Game News Torment: Tides of Numenera Alpha Systems Test Launched

[MRY]

That's what I meant, the sentence in question doesn't actually use irony, it implies someone could interpret 'terminal velocity' as being ironic in the given situation. Of course, that doesn't mean the author holds the same view.

On second thought, this game will probably be more enjoyable if we don't hyper-scrutinize every sentence.

Oh, yeah, I understood your point, I was just being silly.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

As a side note Terminal Velocity was great game, it and Mechwarrior 2 got me hooked on my neighbours pentium 1.
Made my MegaDrive\Genesis get dust.

 

[Trip]

The writing is definitely clunky. Verbose, adverb-y, trying hard and mostly failing at decent spatial descriptions... I hope they give it another pass. "Small moons, unusual structures and strange machines rush past you..." Really?? Also, blind choices leading to insta-death, Fighting Fantasy style. Really??

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

"Small moons, unusual structures and strange machines rush past you..." Really??

As I understand it, you can't have more descriptive information about the things that rush past you, precisely because you don't have time to inspect them.

 

[Trip]

My problem is twofold:
1. the handling of scale, wherein small moons, structures and machines whizz past as if they're airplane debris. What's a "small" moon anyway? It would still be pretty freaking big, right? And unless these "unusual structures" and "strange machines" are commensurate with the moons, putting them right next to one another grammatically is simply chaotic and poorly thought-out. Not to mention how "unusual" and "strange" sound to me like lazy handwaving in the direction of "oooh, weirdnessness".
2. The argument "But it's supposed to be like that, stuff rushes past you" would've worked if the narrative wasn't so leisurely at so many other points of the character's "fall", at times reading like a geographical almanac.

Unfortunately, this problem is pretty usual for the "you wake up in a blank room" opening, which this is a variation of. There's a pretty thin line between your narrative representing disorientation and your narrative being disoriented itself.

By the way, I do think the "falling" introduction is too long; roughly half a page of fluff before each choice, and those seem to be fluff themselves. I get the "larger-view" idea, but I don't think it's necessary at all.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Stop shattering my dreams.

God damn it, how can it be so bad with so many great/good/mediocre writers on board? What the fuck?

 

[Trip]

I'd hold off on calling it bad for now, to be honest. It just seems to me like a lot of verbal foot-shuffling, like any first-draft narrative looking for an "in", a way to overcome the fear of the blank page.

 

[Infinitron]

Observe now the curious RPG Codex phenomenon I call "iterative consensus edgification". It starts with one relatively moderate, seemingly intelligent and therefore trusted poster offering a critique of a game. He'll never outright say "this is shit", but it'll be an incisive critique. Then another, slightly edgier person will seize on the legitimacy of that original argument and add some input of his own using slightly harsher language, and so on, until at the end you have a bunch of edgelords, who nobody would have paid attention to otherwise, going "THIS IS COMPLETE SHIT, WORSE THAN NWN2 OC" and actually getting taken seriously.

What's interesting is that the original "moderate" poster will often end up agreeing with them completely, unable to resist the seductive popularity of his own original argument. Nuance and shades of gray don't last long on the RPG Codex.

2. The argument "But it's supposed to be like that, stuff rushes past you" would've worked if the narrative wasn't so leisurely at so many other points of the character's "fall", at times reading like a geographical almanac.

http://study.com/academy/lesson/motion-parallax-in-psychology-definition-lesson-quiz.html

Motion parallax is a type of depth perception cue in which objects that are closer to you appear to move faster than objects that are further away from you.

 

[Duraframe300]

Stop shattering my dreams.

God damn it, how can it be so bad with so many great/good/mediocre writers on board? What the fuck?

Too many cooks

It's still going to be good. But, one's probably best off expecting something uneven.

 

[Trip]

Observe now the curious RPG Codex phenomenon I call "iterative consensus edgification". It starts with one relatively moderate, seemingly intelligent and therefore trusted poster offering a critique of a game. He'll never outright say "this is shit", but it'll be an incisive critique. Then another, slightly edgier person will seize on the legitimacy of that original argument and add some input of his own, and so on, until at the end you have a bunch of edgelords, who nobody would have paid attention to otherwise, going "THIS IS COMPLETE SHIT, WORSE THAN NWN2 OC" and actually getting taken seriously. What's interesting is that the original moderate poster will often end up agreeing with them, unable to resist the seductive popularity of his own original argument.

I don't see anything being taken "seriously" one way or the other, neither do I see cries of "This is complete shit". Also, there's no point in explaining motion parallax; it's not about what's described, but how well it's described. Stuff doesn't "rush past" you on the one hand, while you, on the other, methodically delineate the geographical niceties of the world below. And here I'm not even mentioning all the general redundancies, fuzzy imagery and cookie-cutter phraseology, of the "you allow yourself a fleeting smile" sort.

 

[Zed]

Colin McComb is the overseer of what writing goes into the game so blame him if you think it's inconsistent or crappy. I think it's alright for an alpha test, judging from what I've read from screenshots. Maybe a little hit-or-miss on the eloquence.

 

[Infinitron]

I don't see anything being taken "seriously" one way or the other, neither do I see cries of "This is complete shit".

Wait for it.

Stuff doesn't "rush past" you on the one hand, while you, on the other, methodically delineate the geographical niceties of the world below.

A person jumps off a plane from a high altitude and is in free-fall. He can see the earth. On the way, he passes by a flock of birds. One of these is going to "rush past", the other not so much.

 

[Trip]

Sure, but then I still can't account for "small moons", "machines" and "structures" (whatever they might be, apart from the "unusual"/"strange" catchwords, of course), rushing past in the same breath with no sense of gradation or any sort of progression, in terms of time, space, how they impinge on the character's consciousness, etc. Neither can I account for the state of mind that affords complete spatial disorientation on the one hand, and intricate map-making observations on the other. It might be a problem of how I imagine stuff would look to a person in free fall (I don't have such experience); but I don't think it would look, or feel, like that.

P.S.: My basic point (I think), is that going with the "you wake up in a [blank][blank] where everything is [blank]" strategy provides too much opportunities for exactly the sort of problems I personally see here.

By the way, I like that all the memories have dramatic charge and some sort of urgency built in, but stylistically they all sound much more like someone telling you about your dreams than vivid mnemonic flashes.

 

[Grotesque]

My basic point (I think)

Oh, just shut the fuck up. I've been reading your "verbal" diarrhea far too long.
You make hiver look like a demigod of pure bliss compared with your obnoxious conglomerate of sophisticated words that is only indicative of how a dumbfuck you are.
You must think of yourself being this refined literary analyst!?

The writing is definitely clunky. Verbose, adverb-y, trying hard and mostly failing at decent spatial descriptions...

It's fair to say, however, that trawling through memories to create a character isn't the freshest daisy in the field when it comes to tropes, either

Not to mention how "unusual" and "strange" sound to me like lazy handwaving in the direction of "oooh, weirdnessness".

And here I'm not even mentioning all the general redundancies, fuzzy imagery and cookie-cutter phraseology, of the "you allow yourself a fleeting smile" sort.

The argument "But it's supposed to be like that, stuff rushes past you" would've worked if the narrative wasn't so leisurely at so many other points of the character's "fall", at times reading like a geographical almanac.

PS: go back to school.

 

[Trip]

Well, I'm sure everyone here has someone feeling that way about them. Better to take it all out, I guess. Take that weight off your shoulders.

You must think of yourself being this refined literary analyst!?

Refined? Not really. Most of this is pretty common-sense, I'd say.

 

[Runciter]

Surprising that no-one has mentioned the narrators so far. The first narrator is pretty good, the second narrator is horrible. The demo would be better off if they removed the second narrator's voice.

As for the writing, it's definitely better than PoE but it's littered with things that stand out as jarring and break the immersion, as in the examples given by a few Codexers so far. What jarred me most was the contrast between the initial confused, rushed observations, trying to make sense of the situation and the methodical description of the land under the falling character carefully enumerating in detail what's in the east, west, north and south as if looking at a map. It didn't make sense to me and I lost interest in a snap.

 

[Ulrox]

The writing is definitely clunky. Verbose, adverb-y, trying hard and mostly failing at decent spatial descriptions... I hope they give it another pass. "Small moons, unusual structures and strange machines rush past you..." Really?? Also, blind choices leading to insta-death, Fighting Fantasy style. Really??

I laughed out loud at the insta-death thing - I think it's great, it tells the player that:" if they dont take great care with selection of their responses, then it can have 'terminal' consequences, hehe"
It sets the stage for what kind of game they're about to play.

 

[Trip]

Well, I hope it won't be a game where you don't know if the next insta-death isn't around the corner... But yeah, I think they put it in as a gag more than anything else

 

[Ulrox]

Well, I hope it won't be a game where you don't know if the next insta-death isn't around the corner... But yeah, I think they put it in as a gag more than anything else

Its a game that wants a wide variety of choices to be there, even less than reasonable ones for you to be able to roleplay. Often times I ask myself when playing bioware trash... :"why can't I do x,y,z" - Torment, like its predecessor, want you to be able to do these things that you cannot do in other rpg's. If there's logic in you dying from a choice, like jumping out of a cliff, then it should have dire consequences.

Guess my point is this:" fuck hand holding in rpg's, let me kill myself through stupid choices instead of everything leading to me pwning everything because the developer cares about my precious feelings - which is something I've noticed happens often in Bioware/Bethesda mainstream 'rpgs' "

 

[Trip]

Well, there's nothing to even hint that diving faster would kill you. The world is Numenera, so that's not a given at all. But as I said, it's probably a gag. (Though annoying.) Also, I don't think the job of an RPG designer is to provide you with all possible choices you might think of, that's impossible. Their job is to provide you with interesting and compelling choices, even if they're heavily constrained. An interesting, meaningful choice among 3 alternatives is miles better than an impossible pipe-dream of 10 alternatives at every step of the way.

Еven better are 2 steps of 3 choices each instead of 10 all at once.

 

[Infinitron]

Surprising that no-one has mentioned the narrators so far. The first narrator is pretty good, the second narrator is horrible. The demo would be better off if they removed the second narrator's voice.

Please tell me you're joking and you do realize that was the LPer

 

[ArchAngel]

Please tell me you're joking and you do realize that was the LPer

Some people should probably be forced to pass IQ tests when trying to access internet.

 

[Ulrox]

Their job is to provide you with interesting and compelling choices, even if they're heavily constrained. An interesting, meaningful choice among 3 alternatives is miles better than an impossible pipe-dream of 10 alternatives at every step of the way.

It's not a pipe dream though. In the future we will have brain scan equipment on us, and the computer will be able to know what our emotions to whatever is happening on the screen are, so as to allow npc's to 'see' our emotions. Impossibilities only exist within the mind that dares not dream, within the mind that has closed itself off from creativity, which happens in our stress induced no alpha brain wave caffeine stimulated society.

 

[Trip]

within the mind that has closed itself off from creativity

The rest of your post notwithstanding (meaning I can't really comment), it's restraints that open the mind up for creativity. And for actually producing anything tangible. Like T:TON's writers restraining themselves from the entire first half of the Alpha Test content and trying to convey the strange moons and machines in the sky, as well as geography, in a somewhat more elegant manner.

 

[Ulrox]

Trip, I'm not sure I really understand your point. Perhaps you could elaborate on it...?