Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[mindfields]

I bought this at release and still haven't played it, the codex reception was enough to scare me off.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Seems like a pass to me. I'm not terribly interested in the setting and while i don't have anything against walls of text in principle, i had too much of it recently. Thanks for the answers.

 

[Sergiu64]

I bought this at release and still haven't played it, the codex reception was enough to scare me off.

I got through it once. It's not that bad, just... kinda disappointing. Think the setting is a bit interesting though.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Is this game any good? Should I play?

It's a walk and talker with very little mandatory combat and people who talk far too much than they really ought to. I liked the story and characters, though many here didn't.

I think most tend to not give Numenera the credit for treating combat largely as "if everything else fails, or something you explicitly WANT to engage in" solution to problems making a good choice for some people who don't like excessive combat in their CRPGs. Where Numenera also sadly fails is by usually spelling out solutions player would probably have way more fun figuring out on their own. I would like to find out on my own that I can use that nearby console to raise a shield and cut off enemies, discouraging them from further combat without the game saying so in my objective tracker, for example.

I said those were shit the moment they showed them before the release. At least they made them optional (if I remember correctly) initially they were forced on you.

Not that it makes much of a difference. Even though the usual suspects (ie agents of decline) will tell you that "it's optional bro what's the problem just don't use it lol" what they fail to realize is that shit design is usually embedded in the experience even if they add a checkbox to turn it off. And if you just ignore it then it will get adopted by everyone because the lowest of the lowest life forms will start to call it "quality of life". Same as it happened with say, the quest compass (HEY IT'S OPTIONAL BRO!!!) and how apparently now you can't design a game without an automap because an automap is a QOL feature and therefore a game with automap is automatically superior to one without.

So remember, reject shit, decline design whenever you encounter it.

 

[Zombra]

This latest round of "So is it good?" is making me think back: why did I get bored with TToN?

On reflection, it wasn't because there was too much text. It wasn't that the writing was bad. It wasn't that the content was uninteresting, or even that the "anything goes" setting sucked.

I liked the setting, the writing was readable, the dialogues were good at best or good enough at worst. Characters were hit or miss but never dealbreaking. The "crisis" things were a drag but rare enough to be tolerable.

What the game lacks is PACING. A big world with a million people to talk to, with lots of little quests where you walk across town and talk to someone else. And that's it. No peaks, no valleys, no danger, no urgency. I like a game with tons of text, but how do you break it up? There's not enough texture. I would almost have welcomed Infinity Engine trash combats just to keep me awake. Then getting back to the dialogue would feel fresh.

 

[Oreshnik Missile]

NumaNuma doesn't have a setting, it has an amorphous clusterfuck.

 

[Chippy]

Still haven't played this.

 

[Luckmann]

I bought this at release and still haven't played it, the codex reception was enough to scare me off.

My work here is done.

 

[Creamy Muffin]

Recently read House of Suns and that book kind of reminded me of this game. For me this book managed to hit all the notes that numenera seemed to want to hit but failed.

Poslano sa mog EVA-L19 koristeći Tapatalk

 

[Prime Junta]

If you want nice graphics, then eh... maybe? It doesn't look bad, IMO.

The visuals are like everything else: occasional nice bits in a sea of shit. Way too much of the visuals look rushed and hastily cobbled-together and like the setting there's no rhyme, reason, or coherence to them. I was grumbling about the cobblestones to a comical extent but they do illustrate the slapdash approach of just throwing on a texture with no concern for how it meshes with the rest of it. A lot could've been salvaged with better lighting, the Gullet for example is about as moody as an operating theatre, whereas it should've been a menacing mess of shadow and gloomy lights, like in the video clips they showed during the Kickstarter.

 

[Prime Junta]

----> moreover

T:ToN is much smaller than it ought to be. Yeah more words than the Bible and all that, but there aren't many maps, especially considering the highly uneven quality. In some places this is painfully obvious, like the government clerk bizarrely working outside the government building -- clearly because they somehow didn't manage to come up with an interior.

This was not a cheap game. The budget was bigger than Pillars of Eternity's, and they got the Pillars engine and asset pipeline ready-made. The ought to have been able to pump out maps and assets more efficiently than Pillars did. With the budget and tools they had, T:ToN should have had a scope, look, and feel more like Deadfire than Pillars 1.

And let's not even get into how the art in the CYOA segments is utter, complete garbage, making the Pillars ink-drawings look like Doré by comparison.

(No, they're not Doré. But they're not offensively incompetent either.)

Somebody fucked up big time, or else raided the T:ToN piggy bank to pay for something else.

 

[Ninjerk]

Did anyone buy a fancy new Italian car in the time that it was being developed?

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Did anyone buy a fancy new Italian car in the time that it was being developed?

Apparently they diverted funds to Wasteland 2.

 

[vortex]

Maybe the real torment were friends we made along the way.

 

[luj1]

NumaNuma doesn't have a setting, it has an amorphous clusterfuck.

Actually the setting and art were the only good things about the game (and tabletop). What a waste.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Setting lacks coherence, consistency and it's just all over the place. In a world where everything goes, nothing matters.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I didn't really understand the setting whatsoever. I'm not sure if I need to read the actual source material or something but I was really confused. Just felt like I was being ferried between a bunch of completely unrelated zones that don't even belong in the same world.

 

[Zombra]

I actually like and respect the Numenera setting. I was lucky enough to play a P&P module once (before Torment: Tides released) and it felt like a real setting. This carried over into comprehension and appreciation of TTON, as far as I went with it. Sadly the story didn't grip me and I felt no sense of pacing.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Maybe the real torment were friends we made along the way.

Maybe the real torment was bard's tale IV.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

----> moreover

T:ToN is much smaller than it ought to be. Yeah more words than the Bible and all that, but there aren't many maps, especially considering the highly uneven quality. In some places this is painfully obvious, like the government clerk bizarrely working outside the government building -- clearly because they somehow didn't manage to come up with an interior.

This was not a cheap game. The budget was bigger than Pillars of Eternity's, and they got the Pillars engine and asset pipeline ready-made. The ought to have been able to pump out maps and assets more efficiently than Pillars did. With the budget and tools they had, T:ToN should have had a scope, look, and feel more like Deadfire than Pillars 1.

And let's not even get into how the art in the CYOA segments is utter, complete garbage, making the Pillars ink-drawings look like Doré by comparison.

But how about them portraits? They look great, don't they?

 

[Luckmann]

I didn't really understand the setting whatsoever. I'm not sure if I need to read the actual source material or something but I was really confused. Just felt like I was being ferried between a bunch of completely unrelated zones that don't even belong in the same world.

Actually, the setting material is worse in this regard, but it's also less of an issue. When it comes to the tabletop game, there's potential in the whole "anything goes", because it becomes up to the GM to make sense of it and to create thematically consistent campaign within that void.

I'm not saying that this makes the setting good - it's actually really bad - but it's not quite as unusable as Tides of Numanuma may suggest, and a good GM can easily use it as a canvas to paint his own shit on.

 

[Life of the Party]

I found their insistence on everyone being brown pretty funny.

It's a magical fantasy land full of wonders where anything goes except for the existence of white people.

 

[The_Mask]

I found their insistence on everyone being brown pretty funny.

It's a magical fantasy land full of wonders where anything goes except for the existence of white people.

I found their insistence of using the word "antediluvian" a billion years into the fucking future within the first 30s of the game, as magically retardred.

 

[hexer]

Setting lacks coherence, consistency and it's just all over the place. In a world where everything goes, nothing matters.

So NumaNuma is just like real life then, everybody's pushing their own agenda

 

[Roguey]

I found their insistence on everyone being brown pretty funny.

It's a magical fantasy land full of wonders where anything goes except for the existence of white people.

It's an "everyone's a mutt" setting. Tybir got de-Lando'd, Monty got that passive aggressive email telling him that a fully-Asian character would be unacceptable.