Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[throwaway]

On the other hand, I don't expect to spend nearly as much time in the inventory or the char sheet in my storyfag as I do in more expansive cRPGs. And the dialogue IU looks just fine to me even at this point.

Edit: I'm sure the deception roll in the first Quorro crisis is either bugged or set up. Critical Successes are way too common.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Well, Torment's UI elements had a deliberate motif of looking like rusted, worn-down metal. I guess the sci-fi equivalent would be UI that resembled shovelware.

Good to see they're staying true to the spirit of Torment.

Oh god. Is this how I (and others) sounded when I talked about PoE?

 

[MRY]

Well, Torment's UI elements had a deliberate motif of looking like rusted, worn-down metal. I guess the sci-fi equivalent would be UI that resembled shovelware.

Good to see they're staying true to the spirit of Torment.

1. Be me.
2. Work three quarters of a year as writer on story-centric RPG.
3. See that beta is released.
4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.
5. Spend all morning monitoring threads.
6. Learn people don't like UI.

 

[throwaway]

Well, Torment's UI elements had a deliberate motif of looking like rusted, worn-down metal. I guess the sci-fi equivalent would be UI that resembled shovelware.

Good to see they're staying true to the spirit of Torment.

1. Be me.
2. Work three quarters of a year as writer on story-centric RPG.
3. See that beta is released.
4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.
5. Spend all morning monitoring threads.
6. Learn people don't like UI.

On the codex, if there is nothing bad to say, nothing at all is said.

 

[SniperHF]

1. Be me.
2. Work three quarters of a year as writer on story-centric RPG.
3. See that beta is released.
4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.
5. Spend all morning monitoring threads.
6. Learn people don't like UI.

Like anything else, people are bitching without having played yet

It's a quality Codex tradition.

 

[agris]

Well, Torment's UI elements had a deliberate motif of looking like rusted, worn-down metal. I guess the sci-fi equivalent would be UI that resembled shovelware.

Good to see they're staying true to the spirit of Torment.

1. Be me.
2. Work three quarters of a year as writer on story-centric RPG.
3. See that beta is released.
4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.
5. Spend all morning monitoring threads.
6. Learn people don't like UI.

On the codex, if one doesn't have something bad to say, nothing at all is said.

Which must mean that people like the content in the beta.

 

[Irenaeus III]

Should have known from the earlier thread (alpha) when I had a post with 50+ brofists making fun of the UI colours, bro.

Ask ksaun

 

[MRY]

Eh, probably people haven't had time to finish downloading it, or backed at the wrong KSer tier.

 

[Lord Andre]

Don't have access to the beta but the quotes on those NPC portraits are bad. All of them. Doesn't anyone quality control the promotional material ?

 

[Fairfax]

Eh, probably people haven't had time to finish downloading it, or backed at the wrong KSer tier.

Still checking out your tides here.

 

[Zed]

I judge books by their cover and it usually works.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Well, Torment's UI elements had a deliberate motif of looking like rusted, worn-down metal. I guess the sci-fi equivalent would be UI that resembled shovelware.

Good to see they're staying true to the spirit of Torment.

1. Be me.
2. Work three quarters of a year as writer on story-centric RPG.
3. See that beta is released.
4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.
5. Spend all morning monitoring threads.
6. Learn people don't like UI.

if only you did a better job about the ui instead of slacking about writing bad stories nobody cares about you fucking slacker

 

[prodigydancer]

Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.

liberals
(Inb4 this actually becomes the Codex consensus on TToN writing.)

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.

Well I haven't been far into the game, so the only thing I can say about the writing is (from my "special" perspective): It has too many words that I don't know. I'm not a native English speaker, but I've been reading exclusively in English for the last couple of years now and I've watched ~3000 movies in English. And this many unfamiliar words - that doesn't happen very often to me. Only with fancy writers like Gaiman and such. And I don't consider this a positive thing, obviously. I don't think the descriptions becomes more vivid by use of thesaurus, instead I think it's somewhat "try-hard" when you write like that. Well, obviously I'd say that, since I'm the one who has to minimize the game every minute or so and google words.

Anyway, I'm not blaming anyone here. It's my shortcoming, not yours.

 

[MRY]

4. Rush to RPG Codex to see what people have to say about writing.

It has too many words that I don't know.

Thanks for the comment. There is a fair amount of this in my writing. For what it's worth, two things drove that impulse for me. The first is simply that Gene Wolfe was my entrypoint to Dying Earth fiction, and his style relies on (waaaaay more) obscure vocabulary. The second is that I think Wolfe was onto something, which is that the use of language that is just beyond our grasp -- a meaning we can more or less intuit, while not being entirely sure that we're right -- has a useful mimetic (!!) effect in a far-future fantastical setting because it captures the sense of uncanniness and unease that the changed world presents. I didn't actually run to the thesaurus on my stuff, but I did choose words that I thought would sort of skirt the reader's comfort zone. I tried not to do it all the time, and I may have overshot.

 

[agris]

Overly descriptive writing is a common problem with newer writers. They think it makes the individual sentence more meaningful by dropping in adjectives and adverbs greasy with connotation (see wat I did ther?), when in fact they should be focused on how the collection of sentences tells a story and evokes a feeling. It's a tree vs forest problem, at least in part.

It would be nice if you, or anyone else, took some screenshots of the dialogue you have issues with, or like, and uploaded them for us. An entire conversation or whatever would be illuminating to read.

edit: I'm assuming bester is talking about proper words, not torment/numenera slang. Slang unique to a setting is a great way to build atmosphere, but it's also like salt. Less is more. I loved the slang of PST for example, and HBS's SR series has gotten better and better about it. All the chummers and hoi's in SRR felt like I was being hit over the head with a hammer named 'Atmosphere'.

 

[Daedalos]

So... does anybody get the bug, that you can't wake up after the intro? Had it twice now, what the fuck :/

 

[evdk]

So... does anybody get the bug, that you can't wake up after the intro? Had it twice now, what the fuck :/

That's just the game emulating the classic Traveller chargen system.

 

[undecaf]

So... does anybody get the bug, that you can't wake up after the intro? Had it twice now, what the fuck :/

It looked like it for me but it just took a while for the game to... "register" what was going on. Same happened with the mirror. Some of the dialog choices just before a scene swaps seem a bit unresponsive.

I did get the "upside down" bug that was in the presentation video, though, and it crashed the game when I tried to re-enter the dome.

 

[Daedalos]

So... does anybody get the bug, that you can't wake up after the intro? Had it twice now, what the fuck :/

It looked like it for me but it just took a while for the game to... "register" what was going on. Same happened with the mirror. Some of the dialog choices just before a scene swaps seem a bit unresponsive.

I did get the "upside down" bug that was in the presentation video, though, and it crashed the game when I tried to re-enter the dome.

Well, I waited like 15 minutes, nothing happend, so. And I got top of the line computer. Everything ran smooth and good until I "woke up". Meh, gonna retry it... but it means I have to go through the chargen all the way again.. Fufufufufu

 

[undecaf]

Well, I waited like 15 minutes, nothing happend, so. And I got top of the line computer. Everything ran smooth and good until I "woke up". Meh, gonna retry it... but it means I have to go through the chargen all the way again.. Fufufufufu

Then it's a bug.

I did have to reclick the transitional choices a couple of times before anything started happening the first time around, but it did eventually work for me.

By the way, saving during the CYOA scene after the fight with the Sorrow Fragments and reloading that later auto passes the CYOA sequence and gets you stuck in the plane with the Specter.

 

[Fairfax]

MRY Really liked the Blue one. I'll write more about it once I've played the rest, but I'm curious, is there a different outcome in the end?

It's a shame the Crisis takes so damn long, makes it really hard to check out the others. Well, it's not that long, but doing it 5 times is.

 

[MRY]

Overly descriptive writing is a common problem with newer writers.

I think "overly descriptive writing" is a different issue from what Bester is talking about. You can have very terse writing and still use unusual words. "Inside the portmanteau, you find an enchiridion on monomachy" is spare but hard to penetrate. "The lush grash, green and dewy and inviting, spread across the lawn like a rich, if unadorned, carpet" is perfectly penetrable but really verbose. In any case, whether TTON has good writers or bad is obviously something that can be debated forever, but I'm not sure there are any "newer" writers on the team.

They think it makes the individual sentence more meaningful by dropping in adjectives and adverbs greasy with connotation (see wat I did ther?), when in fact they should be focused on how the collection of sentences tells a story and evokes a feeling. It's a tree vs forest problem, at least in part.

I think there can be legitimate reasons for larding up a sentence with description. For example, it can be mimetic of decadence or heavy ornamentation, of confusion or sensory overload, etc.

That said, I recently read an interesting quote -- I think of Jeff Vandermeer's, but I'm not sure -- regarding Roger Zelazny. I'm going to do it a disservice, but he was saying that sometimes great lines or turns of phrase of Zelazny's had to be cut from his stories because "if I bang my shin on a coffee table in your living room while you're leading me on a tour, I'm unlikely to impressed that it's a genuine Louis XIV antique." That is a fair criticism and probably one that can be applied with frequency to my writing, only probably you're just banging into a misassembled piece of Ikea furniture, not a Versailles piece.

 

[MRY]

MRY Really liked the Blue one. I'll write more about it once I've played the rest, but I'm curious, is there a different outcome in the end?

Thanks. It depends what you mean by "different outcome." You always come out of the Mere and continue with your adventure. There is some reactivity in the world based on what happened in the Mere, but it is not in the beta because it affects an area outside the beta. But in terms of the narrative conclusion of the Mere itself, it can end seven different ways (I think), though they are not all huge differences. I'll PM you.

 

[agris]

MRY true, I was assuming it was verbose writing that lead to what Bester described. That's why I asked him to post some screenshots of full conversations!