I feel bad saying this, but I find this screenshot really quite off-putting. For me, a key component of the Dying Earth genre -- which Numenera is clearly trying to evoke; key examples would be the Dying Earth series itself by Jack Vance, the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe, and the Viriconium series by John Harrison (how odd, incidentally, that all are tetralogies) -- is the uncanny, alien, and vaguely off-putting quality that infuses them. While the last screenshot may have been over-the-top in that direction, and is somewhat derivative of a variety of other game environments (the Sanitarium one immediately popped out to me), it did at least feel genuinely alien. The idea that humans would inhabit such an environment is part of what infuses, I'm groping for the right word, the tragic displacement of Dying Earth fiction: humans once had a home suited to them, it's been ruined, but there's still something of it left that you can see, enough to remind you of what they lost.
The Sagus Cliffs concept art had that feel because the intense vertical configuration (sort of a hyper-Sorrento), the unnervingly transparent and unreflective water, the not-quite-seagulls, the giant cobwebbing, and even the crappy shanty-town look to some of the buildings. Now, I realize this screenshot is just one thing. But, even considering the force-field bridge, there's nothing that either conjures Earth's lost past (which is to say, our present) or Earth's uncanny future. This could easily be the Forgotten Realms. I do realize that you need some less strange places to offset the strange places, but couldn't the less strange places be more like our world and less like a generic fantasy setting?
Maybe I'm looking a the Numenera world the wrong way, though. For what it is, it's a very pretty screenshot. Would look great in Project: Eternity.
