Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[ShadowSpectre]

I've reached the Valley of Dead Heroes/Necropolis and I'm liking the game so far, but I have to say it doesn't draw you in at the level Planescape: Torment does. I hope they patch the party banter soon (ironically enough, broken like PST's originally was) and do something about the character screen's consolitis. The writing is decent and I'm curious to see if it gets to the PST level of excellence, but we'll see. It appears that the Numenera setting is just not thematically consistent (perhaps that is the point) but the game seems to suffer to some degree because of it.

 

[hexer]

Great review, thank you!!

 

[an Administrator]

Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.

He just wanted his setting to have some realism

 

[DeepOcean]

Pretty great review.

 

[rafaninja888]

Without scanning back through the thread, whats the general consensus on this with people who are playing so far?. Comparable to PST?.

 

[an Administrator]

Without scanning back through the thread, whats the general consensus on this with people who are playing so far?. Comparable to PST?.

A true successor

 

[Prime Junta]

Without scanning back through the thread, whats the general consensus on this with people who are playing so far?. Comparable to PST?.

We have been comparing it to PS:T, yes.

 

[Luckmann]

Without scanning back through the thread, whats the general consensus on this with people who are playing so far?. Comparable to PST?.

Comparable? Yes. It is unfortunately comparable, much in the same way the economical stability between myself and Bill Gates.

 

[Prime Junta]

Ludo Lense gets it. That's a very good review. I salute his patience for putting this together.

 

[rado907]

Beat the game in 16 hours (fast-forwarded through most dialogues) with a diplomatic character and Matkina, Rhis & Erritis.

The game is thoroughly mediocre in every aspect - graphics, mechanics, story, combat, amount of content, themes, music, pacing, characters and so on.

Enjoyable but unremarkable - 7/10.

 

[FeelTheRads]

"What does one life matter" is also a terrible tag-line compared to "What can change the nature of a man".

Very much so. "What can change the nature of a man?" immediately suggests answers -- death? love? rebirth? amnesia? regret? massive brain damage? nothing? -- and once you've picked your answer, leads to pretty cool followup questions. What do you mean by "nature of a man" anyway? Is it "nature" if it can change? What do you mean by "a man" in a setting where souls circulate endlessly between death, birth, and life?

"What does one life matter" OTOH is a silly question. A lot? A little? Not at all? Five feet eight inches? WTF does that even mean?

I thought it was pretty dumb the first time I heard it. It's also a loaded question whereas the one in PST it is not. Feels like the kind of question the developers can use to give you some red tide or whatever if they don't like your answer.

Plus, using such a question as a kind of plot gate made sense in PST, it came from a character infamous for puzzles. Here is just some cunt whose dumb questions you have to answer to continue with your quest. Another one of those things they forced out of PST.

No, really, the whole thing with asking you those questions at that point is so dumb and forced. There's no reason behind it, no feeling, no mystery.

I was pleasantly surprised though when she told me my answer was a boring platitude or something. Did not expect that.

 

[Dwarvophile]

I think you guys are misunderstanding Colin's statement about that Aligern portrait being "too white". Looking at the concept arts, it indicates that characters such as Aligern and Tybir do have brown/black skin color. Of course it would not be ok to change the characters' basic features in a portrait. It's like drawing a blond Durance portrait.

Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.
.

"no white skin" is not something you get through mixing, geneticnatural laws don't follow ideology, the only way you can erase the "white skin" trait is by having a maniac dictator executing every baby borned with recessive gene traits like "white skin" and "blue eyes" ! And yet they mention some albinos NPC when "albinism" actually IS a recessive gene trait

one million year in the future wont change the way dna rewrites

 

[Lurker King]

Ludo Lense nailed!

 

[Daedalos]

Yes, what does one life matter...

...when you have countless immortals running around anyway?

I guess it's supposed the tell a story about the juxtaposition between mortality and immortality and the underlying themes thereof.

The way I interpreted it, had more to do with questions about dealing with death, actually, dealing with the finiteness of life, would immortality really be the answer? - would it make you care more or less? Would it change YOUR nature, your perception of time, of life itself. Also, dealing with the fact, that whatever we as humans do, death is the ultimate outcome, what will we leave behind? Probably nothing, and how does that make you feel?

Despite all these truths, life is, after all, worth living, and each individual life matters in the grander context, because it affects everything and every decision in one way or the other. So I guess the game also wanted to point out the connectness of several lives, even over generations or centuries.

 

[ga♥]

Ludo Lense gets it. That's a very good review. I salute his patience for putting this together.

Pretty much, though he bashes the setting from a personal distaste. Not really objective. I think it could have been implemented better (like for examples having bigger areas and less numenera around), but this is on the devs not on the settings.

 

[Harold]

Much better than 2rment portraits. Someone should do a replacer mod.

 

[Lurker King]

Look, I agree with you generally, but saying that Tworment specifically was ruined by rapid SJWtery is nothing but a cheap cop out. There is no rampant agenda which could bear the brunt of criticism, the game has deep systemic issues entangled with horrible writing, it couldn't push an agenda even if it wanted to.

Instead of just criticizing a game for having failures, we also need to understand why the game has these failures in the first place. This is a major problem if you consider that the core team of MotB was involved in this game. I think this happened because there was both a change in the development practices adopted, and a lack of passion from the developers involved. The development practices changed since you don’t have the same "get together" organic approach that was present in PS:T (see Guido Henkel interview at Matt Chat). A bunch of people meeting on skype doesn’t come close to the way they developed games in the past. The other problem is that the developers themselves changed for worse in the sense that they are not passionate about games anymore. So just saying that SJW interests have nothing to do with it because you don't have too much agenda quests ignores this point.

The point is that htey don't know wtf they are doing

Everyone in this forum can immediately pinpoint what they're doing wrong and I wonder why

Those people don't play RPGs

inXile only had about 12 encounters to tune, how do you end up botching that as hard as they did unless you just flat out don't care?

It seems that everyone was more involved in ToN than the developers themselves because they have other priorities, like social justice activism, etc. cRPG design is a complex intellectual activity. You need to be fully engaged in order to make it work. Just because you have a know-how of your previous games, doesn’t automatically ensure that you will make a great game now.

 

[FeelTheRads]

There is the fairly scary possibility that they actually think what they did is good. Which comes back to what Excidium said: Developers don't play RPGs... or even too many games, really. Otherwise I can't imagine how some things keep showing up in games even though they're universally hated.
So, ignorance is a very possible reason because when you're ignorant about what you're doing you just do it by a checklist.

 

[Lurker King]

Yes, but the ignorance in this case is caused by their lack of engagement. If a developer is not a gamer, but has a high opinion of his own writing accompanied by demeanor towards his medium, his games will not be good.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Ludo's video was nice. The comments, however..

 

[Roguey]

There is the fairly scary possibility that they actually think what they did is good. Which comes back to what Excidium said: Developers don't play RPGs... or even too many games, really. Otherwise I can't imagine how some things keep showing up in games even though they're universally hated.
So, ignorance is a very possible reason because when you're ignorant about what you're doing you just do it by a checklist.

Didn't Adam Heine blog about playing all the new RPGs to prepare for Torment?

I recall there were some suckers here who considered that a good thing, as if we were going to get unsullied 1999 again.

 

[Prime Junta]

There is the fairly scary possibility that they actually think what they did is good. Which comes back to what Excidium said: Developers don't play RPGs... or even too many games, really. Otherwise I can't imagine how some things keep showing up in games even though they're universally hated.
So, ignorance is a very possible reason because when you're ignorant about what you're doing you just do it by a checklist.

Didn't Adam Heine blog about playing all the new RPGs to prepare for Torment?

I recall there were some suckers here who considered that a good thing, as if we were going to get unsullied 1999 again.

They also blogged about playing PS:T to death, just to be sure they'd get it right.

It's obvious that a lot of people who like/claim to like PS:T completely don't get it. I've sometimes suspected that they haven't maybe even played it and are just saying they like it because it's the thing to like. Upon further reflection though I think that just might not be true; they have played it, they did like it, and still managed to miss the entire point of the exercise.

That part I don't understand.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I'm sure they play or are aware of the new shit, that's why we get hand-holding journals, on-screen walkthroughs and other related "game design school" shit.

they have played it, they did like it, and still managed to miss the entire point of the exercise.

McComb, when playing it now after TTON was done didn't seem like he played in 20 years. And he was more worried about tits and trash combat, thank god he noticed those, made TTON much better.

 

[Infinitron]

There is the fairly scary possibility that they actually think what they did is good. Which comes back to what Excidium said: Developers don't play RPGs... or even too many games, really. Otherwise I can't imagine how some things keep showing up in games even though they're universally hated.
So, ignorance is a very possible reason because when you're ignorant about what you're doing you just do it by a checklist.

Didn't Adam Heine blog about playing all the new RPGs to prepare for Torment?

I recall there were some suckers here who considered that a good thing, as if we were going to get unsullied 1999 again.

Maybe this is what you were searching for:

I like that the inXile Area Designer job requires that they have played Planescape Torment

 

[Roguey]

Maybe this is what you were searching for:

If I had read that, it disappeared from my memory. I found it http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-at-pax-prime-2015.101481/page-3#post-4117234

Adam likes Mass Effect even though he thinks it's a movie.

Adam Heine played new RPGs (ME, NWN2) for the first time after joining the Torment team and was disappointed in the de-emphasis on choice.

Bonus:

"If we can't do it well, we're going to cut it"--Adam Heine

Perhaps you should have cut the whole game.