Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Roguey]

What Roguey and Infinitron's arguments logically lead to is that quality has no bearing on sales ever, that even niche gamers are sheep who will literally buy anything with a RTwP combat and a standard setting, regardless of anything else. That's insane.

Film nerds are claiming that Blade Runner 2049 is kinography, and it has great metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings from both critics and users, yet it still flopped hard, just as the original did. Quality can't save you when your budget is too high and you have a concept that most people are flat out not interested in despite the stellar reputation of its predecessor.

One can argue that Tides of Numenera is the Blade Runner 2049 of RPGs, right down to the grognards who say it's a travesty compared to the original.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

What Roguey and Infinitron's arguments logically lead to is that quality has no bearing on sales ever, that even niche gamers are sheep who will literally buy anything with a RTwP combat and a standard setting, regardless of anything else. That's insane.

Not at all, I just conceded the possibility that Torment could have sold twice as much. Which would put it at about the same level of commercial success as Tyranny. (Tyranny is kind of a useful example for this debate for how well a 'meh' but more standard game can do)

Undertale was less standard than any shit you care to throw in for analysis... I believe that sold well and was loathed by a lot of 'grognards'.

I'm sorry, about that rocket...

 

[Infinitron]

The only person who rated that post butthurt was you. The only person rating my posts on this page butthurt is you. You seem to have a really dedicated memory for posts made a very long time ago which you can bring forth at the drop of a hat.

It's useful for a moderator to have a memory for repetitive behavior.

Anyway, I'll reply to you now. Yes, Torment is obviously a game with serious narrative ambitions, certainly compared to other inXile games like Wasteland 2 and Bard's Tale IV, which was the point I was trying to make - apparently that isn't inXile's forte. Instead of thinking, you got mad at me for calling Torment "serious" because your brain thinks "Serious==good, Torment==bad, SO HOW COULD IT BE SERIOUS, KILL THE FANBOY". Get a grip dude.

 

[FeelTheRads]

2. In your 'rocket science' post you seem obsessed that there's this 'grognard' conspiracy against certain games.

Yep, like every other of his posts is about them evil grognards.
And also them neckbeards living in their mother's basesement. Yep, that's how severe Infinitron's butthurt is when people don't like what he likes (particularly PoE and Sawyer's dick), he even lowered himself to calling people he disagrees with neckbeards.

I mean fuck, only cool guys like him can understand PoE, I guess, but seriously, just call the not cool guys retards and be done with it. That's the Codex way.

 

[Lacrymas]

Film nerds are claiming that Blade Runner 2049 is kinography, and it has great metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings from both critics and users, yet it still flopped hard, just as the original did. Quality can't save you when your budget is too high and you have a concept that most people are flat out not interested in despite the stellar reputation of its predecessor.

One can argue that Tides of Numenera is the Blade Runner 2049 of RPGs, right down to the grognards who say it's a travesty compared to the original.

Except nobody is saying Numanuma is good. Because it's not. Its budget was obvious from the KS - 4M$. That was literally free money, all they had to do is make a game with that budget in mind. What they did is squander all their advantages and shit out a disgusting game which appealed to no-one, expecting more sales. That was a bad business move from them and that's nobody's fault but theirs. Blade Runner is nowhere in the same ballpark as Numanuma, as it wasn't crowdfunded (I think?), so it's a false equivalency. It also didn't flop, it made back all its money and a bit more, they are even thinking about making a sequel.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The only person who rated that post butthurt was you. The only person rating my posts on this page butthurt is you. You seem to have a really dedicated memory for posts made a very long time ago which you can bring forth at the drop of a hat.

It's useful for a moderator to have a memory for repetitive behavior.

Anyway, I'll reply to you now. Yes, Torment is obviously a game with serious narrative ambitions, certainly compared to other inXile games like Wasteland 2 and Bard's Tale IV, which was the point I was trying to make - apparently that isn't inXile's forte. Instead of thinking, you got mad at me for calling Torment "serious" because your brain thinks "Serious==good, Torment==bad, SO HOW COULD IT BE SERIOUS, KILL THE FANBOY". Get a grip dude.

And I'll reply what I replied then here:

"In what way, shape or form would you consider TToN to be more 'serious' fare than: Tyranny, Age of Decadence, Serpents in the Staglands, Underrail or any of the other recent cRPG attempts that all have perfectly respectable reputations on this site?"

Your choice of wording is hilarious. I mean:

"Torment is obviously a game with serious narrative ambitions"

What does that even mean? I'm quite sure the writers of Dragon Age 2 felt they had "serious narrative ambitions". Who, when writing a game does not have "serious narrative ambitions"? Did Witcher 3 have "serious narrative ambitions"?

Oh, you meant just with inXile. You meant InXile had shit writing? Why didn't you say that then? What's with all the "serious narrative ambitions"? Who even talks like that?

But yeah, I know what you mean now, you meant inXile are shit at writing. Cool, glad we sorted that out.

 

[passerby]

Fact: Hundreds of thousands of crpg players have no interest in even giving Tides of Numenera a try, even though they were willing to purchase all three Shadowruns, Blackguards and its poorly received sequel, Dragon Age and its sequels, all the Dungeon Sieges including the third one by Obsidian that made DS purists mad, two fucking South Park games (the sequel has already outsold ToN by a bit in just two weeks), Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, and so on. Regardless of the individual quality of these titles, we're not exactly dealing with people who have sky-high standards.

Speculation: Why those hundreds of thousands of crpg fans don't want to bother. Some people in this thread want to believe that it's because those 33% of haters have made a convincing case to keep them away, yet that didn't stop 227,594 ± 14,363 from buying Blackguards 2 with its 63% user score or 780,456 ± 26,582 from buying Dungeon Siege III with its 58% user score.

Some would say it's because of the setting, but this doesn't make much sense to me given the settings of the RPGs listed. You really want to say Numenera has a significantly worse setting than Dragon Age, Dungeon Siege, South Park, and so on and that this would make enough difference to hundreds of thousands of people that they wouldn't even bother?

Most gamers are put off by a mere pretense of the game lacking typical rpg repetitive threadmill, or containing a lot of philosophical walls of text.
So audience is smaller by definition, but potentially could be more loyal and not wait for a heavy sale, if the game delivered on its pretenses.
Audience was wery loyal during kickstarter for example - one of the most funded games.

The numbers are also completely skewed, because most of the mentioned games were available for years for 3$ or less, on every major steam sale, and/or were featured in multiple bundles, 1$ tier included.
If inXile starded to give away the game almost for free, it also could inflate the numbers by 500k, but these 500k would amount to maybe 1M$ on their bank account, no point in doing it this early, if there are no plans to develop a sequel.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Oop, nope, I've been butthurted again [edit: nope he's changed it to a shit rating]. I'm obviously not getting it.

Maybe someone who's good at translating and interpreting can explain what Infinitron is on about?

 

[Lacrymas]

Infinitron displaying diva levels of buttmadness when faced with the truth. Delicious.

 

[Infinitron]

Infinitron displaying diva levels of butmadness at the truth. Delicious.

Siding with a well-known and obvious troll to try to score points, can't say I'm surprised

 

[Lacrymas]

How is IncendiaryDevice a known troll?

 

[passerby]

You're right, one also has to account for the utter alienation of the core audience right before the game was released.

Nope, the codex with all lurkers, and all social networks of the users and lurkers is worth few thousand sales at best.
And the few is closer to one than five. We are irrelevant. Many of us already paid premium upfront anyway.

 

[Ismaul]

That's right Infinitron, go ahead and reduce our arguments to "siding with a known troll". You're the troll right now.

 

[Lacrymas]

Roguey budget and box office performance - http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/default.htm?id=bladerunnersequel.htm

Them thinking about a sequel - https://www.metro.us/entertainment/movies/will-there-be-a-blade-runner-sequel

 

[Roguey]

Except nobody is saying Numanuma is good.

"I am going to ignore every positive review and rating for Tides of Numenera because I disagree with it. My belief shapes reality."

By the by, something that's been completely forgotten by most folks: ToN was received very well by the professional game press. Of course they're gaming journalists, who cares for them? (except McComb, desperate for validation)

Its budget was obvious from the KS - 4M$.

The budget was $8.5 million. Kevin Saunders let his ambitions get to his head and wanted to make a game with a scope that would ultimately cost inXile more than $10 million. Far too late, Fargo took a peek at what was going on, said something along the lines of "What the fuck?!" and demanded cuts that would allow them to put out a shippable product in a far more reasonable amount of time (but not nearly reasonable enough).

Blade Runner is nowhere in the same ballpark as Numanuma, as it wasn't crowdfunded (I think?), so it's a false equivalency. It also didn't flop, it made back all its money and a bit more, they are even thinking about making a sequel.

It's not enough to make back your production budget. Conventional wisdom says the marketing budget is at least just as much, so it'd need to bring in $300 million just to break even, which it hasn't yet, still coming in $100 million short. It's a bomb.

The numbers are also completely skewed, because most of the mentioned games were available for years for 3$ or less, on every major steam sale, and/or were featured in multiple bundles, 1$ tier included.
If inXile starded to give away the game almost for free, it also could inflate the numbers by 500k, but these 500k would amount to maybe 1M$ on their bank account, no point in doing it this early, if there are no plans to develop a sequel.

Tides of Numenera is free to play at this very moment through tomorrow (and on sale for about $20), but the peak concurrent users was a mere 492. More people played freaking Tyranny today even though it's $18.

 

[Lacrymas]

Again, that was the OBVIOUS budget, what Kevin Saunders wanted and did was his own fault. I don't think I should mention that spending more money than you have is not a safe business decision, right?

"I am going to ignore every positive review and rating for Tides of Numenera because I disagree with it. My belief shapes reality."

"I'm going to ignore the fact that only 1.8% of owners reviewed the game".

 

[Ismaul]

1. I didn't bring up ""oldschool RPGers who don't use newfangled social media review systems" as an important factor in a game's success ". I brought that up to counter the horseshit that people are more motivated to rate things if they don't like that thing.

I was replying to the argument made by Ismaul, not to you.

I never said that either. Just avdanced the hypothesis that reviews are not representative because old-school people rate less than younguns. That would be relevant because most gamers who played Torment and expected a lot from it would now be older, and because this is the audience Fargo pitched it for. Those would be the most disappointed, yet less prone to rate. But go ahead, distort away!

 

[Infinitron]

The Kevin Saunders defenders on the Codex (which there might be less of after what he posted on Twitter the other day ) claim that Brian Fargo starved the Torment team of the resources required to finish the game because Wasteland 2 was delayed and then he made a Director's Cut too.

If that's true, the story of Torment is sort of like Visceral Games and EA writ small. Guy gets to make cool game, doesn't get enough resources, doesn't adjust his scope accordingly - whose fault is it? Both. In the end, the optimal outcome seems to be that the game should never have been made in the first place.

From 2012 to 2016, the Fargo strategy was "move fast, Kickstart what you can as soon as possible". That seemed smart, exciting and entrepreneurial at first. But it seems like that hastiness left inXile saddled with a bunch of less-than-optimal strategic commitments. Sometimes waiting and watching is the right thing to do. Imagine what sort of game they might have Kickstarted if they'd waited until 2015 for their second Kickstarter after Wasteland 2. After Divinity: Original Sin, after it became clear that players valued mechanics over walls of text.

 

[Roguey]

Again, that was the OBVIOUS budget, what Kevin Saunders wanted and did was his own fault. I don't think I should mention that spending more money than you have is not a safe business decision, right?

Sure, but some of you cantankerous folks like to go on about "lazy devs" and here was a guy who wanted to deliver everything that was promised and then some. Turns out they overpromised.

"I'm going to ignore the fact that only 1.8% of owners reviewed the game".

So? It seems as though the same is true for every game on Steam. And that's a far cry from "Except nobody is saying Numanuma is good." It's easy to disprove that statement, all you have to do is find a single positive review.

 

[Lacrymas]

If you bother to read the positive Steam reviews, those that aren't a 1 sentence knee-jerk, you'll find out that they are heavy on the criticism as well. Maybe they are Canadian and think it's too rude to rate a game negatively. In either case, trying to "disprove" an obviously exaggerated statement won't lead anywhere. Like I said, literally shit will have a positive Steam review. I don't know what you are trying to say anymore. What are we even talking about? Numanuma is obviously not good, so I can't fathom you trying to defend it in any way in that context, so what is it? That the only reason it flopped is because it overstepped and overestimated its audience and its budget? That quality doesn't have anything to do with sales as the sheeple will buy anything? What?

 

[Cross]

The Kevin Saunders defenders on the Codex (which there might be less of after what he posted on Twitter the other day ) claim that Brian Fargo starved the Torment team of the resources required to finish the game because Wasteland 2 was delayed and then he made a Director's Cut too.

If that's true, the story of Torment is sort of like Visceral Games and EA writ small. Guy gets to make cool game, doesn't get enough resources, doesn't adjust his scope accordingly - whose fault is it? Both. In the end, the optimal outcome seems to be that the game should never have been made in the first place.

Are we talking about the same Fargo who doubled Wasteland 2's scope (it's blatantly obvious the Los Angeles half was an impromptu addition to a game that was originally only supposed to take place in Arizona)? The same Fargo who to this day still can't shut up about how nuTorment has way more words than the Bible?

Lack of resources wasn't the problem, bad management was, and that's all on Fargo, as he made the choices on who to hire, what games to make and how to structure their development. As I said, nuTorment's development was a recipe for disaster from the very start:

• a company with zero experience developing RPG's whose last released game prior to kickstarting T:ToN was Choplifter HD;
• a disorganized development team spread out not just across different locations, but even across different continents;
• a lead writer who hadn't worked in game development for a decade and a half and who was responsible for the weakest parts of the original Torment.

From 2012 to 2016, the Fargo strategy was "move fast, Kickstart what you can as soon as possible". That seemed smart, exciting and entrepreneurial at first. But it seems like that hastiness left inXile saddled with a bunch of less-than-optimal strategic commitments. Sometimes waiting and watching is the right thing to do. Imagine what sort of game they might have Kickstarted if they'd waited until 2015 for their second Kickstarter after Wasteland 2. After Divinity: Original Sin, after it became clear that players valued mechanics over walls of text.

2015 proved that players value mechanics over wall of text? 2015, the same year that The Witcher 3 was released, the game that is now held up the new benchmark for all RPG's specifically for its writing and presentation? Hardly. In that same year Larian also released an enhanced edition of Divinity: Original Sin with one of the stated goals being to improve its story.

 

[Infinitron]

Lack of resources wasn't the problem, bad management was, and that's all on Fargo, as he made the choices on who to hire, what games to make and how to structure their development.

Not true! Torment was the Kingdom of Saunders until he left. Until then, Brian Fargo's only decision was the strategic decision to make a Torment game in the first place and put Kevin in charge of it.

2015 proved that players value mechanics over wall of text? 2015, the same year that The Witcher 3 was released, the game that is now held up the new benchmark for all RPG's specifically for its writing and presentation? Hardly.

I said walls of text, not walls of voice acted open world cinematics.

 

[v1rus]

Do they still plan to add cut content, like they did with Oom?

 

[Roguey]

If you bother to read the positive Steam reviews, those that aren't a 1 sentence knee-jerk, you'll find out that they are heavy on the criticism as well.

Mine was as well. Neutral positive.

What are we even talking about? Numanuma is obviously not good, so I can't fathom you trying to defend it in any way in that context, so what is it? That the only reason it flopped is because it overstepped and overestimated its audience and its budget? That quality doesn't have anything to do with sales as the sheeple will buy anything? What?

This discussion came about because hardly anyone's playing free Torment. I made the claim that this isn't because of its perceived lack of quality, but because they're just not interested in the subgenre. And yes, most crpg players are plebs who love familiar-feeling heroic high fantasy.

Official Roguey prediction:

In next year's rpgoty poll, Torment's going to be in the "instant controversy" space, Grimoire's going to be in "no consensus" and Divinity: Original Sin 2 is going to rocket into "new classics" territory to the dismay of those who can't stand what was changed.

 

[tripedal]

The budget was $8.5 million. Kevin Saunders let his ambitions get to his head and wanted to make a game with a scope that would ultimately cost inXile more than $10 million. Far too late, Fargo took a peek at what was going on, said something along the lines of "What the fuck?!" and demanded cuts that would allow them to put out a shippable product in a far more reasonable amount of time (but not nearly reasonable enough).

But TToN is tiny compared to PoE, which can't have cost much more. And PoE has much higher quality art, and so presumably was more expensive to produce. The issue isn't Saunders' ambitions, it's that the money disappeared down a black hole with nothing to show in return.