Codex Review RPG Codex Review: Torment: Tides of Numenera

[GloomFrost]

How does this game rank alongside Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2, Pillars, WL2, New Vegas, etc.

Its a lot better then DA2, slightly better then W2, worse then DA:O and Pillars and not nearly as good as New Vegas. Pirate it or wait till like 75%-90% discount.

What? No Oblivion? You make a list of some of the worst cRPGs ever made you gotta include that one too. I don't think Nugent was asking the question seriously. Not with a list like that. Presumably the fact that you think TTON was worse than Dragon Age means that you think it is worthless garbage. That seems to be the consensus. More and more I am dreading the installation of this thing.

I did not make any lists. I was just replying to a post. Dont care if it was asked seriously or not. But yeah Oblivion is a lot worst then even DA2.

 

[Lurker King]

T:ToN arbitrarily restricts your choices due to political correctness.

Interesting claim

Rhin was writen by a nu-male beta faggot who made a name for himself writing Mary-Sueish wish fulfillment fantasy that similarly afflicted individuals easily gobble up. Her quest is designed by a born-again christian who moved to Thailand and literally adopted a dozen kids. To expect these 2 dudes to give you the option to do something mean to a fictional child, and have that option be just as rewarding as 'the right thing', is just plain silly.

(...)

To get back to my original point, I 'm all for the death of the author, but the author in case also has to be competent enough for me not to care about him, i.e. despite his personal irl agendas, beliefs etc., he should be a professional when he does an rpg and design to the strengths of the genre: above all else give the player options that make sense in the world and don't passively-agressively judge him for those choices. Yes, you can give her to the slavers, but this is intentionally designed to be the worst option when it shouldn't be. Deciding to keep Rhin should be the harder decision, in a well-designed game you shouldn't be able to learn Tidal Affinity unless you give her to the slavers (or only have one other option to learn it somewhere else that should be significantly more difficult).

As it is, you go ---> Edgy Effort ---> Persuasion: Don't be such a meanie, and the slaver castoff goes: 'k, you're right, take care of her, lemme teach you my powah and maybe I'll even throw in a good bj while I'm at it. To add insult to injury, after that you get the option to ask slaver girl 'What are you doing with your life?'. Are you fucking kidding me?!! In a setting where SLAVERY IS FUCKING LEGAL! And in that node, you get the classic libtard passive agressive option to say 'I'm not judgin you, but srsly, like, you could use your powah for the betterment of society as a whole, oh my gosh!'. Go fuck yourself, game! At that point what I really wanted to ask is what the fuck is my stupid castoff doing with his life. The slaver-girl seems to be living the dream, not giving a fuck about no Sorrow, whereas I have to run around like a scared Crispy to fix a broken PSU - cocoon thing because you showed me a multi-headed dick raping some ghosts inside my brian during the tutorial.

Thing is, this isn't even the only quest where rewards are slanted towards the player 'doing the right thing' (tm). In the Tormented Levy quest, you get a far better reward if you convince the dude to give another year of his life (even though he makes a p. good point why he shouldn't have to), than if you go to the strong, independent chief-of-police woman and tell her 'Hey, one of you Robocops is broken'. I'm sorry, but this is pure, arrogant, libtarded stupidity, and if you don't want me to rant about it, then stop putting it in the game. Just because you give me multiple options doesn't make it better, when you penalise me for not choosing the more liberal one, in a setting that you fucking chose to describe as a decadent, whoever-can-grab-more-power-wins type of world. Imagine if, in AoD, when you go down a dark alley because an individual with deranged eyes and a giant grin told you he has a great deal for you, what would actually happen is... you'd get an awesome fucking deal, no strings attached, go you, gold-hearted boy! We'd all be laughing and pointing at VD, calling him a fucking moran!

And let's not forget the precedent for all this. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, like I said back in the day, this can be traced all the way back to Carceri in PST, an area also designed by McCuck. What are your options there? Either all of a sudden, out of the blue, become a lawful good paladin that reverts the chaos Trias caused OR if you want to play anything other than Lawful Good, go straight after Trias and miss a boatload of XP. But hey, look at all the cool shit happening on screen, all meant to cheaply emotionally engage you to the plight of these poor NPC, whom, by the way, when you first met back in regular Curst, told you 'We're all a bunch of kewl betrayers 'roun' here, you bettah watch your step, cutter!'.

Contrast all this cheap emotional manipulation and 'do the right thing' bs with the options of selling your companions into slavery and/or sacrificing them to gain more power from the evil grimoire, or answers from the Pillar of Skulls. At the time of making those choices, the benefits of being evil are convincingly presented as alluring, thus creating a genuine dilemma. And even so, in all my 3 playthrough of PST throughout the years, I neved betrayed my lovely grinning skull or my bro Dak'kon (well, I did it once to see what happens, then promptly reloaded), because the writing exxpertly made me care for them while at the same time not insulting my intelligence or the tenets of the rpg genre, by providing alluring and sensible-within-the-setting options for screwing them over. But because I stayed up until 5 AM to read the wonderful wonderful Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon and see the shitty things Practical Dude did to him, while also understanding that the bastard had some p. good reasons for doing them (that is what fucking nuance looks like, btw), heard the short voicebark Dak'kon gives once you 'upgrade' him - so little VO, yet such great and memorable delivery - emotional connection is earned, both the emotional link between the PC and companions and the one between the player and the fictional characters make sense, they are not grabbed through cheap, convenient tricks. Contrast that with this game: what do I give a shit about Calistegipsy - the most boring Malkavian who ever lived, or GayPirate#43 - who could just as easily fit in any Bioware game? Why should my character give a shit? (The fact that The Last Castoff is just as bland and boring and there is never any good connection established between you, the player, and him/her/xir is worthy of a whole 'nother rant onto itself, but let's leave that for another time).

It also explains why the game is so mediocre:

The character creation screen assumed only two genders. A thought crime at best. This is an interesting thing to bring up though, they've made them so alike, almost a copy of each other, why give the option of gender at all? Make xir androgynous. See, this is what pisses me off, they are so moderate in their extremes when it comes to art, making everything bland and samey. If you want a genderless utopia, then create one, it might somehow become art if you try hard enough. Not sarcasm.

Even Romanticism has examples of this. There was a novel in which both main characters, a man and a woman (gasp! I assumed xeir genders!), fall in love with an androgynous being (I think it later turns out to be an angel, but don't quote me on that). I have to find which book it was.

To continue my little rant, this is the book I was talking about - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seraphita

This wishy-washy mediocrity everyone is going for (including Mizhena) is tiresome and goes nowhere. The writers are obviously trying to tube-feed agendas down your eye sockets, which is grotesque and unsubtle, even un-art-like. The character designs for Numanuma is a further example of not going in hard enough. Like Lurker King pointed out, the visual designs of the characters are superficial, while this is true to an extent, it illustrates the coherency and strength of the themes they are going for. That is why TNO was a leathery, scarred man, as opposed to a semi-androgynous nothingness. Let me give an example of popular culture - Hellraiser. The designs of the cenobites clearly underline a disdain for normalcy, a path to the extremes of humanity. They wouldn't work out so well if they were simply normal men and women.

I can actually give a counter-example to this - It Follows. It's a movie where a force assumes the form of normal people and stalks the main character. It works well, because it's framed in such a way as to convert normalcy into fear. This depends on the context, Hellraiser wouldn't work with normal people. Exactly how PS:T wouldn't work with the cast of DA:I. The themes are too strong for such mediocrity to thrive. I don't actually know where I'm going with this, what I do know, however, is that character designs tell us a lot, both about the work we are consuming and the writers themselves. And that not being extreme enough cheapens extreme themes, like that of suffering. What Numanuma's designs are telling me is that it's bland and cardboardy.

 

[an Administrator]

PC being a colored person doesn't restrict your choices.

 

[Lurker King]

Is the PS4 DLC real? Holy shit, they deserve their console review scores.

What do you think? It is true.

 

[Junmarko]

Unpopular opinion time, but I do think PS:T's combat has value and serves a purpose. In light of how truly execrable the "just sideline the combat, it doesn't matter" approach went with Numenera, especially so. PS:T's combat is not "good". But contrary to what so many people claim, removing it would not improve the game. It serves as a form of pacing. When the player gets into overload from reading too many dialogues, they have combat to turn to.

That was an inpopular opinion before T:ToN release. Now everyone will understand that combat is the core of gameplay.

Doesn't have to be combat, just frequent challenge through strategic mechanics. Invisible Inc is a good example of tactical stealth gameplay.

Regardless, No Truce With The Furies, may be in for a rough time ahead.

Are there any strategical gameplay mechanics, or is it entirely text-driven?

I suggest you check out Prime Junta's preview and the comments I've made to it. In short: it's text driven -- but the text is strategic.

 

[Ismaul]

PC being a colored person doesn't restrict your choices.

Technically you're grey in PS:T (blue if you go by the cover).

Spoiler

But you were white before, right?

All clear gentlemen! PC crisis averted! You may proceed.

 

[Lurker King]

PC being a colored person doesn't restrict your choices.

It doesn't, but explains why the game is so mediocre. I edited the post with another quote to reinforce this point though.

 

[Sacred82]

If there's one thing more ridiculous than Torment's systems, it's the Codex' reception of it


Prime Junta is a long-standing PS:T fanboy, and his rose-tinted glasses seem to make PS:T's angsty teen writing seem like a glowing achievement compared to Torment's more mature, subdued themes.

 

[Iznaliu]

Another advantage of combat in PS:T is that it gave you some sense of progression

A game shouldn't need combat for progression, even with PS:T's setting where the only progression is smurf → supersmurf

 

[Lurker King]

Doesn't have to be combat, just frequent challenge through strategic mechanics. Invisible Inc is a good example of tactical stealth gameplay.

Good point.

Regardless, No Truce With The Furies, may be in for a rough time ahead.

I suggest you check out Prime Junta's preview and the comments I've made to it. In short: it's text driven -- but the text is strategic.

Let's wait and see. The combat in "King of the Dragon Pass" is also text-based, but the game is good.

 

[TedNugent]

You do like Dragon Age don't you? Why not just admit it? You were willing to admit you liked Pillars which is like admitting to at least some degree of retardation. But I guess liking Dragon Age is admitting to going full retard. Or maybe you are too young to have even played Dragon Age. I guess it's possible. If so go play it I promise you will love it.

I'm not playing that shit, lol.

 

[l3loodAngel]

Another advantage of combat in PS:T is that it gave you some sense of progression

A game shouldn't need combat for progression, even with PS:T's setting where the only progression is smurf → supersmurf

What da fuck is that even supposed to mean? So you measure progression by word count that you read while you were browsing through the text.

-Hey dude what's the level of your character? Man it's like a lot. I have read like 200K words.
-Wow man, wow.

 

[Lurker King]

In every way, we tried to take what people loved about PS:T and push it even further. - Adam of inXile



Player response on GoG (source):

Yeah, tried and failed.

Planescape: Torment feels like a work of art. Like a coherent vision that came together harmoniously, put together with the tools the people who made it had available to them at the time.

Torment: Tides of Numenera feels like a dessicated corpse prancing around in PS:T's clothes desperately trying to form an association between the two in the audience's mind. Where you'd be hard pressed to find flaws with PS:T in much but the lacking combat and pathing and it's sometimes excessive writing, T:ToN does almost nothing right. It's hard to even know where to start. Though the start itself is a pretty good point: Don't overload me with text before I've even started playing the game! Let me get established as a character and THEN start having me interact with the game world. I can't made decisions in an RPG if I don't know who I am or what the consequences of my actions are! You're just wasting my time with all this text!

Then the second thing you notice is the characters. The characters are nearly to a man awful and unlikable. None of them (except the player character and arguably Erretis, the only companion who was even remotely likable just becuse at least the poor guy wasn't responsible for how he always acted like an obnoxious asshole) have sensible or often even coherent motivations for anything that they do.

The keystone figure that unleashes the entire storyline comes off in every scene you have from his perspective as a confused, blundering idiot who's constantly torn between doing one thing or doing another thing, making it feel totally unbelieavable that this guy could've continued doing what he has been doing for as long as he has. And where the goals of the antagonist(s) in PS:T make perfect sense (he just wants to live), the changing god's goals (which are not just living) are at times stupid almost beyond belief.

The second major antagonist, the sorrow, utterly fails to even put on a show of justifying its own existence, relying entirely on shallow anedcotes and spacious reasoning to justify the horrible atrocities it has enacted in the name of... something something, it's not really explained why what it's trying to stop it worse than a countless number of far more horrible things people do right out there in the open without the universe needing to manifest a literal god to stop them from doing it. The character may as well have carried a huge banner around with it that said in glowing, blinking neon letters: "THE AUTHOR NEEDS ME TO EXIST TO PROVIDE YOU WITH AN OBSTACLE".

And the final antagonist comes off as a clueless weakling who's mere moments away from simply killing themselves in their own stupidity before you show up to do it for them.

Then there are companions, which are just terrible. Where PS:T has amazing companions whose motivations feel sincere (Morte alone, once you finally know his full story and see that he isn't just a comic relief but as deeply tortured as anyone else in the game, is one of the best player companions in any game ever), T:ToN's companions rarely even manage to give a compelling reason for why they follow the final castoff around at all - to face almost certain death at the hands of the sorrow or the bloom or the changing god or any number of other unspeakable horrors at his side. They feel like they just follow you around because the game needs to have companions that follow you around. Add that to the way the first two are shoved right in your face it feels almost offensive in how shameless it is.

To add insult to that offense, some of them will even abandon you for utter trivialities, as if one moment ago they were able to tolerate the horrors they suffer at the side of you castoff body with its inherent associations to your disgusting leige, then the next some minor slight against their morality will suddenly cause them to abandon their entire life's goals to instead og sulk in a slum or something equally ridiculous. You even have a character like Rhin, which is perhaps the most shameless embodiment of the "predictable and stupid" trope that PS:T's mission statement stood in rejection of that has been put to text in years.

Then you have what should be cardinal offenses, like dialogue trees that exist just to be exhausted, where you don't click on dialogue options because you're interested in talking to a character about what that text says, but because the game's dialogue is so poorly set up you know you have to click all the options before the game allows you to do the thing that you want to do. A thing that shouldn't logically - in context of the characters conversing with each other having a conversation - have follow from exhausting those dialogue options, but because the game thinks that the player is an idiot it refuses to let us choose any dialoge choices that we haven't asked to have explained to us whether we're allowed to choose or not. It's so unnecessary it's, again... it's offensive.

Like in the final conversation. There's an extremely obvious choice to make in that dialogue that players can easily miss being able to do, not because at any point in that exchange does it not make sense for the character to be able to do that, but because the player will not have asked THE POINTLESS RHETORICAL QUESTIONS necessary for the dialogue option to unlock. It is INCREIDBLY badly written. Just shameful. I could not believe people were paid money to write a scene that ended up so poorly executed. Maybe if it were some heavily combat-focused game and conversation was kind of half of the game and you were at the end of a 50 hour compaign or something, sure, I get it, it can be forgiven. But this is THE FINAL CONCLUSION to a VERY SHORT, ENTIRELY DIALOGUE FOCUSED GAME. You're fucking up the most important part of your game! That's not even touching upon all the other parts of that dialogue that was poorly written, such as the atrociously ambiguous descriptions of some of it that made it very unclear what choosing some options would actually do. Whoever wrote that should be ashamed. This is your JOB. You are incompetent!

It's not just unforgivable to my eyes, but in fact it stands in representation of the entire game. Where PS:T feels like... like the vision of someone who really knew what they wanted put together as well as they were able to do so, everything in T:ToN feels like it was the product of someone trying to put together what they thought someone else wanted, but not actually knowing how to do that. It's a shallow simulacrum robbed of the talent and passion that made its namesake good.

I could easily expand another 20,000+ words upon all the stuff that's awful about the game in excruciating detail. Yeah, this is harsh, and while the game did have some positive parts - few things are ever total shit - those few good parts do not even remotely begin to compensate for all the absolutely terrible parts. The pointless combat system, which really is A BIG DEAL in a GAME. PS:T's combat wasn't good, but T:ToN's is disgusting.

Then there's the small world with its tiny, cramped areas with near-MMO-level shamelessly obvious quest hubs and quest NPCs all situated within pissing distance of each other and makes everything FEEL artificial. Yeah, we know, it IS artificial, but it shouldn't FEEL that way. This is just terrible design. And the inventory and equipment system so anemic it's hard to believe it exists as anything but a vestige. The bland and uninspired character models so terrible that PS:T's decades old sprites look positively radiant by comparison. The pointless tide system that nobody would notice if was removed. The shallow classes and other character fluff. The terrible skillchecks that may as well not even exist by 'virtue' of how easy they were. The Choose Your Own Adventure-sections that jank you right out of the game so jarring and terrible that they're hard to see justified even as resource-saving efforts. The total absence of any kind of storytelling THROUGH THE GAME ITSELF; where are the in-game cutscenes, like those we got plenty of in PS:T, quaint though they were? Where are the videos that give flavour to the world?

The list goes on and on and on and on and on...

It is a terrible game that doesn't deserve to share association with it and should be forgotten by history.

Just like the inane rantings of this disappointed fan hopefully will be alongside it. I had to get this off my chest before I went to bed so it wouldn't keep me up for hours. Good night.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Is the PS4 DLC real? Holy shit, they deserve their console review scores.

What do you think? It is true.

The DLC was for all Techland retail copies, incl pc
Coming for backers too though, they won't be left out

https://steamcommunity.com/app/272270/discussions/0/133258092256055031/

The DLC armors were a retail preorder bonus which Techland, the game's publisher on consoles, asked us to do for the game. We agreed to do so, but only on the condition we could offer it to our Kickstarter backers free of charge (we will be providing these to our backers very soon).

However, we do not intend to sell them post-release on any platform, PC or console. We've contacted Techland, and raised this issue with them. We did not agree to or expect them to sell the armor DLC separately.

 

[undecaf]

Hah, Techland defiling inXile up bit by bit like a good little parasite.

 

[Ruzen]

Let me give another example. Remember the L.A. Noire? The core gameplay was facial animation based, detective adventure game. Even all combat challenges were skippable but you never feel like you should. They were not challenging but not boring either. The problem is that when combat is boring like Numenera the pace of the game stops instantly!

It is like Chekhov's gun mentality. You get to see all these cool weapons, spells, numeneras, etc... and you are bound to show gameplay of good combat even If the core is not about combat you must have at least NOT BORING combat.

 

[TedNugent]

Is the PS4 DLC real? Holy shit, they deserve their console review scores.

What do you think? It is true.

The DLC was for all Techland retail copies, incl pc
Coming for backers too though, they won't be left out

https://steamcommunity.com/app/272270/discussions/0/133258092256055031/

The DLC armors were a retail preorder bonus which Techland, the game's publisher on consoles, asked us to do for the game. We agreed to do so, but only on the condition we could offer it to our Kickstarter backers free of charge (we will be providing these to our backers very soon).

However, we do not intend to sell them post-release on any platform, PC or console. We've contacted Techland, and raised this issue with them. We did not agree to or expect them to sell the armor DLC separately.

I thought Brian Fargo was bypassing the greasy no-good corporate publishers by using Kickstarter and crowd funding
I guess you can't blame Techland in that case. They have to make their money back some how You didn't get your stretch goals, but at least you get the DLC armor for free.

 

[Ismaul]

If there's one thing more ridiculous than Torment's systems, it's the Codex' reception of it


Prime Junta is a long-standing PS:T fanboy, and his rose-tinted glasses seem to make PS:T's angsty teen writing seem like a glowing achievement compared to Torment's more mature, subdued themes.

Is nothing Sacred82 anymore?

 

[huskarls]

A much better review by Junta touching on everything from the gameplay to the UI to the sound track (Even though that part was filled too much with nostalgia baiting rather than criticism). The most cutting point, to me, was that every quest would have its objective conveniently on the same map or the next one, so you end up hustling around the cul de sac through chunks of unedited text, more like a psuedo busy soccer mom than an adventurer. Ideally quests take you somewhere interesting, usually there's more interaction in between that almost make you forget it, and when you arrive there comes a reveal of information - its not talking to people in a hub.

Paragraphs 11 and 13 were terrible though. Those metaphors were so distracting I couldn't even remember their point at the end of them. Stick to more simple metaphors like paragraph 5 were you call cyphers side dishes that were intended to be entrees.

 

[Black Angel]

Prime Junta is a long-standing PS:T fanboy, and his rose-tinted glasses seem to make PS:T's angsty teen writing seem like a glowing achievement compared to Torment's more mature, subdued themes.

 

[Schizophrenic monolog]

U wot? Going on about cobblestones and PnP Numenera for half the review? Then some random musings about KS 'liez' or some shit.

Putting them in quotes doesn't make them less of lie.
Just because you're ok with being robbed by Fargo doesn't mean it's something everybody should be OK with.

Therefore, eat shit. You're crying more than the detractors of this game. Fuck man, talking bad about something someone likes is like sticking a knife in the very core of their universal essence.

Go fuck yourself if you can't fucking read you miserable piece of shit. I already wrote that I'd be fine with a Roxor review as I know he'd actually do a REVIEW not some random bullshit. Cunts like you are the butthurt ones. I like TToN, I like PoE, I like W2. I also like JRPG's, Witcher series, Might and Magic's(even IX and X). Fuck I even like Dead State(the part with the content anyway, not the 40 hours after that). Some Codex faggot who represents 0.001% of the gaming community being an edgelord or not liking something I do, I give less than 0 fucks about.

What I do care is at least a modicum of common sense when reviewing...no 'scary' sounds? kys you fucking retard.

Wow... that escalated quickly...

I think it's time for the Codex to open a new threat: Anger management: We'll have your balls

Some people here will kill somebody over a game!

 

[Lurker King]

Let me give another example. Remember the L.A. Noire? The core gameplay was facial animation based, detective adventure game. Even all combat challenges were skippable but you never feel like you should. They were not challenging but not boring either. The problem is that when combat is boring like Numenera the pace of the game stops instantly!

The gameplay of heavy narrative games works best with the “quick time events” that are characteristic of some triple-A games. In a sense, that’s what games like KoDP were already doing but with text-adventures. I don’t know which one is more expensive though. The quick time events or the text-adventures.

 

[Lurker King]

Regardless, No Truce With The Furies, may be in for a rough time ahead.

I suggest you check out Prime Junta's preview and the comments I've made to it. In short: it's text driven -- but the text is strategic.

Let's wait and see. The combat in "King of the Dragon Pass" is also text-based, but the game is good.

Oh shit. Now that I think about it, KoDP had tons of resource management and events, but NTwtF won't have these.

 

[Fairfax]

What a waste. The game was always meant to be about its writing, and if that sucks, one would expect a scathing Codex review to focus on that. Instead, PJ only talks in detail about everything else. When he does talk about the writing, he beats around the bush so he can get to the next pretentious punchline.

Tides is a philosophy freshman crying into his red wine, in love with the profundity of his navel.

The irony.

 

[duanth123]

Darth Roxor, your people need you.