Game News Torment: Tides of Numenera Released

[l3loodAngel]

Anyways, the combat system of PST is rather solid. It's just that the fights are rather badly designed and, well, there's no real reason to fight.

If the combat is shit, would you say the combat system is solid? It makes any combat build choices pretty pointless.

You know the difference between a combat system and designers input? While the second statement is just retarded.

I am tired of this TB fapping.

D&D was made for turn based. This is not TB fapping, it's just not considering a RTwP rendition "solid D&D".

Breathe, breathe. Just because DnD was made for TB doesn't mean it breaks down being RTwP.

Builds do matter because you get a totaly fuckign different experience

No, because companions give you all those experiences anyways.

Is there a difference between hight int and low int build in PST? I mean both game wise and combat wise.

Now what you are describing as ability to solely use only dagger is more of balancing issue or a bug, that's not multiclassing working properly.

It was designed like that on purpose for the game. Not a bug, just shit system design or incompetence to implement multiclassing.

It's a design issue not DnD issue.

Every time I hear DnD bashing I want to puke, not because it is a masterpiece, but because it is masterpiece compared to what's being offered on the market.

I have ran PnP campaigns for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions of D&D. I am well aware of its strengths and weaknesses.

So what? Your comments scream clueless.

 

[Ismaul]

It might end up weirdly, with many in the Bioware crowd dropping the pretense that they like sophisticated "litterature", and embracing their popamole romance-loving asses for what they are.

You are overthinking, idealizing things and projecting your own preferences on popamole players.

Let me make things clear for you:

might

Most of these people don’t give a fuck about "narrative contextualization", whatever the hell that vague term means.

I did define it for you, but I guess reading is hard, eh?

What all storyfag have in common, I think, is a desire for a (good) story reason to do what they do in the game. They want their actions to have narrative contextualisation, in game, not just LARPed.

If TW3 were a smaller game with more "narrative contextualization", it would sell like shit.

TW3 is good because its quests fit with the world and the character, because they make narrative sense, because they're not just random fed-ex bullshit. That is what people praised about it.

 

[Ismaul]

You know the difference between a combat system and designers input?

Now what you are describing as ability to solely use only dagger is more of balancing issue or a bug, that's not multiclassing working properly.

It was designed like that on purpose for the game. Not a bug, just shit system design or incompetence to implement multiclassing.

It's a design issue not DnD issue.

We're talking about D&D's implementation in PS:T, not D&D itself here.

 

[l3loodAngel]

You know the difference between a combat system and designers input?

Now what you are describing as ability to solely use only dagger is more of balancing issue or a bug, that's not multiclassing working properly.

It was designed like that on purpose for the game. Not a bug, just shit system design or incompetence to implement multiclassing.

It's a design issue not DnD issue.

We're talking about D&D's implementation in PS:T, not D&D itself here.

No? The system is DnD. The implemetation and design sucks. And even then implementation bugs/defects diminish it's quality slightly, because it can be easily fixed, if there is a need for it.

 

[Ismaul]

We're talking about D&D's implementation in PS:T, not D&D itself here.

No? The system is DnD.

So you're telling me PnP D&D's combat system is RTwP? How dumb are you?

The implemetation and design sucks.

Great, we agree.

And even then implementation bugs/defects diminish it's quality slightly, because it can be easily fixed, if there is a need for it.

Or not? Does the implementation "suck", or does it only "diminsh its quality slightly"? FFS

 

[felipepepe]

We did sell-through around 400k worldwide on Torment. There seems to be an ongoing legacy that the game did very poorly at retail, which isn't true. It actually sold more copies than the Fallouts did.

Those aren't Final Fantasy numbers, but it certainly was profitable for the company.

Heh, 1999's Torment might outsell 2017's Torment.

I mean, combined with GOG sales PS:T probably is over 1M and Numanuma will never reach that, but also losing in release sales? That's crazy.

BTW, been trying the game and it's really underwhelming. Overwritten as fuck, describes things more than Tolkien and it's so busy being wacky and dropping exposition on you that if forgets a very important detail: making you fucking care about anything in the first place.

Seriously, it starts throwing flashbacks and explaining who the Changing God is even before you can create your character. Then it immediately goes "this is the big bad, these are your quirky companions and this is your fetch quest - now go". Dev team never heard about foreplay I guess.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

Why do you keep saying TTON flopped? According to Steamspy, it almost reached the amount of Kickstarter backers!
In all seriousness, I predicted that and it's really sad

 

[Kem0sabe]

Apparently the PS4 version is unplayable, with ridiculously low framerate... Seems that inXile's console experiment will be rather short lived.

 

[J_C]

I remember when they have written their long ass boring kickstarter updates, which they made very lengthy just because they thought that a text heavy game needs lengthy updates. And I was saying that this is bullshit, and I hope the game won't have too much text just for the sake of havig much text.

I remember when I complained about this and I was trolled as being casual who doesn't like reading. Heh, it seems I was right, Inxile concentrated so much on the word number, that they forget to make it coherent and natural.

Apparently the PS4 version is unplayable, with ridiculously low framerate... Seems that inXile's console experiment will be rather short lived.

Serves them right.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

And I was saying that this is bullshit, and I hope the game won't have too much text just for the sake of havig much text.

I remember when I complained about this and I was trolled as being casual who doesn't like reading.

Infamous Codex retard heretic says he doesn't like the most beloved Codex RPG cause its too much reading, what did you expect, really? :D

Anyway, I remember this too and I thought it was hypocritical back then as I do think it is now.

Some people here complain about walls of text now too, some Steam reviews complain about a shitty balance in reading and combat. But of course PS:T was a wall of text CYOA too and had shit combat to boot!

I never quite got the appeal of that game to be honest, PS:T has a cool setting, cool characters and cool story, but its not a game in the sense as I understand the term. I got burned out pretty soon because I find it tiresome to walk up to any given NPC, get a fuckton of text dropped over me, click through a million responses, then after twenty minutes when I am done with that, I walk three seconds up to the next NPC, and the same shit happens again. Dropped the game halfway through, maybe I'll complete it some other time.

On the other hand, people used to complain about walls of text in PoE, which never quite got (not speaking about the content level of those texts now) because the game strikes a much better balance between text and gameplay, so the player has much more power over the pacing or balancing text with gameplay.

I don't have anything against text heavy games as long as they strike a balance with that and the gameplay. If I feel like playing a game, I want to play; if feel like reading, I'm gonna read a book.

I can't account for the quality of the writing, so if one doesn't like that, fair enough, I guess. But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that. You'd think people got exactly what they should've expected, spiritual successor in every way, har harrr.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

The Bloom is amazing, finally the best art for Isometric games is here.

Spoiler

why does Little Niehlish map doesn't have fog of war like all the other maps? Is this a bug?

 

[felipepepe]

But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that.

The difference is that Planescape was wordy with interesting text. Numanuma feels like every single word that was written shipped with the game, even the design documents and meeting memos.

Example:

Numanuma is so overwritten that it describes what you're literally seeing with your very own eyes. There's nothing in this text that I can't see by myself, it's 105% useless.

Now Planescape:

Oh look, PST was written by people who knows the audience have eyes, so they don't need to write "you see a big fucking book with a guy writing on it" - they use text to ADD details that you can't see.

FFS, PST doesn't even describes Morte. You just wake up, the skull flies to you and dialog starts. There's no "you see a friendly but somewhat suspicious skull that oddly seems to float around".

It may seem like a small detail, but this permeates Numanuma's writing as a whole. So much of what your read is unnecessary that it gets boring and you get inclined to start skipping text. When you do this, the game dies. There's nothing left.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

So it's top 20 on Steam bestseller list now, behind the AAA blockbusters Ultimate Chicken Horse and Cat Goes Fishing.

 

[Naraya]

But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that.

The difference is that Planescape was wordy with interesting text. Numanuma feels like every single word that was written shipped with the game, even the design documents and meeting memos.

Example:

Numanuma is so overwritten that it describes what you're literally seeing with your very own eyes. There's nothing in this text that I can't see by myself, it's 105% useless.

Now Planescape:

Oh look, PST was written by people who knows the audience have eyes, so they don't need to write "you see a big fucking book with a guy writing on it" - they use text to ADD details that you can't see.

FFS, PST doesn't even describes Morte. You just wake up, the skull flies to you and dialog starts. There's no "you see a friendly but somewhat suspicious skull that oddly seems to float around".

It may seem like a small detail, but this permeates Numanuma's writing as a whole. So much of what your read is unnecessary that it gets boring and you get inclined to start skipping text. When you do this, the game dies. There's nothing left.

To be fair - I had the exact same feeling when I played PoE. Everything was minutely described, even though it was perfectly visible. Sometimes I felt I was playing a text-based game.

 

[Fenix]

the game strikes a much better balance between text and gameplay

Maybe, but it is still shitty RPG, and P:T is still the best.
Why is that? Big secret I think.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Builds don't matter in Torment, except for the fact that if you didn't pump Int/Wis, you're stupid in every sense. So "combat build" is just something that hampers you if you didn't pick a caster, it matters in the worst way.

You're so wrong, lol. In PST, the build can quite matter. It's just that it's less about TNO's build and more about your crew composition.

For example, the basic problem of your bog standard party-sorcerer is that, despite those endgame spells being ultra fancy and taking several hours in real time to cast, the damage they do is pretty shit and you run out of casts fast. So, when you suddenly get left solo, stuff goes quite bad for you. Likewise, while there are some curious items to find in Sigil sewers and while there's the highest tier of the modron maze to complete, the combat in there goes rather badly because, essentially, everyone is underleveled and there are no good force multipliers.

However, if you choose to go solo or with just one companion, the situation changes. A lot. Solo rogue insta-backstabs those pesky sewer lampreys, one after another. The process can be accelerated if you sport rogue + Annah duo. Solo mage deals with the whole packs of them via force missiles (which, at the high levels, become ludicrously good - best spell in the game). Regardless of the class, a high-Con TNO can do a pain reflection combo with Dak'kon (which is provided by one of his zerthimon spells, IIRC). And that's only the stuff I've tried out - I'm pretty sure that high level Ignus is a beast (I can't stand his guts, though, so I hadn't experimented with him much).

Another benefit of these solo/duo playthroughs is that you level up much faster (especially as a rogue) so you have more skillpoints so you have more solutions to everything. There's also a very solid Wis/Cha social buildup for the rogue (as Int is a waste for him). You can go through the game without int and without missing that much.

Anyways, the combat system of PST is rather solid. It's just that the fights are rather badly designed and, well, there's no real reason to fight.

Yeah but mage TNO has so many absurdly inflated xp that I'm usually around lvl 30 by that stage, without grinding the lower ward dungeon for the rare drops (plus you've got Nordrom's massive stat/damage boosts really really on that build).

Even just the insane exp bonus from wisdom gives you an insane advantage over combat builds. The bonus wis xp, plus the bonus xp from int/cha options, plus the bonus memory xp,, plus the bonus xp from high int/wis only quests, invariably means that by the time I'm left solo, my pure mage can melee any enemy just by sheer overlevelling. I don't recall ever having to cast a spell in the fortress of torment - I'm 20 levels higher then on a fighter build, and have maxed out all stats (with tattoos obviously) by not long after ravel. By the time I'm back in sigil, I've got maxed stats even without tattoos so I swap them out for damage or protection boost tattoos.

Try replaying it with minimum str/con/dex and putting all stat increases into wis until maxxed, then int and cha. It breaks the game hilariously. You end up with maxed combat stats in about half the time as you do when going a combat build.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

the game strikes a much better balance between text and gameplay

Maybe, but it is still shitty RPG, and P:T is still the best.
Why is that? Big secret I think.

it is not shitty.

Spoiler

but Tybir is gay

 

[Fenix]

Thepoint is it's surely not the best one.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

Thepoint is it's surely not the best one.

I think it may be a slap in the face for anyone who pledge a lot of money, because of the cuts, but judging from a pure RPG perspective, the game has C&C, reactivity, good story.
but

Spoiler

Tybir is still gay

 

[Imperialist]

1st big difference between T:TORN and WL2---no f'n stupid 1980's dot-matrix printer like text thrown to the screen--I can't read text that is jerky; I wished WL2 Directors-Cut had a toggle to turn off that stupid text delivery system-for fuck sake.

Enjoying T:TORN as much at Torment 1, if not a tad more. LOVE the text!!!

 

[an Administrator]

T H I S

Numanuma is so overwritten that it describes what you're literally seeing with your very own eyes

 

[Lurker King]

But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that.

What is disingenuous is your superficial analysis. PS:T was good despite the walls of text and the bad combat, not because of them. What made the game special is an interesting narrative premise that hooks the player immediately, and is tied harmoniously to the exploration of the game world, NPCs, etc., which also happens to be very lively and imaginative. T:ToN in comparison has only some interesting bits of background lore and setting, nothing more.

 

[Bumvelcrow]

Enjoying T:TORN as much at Torment 1, if not a tad more. LOVE the text!!!

Hmm... I've only played about an hour so far, and it's just not gripping me. As others have said the masses of superfluous text is making it exhausting to read, particularly when relatively little of it seems to be relevant. I can see some interesting ideas here, but I've barely needed to look at the screen so far - everything is in the text, and the plot has basically been handed to me on a scroll before I've left the first scene. I feel like I'm reading somebody else's story, not mine. Hopefully things will pick up - the first fight with the Sorrow didn't leave me with any great confidence in the combat system.

 

[Darkzone]

Why do you keep saying TTON flopped? According to Steamspy, it almost reached the amount of Kickstarter backers!
In all seriousness, I predicted that and it's really sad

Will the consolieros save Torment? Or is Torment just an abstract in the history of cRPGs? How does the retail sales impact the sale numbers? See "The tormenting demise of inXile". Only here on Codex or the next inXile Torment update, next week or month or never!! (Here 40s creepy music.)

 

[Tommy Wiseau]

I can't account for the quality of the writing, so if one doesn't like that, fair enough, I guess. But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that. You'd think people got exactly what they should've expected, spiritual successor in every way, har harrr.

Some of the kodex kiddies only admit they like Torment because they don't want to lose kkk.

But if people complain that Numanuma is too text heavy and the combat is shit, that strikes me as disingenuous - PS:T was exactly that.

What is disingenuous is your superficial analysis. PS:T was good despite the walls of text

What's disingenuous is your ugly mug. The walls of text made the game world intriguing because they were well written. It's not our fault your attention span doesn't stretch beyond the two bits of simple sentences fed to you, like in Fallout 1.