Codex Review RPG Codex Review: Torment: Tides of Numenera

[commie]

Unsubstantiated bullshit

Cool anonymous employees....sounds legit.

Codex consensus also suggests Harebrained Shadowrun tablet RPG's are good. Doesn't necessarily make it fucking so.

It does. Technical flaws aside, the Shadowrun series has a good balance of Strategy-Story+C&C - throughout. The fact that they were able to achieve it, using a game engine essentially neutered by tablets, makes inXile look hopeless.

Bullshit. Games are fluffy shit for commuters. Shit C&C, no strategy since you can just hire what you ain't got. Can't remember a single thing from the whole series apart from the dwarf coroner in the first game.

 

[Arthandas]

Regarding visuals & cobblestones, just look at PST:

That floor is absolutely gorgeous, and was built like a real cobblestone mosaic.

Man, every time I see Planescape screens I get a mental erection.

 

[Junmarko]

Bullshit. Games are fluffy shit for commuters. Shit C&C, no strategy since you can just hire what you ain't got. Can't remember a single thing from the whole series apart from the dwarf coroner in the first game.

I understand where you're coming from. But, while catered for commuters, it was good as any CRPG could've been with such restrictive hardware.

Yet, it's still more consistent and engaging, than a game made with the PoE engine - over four years...

Shameful.

 

[t]

Genuine question, what on Earth was going on with the development if they spent 5 years and 5 million dollars to make a game that feels like it had >1million budget and maybe two years of development time?

Plus "multiple millions." https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts/1647389/comments

We've seen some comments suggesting that backer funds from the Kickstarter are going towards the console versions of the game. These are fair concerns but rest assured, not a single penny of that money went towards console development. On top of the Kickstarter funding, inXile has put in multiple millions of dollars towards development of the game for PC, Mac, and Linux. In addition, Techland is footing the bill for console development.

Putting in the console port money Techland delivered, this could be pushing 10 million.

Honestly, I'd love to have at least 10x more Rogueys at the Codex.

 

[loveblanket]

Thank you for this review. I wish it had come out before I wasted my money. This is one of the worst games I've played in years, especially for the price. It isn't really even a game, it's simply an interactive fiction, a choose your own adventure novel where you can't really make a bad decision or die. Obstacles aren't obstacles, they are just choices. If there is a tree in the road you need to get around you can use your axe to chop it up, you can use your dexterity to jump over it, you can use your strength to lift it, you can use your intelligence to just walk around it, etc. The problem is, as the review points out, that most, or all of those options are available to you and they all lead to the other side of the log. All that changes is some descriptive text. There is no game here, just some bland choices. The characters aren't interesting, the locations are mostly bland and the story is unfulfilling at best. InXile is a strange company. Wasteland 2 was decent, but I never finished it and I consider myself a rabid completionist, this game is awful and the recent gameplay they've shown for Bard's Tale 4 was laughably bad. I make an effort to never base my thoughts or ideas on nostalgia. I grew up with and loved the Ultima series. I went back and played through them again and they were basically garbage. There were some good story concepts there, but the games themselves, with the possible exception of Ultima 7, are not worth playing today and I'm honest with myself about that. They were great at the time and not so much anymore. InXile seems to peddle pure nostalgia. Their desire to recapture the past only exposes the flaws of that way of thinking. If they had approached Torment as it's own game instead of trying to pretend it was a continuation of Planescape, they would have been better off, but would they have gotten the 5 million to make it? Would the bland and kind of boring Wasteland 2 have gotten made if it weren't playing on nostalgia for what was at best an uneven original game now remembered by many to be way better than it was? By trying to prove these games could still be made and be commercially viable, they've instead proven why people and the industry moved on from these types of games a long time ago. So disappointing.

 

[Prime Junta]

Man, every time I see Planescape screens I get a mental erection.

Only mental? Bugger off, poser.

 

[Tao]

This is the first time I fully agree with a review of yours Prime Junta .

Nice Job, and thanks

 

[Abu Antar]

I beat the game yesterday. It took me 35 hours.

-There were a lot of environments that I liked, The Bloom especially comes to mind. There are also some smaller areas that looked good. Unfortunately, maps were generally very small and you couldn't get lost even if you wanted to. Locations like the Valley of dead Heroes looked terrible all around, imo. The inconsistency hurts the game.
-Several quests can be completed in different ways and it can have consequences later on, which is nice. On the other hand, some quests that you got, you could complete them very quickly because what you needed was like 20 feet away. One quest in the Blooms especially comes to mind.
-Erritis, Matkina and Rhin. I liked these characters and had them with me for as long as I could, the others, I tried to avoid like the plague. I didn't even do the quest for Callistege.
- At points, the writing showed some real quality. Some quests and characters were really well done. My favorite NPC would have to be Inifire. There were other characters that were potentially interesting, but nothing ever happens. Several of these NPCs could have been developed more, give the player quests related to them or even have them join your company. They end up as cool concepts, but nothing more.
-I didn't like the combat, but the crisis system was cool in a few instances, when it let you solve a situation without actually fighting. Examples: stop a fight or steal an object. That you could do that showed that there are people at this company that do care and don't just want to phone it in. Unfortunately, there are many encounters where you get to fight an abundance of enemies and I had to wait for so long that I alt+tabbed to do others stuff in the meantime. That's just bad design. I agree with the review that an encounter in the very late game was very silly.
-Cyphers were a cool idea. A lot of them felt worthless, but some of them became very useful later in the game, thanks to one of your companions. Items were boring in general, but you'll find a couple that you will be happy to acquire.
-I haven't followed the Numenera rule set that closely, but what we got in the game wasn't really exciting. The way you develop you characters in tiers just wasn't my thing. On several level ups, I felt like there wasn't anything useful that I could pick. That's a bit of a shame. Mind reading seemed exciting, but it wasn't used as much as I had hoped. made Erritis more interesting and it was usable in some instances.
-Non-combat skills were a bit of a joke. It reminds me of Tyranny in this regard. You had a decent amount but you could almost never fail them, because you could choose whoever you wanted from your party. You had the pools of all 4 active characters at your disposal. I don't remember if Prime Junta had it as a complaint in the Tyranny review, but if he didn't complain about non-combat skills in the Tyranny review, he has no right to complain here. (I'm lazy and don't feel like going back and checking.)
-I do think that the general atmosphere and mood of the game was good. The soundtrack had some decent to good songs, imo. The problem with the whole mood and atmosphere thing is that you have a lot of descriptive text that shouldn't be there. They tell you about stuff that is in front of you. I don't need the game to tell me about it in 123 paragraphs. In the end, I started skimming or even skipping some of it, just reading dialog text. The descriptive text might also be a good excuse for them to have stuff happen in text so that they don't have to animate things.
-In general, I didn't mind the story, but it gets less good as you go on. It doesn't help that what happens in the game never shocks me. There was one part of the main story where I was genuinely surprised. I assume there was another point earlier in the main story, where they also tried to surprise the player. I didn't see that twist coming from a mile, I saw it come from 20 miles.
-There were 2 or 3 meres that were well written, the others, I just got through them quickly. It's a shame these didn't have much of an effect on the actual game world.

There's more I can say, probably, but these are the things that popped out in my head. I still think that overall, this is a solid game and nowhere near a piece of turd. There's a lot of squandered greatness here. Some genuinely good stuff mixed with some mediocrity and some below average stuff. They should have done better with the talent and budget they got. I'd really like to read an honest post-mortem and see what they have to say about the development. I want to know how so many stretch goals that seemed to be an integral part of the game got cut and the reasons. I understand if people are upset about these cuts. but I am not anymore. I am disappointed that they tried to sweep it under the rug, though.

I think Prime Junta's review is overly harsh and it makes the game sound like the next coming of Satan. It is not, in my opinion.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'm fairly certain Satan would be a lot less boring.

 

[Schizophrenic monolog]

It's really weird that people here judge a game by its production time and its budget or what doesn't included in it.

Why?!

A game should be judged from a gaming point of view, And not by a function of quality per time/money spend.

When i play a game, I don't care about how much time it was on pre-production, how much money the company spend on special-effects and so on...

I think the review was mostly based on the writer personal emotions towards InXile.

Which we all know about them...

And as someone who's playing TTON alongside with PS:T, I can definitely see the semilarity between the two.

I've played PS:T a few times before.
And even though PS:T is one of my favorite games, it's still a game.
And therefore it's not perfect.

What I'm trying to say is that PS:T nostalgic value is much higher than the game itself.

It's an amazing game, but it's still have bugs, dull moments, shit journal, shit combat and lots of minor fucks.

And I think people here want to hate TTON not because it's shit.
But, because it was made by InXile.
Because it took long time to make.
Because it cost lots of money (according to some codexers)
And Because all those broken promises.

I said it before, TTON is an amazing experience and a pretty rare one.
I really like the game so far, and it's really similar to PS:T.

And if you don't agree, install PS:T and play alongside with TTON and you'll see the resemblance (quests format, background music, weird-mysterious settings, personal story, shitty combat etc...).

 

[jewboy]

Dunning Kruger? Ouch. Inxile's got some seriously disgruntled ex-employees. The Glassdoor comments would explain a lot though, wouldn't they? Maybe Brian is just getting old. Hell half the team is getting a bit long in the tooth. It happens.

I especially like this comment:

No one left to make games, only management.

 

[Mortmal]

Good review, unexpected, you are not even licking the dev's arse, guess no bribe nor goodies today. Although i disagree with one of the sentence, "they had the bugdet they had the talents" . 5 millions for 4 years developpement time,its really nothing you are not going to pay many people with that. As for the talent , i guess too many cooks spoil the meal, or the real work was done by beginners with few inputs from the celebrities.I am done with half of the game, not really entertained , and never seen the spark of genius i usually find in classic top rpgs.
There's some lack of care, even the french translation is botched, found quite a few typos, and the backer content on the graves for example is not even translated.

 

[Tao]

To be somewhat fair, I can imagine that the kind of writing Tides of Numenera has must have been exhausting, difficult and time-consuming to implement. For instance, in the execution quest, the overseer will remember if you talked to them before you acquired a badge of office, so that way won't work, which is already pretty cool. However, if the Circus Minor is darkened, that freaks the overseer out so he'll let it slide because he wants to get out of there. There's stuff like this all over, stuff that - I should point out - PS:T has very little of. Few of the companions in PS:T even have quests, and companion morale was so bugged that for all practical purposes it didn't exist. The complaint about Tides of Numenera having companion quests that were too simple is disingenuous in that light. The Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon was well written, but hard to get right it was not.

So T:ToN has a lot of reactivity, but, all of these intricate extra paths to solve quests after failed rolls and such - I've only seen a few, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot more - are things that people will probably never see, because like the review pointed out, the game mechanics for exploration skill rolls is highly exploitable and I imagine most people will happily savescum if they failed, say, an 85% probability roll that can't be retaken. What's more, most of the changes aren't terribly interesting, except in a "whoa, the developers thought of that too" kind of way - they don't lead into any especially interesting results. Now, of course, there's only a handful of choices with genuinely interesting results in PS:T, which is, ultimately, rather linear and doesn't really react a whole lot to what the player is doing. But PS:T just has a more interesting scenario and better writing, so the few things that the player does get to do feel more meaningful, so that's that.

In any case, I don't think that Tides of Numenera lacks for ambition or effort. My impression is that if it was mismanaged, it's due to getting caught up in putting entirely superfluous polish on pointless details and not seeing the forest for the (dialogue) trees. So it's just a game that suffocates under the pressure of trying to live up to its spiritual predecessor, to the effect that it - entirely predictably, I might add - fails to capture the irreverent and black-humoured spirit of the original.

Those were exceptions instead of norm. That's why i though the game was better than PoE at the start. But by the time you're ending, all that reactivity in Sagus goes, since the moment you leave the HUB, from anecdotal to nonexistence. And then they give you the Mass Effect ending...

 

[Prime Junta]

And if you don't agree, install PS:T and play alongside with TTON and you'll see the resemblance (quests format, background music, weird-mysterious settings, personal story, shitty combat etc...).

Indeed.

Or, as I put it, T:ToN apes the forms of PS:T without understanding their substance.

 

[Crolug]

I haven't been monitoring Numenara production so I wasn't aware of all those cuts. Quite an impressive list I might say. I have a word for it - CROWDFRAUDING

 

[l3loodAngel]

I like reading codex reviews, but I don't read prime cunta. Is this how it's going to be from now on? Every review by that attention whore mongoloid? Why is it that the dumbest people must be the loudest.

Because the empty pot rings the loudest?

 

[Bohrain]

I have a word for it - CROWDFRAUDING

I believe the word is fraudfunding.

 

[ga♥]

I'm gonna have to try to play it, but now I'm dreading the attempt. I can only hope it isn't really quite this bad, but I'm going to guess that it isn't great. My problem is I am quite picky. The boring/uninspired combat of PoE was enough that I could not get very far into the game. I am one of the few people who actually liked PS:T combat. For me there wasn't much not to like. It was vanilla D&D 2nd Ed, a proven system. I can't help thinking that Inxile should have just used the WotC D20 open gaming license instead of trying to use something new like Tides even if the author was a veteran like Cook.

Clearly this project was overly ambitious even considering the talent they had. They made the mistake of not following KISS. Making any computer game that is actually fun to play is actually very very hard. As for questions of where the money went 5 million isn't that much for a game that took so long to make. Presumably it went into paying salaries, but I would also like to hear a post-mortem on how things went so badly wrong. Whose head should we demand to be put on a stick? Does Fargo ultimately have to take responsibility and if so what did he do wrong?

Is the crowd-funding model itself somehow to blame? So far it doesn't seem to be doing very well. Maybe a developer having a publisher is like a writer having an editor. I for one hated PoE because Josh Sawyer put Balance ahead of Fun for his shiny new combat system and now we have this: another failure of a new combat system. Just because something looks easy doesn't mean it is. I guess even some of the best 'industry veterans' who should have known better can lack enough humility to realize this. As for the writing it sounds like maybe it lacked some strong figure like MCA to oversee everything.

I can't brofist so take that

And yeah , Alas, one of the possible reason of this fiasco is the crowfunding system.

PST combat was VERY OK if you take the game as a whole, and it was pretty rewarding and shit.
While POE combat gave me so much cancer that when I went to my doctor and he said there was a cure I just begged him to let me die.

The game is bad sadly, so prepare yourself to be disappointed.

 

[Konjad]

The game did not disappoint me. I expected it to be shit.

 

[Zeriel]

Cobblestones are more aesthetically pleasing than cRPGs anyway

Spoiler

Hello tile guy.

 

[Schizophrenic monolog]

And if you don't agree, install PS:T and play alongside with TTON and you'll see the resemblance (quests format, background music, weird-mysterious settings, personal story, shitty combat etc...).

Indeed.

Or, as I put it, T:ToN apes the forms of PS:T without understanding their substance.

And I think this is the most important question (how good TTON mimics the things that made PS:T so great).

But, unlike you, I think InXile did a GREAT job.

Maybe it's the joints or the alcohol
But the bottom line is that I'm having a great time with both games.

 

[an Administrator]

Mark Morgan, the composer for the original Planescape: Torment, wrote fifty tracks for the game, but somehow none of them manage to be the least bit memorable.

I think the reviewer has been affected by nostalgia. I personally find TToN's music much more memorable and beautiful than PS:T's.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I think the reviewer has been affected by nostalgia. I personally find TToN's music much more memorable and beautiful than PS:T's.

Post a single track from Numenera more memorable and beautiful than this:

You kidding? That's the one you picked?

 

[an Administrator]

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Hey Junta, remember back when you didn't want to be associated in any way with this cesspit... how does it feel to be regarded by the masses as a "regular" and part of the "hivemind"?


https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comm...ew_torment_tides_of_numenera/#bottom-comments

 

[an Administrator]

Junta on the edge