Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Haba]

I'm glad there are no romances in the game

That's not entirely true... but...

Yeah.

You don't want to know.

Spoiler

 

[TT1]

I ordered a pepperoni pizza and I paid extra to double the cheese, extra sauce and onions too. The guy tells me that the pizza arrives in 30 minutes.

After 3 hours the pizza arrives cold, without sauce, without cheese, without onion and without pepperoni. It's just a baked dish, but, hey, I'm hungry!

After I eat 1/3 of this shit, I get a call from the owner of the pizzeria saying that he will send me some cheese and some pepperoni.

Fuck you, Fargo.

 

[GloomFrost]

I ordered a pepperoni pizza and I paid extra to double the cheese, extra sauce and onions too. The guy tells me that the pizza arrives in 30 minutes.

After 3 hours the pizza arrives cold, without sauce, without cheese, without onion and without pepperoni. It's just a baked dish, but, hey, I'm hungry!

After I eat 1/3 of this shit, I get a call from the owner of the pizzeria saying that he will send me some cheese and some pepperoni.

Fuck you, Fargo.

You are forgetting something! The owner of the restaurant and the "other customers" are trying to convince you that the pizza you got is the best pizza in the world and you are just a spoiled child who doesnt know how to eat!

 

[Luckmann]

Rhin has a major drawback - selling her to slavers has no real benefits.

Alongside the fact that the whole slavers thing is entirely one-sided, I hate how Rhin is just cheap emotional manipulation 101, forcing a situation by means of emotional blackmailing, when there's plenty of reasonable options available, only that they're not offered to the player, completely ignoring one of the key agents of a good RPG; player agency. Pretty much everything related to Rhin is pure garbage. Forced, constipated, narrative garbage.

 

[Apexeon]

Downloading PS:T for the first time.
Thanks InExile!

We have people on the Codex... who never played Planescape?

Fallout 3 was my first RPG

This is why stamps for free wine should be included in welfare. It helps with the pain if we can drink it away.

 

[Roguey]

Colin McComb complains about female NPCs showing too much cleavage in PS:T
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLC6QiV0kv8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzALM1xQoJw

There weren't any prostitutes in Tides of Numenera and I doubt there will be any in Wasteland 3.

Duh, if there's nothing else to compare it to, then it either achieved its goals (10/10) or it didn't (0/10). You won't know how well it achieved its goals because judging art is always abstract and it needs comparisons. That's why we can identify masterpieces. Aesthetic judgement is always tied to an intersubjective consensus.

There are partial successes. If a game succeeds at some things, and fails at others, it'd go somewhere in the middle.

 

[vivec]

Why did people like Rhin out of curiosity? I have mixed feelings about her. She was the best companion, but almost entirely by default. She's the only character (maybe excepting Aligern but Aligern's shit) that has any kind of emotional bond to the MC, which is amazing when you consider that in PST there wasn't a single companion that didn't have or develop some sort of craving dependency on the Nameless One. But even then, Rhin's connection amounts to being a cute, slightly precocious girl in need of protection.

Spoiler

And later an older, Mary Sue-ish badass version of same

It's not necessarily Rhin's fault, it's the problem of the main character being a complete cipher incapable of fulfilling any emotional niche in the plot that prevents any bond being forged.

Was it just the 'stir up protective feelings, then saddle you with terrible party member' thing that people liked, the subversion? Or was there something else to her that made her good?

As I see it, Rhin is a subversion of baggage companion. Generally, games give you a child companion for plot reasons and these are not counted towards party limits. Also, companions, as a rule, are there to fill in party skill gaps; an idea that I totally despise. TToN suffers from this. Most of the companions have no backstory or lore-role to fill in the game. They only talk in platitudes and fail to motivate the game progression in any way. Rhin, on the other hand, provides at least 4 ways in which she can work:

Spoiler

1) She can be abandoned.
2) She can be sold back to Tol (these two options close her story)
3) She can be taken with you as a baggage and then dumped at the first opportunity to foster parents; this option on the first looks seems legible tricking you into ending her story earlier.
4) She can be sent to her real home actually fulfilling her quest.

The funny part is if you keep her in the party until she hits Tier 3 and for that, you *really* have to keep her in the party to get all that XP, she turns into a super powerful member with the ability to retain a used Cypher. That is the twist in her story which makes her so mechanically appealing. You really have to invest in her.

More importantly, in the story itself, she plays the surrogate role of the daughter *similar* to the one the Changing God has. While the Changing God loved his daughter, in the end, he abandoned her, which is what you can do to Rhin as well. This is the redemption that the PC can make to that act. Unfortunately, this aspect of the game is not that well developed, ultimately dooming an actually subtle plotline.

 

[Terpsichore]

Downloading PS:T for the first time.
Thanks InExile!

We have people on the Codex... who never played Planescape?

Fallout 3 was my first RPG

This is why stamps for free wine should be included in welfare. It helps with the pain if we can drink it away.

Who the hell gets drunk off wine?

 

[Lacrymas]

Colin McComb complains about female NPCs showing too much cleavage in PS:T
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLC6QiV0kv8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzALM1xQoJw

There weren't any prostitutes in Tides of Numenera and I doubt there will be any in Wasteland 3.

Duh, if there's nothing else to compare it to, then it either achieved its goals (10/10) or it didn't (0/10). You won't know how well it achieved its goals because judging art is always abstract and it needs comparisons. That's why we can identify masterpieces. Aesthetic judgement is always tied to an intersubjective consensus.

There are partial successes. If a game succeeds at some things, and fails at others, it'd go somewhere in the middle.

How would you know how well it succeeds if it's the first thing of its kind? The goal is to create a game, they succeeded in that, now what? You don't know what a game is, let alone an RPG. You also don't know what a book is, let alone a narrative. I can go on.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

companions, as a rule, are there to fill in party skill gaps; an idea that I totally despise.

I never seem to be able to read a post from you that doesn't have, hidden within its bowels, some really weird and not at all important gripe that no-one else even thinks about but you are somehow overly angry about.

 

[Wulfstand]

Started replaying PS:T like most other fellow Codexers, haven't played the game in years, and 20 minutes in and I can not believe how good the game starts off. It really can not be over stated how well Morte's character has aged, and how cool of a first impression he gives to the game after having met him literally after the introductory cutscene finished playing.

 

[vortex]

1. How T:TON should be balanced ?
2. How to change the general gameplay and how to change the Crisis gameplay?

 

[vivec]

1. How T:TON should be balanced ?
2. How to change the general gameplay and how to change the Crisis gameplay?

Quite easy. Make resting more involved. Make the sources of efforts rare. The problem is that resting is be all end all solution of all your problems in most cases. Timed quests mitigate that a bit, but not sufficiently. Also, make crises harder with fewer but more powerful apponents, so that you *really* have to invest into how to use abilities and cyphers.

 

[MRY]

Terpsichore But you CAN romance a maw, as Junta has pointed out.

oldmanpaco Thanks! Sorry you didn't enjoy the game more though.

 

[Harold]

Rhin has a major drawback - selling her to slavers has no real benefits.

Alongside the fact that the whole slavers thing is entirely one-sided, I hate how Rhin is just cheap emotional manipulation 101, forcing a situation by means of emotional blackmailing, when there's plenty of reasonable options available, only that they're not offered to the player, completely ignoring one of the key agents of a good RPG; player agency. Pretty much everything related to Rhin is pure garbage. Forced, constipated, narrative garbage.

Rhin was writen by a nu-male beta faggot who made a name for himself writing Mary-Sueish wish fulfillment fantasy that similarly afflicted individuals easily gobble up. Her quest is designed by a born-again christian who moved to Thailand and literally adopted a dozen kids. To expect these 2 dudes to give you the option to do something mean to a fictional child, and have that option be just as rewarding as 'the right thing', is just plain silly.

Rhin is better written than the rest of the bland tag-alongs (sans Erritis, but that's been covered already), in that she achieves the emotional-manipulation the author intended with the intended audience susceptible to such things, which is sadly pretty big. I can smell her type a mile away, so despite the fact that her broken memory and 'god' give her a degree a nuance, in the end I can only see her as another Clementine, only with superpowers, a cheap trick to elicit emotional attachment, as old as the 18th century Frenchie soaps that spawned it.

To get back to my original point, I 'm all for the death of the author, but the author in case also has to be competent enough for me not to care about him, i.e. despite his personal irl agendas, beliefs etc., he should be a professional when he does an rpg and design to the strengths of the genre: above all else give the player options that make sense in the world and don't passively-agressively judge him for those choices. Yes, you can give her to the slavers, but this is intentionally designed to be the worst option when it shouldn't be. Deciding to keep Rhin should be the harder decision, in a well-designed game you shouldn't be able to learn Tidal Affinity unless you give her to the slavers (or only have one other option to learn it somewhere else that should be significantly more difficult).

As it is, you go ---> Edgy Effort ---> Persuasion: Don't be such a meanie, and the slaver castoff goes: 'k, you're right, take care of her, lemme teach you my powah and maybe I'll even throw in a good bj while I'm at it. To add insult to injury, after that you get the option to ask slaver girl 'What are you doing with your life?'. Are you fucking kidding me?!! In a setting where SLAVERY IS FUCKING LEGAL! And in that node, you get the classic libtard passive agressive option to say 'I'm not judgin you, but srsly, like, you could use your powah for the betterment of society as a whole, oh my gosh!'. Go fuck yourself, game! At that point what I really wanted to ask is what the fuck is my stupid castoff doing with his life. The slaver-girl seems to be living the dream, not giving a fuck about no Sorrow, whereas I have to run around like a scared Crispy to fix a broken PSU - cocoon thing because you showed me a multi-headed dick raping some ghosts inside my brian during the tutorial.

Thing is, this isn't even the only quest where rewards are slanted towards the player 'doing the right thing' (tm). In the Tormented Levy quest, you get a far better reward if you convince the dude to give another year of his life (even though he makes a p. good point why he shouldn't have to), than if you go to the strong, independent chief-of-police woman and tell her 'Hey, one of you Robocops is broken'. I'm sorry, but this is pure, arrogant, libtarded stupidity, and if you don't want me to rant about it, then stop putting it in the game. Just because you give me multiple options doesn't make it better, when you penalise me for not choosing the more liberal one, in a setting that you fucking chose to describe as a decadent, whoever-can-grab-more-power-wins type of world. Imagine if, in AoD, when you go down a dark alley because an individual with deranged eyes and a giant grin told you he has a great deal for you, what would actually happen is... you'd get an awesome fucking deal, no strings attached, go you, gold-hearted boy! We'd all be laughing and pointing at VD, calling him a fucking moran!

And let's not forget the precedent for all this. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, like I said back in the day, this can be traced all the way back to Carceri in PST, an area also designed by McCuck. What are your options there? Either all of a sudden, out of the blue, become a lawful good paladin that reverts the chaos Trias caused OR if you want to play anything other than Lawful Good, go straight after Trias and miss a boatload of XP. But hey, look at all the cool shit happening on screen, all meant to cheaply emotionally engage you to the plight of these poor NPC, whom, by the way, when you first met back in regular Curst, told you 'We're all a bunch of kewl betrayers 'roun' here, you bettah watch your step, cutter!'.

Contrast all this cheap emotional manipulation and 'do the right thing' bs with the options of selling your companions into slavery and/or sacrificing them to gain more power from the evil grimoire, or answers from the Pillar of Skulls. At the time of making those choices, the benefits of being evil are convincingly presented as alluring, thus creating a genuine dilemma. And even so, in all my 3 playthrough of PST throughout the years, I neved betrayed my lovely grinning skull or my bro Dak'kon (well, I did it once to see what happens, then promptly reloaded), because the writing exxpertly made me care for them while at the same time not insulting my intelligence or the tenets of the rpg genre, by providing alluring and sensible-within-the-setting options for screwing them over. But because I stayed up until 5 AM to read the wonderful wonderful Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon and see the shitty things Practical Dude did to him, while also understanding that the bastard had some p. good reasons for doing them (that is what fucking nuance looks like, btw), heard the short voicebark Dak'kon gives once you 'upgrade' him - so little VO, yet such great and memorable delivery - emotional connection is earned, both the emotional link between the PC and companions and the one between the player and the fictional characters make sense, they are not grabbed through cheap, convenient tricks. Contrast that with this game: what do I give a shit about Calistegipsy - the most boring Malkavian who ever lived, or GayPirate#43 - who could just as easily fit in any Bioware game? Why should my character give a shit? (The fact that The Last Castoff is just as bland and boring and there is never any good connection established between you, the player, and him/her/xir is worthy of a whole 'nother rant onto itself, but let's leave that for another time).

Now, I'm well aware this rant got away from me somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd paragraph, so let me end this post the way that good chap, Kevin Saunders used to begin his kickstarter updates:

tl;dr: No matter what aspect of 2rment: ToNs-of-shitty-text you try to start an analysis from, if you pumped your WIS & INT like any good TNO, you'll always end up at the same conclusion: this game is fucking stupid =))

 

[FeelTheRads]

Harold: Should post that on their official forums. Pretty accurate critique and comparison with PST.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

snip

Bit on the edgy side and I usually don't care much about (anti) SJW whining - but your WOT has some pretty interesting points, mate.

 

[Tacgnol]

when you go down a dark alley because an individual with deranged eyes and a giant grin told you he has a great deal for you

How could you not trust this guy?

 

[DeepOcean]

Harold is spot on, I remember being tempted to give Morte away for the Pillars of Skulls and doing other evil shit as they made you stronger just the very empathy I felt for the characters and guilt for the shit I made them pass through stopped me. The writer was clever, he laid before you the very same choices the practical incarnation had to make on the past, you did what it did and chosen power or you could choose a different way and break the circle of "Torment". For this to have effect you would need to feel the allure of power and not have a weak minded writer judging you.

You were walking on the same path as the practical incarnation by reliving the past story, it was more than just exposition to know what the guy did on the past but to relive the sort of pain he caused and decide if it was time tor end it and achieve redemption. NumaNuma understand this only on a certain level, it has alot of exposition on the Changing God but as you don't walk on his footsteps, you can't understand and can't relate with any of that shit so the exposition feel boring and you alienated from the whole thing.

NumaNuma companions didn't help too, I would gladly give them to the nearest Balthezu in exchange for power.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Companions being bland is the biggest fault of this game.

What's worse, they apparently made them bland on purpose, the reasoning being that the world is so wacky and out there, the characters need to be more grounded.

 

[Karellen]

So, I haven't really played much of the game, since InXile was taking its sweet time implementing the GoG key shift. Here's something that puzzles me though - there seems to be quite a lot of praise for the Numenera setting, which sort of goes along with the notion that the problems with the game have more to do with bad implementation. My initial impression of the game is that the setting is a big part of the problem, though. Ever since I first read the books I had the feeling that the Numenera setting is startingly mediocre for a PnP setting, but I though that there was a good chance that you could hone it into an adequate PnP setting. Now that the game's out, though, I think a lot of problems the game has come down to Numenera just not being even remotely as interesting as Planescape is.

For instance, all these bog-standard humans with special snowflake superpowers that fail to make them interesting individuals? My feeling is that that's exactly what the Numenera PnP game is like. Numenera is a world with a bunch of mysterious junk in it, but the actual people populating the world are bland pseudo-medieval peasants with nothing particularly interesting to them. Mostly, it's a setting which doesn't contain any sort of interesting thematic conflict whatsoever. That's a far cry from Planescape, in which the conflicts between the Sigil factions, under the aegis of "belief changes the world", creates a vast reservoir of tension that can be milked for storytelling, and that's without even getting to angels and devils and all that stuff. I think the early part of PS:T was carried to a large extent by what an interesting place Sigil is and, more specifically, what a grotesque shithole the Hive is; the notion that you can be living in the most interesting place in the multiverse and still be dirt poor, miserable and probably a prostitute does a whole lot to establish the tragicomic feel that PS:T has all over it.

Now, whatever Sagus Cliffs is, it certainly is not the most interesting place in the multiverse. It feels strictly provincial, and even for that, it doesn't have, say, a Mos Eisley-esque liveliness that a seedy backwater town could have. It doesn't feel like there's any interesting tension going on in the city, and no wonder if your appearance is the most interesting thing to happen in ages. Which isn't inherently wrong, but (strangely, because there's a clear effort to involve you in a faction by having you pick between Alliguy and Callistege) no one I've met so far seems to be particularly invested in anything in the actual setting, they just sort of follow you around because you're apparently the only interesting thing in it. So I'm having some difficulty mustering any genuine enthusiasm for the sidequests, since my companions or even the quest givers don't really seem to care a whole lot. I think that PS:T had, on the whole, too much stuff in it and the early game has a positively glacial pace, but for all that, Mebbeth or Coaxmetal or the Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts sure as hell weren't bland.

tl;dr I really miss the prostitutes.

 

[FeelTheRads]

There's a lot of stuff that could've been used from Numenera that's interesting, but wasn't. No, it's nowhere near Planescape, but this game failed to make good use of the setting. A good example is indeed, too many fucking boring humans with the only thing about that they have been modified in some way by Numenera.

Best use of the setting is of course The Bloom itself and the Lost Anchorage I think.

 

[FeelTheRads]

NumaNuma companions didn't help too, I would gladly give them to the nearest Balthezu in exchange for power.

Also this. Apparently you can "free" them or some shit at the end, but the punchline is, that I never felt like they were chained to me in the first place and it would mean giving up on the skills they provide only to get some better ending slides about some characters you don't give a shit about.

 

[Infinitron]

So, I haven't really played much of the game, since InXile was taking its sweet time implementing the GoG key shift. Here's something that puzzles me though - there seems to be quite a lot of praise for the Numenera setting, which sort of goes along with the notion that the problems with the game have more to do with bad implementation. My initial impression of the game is that the setting is a big part of the problem, though. Ever since I first read the books I had the feeling that the Numenera setting is startingly mediocre for a PnP setting, but I though that there was a good chance that you could hone it into an adequate PnP setting. Now that the game's out, though, I think a lot of problems the game has come down to Numenera just not being even remotely as interesting as Planescape is.

For instance, all these bog-standard humans with special snowflake superpowers that fail to make them interesting individuals? My feeling is that that's exactly what the Numenera PnP game is like. Numenera is a world with a bunch of mysterious junk in it, but the actual people populating the world are bland pseudo-medieval peasants with nothing particularly interesting to them. Mostly, it's a setting which doesn't contain any sort of interesting thematic conflict whatsoever. That's a far cry from Planescape, in which the conflicts between the Sigil factions, under the aegis of "belief changes the world", creates a vast reservoir of tension that can be milked for storytelling, and that's without even getting to angels and devils and all that stuff. I think the early part of PS:T was carried to a large extent by what an interesting place Sigil is and, more specifically, what a grotesque shithole the Hive is; the notion that you can be living in the most interesting place in the multiverse and still be dirt poor, miserable and probably a prostitute does a whole lot to establish the tragicomic feel that PS:T has all over it.

Now, whatever Sagus Cliffs is, it certainly is not the most interesting place in the multiverse. It feels strictly provincial, and even for that, it doesn't have, say, a Mos Eisley-esque liveliness that a seedy backwater town could have. It doesn't feel like there's any interesting tension going on in the city, and no wonder if your appearance is the most interesting thing to happen in ages. Which isn't inherently wrong, but (strangely, because there's a clear effort to involve you in a faction by having you pick between Alliguy and Callistege) no one I've met so far seems to be particularly invested in anything in the actual setting, they just sort of follow you around because you're apparently the only interesting thing in it. So I'm having some difficulty mustering any genuine enthusiasm for the sidequests, since my companions or even the quest givers don't really seem to care a whole lot. I think that PS:T had, on the whole, too much stuff in it and the early game has a positively glacial pace, but for all that, Mebbeth or Coaxmetal or the Brothel for Slaking Intellectual Lusts sure as hell weren't bland.

tl;dr I really miss the prostitutes.

Lots of truth here, although at the same time PS:T was somewhat notorious for not actually making that much use of Sigil's factions (compared to their prominence in the source material).

 

[Malpercio]

The

Spoiler

time-loop murder that erases the dude from existence

in the Bloom was admittedly very funny.