Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[tripedal]

I forced myself to play a bit more, and the game does get a bit better once you get out of Sagus.

Something that I find shocking is how boring the cyphers are. 95% of them are basically either grenades or potions. They could've gone absolutely crazy with the cypher mechanics given the setting, and the best they managed to come up with was 15 damage in a circular aoe?

 

[Roguey]

I forced myself to play a bit more, and the game does get a bit better once you get out of Sagus.

Something that I find shocking is how boring the cyphers are. 95% of them are basically either grenades or potions. They could've gone absolutely crazy with the cypher mechanics given the setting, and the best they managed to come up with was 15 damage in a circular aoe?

Crises are already buggy enough as it is, wacky wild cyphers would create even more bugs. Cut content.

 

[Terpsichore]

I already forgot the game existed but saw this thread.

 

[Saduj]

that huge time travel paradox in the end is awful.

This. I'm not completely negative on this game. I enjoyed parts of Sagus Cliffs and I liked The Bloom. I liked Erritus. I don't regret having purchased/played the game. But the ending was an unnecessarily drawn out mess and the mere doors at the end really pissed me off. They didn't even offer a real twist at that point as "what the last castoff is and where the changing god is" had been revealed well before. To me, the doors were just more walls of text at a point where walls of text are not going to add anything to the game. I tried to use the doors to get myself killed and the game responded with "LOL, you can't do that". No shit.

If the ending sequence had been a decent follow up to the high points in The Bloom, the game would have left a much better overall impression. But as it is, it mostly serves as a reminder: "Yeah, you liked The Bloom but don't forget that much of the game was a slog".

Edit:

Spoiler

Also, who thought that crisis in Miel Avest was a good idea? I get that an encounter that makes The Sorrow actually scary is a good idea. But "get to the macguffin while endless enemies spawn" is not fun. And it is only a challenge if you end up out of position due to the false goal presented at the outset of the crisis. If you get killed by The Sorrow because you were trying to save castoffs, you just reload and ignore that goal and head to the pyramid while endless enemies and NPCs do shit that doesn't matter. It was a necessary encounter but horribly done.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

did you guys know about this? you can play it on Shield as a stream device:
https://shield.nvidia.com/games/geforce-now/torment-tides-of-numenera?nvid=nv-int-tttsfnr-8017

 

[hivemind]

hype

 

[HoboForEternity]

Yeah. Overall crisis system is a great idea, but most of them are horribly executed.

Now if something like this is implemented in something competent like divinity original sin system for example. It would be amazing. Imagine using the elemental and environmental thing in divinity to complete objectives that dont just make the enemy HP goes to 0.

 

[Saduj]

One crisis that was oddly satisfying was slaughtering the Bloom murdens. You can easily resolve everything with them peacefully. Then pick the one dialogue option that obviously serves no other purpose than to provoke a fight. And you get a gold tide boost for it.

 

[Lord Andre]

that huge time travel paradox in the end is awful.

This. I'm not completely negative on this game. I enjoyed parts of Sagus Cliffs and I liked The Bloom. I liked Erritus. I don't regret having purchased/played the game. But the ending was an unnecessarily drawn out mess and the mere doors at the end really pissed me off. They didn't even offer a real twist at that point as "what the last castoff is and where the changing god is" had been revealed well before. To me, the doors were just more walls of text at a point where walls of text are not going to add anything to the game. I tried to use the doors to get myself killed and the game responded with "LOL, you can't do that". No shit.

If the ending sequence had been a decent follow up to the high points in The Bloom, the game would have left a much better overall impression. But as it is, it mostly serves as a reminder: "Yeah, you liked The Bloom but don't forget that much of the game was a slog".

Edit:

Spoiler

Also, who thought that crisis in Miel Avest was a good idea? I get that an encounter that makes The Sorrow actually scary is a good idea. But "get to the macguffin while endless enemies spawn" is not fun. And it is only a challenge if you end up out of position due to the false goal presented at the outset of the crisis. If you get killed by The Sorrow because you were trying to save castoffs, you just reload and ignore that goal and head to the pyramid while endless enemies and NPCs do shit that doesn't matter. It was a necessary encounter but horribly done.

Game should have ended with the fight with the memovira. When the smug bitch teleported down with her 4 lapdog castoffs I muttered under my breath "This I going to end with my dick in your mouth." I used the double damage cypher I had been saving up and rained down quad damage fireballs on their asses. In 2 turns it was over. I walk over to her corpse, my dick is out, I'm ready to skit, climatic ending engaged... and then fucking Deux ex McSorrow bursts in with a crowbar in one hand and the mass effect ending in the other...
From then on it's a painful slog to the credits roll amidst a storm of

 

[Deleted member 7219]

I've finished my first playthrough. It took 21 hours.

Overall, I'm a little bit confused by what inXile produced here. They got the largest amount of crowdfunding of any RPG but there isn't much to show for it. I think if they hadn't cut so much content the game could have been at least 25-30 hours long, but that's still a lot shorter than Pillars of Eternity. inXile already had a setting (Numenera) and an engine (Pillars), and the overall scope of the game is much smaller than Pillars, so it is difficult to see where the money went.

I guess it comes down to the ambitions of the studio and I think their ambitions lie on similar grounds to Harebrained Schemes and Stoic. I'm sure future playthroughs will give me some new content here and there, but overall it felt quite linear. As a Torment game, it works, because Planescape Torment was very linear and had an overwhelmingly shitty second half. At least TTON didn't sink to those depths.

Combat was frustrating and difficult to avoid. Some combat encounters let you tinker with things to get the combat over with sooner, but unlike Fallout, IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TOTALLY AVOID COMBAT IN TTON.

Writing held up all the way through, though. The meres are easily the best part of the game, and reminded me of the novellas. If only they had been put into the game itself, TTON might have been great.

 

[Lord Andre]

You know your game sucks when even a retard with shit taste like Matt with a full stop at the end has some criticism.

The last nail in the coffin would be J_C the Retard King of Cuck Valley, voicing his discontent as well.

 

[Prime Junta]

Just checked the SteamSpy numbers again.

T:ToN has fallen to around 750 CCU (median, varies actually between about 500 and 1000).

For comparison, Battle Brothers has been holding steady at around that during EA, and now it's peaking at around 3000, and Pillars is pulling about 2000.

The "Audience" numbers tell a bit of a different story: T:ToN has fallen to around 35000 players / last two weeks, Pillars was at 60k but is now at around 45k, and Battle brothers is at 14k.

The other big inXile game, Wasteland 2 DC, is as good as dead. Daily CCU is in the tens rather than the hundreds or thousands, and the two-week audience is at around 2k.

In other words, BB has about half the players of Pillars or T:ToN but they play it a lot more. Pillars clearly has a big fat long tail, with quite a lot of people still playing it after all this time. Whereas inXile's games appear to be going down like a lead balloon: T:ToN is dropping like a rock while Wasteland 2 is done.

(Fuck me though but more people need to play Battle Brothers.)

 

[Lord Andre]

Maybe nuTorment players and/or backers aren't dumb enough to buy/play the game on steam when the game is available on gog...

Spoiler

 

[t]

Yes, numbers for TToN look simply atrocious. Even checking peak number at release, TToN had barely 7k concurret while all of the other KS RPGs (Pillars, WL2, SR) broke 20k. (for details ping Roguey)

TToN has been sitting at 100k copies at steamspy for a while now, so it seems like this is the final number. Which is ridiculously bad, considering it had 80k backers at least. Even considering those numbers are 20% too low and there is another 20% of players that redeemed the game on GoG, that still mean less people bought it at release than preordered in 2013.

 

[Roguey]

Since no one's playing it anymore, wonder if they're still going to bother spending all that money on new content. I suppose there might be some value in doing damage control for their pre-Bard's Tale-release fig campaign.

We can thank the multiplatform release for why it's been nearly a month without a single patch. They have to patch and test three builds at once, which is particularly time-consuming for a small studio like inXile. Even though the days of getting charged per patch by Microsoft are over, I wouldn't expect to see too many.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Pillars was just on sale, otherwise I doubt it's normally pulling numbers that good. But yeah, T:TON is a flop, and not just by Kickstarter standards either. We're talking about $5 million game barely even moving any units at all, despite launching to good reviews and plenty of marketing. It's a total disaster.

 

[ArchAngel]

Yes, numbers for TToN look simply atrocious. Even checking peak number at release, TToN had barely 7k concurret while all of the other KS RPGs (Pillars, WL2, SR) broke 20k. (for details ping Roguey)

TToN has been sitting at 100k copies at steamspy for a while now, so it seems like this is the final number. Which is ridiculously bad, considering it had 80k backers at least. Even considering those numbers are 20% too low and there is another 20% of players that redeemed the game on GoG, that still mean less people bought it at release than preordered in 2013.

I think it is pretty certain not all 80k backers redeemed it already. I would not be surprised if only half did by now. Many probably backed it because of the nostalgia but don't really have time to play it, or they are waiting for patches or their CE version or something.

 

[Roguey]

Pillars was just on sale, otherwise I doubt it's normally pulling numbers that good.

http://steamcharts.com/app/291650#3m

Josh Sawyer makes RPGs with staying power http://steamcharts.com/app/22380#3m

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Got to actually play TToN a bit the last few days. I've had low expectations going in, and thus far the game exceeded them slightly. I don't find it bad per se, but it feels like a shoddy knock-off of PST. There's been a few neat ideas here and there, but on the whole I never felt particularly intrigued or surprised by anything I saw. One thing that stood out to me (especially in the decidedly bad opening) is that TToN seems deathly afraid of confusing the player (a strange notion given that being weird and unusual is supposed to be one of its selling points), and is annoyingly eager to explain everything in great detail immediately. For example, the opening has the Sorrow invade your mind, and the guy you meet there goes "Oh no, the Sorrow is attacking! By the way, this is the inside of your mind and I'm a fragment of it, in case you were wondering. Would you like to know more?". Good thing he was there to explain everything, otherwise I might've gotten intrigued there for a bit. Same shit with Aligern and Callistege afterwards.

I actually kinda like the effort/stat pool system and I bet one could design a game where it would offer compelling choices combined with meaningful resource management. Bit unfortunate that TToN isn't that game.

 

[oldmanpaco]

So my collectors edition box just got dropped off a few minutes ago. Concept art book, sound track, game disc, a DLC activation code (not holding my breath), manual, and, by far the best item, a beautiful cloth map which shows all the locations in the world you never get to go to.

Fucking 2012 kickstarters.

 

[Lord Andre]

So my collectors edition box just got dropped off a few minutes ago. Concept art book, sound track, game disc, a DLC activation code (not holding my breath), manual, and, by far the best item, a beautiful cloth map which shows all the locations in the world you never get to go to.

Fucking 2012 kickstarters.

I'm waiting for that shit too. Knowing the post service over here, it will probably get lost in transit, just like all my hopes and dreams for this game.

I got an ups tracking number sent to my email. My shit's to arrive on Wednesday. You should have gotten something similar...

 

[undecaf]

I don't wait mine, it arrives when it arrives. I can't even begin to guess what the hell was going through my mind when I opted for a boxed copy (for any of the kcikstarters). I don't need any of that shit and the space the box takes could be better spent by not having anything on the spot.

 

[FeelTheRads]

TToN seems deathly afraid of confusing the player (a strange notion given that being weird and unusual is supposed to be one of its selling points)

Well, because you know, "weird" and "mysterious" are fairly abstract and subjective concepts they went for the sure way which is to literally describe things as "weird" and "mysterious". Bullet-proof.

Seriously, it feels like a big part of this game was written by interns.

 

[t]

Lol so cloth map has locations that have been later cut? So funny.

 

[A user named cat]

This thread should die and so should inxile.