Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Luckmann]

Yeah, we need to get MCA and JES together so they can make a baby. Zhe would combine the creativity and passion of MCA with the Teutonic focus and organisational skills of JES and it would be heavan.

Spoiler

Sucks to zir if it goes the other way around though .

It.

 

[Prime Junta]

Yeah, we need to get MCA and JES together so they can make a baby. Zhe would combine the creativity and passion of MCA with the Teutonic focus and organisational skills of JES and it would be heavan.

Spoiler

Sucks to zir if it goes the other way around though .

It.

Pronouns are hard.

 

[FeelTheRads]

It turns out that in the end publisher funded small projects (the likes of Fallout) were still the best of both worlds. You know, like exactly what's not being done anymore.

How was the initial development process of Kevin Saunders's Torment different from Tim Cain's Fallout? In both cases, Fargo just let a guy do whatever he wanted with no oversight for years.

Dunno? Interplay had more money and more people while inXile is operating on emergency power. Also talent and passion which also seem to be on emergency power at inXile.

 

[Fairfax]

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.

That's true regardless of any mistakes Kevin Saunders might have made.

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.

Completely different situations. TTON was crowdfunded, so InXile was expected to deliver on a ton of promises to the public. The Visceral project was only known within EA. All that was expected of them was a Star Wars game with a single-player campaign. They didn't have to insist on their ambitious ideas at all, and they knew about their lack of resources beforehand, so the damage was self-inflicted. The only problem forced on them was having to use Frostbite.

Another difference is that Amy Hennig was criticized by multiple designers and leads who worked on the game, whereas Kevin's case people came to his defense and praised his work.

It turns out that in the end publisher funded small projects (the likes of Fallout) were still the best of both worlds. You know, like exactly what's not being done anymore.

How was the initial development process of Kevin Saunders's Torment different from Tim Cain's Fallout? In both cases, Fargo just let a guy do whatever he wanted with no oversight for years.

Tim Cain had a proper team to work on the game from day 1. InXile had programmers, artists, animators, etc shared between projects, and most were busy with WL2, which meant TTON had ~18 months of pre-production.

 

[Roguey]

What a surprise, guy whose design philosophy is "Do what you want, the sky's the limit! " finds himself well-liked by the designers who worked for him.

 

[Cross]

Tim Cain had a proper team to work on the game from day 1. InXile had programmers, artists, animators, etc shared between projects, and most were busy with WL2, which meant TTON had ~18 months of pre-production.

18 months would be for the original release of Wasteland 2. But I would assume a significant amount of its staff then went on to work on its director's cut, which came out more than two and a half years after T:ToN's Kickstarter campaign had concludes.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

it became clear that players were interested in mechanics over walls of text.

I don't really get how this isn't an established common-sense. I have no idea why anyone would need examples.

 

[Roguey]

I don't really get how this isn't an established common-sense. I have no idea why anyone would need examples.

Planescape: Torment was memed into being a classic.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I don't really get how this isn't an established common-sense. I have no idea why anyone would need examples.

Planescape: Torment was memed into being a classic.

PS:T wasn't walls of text though. You occasionally got a wall of text, but in the main, most text was conversational. There's also quite a lot of combat in the game and min/max'ing most of the combat away via attributes is something only a teeny percentage of people do. Shadowrun Hong Kong on the other hand, people use the phrase walls of text and, surprise surprise (to all but the most deranged) Hong Kong does not fare as well in reviews as Dragonfall.

 

[Roguey]

No walls of text he says.

 

[Gepeu]

I think he means pointless wall of text, mania of writing, i.e. extremely long and over the top descriptions of things the player can, well, already see on the screen in detail. The picture above contains strictly actual dialogue lines.

 

[Cross]

https://www.inverse.com/article/26761-torment-tides-of-numenera-inxile-entertainment-preview

With a game script of over 1.2 million words

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment

The game's script contains around 800,000 words

If these figures are to be believed, T:ToN's word count is at least 50% higher than PS:T's. That's a significant difference.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

No walls of text he says.

I didn't say that. I said is wasn't walls of text as in the entire game is not just one wall of text after another. You screenshotting every example of something you can argue is a wall of text doesn't change that.

Moreover, your screenshot shows that when you're making examples you think are right for your argument you are infact simply agreeing with what I wrote. A wall of text is a large block of writing without paragraph breaks, if something is neatly broken down into compartments then its not a wall of text, which is what all IE games did, they compartmentalised the text into dialogue options - which was then further broken up via combat, looting/inventory management, trading, puzzle solving and all the other things that help break-up the monotony of repetitive gameplay.

Is there any particular reason you're intentionally trying to fail to understand common-sense? I don't remember you white-knighting Driftmoon...

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I think he means pointless wall of text, mania of writing, i.e. extremely long and over the top descriptions of things the player can, well, already see on the screen in detail. The picture above contains strictly actual dialogue lines.

He seems to have common-sense issues.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

https://www.inverse.com/article/26761-torment-tides-of-numenera-inxile-entertainment-preview

With a game script of over 1.2 million words

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape:_Torment

The game's script contains around 800,000 words

If these figures are to be believed, T:ToN's word count is at least 50% higher than PS:T's. That's a significant difference.

...And TToN is a much shorter game to-boot. So it feels more like 100% more.

 

[Fairfax]

The term "wall of text" comes from forum discussions, it's pointless to use as criticism for games (let alone books). People do use it as a derogatory term when the text is not interesting or is way too long for it's trying to accomplish. In that sense, PS:T has very few indeed.

Also, PS:T is not nearly as wordy as people make it sound. The actual word count is around 700-800k words, significantly less than TTON, BG2, NWN and even D:OS2. PS:T seems wordier than it actually is because it doesn't have as much combat as other RPGs, its encounters don't last as long, and the writing is much more memorable than the action parts.

 

[Prime Junta]

...And TToN is a much shorter game to-boot. So it feels more like 100% more.

It has a lot more reactivity though. You're likely to miss big chunks of that word count in any given playthrough.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

The term "wall of text" comes from forum discussions, it's pointless to use as criticism for games (let alone books). People do use it as a derogatory term when the text is not interesting or is way too long for it's trying to accomplish. In that sense, PS:T has very few indeed.

Also, PS:T is not nearly as wordy as people make it sound. The actual word count is around 700-800k words, significantly less than TTON, BG2, NWN and even D:OS2. PS:T seems wordier than it actually is because it doesn't have as much combat as other RPGs, its encounters don't last as long, and the writing is much more memorable than the action parts.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Avernum has more text than even TToN... there is shitting tons of text in those games. You just notice it less because there's still more of everything else you do in an RPG.

...And TToN is a much shorter game to-boot. So it feels more like 100% more.

It has a lot more reactivity though. You're likely to miss big chunks of that word count in any given playthrough.

You could say that about most games. Even in Icewind Dale, a game with virtually fuck-all reactivity, I discovered huge amounts of text and options I had missed the first time playing when reading up on the game later. I use this as an extreme example because I suspect the percentages are fairly similar, and would be similar in most games where someone has bothered to put optional text/activities in a game.

 

[Roguey]

I think he means pointless wall of text, mania of writing, i.e. extremely long and over the top descriptions of things the player can, well, already see on the screen in detail. The picture above contains strictly actual dialogue lines.

Tides of Numenera does not actually have what you're talking about.

A wall of text is a large block of writing without paragraph breaks, if something is neatly broken down into compartments then its not a wall of text, which is what all IE games did, they compartmentalised the text into dialogue options - which was then further broken up via combat, looting/inventory management, trading, puzzle solving and all the other things that help break-up the monotony of repetitive gameplay.

It doesn't have this either.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I have to agree with most of you that it was a bit too wordy. I'd often skim the text walls and then read the brief version that you get when you click the line again, which frankly, should have been the original line to start with in many cases. The conversation with Inifere was the most impenetrable because it was wordy, and the guy didn't give you straight answers to your questions. I was more or less able to figure out what was going on by reading the quest journal text and the relevant codex entries.

 

[Roguey]

I used "text walls" in the colloquial sense, not the "large block of writing without paragraph breaks" sense.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

I used "text walls" in the colloquial sense, not the "large block of writing without paragraph breaks" sense.

Awesome, so if I write another sentence explaining why you're not getting it, will you then be attempting to define what I mean by "getting it" rather than attempt to actually conceptualise the whole post and replying to the whole post instead of that one segway you feel you can make pedantic to-and-fro about?

 

[FeelTheRads]

I think he means pointless wall of text, mania of writing, i.e. extremely long and over the top descriptions of things the player can, well, already see on the screen in detail. The picture above contains strictly actual dialogue lines.

Tides of Numenera does not actually have what you're talking about.

A wall of text is a large block of writing without paragraph breaks, if something is neatly broken down into compartments then its not a wall of text, which is what all IE games did, they compartmentalised the text into dialogue options - which was then further broken up via combat, looting/inventory management, trading, puzzle solving and all the other things that help break-up the monotony of repetitive gameplay.

It doesn't have this either.

lol lies

At every step the game keeps dumping stupid descriptions on you, both things you can already see (durr the pyramid is floating like a lazy turd in a dark and musty toilet) or things your character has not business knowing (durr iz alien script from some unknown evil).

Seriously, get fucked, if it's unknown then don't tell me about it. Fucking high-school level deep and mysterious writing.

The whole writing is a fucking mess.

Perhaps it's harder to notice if you skip it.

 

[Prime Junta]

Gotta hand it to Roguey, it takes a special kind of bloody-mindedness to like something as obviously terrible as T:ToN.

 

[Efe]

at least it is entertaining to watch him get schooled