different roles.

Non-Combat gameplay: Like everyone says, it's too forgiving. Character-building is therefore boring.

Loot: There's loads of weird stuff you can get, but when everything is weird nothing is. I can remember some kind of leech-worm being a melee weapon, and a knife that could cut through the dimensions themselves; that's it really.

Overall the game is actually quite good in specific areas, but it fails hardest in the areas which it most emphasised.

 

[Forest Dweller]

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.

You forgot to add a picture of Bible quotes.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Why wait so long? You're probably pretty decrepit now, at least give it your first run??

Oh I tried. Twice. It's just more of a "wheelchair" game you know.

 

[Bohrain]

I somehow had the patience to play through the game with lengthiest script in history with machine translation, but the purple prose in Numerera was so awful that I dropped it after about an hour and a half.

 

[Luckmann]

Both Oblivion and Torment are good games

No they're not. They're really, really not, and the fact that you try to claim otherwise is downright disturbing, especially considering that they're not just bad, but singularly bad to the point where they tend to be the rock bottom other bad games can only aspire to even be close to.

That being said, Oblivion had some merits. Torment does not. It has no redeeming qualities. It's like the opposite of pizza and sex - things that are "even when its bad it's pretty good" - in that even when there's something that isn't the worst thing since a Jewish gulag, it's still pretty bad. Miniscule rays of sunshine such as Avellone's character and the early area designs and The Bloom are completely drowned in the relentless river of awful that is Tides of Numanuma.

Which would you rather do:
Play Tides
or
Eat Tide (Pods)

I would eat the tide pods. I'm not even joking. Eating tide pods is the lesser retardation, and probably far more enjoyable of an experience.

But that's just the thing - the setting is fantastic, weird, original, CRAZY. Doesn't that inspire some wonder in you?

It doesn't, because there is nothing "fantastic" or "original" about the setting at all. It's an endless stream of "lmao that's weird?!" and "haha so crazy amirite xD!?". There is no substance to it, no logic to it, and it lends itself to prebuscent-level make-believe, not a coherent setting with relevant threads to pull on. It's all flash and no substance. This is even fairly explicit in the backgroud material, especially.

If Tides of Numanuma managed to imply otherwise, you've been bamboozled, and if you're so easily amused, we might as well roll you down into the ball pit at McDonalds and turn on a disco ball, because holy shit.

 

[Theldaran]

I guess it's too mediocre an RPG to recommend it. There's dozens you need to play before this. Get Atom instead. Russians also know how to keep their women in check, unlike current Westerners. So an upvote for them.

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

I stopped playing it after the first city. It was ok, I guess.

 

[toro]

I finished Numenera once. Towards the end I started to enjoy the combat however the story became so retarded it obliterated all my enjoyment.

The thing is: I don't hate the game. It was not great but it had occasional good or interesting moments which makes it alright for one play-through ... but I don't plan to play it ever again.

 

[Harry Easter]

I liked the first city and it's quest, I liked the companions and main antagonist, what I saw of the setting was interesting and some concepts were equally interesting. There was a lot to like about this game, it just didn't connect its parts well. So I guess, my answer is "yes, partly?"

 

[Lord_Potato]

Finished the game but don't really know how and why. I was not invested in the story and the walls of text bored me to tears so I scanned them for important info and ignored everything else, all the retarded 'lore'.

Somehow I managed to get to the endgame. I rushed it, loosing all the final battles, but somehow the game went on and finally I got one of the good endings (I guess, didn't care the check the others).

For me it was a mediocre, forgettable experience, with poor rpg mechanics and a story too convoluted to be interesting. Much worse than Wasteland 2. I do not play on replaying it ever again.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Tides was the rare game that even after playing 78 hours and completing it, I wanted to immediately play again. I'm not seeing what you guys are seeing, clearly.

I do find it interesting how many here complain about purple prose and walls of text describing "mundane, non important shit". I love that kind of thing in an RPG, especially one like Tides with the unusual and strange world it presents. Then again I love reading lore in RPGs, I once spent a Morrowind playthrough reading every lore book in the game. I am a nerd and get very invested in good RPGs.

I do understand if you don't care about that kind of thing, the game might not be for you. Some gamers want more action after all.

 

[Raghar]

Come on guys, why do you think it's so bad? It's a GOOD game, I swear!

It's only game I heard a plea of me pirating it to try it and explain how the combat system works. Basically the person who bought it was completely lost.

As for its other vices, it's a nice example of stuff thrown together without much thought.

 

[Rahdulan]

I played this game shortly before coming to Codex. Looking back on it, the meme NPC that explicitly references Incline and hopw reowur ne didn't stick out at all. Didn't seem any more lolrandum than anything else in the game.

Setting: total failure, Numanuma doesn't even have a setting, just a random shitshow. People compliment the Bloom, but the Bloom embodies exactly why the 'setting' is awful, or doesn't even exist - total randomness. It's a trade hub where instead of trading for such-and-such with such-and-such places, people trade for completely random things from completely random places, through avenues that open and close randomly. They even trade with past and future eras of time, ridiculous.
In comparison the PST setting is actually very ordered and hierarchical, because of things like the planar alignment system and the unchallenged dominance of the Lady of Pain over Sigil.

Problem with the setting specifically is it needs a strong hands-on type of DM to work, particularly because it's a sort of "anything goes, NANOMACHINES SON" world that can quickly spiral to loss of any individual identity and players running amok. Same with any tabletop roleplaying transitioning to video games this cannot be handled in proper fashion and you have to make hard choices. InXile writers [seemingly] chose to throw bits of everything to the wall and see what sticks. The closest equivalent I can think of would be running a Rifts game and letting players explore the world willy-nilly. That's a quick way to abort your game before it even begins due to world setup, power balance, etc.

I do find it interesting how many here complain about purple prose and walls of text describing "mundane, non important shit". I love that kind of thing in an RPG, especially one like Tides with the unusual and strange world it presents. Then again I love reading lore in RPGs, I once spent a Morrowind playthrough reading every lore book in the game. I am a nerd and get very invested in good RPGs.

If I had to use a somewhat appropriate analogy that's because it spends a lot of time speaking without actually saying that much of worth. Once again, drawing direct comparisons to Planescape Torment was its biggest mistake simply because quality of writing between the two games varies drastically. I did like how the Meres were written in that CYOA format, though. They sadly weren't that prominent in the final game. I remember having a great talk with MRY about the Indigo Mere while the game was in development.

 

[Makabb]

There's only one numa numa !

 

[HeatEXTEND]

I do understand if you don't care about that kind of thing, the game might not be for you. Some gamers want more action after all.

Most do care, it's just that ton does a shitty job of it.

 

[deama]

I tried playing it for about 1-2 hours on release but gave up. My problem was mostly the text, it was not as elegant as torment's, not as well written, and seemed to like to waste my time more. Then going through it some more it kept giving me more walls of text, and then I just gave up, it was too annoying to read. I had a similiar problem with PoE, but the walls of text weren't as big there.

No, I don't have a problem with walls of text, I have a problem with walls of badly written text. I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it was all done in rhymes, I don't think a game even attempted that?

Anyway, the performance sucked too from my memory, I had to cap it to 30fps, everything on low, and my GPU still sounded like a jet engine.

 

[thesheeep]

Come on guys, why do you think it's so bad? It's a GOOD game, I swear!

No swearing, this is a civilized place, you fucker.

 

[Oreshnik Missile]

I do find it interesting how many here complain about purple prose and walls of text describing "mundane, non important shit". I love that kind of thing in an RPG, especially one like Tides with the unusual and strange world it presents. Then again I love reading lore in RPGs, I once spent a Morrowind playthrough reading every lore book in the game. I am a nerd and get very invested in good RPGs.

I do understand if you don't care about that kind of thing, the game might not be for you. Some gamers want more action after all.

The endless NumaNuma-tard cope, congratulating themselves for liking to read, and implying that the game's detractors don't. In reality NumaNuma's writing just isn't that good, you like it because you have low standards.

 

[Morkar Left]

With proper exploration, levelups, loot and combat I would have liked the world. But it's just not good as an rpg.