Game News Torment: Tides of Numenera Alpha Systems Test Launched

[Sensuki]

There's always that one guy who hangs onto the door and climbs back over the maze though, what a champ.

 

[Jasede]

MRY
How do you feel about Anchorhead, Galatea and Shades?

 

[DarkUnderlord]

There's also a couple of new ones:

IS THE DANCER SPINNING LEFT OR RIGHT?

 

[Jaedar]

(While the current instadeath is a bit abrupt, the player option that leads to it is this (after having previously chosen "Dive to the ground" and then reading about how your skin is burning and your vision blurring):

"Keep diving - the faster the better!")

Anyone who died to this deserves it. You should keep it exactly as is, teach people to pay attention. The sooner in the game you do this the better.

Although I still find it a bit silly that the difference in speed with which you'd hit the ground would be so different depending on whether you dive or try to slow your fall.

 

[Infinitron]

How to survive a freefall: http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/4344036/

By now, you've descended into breathable air. You sputter into consciousness. At this altitude, you've got roughly 2 minutes until impact. Your plan is simple. You will enter a Zen state and decide to live. You will understand, as Hamilton notes, "that it isn't the fall that kills you—it's the landing."

Keeping your wits about you, you take aim.

But at what? Magee's landing on the stone floor of that French train station was softened by the skylight he crashed through a moment earlier. Glass hurts, but it gives. So does grass. Haystacks and bushes have cushioned surprised-to-be-alive free-fallers. Trees aren't bad, though they tend to skewer. Snow? Absolutely. Swamps? With their mucky, plant-covered surface, even more awesome. Hamilton documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn't compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won't "open up and swallow your shattered body."

With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don't relax. This is not your landing pose.

The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal War Medicine noted "distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury." Recommendation: wide-body impact.

 

[ArchAngel]

Anyone who died to this deserves it. You should keep it exactly as is, teach people to pay attention. The sooner in the game you do this the better.

Although I still find it a bit silly that the difference in speed with which you'd hit the ground would be so different depending on whether you dive or try to slow your fall.

Well from what I seen the difference is that if you don't speed up a Nano manages to catch you with this esotery and slow you down so you don't die and if you speed up you are too fast for him and you go splat. Without that nano you would go splat in both situations.

 

[Mrowak]

Anyone who died to this deserves it. You should keep it exactly as is, teach people to pay attention. The sooner in the game you do this the better.

Although I still find it a bit silly that the difference in speed with which you'd hit the ground would be so different depending on whether you dive or try to slow your fall.

Guys, guys, this is a *Torment* game we are talking about. You are supposed to die a couple of times even only to solve some quests, shits and stuffies. Or access your Stronghold:

Death and the Castoff's Labyrinth
Death in Torment: Tides of Numenera is not the same as "game over," and there's more to it than waking up in a mortuary.

Your body is mostly immortal. Your consciousness, on the other hand, is a twisted place. When you die, your consciousness travels elsewhere, to a labyrinth of the mind, while your body heals.

The Castoff's Labyrinth is a strange realm, a dreamlike maze of jungles, stairways, tunnels, and ruined cities. It's your mind, but you wouldn't know it from all that's in here.

When you die in the game, you can always just reload, or maybe find the easy way out of the maze and back to your body, but you'll be missing out if you do. The Castoff's Labyrinth is a bizarre and interesting gameplay area, one of haunting exploration and discovery. As it grows, its secrets become deeper, more complex.

Its depths are called Fathoms, and each brings new secrets and--for the determined--new rewards.

Here are some of the things you might be able to do if you search out the mysteries of your own mind in death:

• Meet Reflections of your companions and other characters. Learn secrets from these figments that you wouldn't learn in the world of the living. But are these secrets really about them? Or are they about you?
• Uncover Lacunae. Lacunae are figments of your mind that represent parts of yourself (or do they?). Through conversing with a Lacuna, you'll discover puzzles and quests, and might even enhance your own abilities.
• Become more powerful. Gain special items and abilities. (How do they transfer back to your real body? Who knows? The numenera are weird like that.)
• Gain access to hidden areas in the real world through secret information, portals, or other strange interactions with the numenera.
• Find Meres (connections to the consciousnesses of other castoffs) that are unavailable to you in the living world.

The Labyrinth has twelve Fathoms within it that you will be able to explore, if you so choose. A few you may have to explore to complete your quest, but the rest... that's up to you.

*Souce: https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/game/about/gameplay

TL;DR version: Dying abruptly, unfairly, out of the blue is by design.

 

[Karwelas]

(short version: you are mostly immortal; shattered bones won't kill you, but a splatter-death will),

Hmm, I don't know if I can ask about that thing, but want to try anyway - so this mean that terrible wounds will kill our character anyway? (I mean, like crushing our head into pieces or jumping into lava)

For some weird reason I will also be very nice to some people with staff, long grey beard and big collection of skulls...

 

[Darkzone]

How to survive a freefall: http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoors/a5045/4344036/

Water has a not low bulk modus: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/bulk-modulus-elasticity-d_585.html
Therefore much pressure force is required to compress it and move aside, and if the force is high enough to compress it and move the water mass aside (equals your body weight), then it is high enough to break your bones form a fall and kill you by mostly breaking the spine.
30m fall into a body of water is not a problem for a skilled person, but 60m is nearly always deady, because of the end velocity.
This height becomes irrelevant as long as you have enough oxygen and the fall is longer than 10 seconds, if you reach the terminal velocity (depending on the attacking body surface to body volume relation to atmosphere pressure), but the 54m/s - 47m/s is a good estimate (reached within 12-14 seconds of fall).
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=free+fall+from+160m
Here with adjustable drag coeficient for a 62kg person with 0.73m^2 attacking body surface.
Here with drag coeficient of 1.
Here with drag coeficient of 1.3.
So by enlarging your body surface (spreading arms and legs out and apart and lying horizontal to the ground) you lower the terminal velocity, because the drag becomes higher. Now you need something to even lower it even further: trees may lower your falling speed (or pierce through your body) or even glass surfaces that you can break through or cut you to pieces. Swamps are mostly body water covered by grass, so i do not recommend choosing swamps, but snow covered areas are good (very low compression module).

The funny thing is i knew that diving down would result in much faster velocity and much higher percentagel of being killed from the fall, and therefore i never choose it. And so i didn't knew for sure that you can instant die in Torment, before you created the character.
So yes i approve this chapter of character creation.

 

[MRY]

MRY
How do you feel about Anchorhead, Galatea and Shades?

Amazing and near perfect (except for last quarter), interesting but not engaging, and not brilliant except for the interesting moment where creating sand goes from an impediment to a goal. (All IMHO.)

 

[Jasede]

We used to talk about IF before on the Dex but it was a long time ago. Do you have some favorites? How do you feel about Infocom ones? I really admire A Mind Forever Voyaging. You should read its manual, it is fantastic.

 

[MRY]

We used to talk about IF before on the Dex but it was a long time ago. Do you have some favorites? How do you feel about Infocom ones? I really admire A Mind Forever Voyaging. You should read its manual, it is fantastic.

I like the Infocom games, but I suffer from the weakness of having gotten to them backwards -- I played modern IF first -- and so the sheer scope of them (in terms of rooms, manipulable items, etc.) is somewhat harder for me to manage. That is less so of AMFV, which I think is a great example of how writing that is good, but not great, becomes great when it is part of a game. (Incidentally, I wonder whether AMFV is the spiritual grandfather of the modern walking simulator.)

There are lots of other IF from the 90s-00s that I really like. I'd have to look at a list to remember all their names, though. Generally my sweetspot is a moderate-sized game with relatively light puzzles and a strong narrative -- I'm just not smart enough or organized enough or patient enough for the really big puzzle-fests.

 

[Jasede]

Which ones would you consider to have "great" writing? I am curious as I am a fan of writing and might be you know some gems I don't, since modern IF games are well past my horizon, other than Anchorhead which I adore.