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

[Starwars]

Also, I know this is just the beta/early access, but this game had my graphics card running hotter than when I played the Witcher 3.

 

[Prime Junta]

Can't stop gushing about all the different ways the quests can play out. I'm pretty deep into it again -- just hit Tier 2 on my main character a while back -- and while I've only found a couple of not enormously significant things I missed the first time around, I'm having a materially different experience.

I do hope they'll get the crises working properly though, it's really annoying to suddenly have one character not executing commands, the whole thing going unresponsive, or what have you. Not being able to swap cyphers is also a huge impediment to getting much fun out of them. I have been actively trying to avoid them for these reasons.

As to the start, yeah I stand by my original criticism: too much info too early. It kills the mystery and gives that "interactive novel" feel. However I don't think it'd necessarily need as drastic surgery as I was proposing; just slashing a lot of the expository text would help a lot. I don't think it'll match the Mortuary -- too linear, too constrained -- but it would be tolerable.

I'm also loving the Meres. There's a huge amount of branching in them as well. I hope there'll be consequences down the line for how they play out.

 

[MRY]

PrimeJunta: To be a pain in the ass / broken record, are you talking about "expository text" in the Falling sequence, the orbs, the tubes, the Meres, etc.? I really want to be able to provide a precise account of the Codex Consensus(tm) on Excessive Prose. Also, I'm going to go back and do my own review with these comments in mind (though of course I'll be focusing on the Meres primarily).

 

[prodigydancer]

Spot on. PS:T writing was sophisticated sometimes but never self-important. They didn't use big words for the sake of having big words and the game didn't scream at you "SEE HOW AWESOME I AM? SEE?!" at every step. There was no need for that - unlike inXile, Black Isle didn't have anything to prove. They were just making an RPG and it happened to come out great.

I guess what we see here is an inevitable downside of crowdfunding combined with the cult status of the predecessor. It's hard to make anything original and worthwhile when you're under constant scrutiny. And it'll be p. ironic if BT4 will surpass TToN in most (all?) aspects - simply because almost nobody cares about it and its development team can quietly do what they think is best.

 

[Prime Junta]

PrimeJunta: To be a pain in the ass / broken record, are you talking about "expository text" in the Falling sequence, the orbs, the tubes, the Meres, etc.? I really want to be able to provide a precise account of the Codex Consensus(tm) on Excessive Prose. Also, I'm going to go back and do my own review with these comments in mind (though of course I'll be focusing on the Meres primarily).

The Meres are great, don't touch them except for maybe a style pass (excessive adjectives). The falling sequence was wordy and rather long, but it didn't bother me overmuch. I was most triggered by the heaps of detailed exposition the Specter, and subsequently Aligern and Callistege volunteered.

If major changes to that part would be too laborious due to affecting triggers later on, it would IMO already help a lot if you removed the nodes explaining what the Changing God, castoffs, Tides, and the Sorrow are in such meticulous detail.

Another thing that bothered me was how pat the breadcrumb trail leading to Matkina is. I dig that you have to find her to progress the quest, but as it is it's kind of giant flashing neon arrow thing. I would've expected to have to work a bit to locate her instead of just beelining there directly. Might want to see if there's a simple way to obfuscate that a bit.

Edit: oh, and, I would also move the Last Tabaht to some other area. Having him stand around so close to where you first enter Sagus Cliffs to offer yet more exposition makes it feel even infodumpier. The Government District would be a more 'logical' place for him anyway IMO.

 

[Agesilaus]

is it as shit as the original

 

[FeelTheRads]

^ AoD tard.

So, has it been confirmed if it will be possible to skip the character creation in the future? I mean it's just a tutorial and it doesn't look like it matters what you do since you can change everything at the end. Way too much to go through just to make a new character.

An exploration based Numenera RPG would be a blast to play.

This would be awesome. Something like Underrail... explore a bunch of weird places, mess around with devices, kill interdimensional monsters? Fuck yeah, I might even pledge to inXile again.

 

[Roguey]

such a good tabletop system

Good thing she's only a writer on D:OS 2!

 

[Excidium II]

That sentence doesn't make much sense.

 

[Expon]

On a scale of 1/10 what do you guys think of the chances for a mobile port?

 

[Fairfax]

Get Fucked/10

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

If you're not trolling, the answer is that it's technologically impossible. It barely runs on PCs as is.

 

[Fry]

Even if they optimize the shit out of it, not worth the effort to put it on tablets. The mobile gaming market is stingy and fickle.

 

[Prime Junta]

So, has it been confirmed if it will be possible to skip the character creation in the future? I mean it's just a tutorial and it doesn't look like it matters what you do since you can change everything at the end. Way too much to go through just to make a new character.

The start determines how your Tides start out. There are several Meres (CYOA's) you can end up in depending on that, and I get the feeling that the Tides are pretty important in the way dialogs play out later on. So while you can change your class and descriptor when you return to your body, there's some pretty important stuff that you can't change. Making it skippable isn't entirely unproblematic.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Ah, I see. Well, an easy solution is to make everything changeable then.

 

[veevoir]

In the meantime, in secret inXile headquarters, incline is born:

Hey! I'm the writer who did the Indigo, Gold, and Blue Tidal Meres. Let me first say, thank you so much for the kind words. I'm sure you already know this, but the real reward for pouring yourself into a story like this (as a writer) is to see that others got out of it even more than you put in. It makes me very happy to hear that the stories were good enough to make you want to have them all!

I share your dismay at not being able to encounter everything -- I'm always a completionist when I'm a player -- but I nevertheless think it's probably best that you can't have everything. A huge amount of work has gone into making TTON reactive to the player's choices such that it really becomes your story, one that you've shaped from the raw materials we've given you. As much as it pains me to know that 2/3 of the Tidal Meres I wrote will go unread for the average player, I think that there's something amazing that happens as a player when you realize that there is a huge world out there where you never left a single footprint. I recently played The Age of Decadence (twice!), and was reading other players' experiences, and realized there were large areas that I never even knew I was missing. Of course I was annoyed, on one level, but it made the path I took feel more meaningful at the same time.

I must say, having chance to see only silver and blue tides - Blue one is really good, they all seem to be.

 

[Prime Junta]

All the Meres I've seen have been awesome.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Is there a day/night circle or it would be like W2? Pillars engine has this circle enabled so it would not seem costly to implement it properly.

 

[Prime Junta]

No day/night cycle... in the conventional sense anyway.

 

[Infinitron]

I wonder what would happen if you hacked it and enabled the PoE day/night cycle code.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Don't they have two different background sets for night and day in PoE?

 

[Prime Junta]

Don't they have two different background sets for night and day in PoE?

I'm pretty sure it's just done with lighting effects. Here's an early update explaining and demoing it (demo starts at 2:37 or so)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUleDEFkUtE

 

[Jarpie]

PrimeJunta: To be a pain in the ass / broken record, are you talking about "expository text" in the Falling sequence, the orbs, the tubes, the Meres, etc.? I really want to be able to provide a precise account of the Codex Consensus(tm) on Excessive Prose. Also, I'm going to go back and do my own review with these comments in mind (though of course I'll be focusing on the Meres primarily).

Hey MRY, PrimeJunta isn't Codexer, he's a dirty RPGWatcher.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

itèll probably end up on console. enhanced edition, more voice acting etc

Just saw this gem on the Inxile forums:

So I don't know if its always been this way or if its just a new fade but all CRPGs seem to eventually have a Enchanced edition.

• Will this game have an enhanced edition some day?
• Since this game uses the unity engine, similarly to Divinity OS, is it possilbe that someday this game could be fully 3D?

 

[Prime Junta]

PrimeJunta: To be a pain in the ass / broken record, are you talking about "expository text" in the Falling sequence, the orbs, the tubes, the Meres, etc.? I really want to be able to provide a precise account of the Codex Consensus(tm) on Excessive Prose. Also, I'm going to go back and do my own review with these comments in mind (though of course I'll be focusing on the Meres primarily).

Hey MRY, PrimeJunta isn't Codexer, he's a dirty RPGWatcher.