Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[2house2fly]

"Is the person with amnesia a different person from who he was before he had amnesia?" isn't a bad existential question

 

[hexer]

At the end of Torment, you absorb the memories of all the previous personalities who had control of your body, much like how in one of the optional endings of ToN, you absorb all the memories of every cast-off (alternately you can put yourself into this pool of memories and transfer them to The First, Matkina, or TCG's daughter).

I hope you're not trolling me but are just stubborn..

TNO suffers from amnesia - he recalls the personalities of his previous selves from his own memory. That's what Guido Henkel was talking about.
He's missing his mortality - that's the only thing he absorbs.

"Is the person with amnesia a different person from who he was before he had amnesia?" isn't a bad existential question

If the amnesia is gone, then he is the same person.

 

[2house2fly]

What if the experiences from the time when he had amnesia result in a personality change that persists even with the amnesia gone? He wouldn't change without that time he spent as a different person. So is he now a fusion of those two people?

 

[hexer]

So is he now a fusion of those two people?

Yes! I haven't met any amnesiacs who regained memory but it must be a pretty weird feeling.. remembering two persons inside the same mind.

 

[KyivAfter12am]

So is he now a fusion of those two people?

Yes! I haven't met any amnesiacs who regained memory but it must be a pretty weird feeling.. remembering two persons inside the same mind.

You could always play Witcher 3! It answers the question and poses another: if you slept with women who are not your partner while you had amnesia, is it still considered cheating? And people say Torment asks the deepest questions...

 

[Roguey]

TNO suffers from amnesia - he recalls the personalities of his previous selves from his own memory. That's what Guido Henkel was talking about.

The Last Castoff (which is a misnomer; TCG didn't jump out, he was erased by the the Sorrow) is also recalling previous memories.

He's missing his mortality - that's the only thing he absorbs.

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I believe you run into those other selves in the Fortress of Regrets, not within TNO's own mind. The Paranoid Incarnation can actually kill you, the Practical One can absorb you. This makes them alters, i.e. not you.

 

[Sykar]

If that were the case then you would not suffer the fate you do in the end. You were them, in a different life. That is why you bear their sins and have to atone for them in the end no ifs or buts. It was you who committed all those atrocities because you were afraid of death.
If they were simply different "variants" then it would not make sense that you still go to hell even if you were a saint during your playthrough.

 

[hexer]

The Paranoid Incarnation can actually kill you, the Practical One can absorb you. This makes them alters, i.e. not you.

You're forgetting (or didn't know?) that Planescape campaign setting is made out of beliefs (e.g. subjective mental laws), it's not material.
It's not right to use rules from the Prime Material Plane to make an analogy on Outer Planes.
Planescape = Idealism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism)

TNO can be killed / absorbed / unwilled by someone with stronger beliefs, just as he can do the same to someone with weaker beliefs.
There is more than one example of that happening in the game.

 

[Roguey]

If that were the case then you would not suffer the fate you do in the end. You were them, in a different life. That is why you bear their sins and have to atone for them in the end no ifs or buts. It was you who committed all those atrocities because you were afraid of death.
If they were simply different "variants" then it would not make sense that you still go to hell even if you were a saint during your playthrough.

Those who judge can be unfairly absolute about that kind of thing.

The gal who ran the Castoff Sanctuary was marked for death by the Sorrow even though she had never abused a tide in her life, because the Changing God abused the tides in her body.

 

[Sykar]

If that were the case then you would not suffer the fate you do in the end. You were them, in a different life. That is why you bear their sins and have to atone for them in the end no ifs or buts. It was you who committed all those atrocities because you were afraid of death.
If they were simply different "variants" then it would not make sense that you still go to hell even if you were a saint during your playthrough.

Those who judge can be unfairly absolute about that kind of thing.

The gal who ran the Castoff Sanctuary was marked for death by the Sorrow even though she had never abused a tide in her life, because the Changing God abused the tides in her body.

There is no "those" in Planescape. It is effectively a karma system and where your soul goes depends on your deeds in life without any divine intervention. In other words, those incarnations were you and are still part of you. Remember beliefs in Planescape can alter and shape reality same as for example Adahn happened if you continue to make him up. The fact that those two incarnations manifested is because YOU remember through your journal, companions and other NPCs of your past lives and like Adahn formed so did your previous incarnation. The game does not spell it out to you but gives you plenty of hints for that.

 

[Roguey]

It is effectively a karma system and where your soul goes depends on your deeds in life without any divine intervention.

Who designed this system? Did it just naturally come about?

 

[hexer]

Who designed this system? Did it just naturally come about?

Gary Gygax and later David Zeb Cook.
And they were inspired by RL religions and philosophies.

 

[Roguey]

Gary Gygax and later David Zeb Cook.
And they were inspired by RL religions and philosophies.

I meant in-lore.

 

[Fairfax]

It is effectively a karma system and where your soul goes depends on your deeds in life without any divine intervention.

Who designed this system? Did it just naturally come about?

That's not really the system. Here's how it works in Planescape:

Spirits from dead creatures become petitioners (though there are different theories on how this applies to animals). However, this only happens if they believe in some form of afterlife. If they don't, they're just gone.
The spirit is sent through the Astral Plane, where it's stripped of its mortal memories, which stay there as memory cores.
The spirit is reformed in the plane that matches their alignment and beliefs. If they worship a specific deity, they're sent to their realm. There are exceptions: planars have to reach the right plane on their own, and worshippers of some pantheons (like the chinese deities) are judged before being sent to a plane.
Petitioners retain their original personality, but they're heavily affected by their new plane and other factors.
There's a bunch of details on how petitioners work based on each plane, previous life, etc., but most have an urge to improve and eventually merge with their plane.
This system is good for deities because the merger makes them more powerful (though some of these planes have no deity).

As for how it came about, that would be the origins of powers, planes, beliefs, alignments, and so on. There's no meta explanation, but there are some in-lore theories:

 

[BEvers]

Colin McComb has a personal Discord channel where he talks about Torment: Tides of Numenera with one of his fans:

bit.ly/ColinChat

"what was riastrad's whole deal suppose to be?
Cuz he was cut out of the final game"

:crying_cat_face:

Painful memories.

OK, Riastrad's deal was that he used his own Merecaster to try to change his past (at Matkina's urging, because she wanted to see if it would work) to save himself and his lover, Satsada - a psychic torturer for the Memovira. (they had fled the Memovira, but she caught them. As punishment, the Memovira phase-shifted Satsada so the two would always be together but always apart.)
When Riastrad tried to change the past in his Mere, it broke his mind.
So the ghost of Satsada helps guide Riastrad, and we can as well - and when we discover his Merecaster, we can enter it to change his past and fix their story, returning him to sanity and her to corporeality.
That was his deal. Also, he was a dude covered in living metal armor.
Re: the Labyrinth, yeah. That's a victim of reducing scope.

Heh. M'ra Jolios was supposed to be after the Bloom. We would tame the Bloom (or flee the Bloom) and take a maw to M'ra Jolios.

M'ra Jolios wasn't going to be as massive as the prior two cities. From that point, we'd find the First and discover her plot, and then have a different end sequence.

the resonance chamber?
That was part of the ending from the start.

(though I don't think we were quite sure how it was finally going to work until fairly late in development - we just knew we wanted it for something)

"Another question: what is the purpose of the merecasters, other than for storytelling and world-building?
Cuz I feel like some of them are parts of unfinished puzzles
Like, you'd retread an old memory of another incarnation, and you'd work out some details of their lives which you could then implement in a later dialogue sequence"

They are unfinished puzzles, mostly.
They were intended to be tools by which you could change the past of many more castoffs, and then have some effects in the real world.

"Would you have found the old guy from the original alpha test?"

We might have! I'm trying to remember if we'd have found the guy himself. If we had, it would have been his memory of the First Castoff (not the actual first castoff) finding him and killing him so she could have the title.

The final product was definitely flawed because of scope reduction. Not just in narrative but across the board.
I'm still proud of what we did, but...

The Bloom was actually the first area we completed!
The Labyrinth, though, was the last.

and yeah, you can tell. You can feel the deadlines.

I think Oom was kind of the anti-Morte.

"I feel that if I play as a Glaive I've pretty much limited my choices in terms of action"

Yeah. That's true, and it's one of the things I regret.

"Also, how would have the Labyrinth worked originally?"

It was basically deeper Inception levels - each Fathom related a new perspective about you, and if you unlocked them you'd gain more powers.

 

[Roguey]

I'm glad enough time has passed that he's achieved more objectivity about it.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'm glad enough time has passed that he's achieved more objectivity about it.

I'd still be interested to know more about how it turned out such a trainwreck. They had the budget. They had the people, at least some of whom have genuine talent (Ziets notably, and Morgan for the soundtrack). They even had MCA on board. They had a rough but functional engine and asset production pipeline. So what happened that it ended up this bloodied stump of a game with at best the wreckage of promising ideas here and there?

 

[Roguey]

I'd still be interested to know more about how it turned out such a trainwreck. They had the budget. They had the people, at least some of whom have genuine talent (Ziets notably, and Morgan for the soundtrack). They even had MCA on board. They had a rough but functional engine and asset production pipeline. So what happened that it ended up this bloodied stump of a game with at best the wreckage of promising ideas here and there?

As mentioned earlier in the thread, Fargo took their budget and gave it to Wasteland 2, told them to deal with it, and Saunders refused to budge an inch on the original vision, resulting in Keenan doing the best he could to take what they had and make it finished in a time frame Fargo deemed acceptable.

 

[Fairfax]

Saunders refused to budge an inch on the original vision

This part is speculation.

He's left the industry now, so perhaps at some point he'll reveal what happened.

 

[Roguey]

This part is speculation.

He's left the industry now, so perhaps at some point he'll reveal what happened.

We can see the results of Saunders's refusal to downscope early in the game itself (that one scene with the fancy swimming animations).

Additionally https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-numenera-thread.113925/page-223#post-5441268 details the absurd over-ambition they started with.

 

[Fairfax]

This part is speculation.

He's left the industry now, so perhaps at some point he'll reveal what happened.

We can see the results of Saunders's refusal to downscope early in the game itself (that one scene with the fancy swimming animations).

Additionally https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...-numenera-thread.113925/page-223#post-5441268 details the absurd over-ambition they started with.

I remember that, but I don't think it sounds particularly overambitious. Perhaps the second hub, but PoE had a similar budget and made it happen. A lot of it probably could've been achieved with a complete (and perhaps more competent) team all along, and they had a decent head start by using Numenera and Obsidian's tech.

 

[Luckmann]

As was being discussed much earlier in the thread, the fact that several people were basically phoning it in like George Lucas working on just one last Indiana Jones probably didn't help. It is also obvious that despite lofty goals and potentially good-ish people, they didn't seem to have understood Torment and the appeal of the that game.

And the thing with the setting being a trainwreck, Monty Cuck and Colin McCuck politicizing the game, and then not at all being sure how to deal with the resource management (or lack thereof) in realizing the Cypher System was just another nail in the coffin.

Has the thing with Fargo taking the budget and funneling it into Wasteland 3 been confirmed, by the way? I have obviously not been keeping up with the thread, since the game was shit and all, but I remember it just being speculation, IIRC.

Edit: What, Zombra? I don't understand what I said that might be interpreted as edgy. It's true that some were phoning it in, with select personnel being on the other side of the globe, and it's also true that they needlessly politicized the game and had issues realizing the Cypher System in a digital format.

 

[TemplarGR]

Is the game really THAT bad? Why? I haven't played it yet, should i get it?

 

[Darth Canoli]

Of course you should and refuse any discount, to be a satisfying experience, you have to pay the full price at least, double if you can, don't be cheap.

Why ?
- Best combat system ever, even better than generic RPGMaker
- Every single useless thing has a description, making it a useless waste of time.

I don't want to spoil the experience talking about the rest of its awesome features.

 

[Herald of Durance]

Is the game really THAT bad? Why? I haven't played it yet, should i get it?

No, it's not. But it's not good either. If you go in without expectations, you might finish it with mildly satisfied "meh".