FeelTheRads
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2008
- Messages
- 13,716
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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread
- Thread starter Florian Gheorghe
- Start date
MRY
Wormwood Studios
FeelTheRads Truly, the face of someone who would be happy to get complimented on the Codex.
Lacrymas Well, ~160k words are just the Kickstarter backers' first and last names. Kidding. (I think?) But the credits are 1.25 hours long! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X1ViwPcMSY&t=64s Anyway, I think the answer is that only a portion (1/3?) of the text comes up in any given game.
Lacrymas Well, ~160k words are just the Kickstarter backers' first and last names. Kidding. (I think?) But the credits are 1.25 hours long! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X1ViwPcMSY&t=64s Anyway, I think the answer is that only a portion (1/3?) of the text comes up in any given game.
Lacrymas
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2015
- Messages
- 18,735
I'm not Sherlock Holmes, but let me note a few facts:
Upon leaving Obsidian, Chris noted something along the lines of leaving to pursue own goals, or additional projects of his own choosing, or something to that intent. Psychologically, that means "I was fired for doing my own projects". Chris was helping other people out with lots of miscellaneous stuff. Meanwhile, he was working at Obsidian, where he notably DIDN'T finish his PoE novel in time, and DIDN'T finish his Arcanum LP properly (which is very sad, since it is BEST LP EVAR).
I will bet you almost anything that MCA's departure from Obsidian was due to him taking on other work. I can't imagine Feargus was too happy about that. Sawyer would likely also not be pleased, and while he might have had some slight differences with regard to design emphasis with MCA, I don't think any arguments about design choices are behind MCA leaving but rather him choosing to work on other stuff while not finishing his Obsidian duties in time.
That ending the game 5 minutes in... was that really about how you can die in the intro? Is that something to brag about to modern gamers? I like how they said "end" though, instead of die as if it's some kind speedrun that you can do.
It was an exaggeration, but...
FUCK, it's rewarding to be able to die like you could in the good old days. They may have formulated things badly, but they describe an incredibly inclined part of the game.
IHaveHugeNick
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2015
- Messages
- 1,870,558
Easily possible. The dialogue systems seem really robust, I think there's a lot more shit going underneath than people realize. The game most likely tracks a lot of tiny little decisions and variables like male/female/class, and outputs different text based on that. Most of it will be flavor text, mind. It's all probably barely noticeable unless you go out of your way looking for it.
And you know, I'd imagine that every "ask this question again" line is probably counted as 4 additional words.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Right.
Easily possible. The dialogue systems seem really robust, I think there's a lot more shit going underneath than people realize. The game most likely tracks a lot of tiny little decisions and variables like male/female/class, and outputs different text based on that. Most of it will be flavor text, mind. It's all probably barely noticeable unless you go out of your way looking for it.
And you know, I'd imagine that every "ask this question again" line is probably counted as 5 additional words.
For example, the way gender-specific dialogue nodes work is that for a given node, you can create an alternate node (n.M vs. n.F) to account for gender. Each one is stand-alone, meaning that it's not like you write a node that says: "Oh, little [brother/sister], what a fool you are!" Instead, you write two nodes, one each. There are ~25,000 female nodes in the game. Of those, I'd guess that ~24,000 are just slight variants, but they all count. Every skill check has a success and failure child, and many then have additional try-again variants. Many dialogues have significant branching. For example, I would say that in the Meres I did, the player should get something like 1/3 of the nodes in a given pass through them. Many nodes rest on extremely improbable conditions that they player won't see, or on mutually exclusive conditions that the player can't see.
Honestly, I'm still not sure how to explain it. Skimming, I suppose. Back when I was a kid and read fantasy novels, I would probably read at a rate of ~125 pages an hour, and I remember reading an 800-page Wheel of Time book in a single torrid day. How Long to Beat has 34 hours for Planescape: Torment, and it has a lot of words, too.
Terpsichore
Arcane
Well, just finished it. The ending felt very poor and rushed, that ragpicker in the Bloom is a more interesting character and offers more text than the Sorrow, who for some reason speaks like a generic character and not an incomprehensible cosmic horror after being a towering and silent horror the whole game. I wanted to try all possible endings but my save right before the final event got corrupted or something and gets stuck at 49% so whatever.
I'd say the game is better than PoE, at least I got to finish it before dying of boredom from hours of poor, tedious combat and savescumming.
Writing isn't memorable but there are some decent bits, usually allocated to unimportant characters for some reason. Most of writing forced me to quickly skim through as it wasn't engaging or I already more or less knew what I was going to read, that's quite sad considering that reading everything in PS:T was a delight.
Combat has potential with the multiple ways to solve the objective thing and cyphers, but neither case is really explored and there's barely any combat to begin with so it all fails to deliver. I had to sell/drop a lot of cyphers to avoid the sickness since you can't even use them fast enough with the amount of fights the game has, and even if you try to, there aren't any good opportunities as combat is either too easy to begin with (most of it) or it can't be solved by fighting (Miel Avest/Bloom). The same goes for gear more or less, finding upgrades and buying new pieces is symbolic at best.
It's also pretty tiring to see archaic fuckups recreated in new games for some bizarre reason. Was it really necessary to make Scan Thoughts exclusive to nanos? I guess they wanted to imitate PS:T in this regard but it's simply overdone, because besides this ability, 90% of important checks are already INT based. I can't see the game being even remotely enjoyable if you don't pick nano. Another issue is the lack of backtracking, why exactly can't we go back to Sagus Cliffs? There's a quest in the Bloom involving Aligern where he mentions going back to the city and speaking to someone to solve his tatoo voodoo, but you never get the chance. You don't get to see the mercenary you save going back to his kids either. Why don't party members that go away give you back all the stuff they carry? I don't think that Erritis is going to need all that gear and cyphers in the afterlife.
What I liked are the Merecasters, it's a nice addition and a way to add loredumps in an interactive manner.
I'd say the game is better than PoE, at least I got to finish it before dying of boredom from hours of poor, tedious combat and savescumming.
Writing isn't memorable but there are some decent bits, usually allocated to unimportant characters for some reason. Most of writing forced me to quickly skim through as it wasn't engaging or I already more or less knew what I was going to read, that's quite sad considering that reading everything in PS:T was a delight.
Combat has potential with the multiple ways to solve the objective thing and cyphers, but neither case is really explored and there's barely any combat to begin with so it all fails to deliver. I had to sell/drop a lot of cyphers to avoid the sickness since you can't even use them fast enough with the amount of fights the game has, and even if you try to, there aren't any good opportunities as combat is either too easy to begin with (most of it) or it can't be solved by fighting (Miel Avest/Bloom). The same goes for gear more or less, finding upgrades and buying new pieces is symbolic at best.
It's also pretty tiring to see archaic fuckups recreated in new games for some bizarre reason. Was it really necessary to make Scan Thoughts exclusive to nanos? I guess they wanted to imitate PS:T in this regard but it's simply overdone, because besides this ability, 90% of important checks are already INT based. I can't see the game being even remotely enjoyable if you don't pick nano. Another issue is the lack of backtracking, why exactly can't we go back to Sagus Cliffs? There's a quest in the Bloom involving Aligern where he mentions going back to the city and speaking to someone to solve his tatoo voodoo, but you never get the chance. You don't get to see the mercenary you save going back to his kids either. Why don't party members that go away give you back all the stuff they carry? I don't think that Erritis is going to need all that gear and cyphers in the afterlife.
What I liked are the Merecasters, it's a nice addition and a way to add loredumps in an interactive manner.
Lord Andre
Arcane
Man, I can't get over how shit the foci thing is. I don't care they axed some retarded companions but the foci thing is handled so bad. Like the 3 available are the ones the 3 specter castoffs have and they tell you in dialogue "Oh no, you have a unique one, a gift you must choose...". Did no one think to at least change the fucking dialogue that clearly points to being more foci. And the 3 available are boring and bland as shit. I'd rather not have one at all than that shit. And how hard really would it have been to come up with another dozen on par with the 3 ones.
"who Meditates a lot" - regenerate 5 INT once per day. "who plays with fire" - + 3 fire damage once per combat
There, I just created 2 in 30 seconds. FFS.
And I only realized how shit the character system is when the level up came and there was nothing to spend my points on that looked useful or interesting.
Maybe the writing's good, I haven't gone that far, but this looks more like a text adventure game than an RPG.
I knew there was faggotry afoot when Kevin Saunders left the game. Very, very disappointed with this shit. Still not as bland as PoE though. Mainly because Colin could wipe his ass with a piece of paper and it would be a more interesting read than PoE's shitty writing...
"who Meditates a lot" - regenerate 5 INT once per day. "who plays with fire" - + 3 fire damage once per combat
There, I just created 2 in 30 seconds. FFS.
And I only realized how shit the character system is when the level up came and there was nothing to spend my points on that looked useful or interesting.
Maybe the writing's good, I haven't gone that far, but this looks more like a text adventure game than an RPG.
I knew there was faggotry afoot when Kevin Saunders left the game. Very, very disappointed with this shit. Still not as bland as PoE though. Mainly because Colin could wipe his ass with a piece of paper and it would be a more interesting read than PoE's shitty writing...
passerby
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2016
- Messages
- 2,788
Apparently average regular book reader reads around 300 words per minute ( 200 for average person ).
Last edited:
Excidium II
Self-Ejected
Text adventures have puzzles and shit. This is just about exhausting dialogue and it's so easy to pass every check that it's basically a glorified VN.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I think he means "Twine game."
Terpsichore
Arcane
By the way, the numanuma setting or whatever is basically watered down DnD with some MTG and SJW "diversity" mixed in, just instead of magic, it's nanos!
Excidium II
Self-Ejected
Most D&D settings at least attempt to have basic consistence. Numanuma is a kitchen sink world, it's closer to something like Rifts.
Harry Easter
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Jul 27, 2016
- Messages
- 819
I really thought, that the consequences of our choices would be implemented. It's kinda a lost chance.
Kem0sabe
Arcane
Wasn't MCA one of the owners of Obsidian? If so, he could very well do what the fuck he pleases. Only by his own accord could he be bought out by the other partners.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Unfortunately, some of the consequences from my Tidal meres got disrupted when the meres were moved from the start of the game to later. (A change that was generally thought to improve the intro by getting you into Sagus Cliffs faster.) There were never huge consequences to them, but, for example, how you resolved the whale mere had some small effects around Sagus Cliffs, learning the Tabaht runes in and meeting the Tabaht general in the mindworm mere had consequences with the Genocide and in some other spots, and various small things in Sagus Cliffs would track the outcome for the inheritance mere. Mind-battling against the Tabaht general would also make it easier to win other mind-battles in the game (at least it made the Inifere mental struggle easier). I'm not sure whether these are still in (and you missed them) or they don't work because of things being moved or what.
One thing I really wanted to do, but never had the bandwidth to accomplish, related to the inheritance mere:
One thing I really wanted to do, but never had the bandwidth to accomplish, related to the inheritance mere:
At the end of it, the mere P.C. imagines the consequences of giving money to particular people. But it would turn out that he was all wrong -- the ne'er-do-well nephew turned out to actually use the money to become a successful entrepreneur, the hardscrabble girl who wanted to be free from her past wound up murdered in her home, the orphans were exploited (though this should've been obvious to anyone who read that they had previously benefited from the "honest work of gleaning numenera in the wrecking fields" or whatever), Cardogo's trust was embezzled, and so on. Some of this might have gotten in, but I don't think so.
Kem0sabe
Arcane
I'm really starting to dislike the name mere. Doesn't even sound like we are discussing an rpg, but a Japanese visual novel.
Terpsichore
Arcane
I haven't read on the actual setting, just going by what the game offers. The whole "superhumans traveling through worlds, dimensions and time" just reeks of MTG and its planeswalkers. Magic and highly advanced technology being the same thing on practice isn't a new concept but I don't recall it being explored in games. I think the setting has potential though, but they would need to get the shit together when it comes to consistency and lore first. Right now it's just "everything is possible, realities are infinite, choices don't matter and consequences can be changed, nothing is real but everything is real too, I'm also you but you are not me and you aren't even yourself also lol btw I'm gay and genders are infinite" high school philosophy mumbo jumbo, which is way too pretentious and chaotic for a setting. The SJW garbage just adds the cringe factor but nothing of actual value as usual.
DeepOcean
Arcane
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2012
- Messages
- 7,404
Man, I can't wait to see you despair... [evil laughter]
Ivan
Arcane
which was the "inheritance mere"? i don't remember that one at all
Father Foreskin
Learned
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2017
- Messages
- 167
The damage control with the added content is a really nice idea and i appriciate it. However it wont save the games sales or ratings. It comes too late because the shitstorm has been going on for months already and the media attention is largely over. Also its kinda like a child molester making a donation to UNICEF after getting caught. Of course the man himself, Brian "down syndrome shoes" Fargo is just smelling his own farts on Twitter in awe of those few good reviws the game got.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
It was the Gold Tidal Mere. You are a sick old person dying from the Iron Wind. Starts with you looking out a window at the ocean.
vortex
Fabulous Optimist
Excidium II
Self-Ejected
Expansion...more like Restoration Patch.
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