Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Pre-Release Thread [ALPHA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Perkel]

Obsidian should hire you to explain to the players why both warriors and mages have their damage determined by the same stat.

That is easy. It's called sawyerism.

 

[Athelas]

I meant an in-lore explanation.

 

[Perkel]

I meant an in-lore explanation.

easy.

Sawyer is a god in poe universe he governs balance. Upon world creation Sawyer said balance is everything and he made magic and malee to take power from single source which is quantified in poe UI for players to see.

There you have it.

And you will form in game Order of Balance in which you will be seeking to make world balanced and to fight fun.
For example you will have to balance orks right so you will need to set average of orc and cut down rest of them so that balance may have been restored.

 

[hiver]

Considering numenera setting and its mythos they can say that time is relative to frame of reference in which case frame of reference is player not actual character or narrator thus concept of time can be moved and shifted as they want with things like one part of city being in night and other in sun.
edit:

in simplier words:
Story is told from narrator point of view not from character point of view. In this case time can move and shift without causing continuity problems.
As : Narrator focused on that part of story more thus days and nights are longer or there is only a day or night where in other case time can move freely.

Did anyone request a seemingly realistic based excuse for it? And what does it matter? Its not like anyone is complaining because this seems "unrealistic" ffs.

The simple truth is they took the weak path and created a false sense of time passage that wont work in the game at all. They might as well remove it completely.

Its not like any player will choose to just go and sleep - knowing he still has other things to do.

Except a player who would want to simply see what would be the consequences of some specific action or inaction.


Both are meta perspectives, none of it comes naturally from the gameworld internal laws and rules.
Its a meta reinforcing feature that breaks the fourth wall and reinforces metagaming.

This is perfectly fine. Time in rpgs is abstract anyways. Plus, InXile can do specific "you have to do this thing next" quests on top of it.

Time in ROGs is abstract only because its made to be.

Its perfectly fine because previous games did it so we should just repeat it.

 

[MRY]

Tying the passage of time to resting makes both mechanical sense and a modicum of logical sense. In an RPG, too many things are happening at different time scales for "real time" to really work well. For example, it's hardly logical if it takes ten times as long to walk across a room as it does to change from one suit of plate mail armor to another. And, the fact is, periods between sleeping really are fairly flexible: I'm sure we've all had days where we've by will alone crammed in 50 hours of activites, and days where barely a minute's meaningful work was done.

The key to its working mechanically is for resting to be important, even compulsory. MOTB (IIRC) put similarly heavy weight on resting, and the consequence was that I hardly ever rested at all: no need to, it was easy enough to power through the game without relying much on spells. But it sounds like the Numenera mechanic where you run down your stats to do anything worth doing and can only restore them through resting will balance things nicely: yes, you can try to live in crunch mode, and you'll discover that, as with real life, everything you do turns out like shit until you die. As long as the challenge is high enough to require people to expend Effort and run down their stats, then we're not going to be talking about players beating the game one two or three rests; rather, you'd have meaningful cost-benefit analysis: do I try to push on so that I can reach my goal a day earlier, or do I stop to rejuvenate to make sure I reach my goal at all? It would be nice if essentially every game activity inflicted some wear-and-tear on your stats, such that even dialogue grinding could force you to rest, but I doubt things will go that far.

As with any kind of timer, you face perils of metagaming if you make it too pressing and irrelevance if you make it too lax, but on its face, it sounds like a decent enough system. There needs to be some cost to resting, after all, or things get stupid fast.

(As an aside: I assume someone has already used the "balance in all things" mot re: Sawyer?)

 

[hiver]

I would first need to hear that there will be something that pushes me to sleep, before i integrate that into my thinking about the matter.

Dont we regain effort in different ways in the Tides?

In an RPG, too many things are happening at different time scales for "real time" to really work well. For example, it's hardly logical if it takes ten times as long to walk across a room as it does to change from one suit of plate mail armor to another.

False dichotomy.

 

[Grunker]

You should make a game, hiver. And a TV-series based off of a book.

 

[hiver]

I totally should, thats correct.

besides being a completely useless comment.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Jesus, if this sucks, the butthurt could potentially kill the codex.

There will never be an RPG anywhere in the incline that will satisfy the Codex - a sizeable minority will hate every game that is released, no matter what, if for no other reason than because the closest reference points are already one full nostalgia away. I'm looking forward Torment and PoE if only to see what the nitpicks turn out to be.

You have to think of the Codex like the guy who lost his wife in a tragic accident a good decade ago. No matter how hot the girl is that you parade in front of him, there will always be that small part of him who won't care because it's just not her.

Of course, but just like our tragic widower, we're still a lonely sonofabitch that will get really clingy the moment we see a girl who vaguely resembles our dead beloved, even while we treat her like crap and complain that she isn't good enough.

 

[Tigranes]

Codex doesn't even have a unified love for Torment or Fallout 1 or Darklands etc., why would it have universal praise for any of the new ones?

 

[Azrael the cat]

Because then the "target audience" will not be able to have its cake and eat it too, duh. Obviously.

But its alright, I actually prefer them not to use my ideas too much. Far better if i can be the first to actually use them one day.

Play Dead State if you want to see how difficult time progression is in a non linear crpg that's heavily story based, without running into a crap load of quest bugs.

Yes Fallout did it, but only a couple of areas were affected, all late game, none of which changed state more than once, and all of which did so in very blanket terms (folks are either there, or they're dead).

 

[Azrael the cat]

Codex doesn't even have a unified love for Torment or Fallout 1 or Darklands etc., why would it have universal praise for any of the new ones?

Yeah, we're more like the guy who lost his wife in a tragic accident, but used to cheat on her constantly:D

 

[Azrael the cat]

I meant an in-lore explanation.

easy.

Sawyer is a god in poe universe he governs balance. Upon world creation Sawyer said balance is everything and he made magic and malee to take power from single source which is quantified in poe UI for players to see.

There you have it.

And you will form in game Order of Balance in which you will be seeking to make world balanced and to fight fun.
For example you will have to balance orks right so you will need to set average of orc and cut down rest of them so that balance may have been restored.

Oh dear god, that just made me think of life in a Prosper game:

 

[Azrael the cat]

Obsidian should hire you to explain to the players why both warriors and mages have their damage determined by the same stat.

Well strength in some settings is an entirely projected phenomenon. As long as he's posting at the codex, Bryce can have the same strength as Roqua. It's only when the 4th wall is broken by the shout of 'plane tickets bitch' that the mechanics fall apart.

 

[hiver]

Because then the "target audience" will not be able to have its cake and eat it too, duh. Obviously.

But its alright, I actually prefer them not to use my ideas too much. Far better if i can be the first to actually use them one day.

Play Dead State if you want to see how difficult time progression is in a non linear crpg that's heavily story based, without running into a crap load of quest bugs.
Yes Fallout did it, but only a couple of areas were affected, all late game, none of which changed state more than once, and all of which did so in very blanket terms (folks are either there, or they're dead).

Anything done badly will have negative results.

Was i talking about Fallouts?

Was i talking about applying an overall global time limit to everything? No. I did not.

 

[OSK]

I see. OK, it makes more sense from that perspective.
It just rubs me the wrong that one point you can do something but doing a metagame choice then stops you.

For example:

- I kill you! [Attack]

Stopping you from accessing a quest or a location -> Good.

- I will protect you! [Truth]

Stopping you from attacking him -> Bad.

That's what the reconsider option is for.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I get that. But:

1. It seems the reconsider option is not always available. In fact it sounds like it's available only sometimes (as in rarely)
2. What's the point? I'd say that doing the opposite counts as reconsidering. Why do I have to push a button to let the game know?

Even worse, what does "the game expects you to" mean? What if I don't? I'll get locked in some place until I kill the guy I told the game I will?

It doesn't give more options, it actually cuts them. So, what they mean is they'll have an easier time scripting so they could add "reconsider" paths when they wouldn't have otherwise. Which I guess counts as more options than they would have given you initially (taking into account what Infinitron said too), so maybe that's what they meant, I don't know.

 

[Snozgobler]

Obsidian should hire you to explain to the players why both warriors and mages have their damage determined by the same stat.

That's pretty easy really. In PoE the "soul" is of key importance, so the exact shape and resonance of your soul is what determines your potential effectiveness and balance as a person. The exact way the attributes of your soul are expressed may vary, but if you have a "Mighty" soul, then your effectiveness at dealing damage (be that through physical or magical means) is enhanced.

I get that. But:

1. It seems the reconsider option is not always available. In fact it sounds like it's available only sometimes (as in rarely)
2. What's the point? I'd say that doing the opposite counts as reconsidering. Why do I have to push a button to let the game know?

It doesn't give more options, it actually cuts them. So, what they mean is they'll have an easier time scripting so they'd could add "reconsider" paths when they wouldn't have otherwise. Which I guess counts as more options than they would have given you initially (taking into account what Infinitron said too), so maybe that's what they meant, I don't know.

I assume mainly because TToN is going to handle all potential combat encounters as crises, and you can't just attack people at random (at least last time I paid attention that was how it was going to work). However, if a situation arises where you have the option of protecting the person, I doubt they would railroad you into protecting them without giving you the option of choosing not to as part of that crisis; if that option didn't exist, I would be disappointed.

Talky talky choice and consequence and all that jazz.

 

[Infinitron]

Adventure game with stats(tm), baby

Here's the RPS interview where the Torment guys introduced "tussles", small non-crises battles. It's not clear how common they will be, or if they will even be in: http://www.rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=9499

When we do break from what PST did, we have to ask ourselves why PST did it that way, what they were trying to accomplish, and is our proposed solution better than that? For example, early on I had assumed that combat would be allowed anywhere – because that’s how PST did it, and because I, being a relatively old-school gamer, had never played a game where you couldn’t do that. Others had assumed the opposite.

The ensuing discussion forced us to ask important questions. Did PST allow combat anywhere because it was the right thing to do or because that’s how the Infinity Engine worked by default? Was it a critical part of PST? This is a tricky question, because for any given aspect, there will always be some people who believe that it was. Did it work and was it a good decision for PST?

We determined somewhat reluctantly that it wasn’t critical to PST and that it added a lot of work for the designers and scripters at the time. Then we had to decide: is our proposed solution better? What does it gain us? What do we lose by it? In removing the possibility of combat anywhere. We lost some perceived freedom, but we gained more focus on our core vision – no trash mobs, quality, handcrafted encounters that support the narrative, etc, and a heck of a lot of time that would otherwise be spent designing, implementing, and debugging reactivity to handle the case where any combination of NPCs might have died. Because that time would be spent improving quality and reactivity elsewhere in the game, where it would be more likely to be seen by more players, we decided to drop the “kill anyone” approach.

But then as dialogues and designs started coming in, we realized it was almost too restricting. I mean, sure, we don’t have to cater to the player who just wants to slaughter everyone to see what happens, but if an NPC is in your way and really pissing you off, shouldn’t you have the option to smack them down? The problem with this is that our Crisis concept demands a limited number of handcrafted situations, but we couldn’t go through the whole game handcrafting every possible scenario where the player might want to get into a brawl.

The solution was what we called mini-Crises, or Tussles. They’re basically shorter, non-handcrafted combats that are always entered into by player choice or occasionally by player failure, but usually the player will be aware that he’s trying something that could start a fight. In this way, we can give the player freedom to attack people that are reasonable to attack, while still maintaining control over which NPCs can die and when. It also gives players who want to focus on combat more opportunities to do what they’re good at.

Though, as with everything, we still need to prove out how well these will work, or how much extra effort will be necessary for them to work well, before we can commit to it. If Tussles as we currently imagine them prove too ambitious, we have some fallback ideas that would allow for this type of freedom in other, simpler ways.

 

[Snozgobler]

Would Brofist if I'd signed up when I first started reading this forum. As I was a skulking faggot for a number of years before deciding to actually post, please accept a

 

[Kem0sabe]

Seems that they created their own problem that they then had to overdesign around.

 

[Lord Andre]

Attacking whoever you want, when you want is pretty important in an RPG. I am dissapointed with their excuse. I didn't miss it in Shadowrun but still... any RPG is weaker for losing such a feature.

 

[Roguey]

Like clockwork, a developer makes a change and grognards complain.

Didn't really care too much that I couldn't kill anyone at any time in Mask of the Betrayer.

 

[Cosmo]

any RPG is weaker for losing such a feature.

Says who ? Sorry to break it to you, but that ideal RPG doesn't exist anywhere but in your imagination, whereas those guys are constrained by a budget and the constrictive philosophy that will enable them to reach some very precise design goals.
They HAVE TO make these choices.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Like clockwork, a developer makes a change and grognards complain.

Didn't really care too much that I couldn't kill anyone at any time in Mask of the Betrayer.

Like clockwork, Roguey misses the point and babbles dumb nonsense about TEH HURR DURR GRONGARDS!!1

It's not only about killing.

Take this for example:

- I will solve your quest. [lie]

What then? What if I actually want to do it after all? Will the game stop me?

Or:

- I will solve your quest. [truth]

And what if I don't and the game "expects" me to?

I'd rather do my choices in the game world not in the game's scripts.