Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Nihiliste]

Tyranny on the other hand was cancer.

What do you think about Torment? I wanted it for the turnbased but the reviews and impressions left me really sour.

I haven't played it yet, even though I spent quite a bit on the kickstarter. The negative reception turned me off as well and I've been busy with work. Will probably give it a spin though soon

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I don't understand the hate for this game, though. It's not as good as Planescape and I think most people would agree on that. But it's not some terrible game. I thought it was great actually, but granted I had just play PS:T recently and was into the large amounts of text and "virtual novel" type gameplay.

To me, it's like a smaller scale PS:T. Somehow it took me 77 hours to beat while PS:T(EE) took 84 according to Steam, yet Tides felt much smaller. I'm not sure why that is exactly. To me, the maps in Tides just seemed too small. The content was too dense, where you would walk 5 feet, play with something, walk 5 more, talk to someone, etc.. They should have spread it out by about 300% to make it feel more "grand". It was cramped, IMO.

I thought the merecasters were great, and some of the choice & consequence, even if it was an illusion (dunno, dun care) gave a sense that the game is very complex and a lot of different stuff could happen. The feeling of that adds a lot to the game, just like it did in PS:T.

I dunno, I want to see a sequel or more games in this style. I'd love to see some of the ideas like the Effort system, Crisis system, Merecasters, Cyphers and the leveling up system all be improved, tweaked and expanded upon.

It was surprisingly good to me. Flawed as every game, but an interesting total package.

 

[Daedalos]

Yeah lung cancer is just so fucking fun. It's worth it for 5 years of being "zeh cool kid" and being "clear minded"

I stopped smoking 12 years ago, never been happier in my life. And I've never been more clear headed either.

You want some real proven results? Exercise more, eat healthy and get more sleep.

You are sounding like a health freak that will die in his thirties from hearth attack during his jogging. Also the biggest reason for cancer is not cigarettes or alcohol,it is the pollution of our living environment,the smog from cars and factories,toxins from the water filtration, pesticides and mutations in the food and a few other shit. I am man that likes to mix his life,nice black tea in the morning,quality food,a lot of walking during the day, nice drink at diner,shitposting in the codex,going out drinking from time to time the simple pleasures in life are important to me.

PS: What kind of cancer do you have,if it is not the lung one?

If I die in my thirties, it would have happend either way. But there's no reason to speed up your own demise, by living a unhealthy lifestyle, regardless of you're predisposed to dying early or not, that's not within your control. What IS within your control is how you deal with life. The biggest reason for cancer is not cigarettes? Okaaaaay, source? Cos there's quite a bit of evidence that says otherwise. Sure living environments have a say, too, but compared to cigarettes? nah.

Luckily though, I live in Denmark, we have the strichtest regulations on food, water, sanisation and pollution in the world. We have some of the cleanest air, too, add to that, I don't live in a big city.

I would absolutely hate myself for getting addicted to drugs or cigarrettes. That's something I will simply not allow. I'm trying to kick my sugar addiction/habit in the new year, so far it's going great, and I've exercised more in the past weeks than I have in months.

 

[aweigh]

You are sounding like a health freak that will die in his thirties from hearth attack

LOL

 

[sstacks]

Tyranny on the other hand was cancer.

What do you think about Torment? I wanted it for the turnbased but the reviews and impressions left me really sour.

If it didn't have TORMENT in the title, people would probably be singing it's praises. Excellent game, excellent setting (Numenera), plus turn-based combat. It's written in such a way that two people can play it at the same time and have a very different experience but assume they are on the "main" narrative and choices. I only hope that down the road the crpg community slaps its forehead and revisits.

 

[Sizzle]

I don't understand the hate for this game, though.

The hate for this game is simple, and consists of two main reasons:

1) The lying.

Unfulfilled stretchgoal promises, that they didn't even want to admit to, had they not been caught with their pants down. A completely scumbag move, something you'd expect POS's like EA or Activision to pull.

2) The fact that it was so promising and ended up being a wasted opportunity.

When we first learned about this game - the all-star team, the ideas, and promises - it seemed like it would be a great game (maybe not as good as PS:T, but certainly great in its own way), a classic in the making, which would even solve some of its spiritual predecessor's problems (like the bad combat). What we got instead was a poorly constructed, barely thought out, uninspired mess, that somehow managed to look and play worse than a game from 1999.

Worst of all, T:ToN probably forever ruined the chances of a similar game ever getting made by a mid-sized studio with a reasonable budget. It's one of the few cases where you can safely say that it ended up being a detriment to the entire industry.

 

[Nihiliste]

It was hard to get excited about Torment's release because it felt like literally no one was excited about it. POE had its share of boosters. To be fair though some of that was probably due to the friction between the codex and inXile.

 

[sstacks]

Personally, I recommend it. And not like I say I enjoy SCL... SCL is a late night B movie on cable but enjoyable on that level. Torment Tides of Numenera is sublime.

 

[Lhynn]

I dont hate this game, theres no investment on my part here. Its just a shit game. But to be honest i have noticed that lefties and their infinite capacity for bullshit makes them like it, so whatever, if you voted hillary this is the game for you. If you are a filthy commie this is the game for you.

 

[MRY]

somehow managed to look and play worse than a game from 1999

All other criticisms are no doubt well-founded (and certainly I wouldn't argue with them), but this point is ridiculous, especially on the Codex. For the most part there has been no improvement in traditional RPG design since the 90s, and PS:T had excellent artists working with technology that could handle a prerendered 3D environment perfectly well. Maybe we'll someday get a Fallout-like game that looks and plays better than Fallout 1 and 2, for instance, but I'd be very surprised, and I certainly wouldn't express incredulity to discover that a Fallout-like made today had worse graphics and gameplay than Fallout. It would be like expecting 2D platformers to look and play better than SNES era games or run-and-guns to look and play better than Metal Slug or space shooters to look and play better than Freespace or fighters to look and play better than Street Fighter II and King of Fighters, etc. It's not impossible, but I'd probably frame at as "somehow managed to improve on a game from 199X" rather than being shocked in the opposite direction.

To be clear, it's totally fair to compare TTON unfavorably to PST, but part of defending good games is not buying into the notion that games in current year default to better than the classics.

 

[Lhynn]

MRY considering the first part of gameplay consists on the text part, and the writing is mostly bad with some exceptions, and the second part of gameplay is this turn based abomination that sets out to prove that turn based CAN be worse than RTwP combat.
Also i cant believe no one was bothered by the small pause before moving, it drove me insane.

 

[Sizzle]

somehow managed to look and play worse than a game from 1999

All other criticisms are no doubt well-founded (and certainly I wouldn't argue with them), but this point is ridiculous, especially on the Codex. For the most part there has been no improvement in traditional RPG design since the 90s, and PS:T had excellent artists working with technology that could handle a prerendered 3D environment perfectly well. Maybe we'll someday get a Fallout-like game that looks and plays better than Fallout 1 and 2, for instance, but I'd be very surprised, and I certainly wouldn't express incredulity to discover that a Fallout-like made today had worse graphics and gameplay than Fallout. It would be like expecting 2D platformers to look and play better than SNES era games or run-and-guns to look and play better than Metal Slug or space shooters to look and play better than Freespace or fighters to look and play better than Street Fighter II and King of Fighters, etc. It's not impossible, but I'd probably frame at as "somehow managed to improve on a game from 199X" rather than being shocked in the opposite direction.

To be clear, it's totally fair to compare TTON unfavorably to PST, but part of defending good games is not buying into the notion that games in current year default to better than the classics.

What I meant by this part was that almost 20 years have passed since PS:T was released.

I had hoped that - especially considering the team working on it and the amount of time passed that allowed for lengthy analysis - PS:T's good, as well as bad parts, could have been precisely identified and expanded upon/rectified.

 

[Stoned Ape]

I really enjoyed my Torment: Tides... playthrough, it was a great experience to just dive in and explore.

I think the character system is a bit simplistic and fits better for tabletop play than a CRPG in my opinion.

The combat is fine, but there's not much of it and out of the ten or so fights (?) about half of them are set pieces which are puzzle as much as fight and half of what remain are not exactly the most interesting.

Due to the lack of combat, the game is quite short as there aren't the number of random time wasting trash mobs you usually find.

The C&C, writing, and the setting is all awesome.

I think it was worth the money, although I have absolutely no desire to play it again.

 

[sstacks]

Tormet ToN has what is called "crisis" encounters (IIRC) .. the amount of combat you engage in is up to you. There are a few "must fights" but if you want a lot of combat it's there. The game allows you to go with the play style you want.

That said, the turn based combat is not mega tactical... but it is indeed turn-based on a grid.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

To me it's not even the missed stretch goals and it's not failing to live up to PST.

It's the disparity between early development updates and what eventually came out. That's what gets me. I followed this project with a firm conviction to manage the expectations and don't expect PST-quality game. But those early updates really gave an appearance of masterpiece in the making. All that beautiful early artwork. Saunders with his meaty updates and his Video Game Concepts That Are So Cool We Type Them In Caps. All their elaborate plans for various systems, the thought and attention to detail it all seemed to have.

Then it comes out, and not only it sucks ass, but it turns out the development was a complete clusterfuck from day one.

All those updates that made me think the work is progressing great? All of it was written by storytellers with an agenda to lie, mislead and deflect any concerns, while behind the scenes they were desperately scrambling to salvage the wreck.

And the final nail in the coffin was the behavior of McComb. In the interviews with the press he seemed genuinely surprised that there aren't parades on the street with people chanting his name, that women aren't stopping him on the street asking that he impregnates them because they want a genius baby, and that New York's Museum of Modern Art isn't inviting him for a lecture about how he created his opus magnum masterpiece.

Then they do the Codex interview and most of them acknowledge, sometimes reluctantly, but they acknowledge they've fucked up. Meanwhile, McComb is throwing childish tantrums and acting like everything went great and people just don't understand his genius. Seriously the guy is so deluded, you could put him next to mental patients who think they are Napoleon or da Vinci, and they would seem more sane.

 

[MRY]

Lhynn Like I said, I can't/won't debate whether the game is bad, whether the writing is bad, gameplay is bad, whether the art is bad, etc. As I've said before, I am obviously biased in favor of the game, as a matter of courtesy even if I had negative views I wouldn't share them, and (most importantly) I never really played much of the game because my computer wasn't powerful enough. I have read lots of articulate and reasonable negative evaluations, including from people whom I hold in high regard (along with articulate positive evaluations), so I am certainly not arguing with the negative reception.

My point has to do with framing and rhetoric, not with substance. It is bad to expect an isometric RPG in 2018 to look and play better than an insometric RPG in 1999; even a quick glance at the Codex's shows that only one of the top 10 games came out in the past 15 years, only one in the top 25 is newer than a decade old (the console action RPG Dark Souls). It's 100% true and fair to say that TTON brought a comparison to PST on itself, but PST didn't establish a baseline that merits a "somehow" a game didn't rise to that level.

Sizzle Well, it certainly shot at the target of improving on the trash, RTwP combat that PS:T often got criticized for. But many people deemed that shot a critical miss. And I think it also reveals that the trash, RTwP combat in PS:T served the same role that trash combat serves in jRPGs, namely spacing out the long narrative segments. TTON also tried, and I think maybe did, improve on the reactivity of PS:T -- at least in my mind, PS:T actually has relatively light choice-and-consequences in terms of quest design, while generally people seem to think that TTON did that pretty well, or maybe just signposted the consequences a little better than PS:T did. The Meres probably started out in someone's mind as an enhancement on the uninteractive text of the sensory stones and the largely uninteractive flashback sequences that TNO had; I'm particularly ill-suited to judge whether they succeeded or failed at that.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

The reason I don't understand the hate is because it's the same damn game as PS:T, set in a weird sci-fi setting, lol. I just wonder if people's tastes have changed, because I played PS:T for the first time a few months before Tides and Tides is damn near the same game. Tides actually has more "thingamabobs" to play with and feels like it has a lesser size and scale, but it ain't all that different from PS:T, at all.

 

[Sizzle]

Sizzle Well, it certainly shot at the target of improving on the trash, RTwP combat that PS:T often got criticized for. But many people deemed that shot a critical miss. And I think it also reveals that the trash, RTwP combat in PS:T served the same role that trash combat serves in jRPGs, namely spacing out the long narrative segments. TTON also tried, and I think maybe did, improve on the reactivity of PS:T -- at least in my mind, PS:T actually has relatively light choice-and-consequences in terms of quest design, while generally people seem to think that TTON did that pretty well, or maybe just signposted the consequences a little better than PS:T did. The Meres probably started out in someone's mind as an enhancement on the uninteractive text of the sensory stones and the largely uninteractive flashback sequences that TNO had; I'm particularly ill-suited to judge whether they succeeded or failed at that.

No one is denying that it tried to do some new things, only whether or not it succeeded in doing so. Which, in most cases, it, sadly, did not.

The reason I don't understand the hate is because it's the same damn game as PS:T, set in a weird sci-fi setting, lol.

It's most certainly not the same damn game. It differs in almost every quality aspect of what made PS:T good - it features bloated writing, characters which are weird just for the sake of being weird, an anything-goes setting, weaker tacked-on themes, etc.

I just wonder if people's tastes have changed, because I played PS:T for the first time a few months before Tides and Tides is damn near the same game.

Only you claim that it's the same game. Anyone else can clearly see that it is not.

Tides actually has more "thingamabobs" to play with

It has random items, which tell unconnected little stories, and which have nothing to do with the plot, or feature any use in the game itself.

PS:T, on the other hand, has fewer items, but they actually get used and have a purpose.

and feels like it has a lesser size and scale, but it ain't all that different from PS:T, at all.

It's different in almost every way that counts.

The most baffling thing about it is that it was made by some of the same people who made PS:T, but it came out feeling like a game made by people who played PS:T for 30 minutes a decade ago - they liked most of it, but can't seem to remember exactly what, so they decided to wing it.

 

[MRY]

No one is denying that it tried to do some new things, only whether or not it succeeded in doing so. Which, in most cases, it, sadly, did not.

Well, I thought you were suggesting that the developers hadn't identified and remedied/expanded upon shortcomings of PS:T. I think they did those things, but the cure/alternative was often worse than the original. That's not especially surprising to me because what you're describing as going awry with TTON is the ordinary, indeed banal, experience of my life. When people take something somewhat old and very good (but flawed, as everything in this world is) and try to make it new and better, they usually end up overshooting and screwing up what made the original work -- an easy example is Star Wars, but the constant reworking of nerd pop culture (Spider-Man's original story or Batman's voice and costume or Star Trek's latest iteration) provides plenty of fodder.

Removing the trash combat from PS:T is a good example of this -- lots and lots of thoughtful people viewed the combat in PS:T as something extraneous and tedious, but it turns out that it serves a variety of important roles:

• fun visuals;
• spacing out long, text-driven narrative sequences;
• giving the player very low-stakes interactions to relax between high-stakes encounters and seemingly high-stakes choices;
• stroking the player's ego;
• dramatizing key aspects of TNO (his power and his immortality) and other characters (IMO, a non-trivial part of Dak'kon's character is defined by the way he fights);
• demonstrating the power progression from leveling up.

Even if the Crises had worked as intended (the concept seemed amazing to me), I still think the lack of PS:T's "trash" combat would've caused significant collateral harm to the game.

The most baffling thing about it is that it was made by some of the same people who made PS:T

IMO, the team's connection to PS:T (Heine, a scripter, and McComb, a designer) is way more attenuated than its connection to MOTB (Kevin Saunders, project/design lead, and George Ziets, creative lead). Of course, that doesn't change the criticism, since MOTB is also amazing and TTON seems even farther from MOTB than PST in feel.

I think it's easy to underestimate what a big difference the Numenera ruleset may have had -- it just seems pretty ill-suited to a traditional cRPG because of its resistance to statistical complexity and its reliance on a live GM to make the thin stats interact interestingly with encounters. Some of stuff that gets the most grief in TTON flows from the Numenera ruleset (the effort system, the lack of character progression, the bland combat). PS:T had the advantage of working against a backdrop of a ruleset that (1) had helped frame what cRPGs are and (2) had for years been integrated into cRPGs in a fun way. Now, picking Numenera's ruleset was a choice, and choosers are responsible for the consequences, but to me at least it's pretty unsurprising in retrospect that a cRPG using Numenera rules would not feel the same (or as a good) as a cRPG using AD&D, particularly if the Numenera rules were used to make a cRPG that played like an AD&D cRPG.

Anyway, this is now quite far from my initial point, which is simply that presumptively an isometric cRPG in 2018 will be worse, not better, than an acclaimed isometric cRPG from 1999.

 

[Morality Games]

I'm pretty sure I would still consider T:TON a waste of potential even if it wasn't part of the 'Torment' label.

 

[Infinitron]

I never really played much of the game because my computer wasn't powerful enough.

MRY I love you man but knock it off with this shit, you're a BIGLAW attorney. Are you avoiding purchasing a new computer so you have an excuse not to get sucked up into new games?

 

[FeelTheRads]

More like an excuse to not play this game and regret having anything to do with it.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Breaking News: TTON Writer Viciously Attacks His Former Company For Poor Optimization And High System Requirements.

In a shocking confession made on a prestigious gaming forum RPG Codex, the heartbroken employee who shall remained unnamed, spoke of his disappointment with Brian Fargo's leadership.

"Can you imagine? It's a video game company, but they pay so poorly, we can't even afford a computer to launch the games we are working on. I wrote my entire script on a roll of toilet paper".

"The entire experience was a nightmare. This game was my baby, my darling, my precious, but those shitty programmers can't optimize, so I cannot experience my own creation".

"My family always supported that I choose to pursue career of video game writing, times are hard but we manage. My wife has 5 jobs and my children are eating grass from the lawn, while I sit in my study and consider deep philosophical questions of whether the particular quest should require 3 or 4 rat pelts. I cannot allow myself to get distracted from my art".

 

[MRY]

At the time I worked on it, I was a civil servant, and the cost would've been non-trivial. Now, I don't really have time to play games except with kids, and it's actually fairly labor intensive to get a new computer or slot new parts into my old one, and it's hard to justify that labor. It's a time-cost more than a dollar-cost thing now.

But also, this would not be the first game I played if I had time and computer power, or even in the 20th. The longer I wait, the more I'll have forgotten what I know of the story, and the more I can be pleasantly surprised. For instance, when I replayed Primordia after a few years, even my own lines amused me a little, so if I wait long enough, maybe I'll forget enough twists that TTON's plot will work.

And I think FeelTheRads is basically right. There are three possible things that could happen when I played: (1) the other writers' work blows me away, and I feel ashamed of my own writing in comparison; (2) I conclude that my writing stands out favorably in the game, and I have to face the fact that I had a chance to work on the project I dreamed about for years and rather than trying to get meaningfully involved in the overall plotting, I siloed myself in the most extraneous pieces of the game;* or (3) I dislike all the writing, thus having wasted not only the time playing the game but also the years working on it. I suppose there is a chance that I love all the writing including my own, but given my Eeyore-ish disposition, that seems improbable.

(* Earlier in this thread I gave my own pie-in-the-sky plotting thoughts.)

--EDIT--

"Don't expect our games to be as good as those from the '90s."

- official inXile Codex motto​

FTFY

 

[Luckmann]

[...] not so long it drags on unbearably.

Unlike this game, amirite?

(Just lost someone to it a few months ago.)

Seriously though, my sincerest condolences.