Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Kem0sabe]

Coling McCuck with a super duper important message

There's no one left with the game on consoles, the 10 people who bought it already traded it in for a discount on persona 5.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Here's an update for your console game:

 

[undecaf]

That sounds pretty sad. A video announcement for a patch to a version of the game that's apparently selling less than shit...

 

[aratuk]

Coling McCuck with a super duper important message

I hope they make him the narrator for all future patch notes. Read aloud every bullet point.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

I guess they all realize it's his fault the game is shit and isn't selling, so now if they say jump on camera, Colin jumps. If his jump even has a slight chance of generating +1 purchase, then he better jump. And he knows it too. He's the sole reason they lost millions.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

The issue of reactivity not being signalled well is something that J.E. Sawyer talked about in his gdc talk on dialogue.

Signalled my foot. The reactivity is mostly cosmetic.

 

[Sizzle]

He's the sole reason they lost millions.

I'd say T:ToN's sucking was a team effort :D

 

[Rev]

I'd say T:ToN's sucking was a team effort :D

You're right but he was the creative lead in a game all focused on story and dialogues, so I'd say he's more responsible for the game failures than anyone else.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yup. Games are a team effort so pointing most the blame at one person is usually pointless, but T:TON is a 99.99% story and he was the story lead.

 

[Sizzle]

I'd say T:ToN's sucking was a team effort :D

You're right but he was the creative lead in a game all focused on story and dialogues, so I'd say he's more responsible for the game failures than anyone else.

Sure, but everything about T:ToN is subpar - the writing, the character systems, the combat, even the art. Colin, Fargo, Saunders and Keenan obviously hold the most blame here, but it's still impressive how they couldn't even produce good character portraits (all, what, eight of them?). It's not every day that we get to play a game that fails on practically every front.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

There's one thing I havven't seen anyone here question yet (well maybe you guys have):

Adam Heine only worked on one game in the past many years ago as a scripter.. so why was he Lead Designer? He's Either way, he's now working at Nexon as a Narrative Designer, probably under Kevin Saunders. Plus he was working on multiple projects at one time, now I can't speculate what his duties on the project actually were but I can't comprehend why this decision was made.

Colin requested that Heine be on the team.

 

[Roguey]

It's appropriate that the Codex's most anticipated game would also be its most disappointing.

Good thing I removed my vote way ahead of time when the signs were clear.

 

[Infinitron]

http://tormentgame.com/patch-notes

TORMENT PATCH 1.0.2 NOTES (CONSOLE)
HIGHLIGHTS

• Fixed a large number of freezes that would happen in various states.
• Numerous performance optimizations.
• Addendum text should now be appearing on item descriptions. Many dozens of items now have more details depending on your lore skills and other factors!
• Fixed an issue that was preventing party members from bantering. Party members should now be much more talkative!
• Updated a number of crisis sequences to rebalance a number of enemies. In some situations, it will make combat proceed more quickly with combats that were sluggish.
• Numerous fixes and improvements to movement grid, pathing, and AI. This should prevent issues where the game would hang as combat could get stuck in numerous situations.
• Several quest and conversation fixes.
• Inspiring Presence and other looping sound effects have been reduced or removed.

Spoiler

FULL RELEASE NOTES (SPOILER WARNING)
CONVERSATIONS & QUESTS

• Fixed issue where conversation with Sorrow does not trigger if Matkina does not participate in Memovira Crisis and castoffs are merged into her.
• No longer start the Familiar Skies quest if you access the helmet after already having been kicked out of Anchorage.
• Move to correct objective Covetous Hearts objective if you try to get the Cortex before talking to Dracogen about it
• Fixed issue where Indigo Tide can be raised repeatedly after telling Theboros to sacrifice himself.
• Fixed issue where two Shadow Rings can be created.
• Fixed a bug where Infestation quest could get in an unfinishable if the player left the scene during the crisis and returned later.
• Fixed bug where finding out about what Maw eats through Magmatic Annulet does not allow attempt to persuade Siowan to offer himself.
• Inkpot now always tells you about killing Ioxu, regardless of the order you see him or Ioxu after bonding with the Bloom.
• Show reflection message when Artaglio invades your mind in the Gullet.
• Fixed bug where Inifere's Reflection used male pronoun when speaking to female Last Castoff.
• Fixed bug where asking Canadu again about his hammer produced an incorrect response.
• Fixed a bug in Aligern’s ending slides.
• Numerous misc. typo fixes.

GAMEPLAY

• Fixed bug where enemies damaged by Frost Brooch at the beginning of their turn would sometimes lock up game after performing their move.
• Fixed a bug which could cause dead enemies from trying to patrol.
• Beads of Neverending Time now limit uses of Haste per crisis.
• Waits-For-Prey AI better handles being stunned and/or knocked down.
• Fixed an issue where retries on tasks were erroneously checking companions during crisis.
• Added Initiative as a possible option for Flex Skill.
• Numerous fixes to Anechoic Lazaret crisis.
• Reduced number of Peerless drones during Anechoic Lazaret crisis.
• Updated Sorrow Fragment AI in several fights to ensure they use their burst attack as designed.
• Reduced total number of combatants in the Bloom Heart, reduced knockdown effects, and streamlined introduction of spawned enemies.
• Reduced total number of enemies in Miel Avest, and made Sorrow's aura do noticeable damage but not insta-kill.
• Reduced total number of enemies in the Memovira’s Fortress crisis, and added non-insta-kill aura to Sorrow.
• Allowed spawned enemies to have modified initiative values.
• Added instigation points to several examinables.
• Fixed camera centering on Last Castoff every time a companion is granted or loses a fettle from an aura.
• Weapon attack abilities use weapon stats instead of fixed cost stat. Cost tooltip info includes weapon name when this happens.
• Abilities that have the potential to push/pull no longer can affect user (could cause issues with AI progressing correctly under some conditions).
• Fixed an issue where auras could affect player characters not currently in the party.
• Remove redundant modifiers with Cypher Sickness fettle.
• Added item drops to Peliai when killed.
• Rhin now gains additional abilities late in the game.
• Fixed issues with Erritis “wants to talk” trigger in the Valley of Dead Heroes.

USER INTERFACE

• Addendums should now be appearing on items. Many dozens of items now have more details depending on your lore skills and other factors!
• Fixed an issue where players could sometimes use on-ground targeted abilities on top of other characters.
• Changed the Continue button text in the conversation window to be more in line with other buttons.
• Make sure triggers that start conversations fire off if no owner is set, but not if owner is set and owner is inactive.
• Movement lines should start disabled so they don't do stuff during exploration mode.
• The Item Gained panel in the Conversation window should be disabled unless actually needed.
• Added some error checking to prevent a null reference when advancing past the Type selection panel in Character Creation.
• Controller version of the crisis HUD now hides the cursor during player movements, in order to stop tooltips from appearing during this time.
• Fixed an issue on controllers where pressing the trigger buttons would not always register on older controllers where the triggers weren’t being fully pressed down. This was causing some players to get stuck in specific menus.
• Fixes for certain radial and skill selection menus.
• Fixed a text overflow issue in the Max Effort display.
• Added color markup code for Resistance.
• Added details of bonuses from Descriptor to character overview panel.
• Added new version of ConsumeAction script that doesn't trigger tags in conversation text (used to handle special cases where actions are consumed NOT on selecting an option but delayed).
• Fixed an issue where it was sometimes possible to select Edge pips on the Effort window that weren’t intended to be selectable.
• Added a null reference check to avoid exploding the Item Details window under certain circumstances.

SOUND

• Reduced the frequency with which companion banter timer is reset. Adjusted banter frequency values. Party members should now talk much more often!
• Removed looping sound effects from Inspiring Presence.
• Removed looping sound effects from Galvanic Hammer.
• Reduced looping sound effects from Innervate.
• Increased music volume in Fifth Eye.
• Fixed incorrect or missing music in Old Slave Block, Memovira’s Courtyard, and some late game fathoms.
• Fixed sound cues for Journal and Character Sheet windows.
• Improvements to footstep sounds.

GRAPHICS

• Fixed Sticha stuttering when stopping after a forced walk.
• Updated visual effects for Callistege reflection during endgame.
• Adjusted visual effects of Psychic Battlefield.
• Improved texture for Piton Driver.

PERFORMANCE & STABILITY

• Scene-specific performance optimizations for a majority of game scenes, particularly throughout Sagus Cliffs.
• Numerous cleanups and optimizations to movement grid, pathfinding, and AI calculations.
• Improved performance on several visual effects.
• Reduction of garbage generation to reduce associated frame drops from garbage collection.
• Significant reduction of garbage generation during controller movement.
• Various game cameras are now disabled when fullscreen UI is present. This should improve framerate in Inventory, Character Creation, and other screens.
• Performance improvements and optimizations to NPC animators.

MISCELLANEOUS

• Polish localization updates.
• Updated backer credits with some missing backers who wrote in!
• Updated Techland credits.

 

[Elwro]

So it turns out I had given them so much money I was supposed to receive a 'Colin McComb novella'. Can't find it anywhere. Is it available at all?

 

[FeelTheRads]

The writing in the game is thematically in-line with a novella.

 

[Elwro]

https://inxile.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004647468-When-is-Colin-McComb-s-novella-coming-out-

"Although we managed to get almost every novella finished by the release of the game, Colin McComb's didn't quite make it, as he was actively working on the game right up until release. However, his novella is in production and we hope to have it out soon!"

I FEEL SO CHEATED

 

[Carrion]

I know I'm super late to the party, but I finally got around to playing this after being handed a copy. I've been through a couple of early-game areas, finished about half-a-dozen quests, taken part in one fight (excluding the tutorial), leveled up twice and met almost all of my companions. I'm not hating it, but then again, my expectations were pretty low anyway.

I like it when fantasy settings are actually fantastical, and it's something that the original Torment did really well in the Planescape setting. Numenera, on the other hand, is trying too hard. The world feels like a freak circus where every NPC is an attraction of sorts, which is not a good thing. PS:T was full of strange stuff, but the world felt coherent, and the game was aware of its own themes at all times, whereas T:ToN is more like a thousand different ideas thrown into a blender and then scattered all over the game. Everyone you meet appears to be a walking gimmick, and it's making it harder to get into the game world when you don't know what a "normal" person is supposed to be like. It also screws up the pacing of the game, as everyone seems to be vomiting walls of text at you. The writing itself has probably been dissected a billion times over already, but they really would've needed a proper editor. There is some good stuff in there, but it's undermined by purple prose and failed attempts at mimicking the form of the original without any of the substance. Most of the time the writing also comes off as pretty sterile and very "21th century", and it's missing the grit and the teeth that PS:T had. The main quest hasn't grabbed me at all yet, but I do like that the game at least tries to make every quest unique and offer you a number of different ways to do stuff. That's one positive, I guess.

I pbobably haven't played enough to make a fair judgement of the game mechanics, but the Effort system seems to make your build more or less irrelevant. So far I've failed just one skill check in the game, and even with that I got a 60% chance of success without having any points in the skill in question. The only combat encounter I've taken part in was pretty long but also easy and repetitive, and I didn't feel like there were that many tactical options available in it. Three-companion limit sucks ass and should've been increased at least by one.

While I haven't encountered any bugs or crashes, the game still feels very unstable. It doesn't look particularly good (PoE had much better character models and environments), but it still feels sluggish somehow, and when highlighting items in the game world there's a small but annoying delay. There's this tablet game feel about it that I don't like at all. The music is utterly forgettable except for those moments when it borrows a few notes directly from the PS:T soundtrack, and the game definitely could've used some more ambient sound to make the environments more alive.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

That sounds pretty sad. A video announcement for a patch to a version of the game that's apparently selling less than shit...

You know what else is sad? The spambot-like developer responses to Steam reviews.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198114807114/recommended/272270/#developer_response

at no point in those 13 hours do I remember enjoying the game.

upcoming update which will definitely give you more content to enjoy

 

[GloomFrost]

That sounds pretty sad. A video announcement for a patch to a version of the game that's apparently selling less than shit...

You know what else is sad? The spambot-like developer responses to Steam reviews.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198114807114/recommended/272270/#developer_response

at no point in those 13 hours do I remember enjoying the game.

upcoming update which will definitely give you more content to enjoy

Yep. They also respond to every comment on youtube that says anything good about the game. Now there is desperate and then there is inxile.

 

[Roguey]

Hey, that's their new community manager.

Good to see he's already putting in all those hours at the shill factory. Though I'm not sure what the point of hiring him was if he's just going to be Brother None 3.0/sea 2.0.

 

[FeelTheRads]

In other words they hired a human spam-bot.

I expect his posts to show up in random threads on forums where the torment word is mentioned.

"It's such a torment living without my wife."

"Did you know we released a new update for our award winning game Torment Tides of Numenera? It now has even more content for you to enjoy!

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

In other words they hired a human spam-bot.

I expect his posts to show up in random threads on forums where the torment word is mentioned.

"It's such a torment living without my wife."

"Did you know we released a new update for our award winning game Torment Tides of Numenera? It now has even more content for you to enjoy!

"My terminal cancer diagnosis has brought great torment to me and my family. I'm thankful for each day I am still able to spend with them."

"Thank you for taking a moment to write this review of our game! Replayability and reactivity were our main goals in designing Torment, and we have even more content coming in a few months for you to enjoy. Stay tuned! "

 

[Sigourn]

You know, re-playing Planescape is making Tides look worse in my eyes.

I already wasn't a fan of the first area, but now it looks even worse. There are a lot of stuff that Planescape does well that I often don't see mentioned. Like how the game actually spaces content very well, NPC aren't placed one after another. (With some exception, like some of the Smoldering Corpse Bar infodumps)

TToN is exhausting to play on other hand, you can't go 5 steps without an NPC telling you his/her life story in over-descriptive language.

TToN feels like it was designed by someone who thought Planescape was good because "it had a lot of words".

I'm replaying Torment as well, and I agree. There are only THREE "info dumps" in the Mortuary, those being Morte, Dhall, and Deionarra. Morte isn't an info dump at all, Deionarra gives valuable advice for the future that is now even more interesting to me (as I have beaten the game already and thus can see the connections), and Dhall brings short but interesting info about the Mortuary, the Dustmen, and who you are and your past. The dialogue feels short and to the point, which makes it contrast with its dialogue structure: there are lots of dialogues to read, but they are all relatively simple. I think I haven't encountered a word yet that I'm not familiar with (as in, word from the English language). By comparison, Numenera threw around words I had never read in 15 years, and the dialogue was the opposite of short, not to mention those two companions would constantly interrupt the flow of conversation.

Regarding my Deionarra comment, I can see this second playthrough be very much worthwile already. I like seeing rewatching films that have interesting plot twists, and see what hints was the film dropping since the beginning.

EDIT: The Smoldering Corpse Bar, now that you mention it, gives very strong Numenera vibes. I think I remember getting so tired of the NPCs the first time that I quit the game until the next day.

 

[Luckmann]

That sounds pretty sad. A video announcement for a patch to a version of the game that's apparently selling less than shit...

You know what else is sad? The spambot-like developer responses to Steam reviews.

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198114807114/recommended/272270/#developer_response

at no point in those 13 hours do I remember enjoying the game.

upcoming update which will definitely give you more content to enjoy

"I think the writers used every word in the dictionary except brevity."

Now that is gold.

The worst thing is that the developers still don't seem to understand, even when the reviewer spells it out, that the issue really isn't that there's not enough content, but how the game is structured, how the content is written and applied, and the overall pacing of the game. It really does read like a spambot message, because it doesn't seem like the would-be bot read the review at all. It just registered something about game length and copy-pasted a canned response.

The game needs a complete restructuring and a narrative overhaul. Only adding content to the game is just going to add to the issues of the game. It won't solve anything.

Edit:

You know, re-playing Planescape is making Tides look worse in my eyes.

I already wasn't a fan of the first area, but now it looks even worse. There are a lot of stuff that Planescape does well that I often don't see mentioned. Like how the game actually spaces content very well, NPC aren't placed one after another. (With some exception, like some of the Smoldering Corpse Bar infodumps)

TToN is exhausting to play on other hand, you can't go 5 steps without an NPC telling you his/her life story in over-descriptive language.

TToN feels like it was designed by someone who thought Planescape was good because "it had a lot of words".

I'm replaying Torment as well, and I agree. There are only THREE "info dumps" in the Mortuary, those being Morte, Dhall, and Deionarra. Morte isn't an info dump at all, Deionarra gives valuable advice for the future that is now even more interesting to me (as I have beaten the game already and thus can see the connections), and Dhall brings short but interesting info about the Mortuary, the Dustmen, and who you are and your past. The dialogue feels short and to the point, which makes it contrast with its dialogue structure: there are lots of dialogues to read, but they are all relatively simple. I think I haven't encountered a word yet that I'm not familiar with (as in, word from the English language). By comparison, Numenera threw around words I had never read in 15 years, and the dialogue was the opposite of short, not to mention those two companions would constantly interrupt the flow of conversation.

Regarding my Deionarra comment, I can see this second playthrough be very much worthwile already. I like seeing rewatching films that have interesting plot twists, and see what hints was the film dropping since the beginning.

EDIT: The Smoldering Corpse Bar, now that you mention it, gives very strong Numenera vibes. I think I remember getting so tired of the NPCs the first time that I quit the game until the next day.

The familiar vibe of the Smoldering Corpse bar isn't a coincidence, since most of the Smoldering Corpse Bar was written by Colin McCuck, and part of the thing the Smoldering Corpse bar did was tie Planescape: Torment to the overall Planescape universe, referencing all the crazy of the multiverse.

As a small part of an overall game, I don't think this is necessarily bad. Quite the opposite, I think it's a good opportunity to actually anchor the events of the game and hint that there's a much larger universe out there of which you are not a part, but in which everything takes place. And it is also OK for a game to occasionally be lore-dumpy or have a high content density where you just sorta click things and read, click things and read.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily good design or even good overall, but it's OK; the game doesn't necessarily become worse from having this, and it's both a thematic break (or highlight) as well as a change of pacing, which prevents a game from feeling like it's constantly running at the same speed.

But in Numenera, this is the entirety of the game.

 

[Sigourn]

The familiar vibe of the Smoldering Corpse bar isn't a coincidence, since most of the Smoldering Corpse Bar was written by Colin McCuck, and part of the thing the Smoldering Corpse bar did was tie Planescape: Torment to the overall Planescape universe, referencing all the crazy of the multiverse.

As a small part of an overall game, I don't think this is necessarily bad. Quite the opposite, I think it's a good opportunity to actually anchor the events of the game and hint that there's a much larger universe out there of which you are not a part, but in which everything takes place. And it is also OK for a game to occasionally be lore-dumpy or have a high content density where you just sorta click things and read, click things and read.

I'm not saying that this is necessarily good design or even good overall, but it's OK; the game doesn't necessarily become worse from having this, and it's both a thematic break (or highlight) as well as a change of pacing, which prevents a game from feeling like it's constantly running at the same speed.

But in Numenera, this is the entirety of the game.

Hmmm, that's interesting. I remember being at that exact point of the game, and thinking something along the lines of "if this is how the rest of the game is going to play out, it's over". I would actually need to continue my playthrough and see what other parts stand out as particularly annoying. But it explains why Numenera was so much shit, like you mentioned: every single part of the game, every NPC with actual lines, is such a chore to read through. The giant octopus-like creature, for example, was cool to see... but I couldn't care less about how the guys actually caught it. Or the other NPC, who tells you such and such marvels about her magical artifacts, and you cannot even buy them.