Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Terpsichore]

 

[Viata]

So guys, thinking about buying this game. How good is it? Is the combat as shit as Planescape?

 

[Ulfhednar]

So guys, thinking about buying this game. How good is it? Is the combat as shit as Planescape?

I recommend getting it on sale if you're interested. In regards to combat - I feel like InXile's thought process was basically "Everyone says that combat in PS:T is bad, therefore we can have shitty combat in this game because it isn't an essential piece of the Torment legacy..." rather than "PS:T's combat was unimaginative and kind of trashy, so lets see if we can fix that." But my opinion is highly biased and very edge-lordy on this particular game.

 

[MRY]

So guys, thinking about buying this game. How good is it? Is the combat as shit as Planescape?

I recommend getting it on sale if you're interested. In regards to combat - I feel like InXile's thought process was basically "Everyone says that combat in PS:T is bad, therefore we can have shitty combat in this game because it isn't an essential piece of the Torment legacy..." rather than "PS:T's combat was unimaginative and kind of trashy, so lets see if we can fix that." But my opinion is highly biased and very edge-lordy on this particular game.

While the Codex Consensus -- and the view of many other players -- is that the combat is terrible, "we can have bad combat because PS:T had bad combat" was definitely not the thought process. The Crisis system was a huge investment of time and resources and was meant to be elaborate, exciting, and strikingly different from normal RPG combat by allowing you to undertake lots of non-combat actions over the course of a prolonged Crisis. It was the opposite of PS:T's "trash" spammy real-time combat. If it went awry, I think it went awry for different reasons (too rare, too long, somewhat unintuitive) from the problems with PS:T (too frequent, too easy), and not because of a lack of resources. As Tolstoy would say, every unhappy combat is unhappy in its own way.

I do think that the view was that combat could be of limited significance because it was insignificant in PS:T, but the approach was to have it be limited but great, not limited and boring. :D

--EDIT--

I'll add that when I first heard of the Crisis system, and read the initial documentation, I thought it would be revolutionary and one of the coolest things in any non-P&P RPG, so it's particularly sad that it would up being worse than RTwP spam in the view of many.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'll add that when I first heard of the Crisis system, and read the initial documentation, I thought it would be revolutionary and one of the coolest things in any non-P&P RPG, so it's particularly sad that it would up being worse than RTwP spam in the view of many.

Me too. The Crisis system was one of the reasons I was so stoked about the game in the beginning -- it sounded freakin' wonderful.

Sadly, it just doesn't work. That very first encounter on the Reef shows its potential -- you can talk, interact with the environment, or fight -- but it never lives up to it.

A part of it is just shitty implementation of moment-to-moment combat: having the player wait for ages as enemies march around the screen is no fun at all.

A part of it is encounter design, which aggravates the above: combine that aggravating slowness with a large number of enemies or, worse, (re)spawning enemies, and it gets a lot worse -- the Anechoic Lazaret and the Sanctuary are particularly bad offenders here.

A part of it is that it would need to be backed up by robust combat and non-combat systems. They're just not there: all you have is Effort.

So the end result is really half-arsed. Yeah you can talk or interact with the environment sometimes, but it's an excruciating slog to play through, and the interactions themselves become a matter of putting the right number of Effort pips into whatever it is you're doing. Ideas are easy, execution is hard, and this one failed in execution.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yep, the crises are one of those good ideas that are either badly implemented or that just can't work in the real world.

Best one was in the spaceship, I think... forgot the name already.

 

[Iznaliu]

Yep, the crises are one of those good ideas that are either badly implemented or that just can't work in the real world.

That is PS:T for you.

 

[Luckmann]

[...]

Maybe it was never going to sell very well, and PS:T being such a cult classic made a disproportionate amount of passionate fans back the Kickstarter, making InXile set unrealistic sales expectations. [...]

That's not it at all, honestly. Tides of Numenera is a genuinely bad game in many ways, all in it's own right. PS:T nostalgia or overhyping the PS:T connection explains some of the initial backlash, but it doesn't explain the wealth of issues the game has, even if we completely ignore all the broken promises. Even though they've technically fulfilled some of them after the release of the game (Oom, the Codex), they're haphazard and half-hearted, seemingly created and pushed out on principle.

For trying, inXile should get a genuine participation award, but it's not only too late, but far, far, far too little.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yep, the crises are one of those good ideas that are either badly implemented or that just can't work in the real world.

That is PS:T for you.

What was a good idea in PS:T that didn't work out?

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Having played a few hours of Torment I think the biggest thing so far is that it's just kind of odd. Not just thematically, mechanically too. There isn't much for somebody to grapple onto and go "oh yeah I love these kinds of games". For the visual novel people there's a lot more systems than they'd be used to and it's not much to look at. For the combat people there isn't that much fighting and what's there isn't very good. There doesn't seem to be much depth in character building but that might change as the game goes on. The story isn't uninteresting so far, although from what I'm told it won't be a classic work of the genre.

Planescape also evoked alienness in its setting and some of the design choices, but it did have some ins for people - if you liked D&D lore it was exploring the weirder parts of it; if you liked other D&D games of the era this used the same basic mechanics and you could ease into the gameplay immediately. I can understand why hardly anybody bought it. Once I put some more time in I expect I'll probably enjoy it, but it's a tall fuckin' order for joe sixpack or his minecraft loving son to discover and decide to try. It doesn't look exciting in trailers, it's not a popular genre, it's very different from other games even in the same nostalgia-fueled niche, it's not twitch or youtube friendly, and the setting chosen for it is dense and confusing for an average person. It's not a conventional fantasy setting, it's not a well known license, and most people seeing an ad for it at the front of a video are not going to know what to make of it.

 

[Infinitron]

In retrospect, inXile's true calling may be making games with a crowd-pleasing pulp sensibility (Robots and punks in the post-apocalypse! Funny singing goblins and snarky bards!), and their attempt to branch out into more serious fare a predictable flop.

 

[ga♥]

Why predictable?

 

[Grunker]

In retrospect, inXile's true calling may be making games with a crowd-pleasing pulp sensibility (Robots and punks in the post-apocalypse! Funny singing goblins and snarky bards!), and their attempt to branch out into more serious fare a predictable flop.

I wanted to respond to this with the 'meh' emote but it isn't there. Please give emoticon quest compass

 

[Grunker]

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

In retrospect, inXile's true calling may be making games with a crowd-pleasing pulp sensibility (Robots and punks in the post-apocalypse! Funny singing goblins and snarky bards!), and their attempt to branch out into more serious fare a predictable flop.

Tyranny demolishing it in long term sales was the biggest surprise for me. An out-of-nowhere RTwP RPG in an original setting with a frankly pretty bad marketing campaign (I honestly thought it was a campy Overlord type game based on the initial press) has managed to pull 200k sales to date. It was looking close there for a while, but now Tyranny is far, far ahead of Torment's sales. Based on the number of backers it had, it seems like kickstarter was responisible for the lion's share of "owners" for Numenera on steam, too. Absolute trainwreck from a commercial standpoint.

 

[Iznaliu]

What was a good idea in PS:T that didn't work out?

• The whole effort system
• The idea of an PS:T spiritual successor
• The implementation of Numenera.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

What was a good idea in TTON that didn't work out?

• The whole effort system
• The idea of an PS:T spiritual successor
• The implementation of Numenera.

FYP, np.

 

[MRY]

He was asking about PS:T, not TTON.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

In retrospect, inXile's true calling may be making games with a crowd-pleasing pulp sensibility (Robots and punks in the post-apocalypse! Funny singing goblins and snarky bards!), and their attempt to branch out into more serious fare a predictable flop.

Unfortunately this does not impact just Inxile. TTON flopping means that, apart from extreme indies, there will be nothing risky done in this genre for another decade.

 

[Zed]

In retrospect, inXile's true calling may be making games with a crowd-pleasing pulp sensibility (Robots and punks in the post-apocalypse! Funny singing goblins and snarky bards!), and their attempt to branch out into more serious fare a predictable flop.

There's a wide spectrum between taking something seriously (perhaps too seriously) and whimsical goblins.

Unfortunately this does not impact just Inxile. TTON flopping means that, apart from extreme indies, there will be nothing risky done in this genre for another decade.

Any developer looking at inXile failing and going "well I better not develop this cool risky game I had in mind" wouldn't be able to make a good game in the first place. Good developers know they're better than inXile.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Any developer looking at inXile failing and going "well I better not develop this cool risky game I had in mind" wouldn't be able to make a good game in the first place. Good developers know they're better than inXile.

And then he'll go to the publisher or CEO to ask for funds, he will be denied because "the last one sold crappy", and that will be the end of it.

 

[Zed]

I really don't think that would be the case. Unless you mean internally at inXile in which case who gives a shit.

 

[Sizzle]

The only thing T:ToN irrefutably proves is that game studios don't need publishers to fuck things up - they can manage that all on their own :D

 

[ERYFKRAD]

What was a good idea in TTON that didn't work out?

• The kickstarter

FYP, np.

FYP++

 

[HeatEXTEND]

He was asking about PS:T, not TTON.

Spoiler