Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[you know what time it is]

Aight so got some time and patience to try it again, performance varies greatly from area to area and for the most part makes no sense (i.e. in a big city everything is fine and dandy, yet in some small and uneventful area it might dip down to 5-10 fps as mentioned before).

Here are some impressions after a couple of hours in:

UI isn't as bad as the initial mockup, could have been better in some areas but whatever (especially when it comes to world interaction), it does it's job more or less.

Writing is okay, info dumps (including interaction with companions) are exactly the same as they were in pillars tho. Dialogues are a bit better but that is to be expected, since it's more of an adventure game, than a shitty combat simulator that PoE was.

Music is alright, but sound design is surprisingly bad, 1-2 random ass loud sounds looped in pretty much every area is just awful.

Setting tries pretty hard to be all weird and otherworldly, but it all seems rather artificial compared to PS:T.

To sum it up, if you treat it as just a game and not a spiritual successor (that it was marketed as) than it's surprisingly decent, but then again i'm a sucker for CYOA games. On other hand if you were waiting for the second coming of TNO than it's definetly not it.

Might buy a DC version in a year or so, still though Fargo and Co are confirmed scammers at this point, so be very wary of giving them money based on their promises.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Like I learned from PoE - "spiritual successor" is a weasel word where the lead designer can change fundamentally the most important part of what he is "succeeding", include nods to the other parts, and this will be enough for him to have an excuse to name-drop old classics.

 

[Sensuki]

Regarding the party control out of combat, ksaun said that he was the one who decided to cut full party navigation from the game early on to save resources. It was like that from the very first alpha.

Is Kevin telling the whole truth about that? Your guess is as good as mine. Full party control was already in the engine when they got it from Obsidian though ...

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

Regarding the party control out of combat, ksaun said that he was the one who decided to cut full party navigation from the game early on to save resources. It was like that from the very first alpha.

Is Kevin telling the whole truth about that? Your guess is as good as mine. Full party control was already in the engine when they got it from Obsidian though ...

well now , a lot of pillars engine functions are out like : day/night cycle, party management, codex, world map, the ability to go to a location from the map.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Look at all these "saved resources"!

 

[Sensuki]

They did inherit a very early version of the engine, however.

 

[Morgoth]

This thread reminds me I should prolly replay Planescape Torment.

Don't care about ToN at all.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

The greek review at ragequit.gr puts it accurately. If this was a 10$ indie game maybe it has praiseworthy elements. But Numenera is not a Torment game.

Heck jeff vogel had better writing and atmoshpere in Geneforge.

One thing is for certain, not backing anything by Fargo / inXile / Obsidian ever.

VaultDweller SwenVincke and Styg feel free to ask money from me though. I really enjoyed AoD, Dungeon Rats, Underrail and Divinity Original Sin.

 

[Parabalus]

Some thoughts from being halfway into the Bloom:

• Writing is mostly ok/ok+/good. It gets inane at times for me but so does life
• Crisis combat is oddly satisfying and some encounters are hard, "bonus" objectives contribute to that. I find my self wanting to kill anyone I come across (which is funny for Torment) just so I can fight.
• I have no qualms about the UI. It's horrible if you have low FPS because it's terribly laggy, had to switch PCs
• Replayability seems to be there since there a many ways for quests to play out, with ambiguous reward value - PS:T didn't have much stock here
• It feels a lot more "gamey" because of the amount of hotspots which do something immediately
• Overall it's good but I'm not cumming every second

Regarding the party control out of combat, ksaun said that he was the one who decided to cut full party navigation from the game early on to save resources. It was like that from the very first alpha.

Is Kevin telling the whole truth about that? Your guess is as good as mine. Full party control was already in the engine when they got it from Obsidian though ...

I played for a while and there really isn't any reason for controlling everyone. You could use it to cheese a Crisis in which you aren't preplaced, which are few and minor, but that's about the only thing. The game just doesn't have a use for it. PS:T also didn't have out of combat uses for party splitting (except rapid transitions because it doesn't have the "You must gather..."), for combat maybe the Curst Prison, but it just doesn't affect you while you play.

 

[Zero Credibility]

The problem I have with these "spiritual successors" is that by declaring them so (in an attempt to cash in on nostalgia) they not only invite comparison to old classics, but make that comparison absolutely fair and indeed necessary when reviewing the game. And then you realize the new game is crap compared to what we got almost 20 years ago.

 

[ArchAngel]

So how do you get access to your first Focus?
And can anyone tell us how many Focuses did they find so far?

 

[Excidium II]

So how do you get access to your first Focus?
And can anyone tell us how many Focuses did they find so far?

You have to fix the big clock in the market.

As far as I know there's only 3 foci, +dialogue, +stealth and +defense. All banal shit boring passive bonuses to some stat, the rest are on companions

 

[Deleted member 7219]

So speculation followed, and I presumed the Final Fantasy crowd, and SJW crowd. Who else would play that on consoles?

Techland has big fanbase of console-only gamers. People in Poland were swapping their kickstarter pc version for console version and buing consoles for this game. Those are 30+ y/old who played IE games on release. I have no idea why they are doing it. One explanation I heard was that "PCs are for work, consoles are for games". Recently people were asking when Torment's iOS port is coming. When Techland's local branch published some PC exclusive (Stasis?) they were crying for weeks about being neglected.
Maybe it's the same in other countries and they had researched it or Polish market is enough to break even, maybe they wanted multiplatform release for sake of having one.

It's true that there were a good number of Kickstarter backers - in theory the most hardcore fans of a Torment game - who vocally demanded that their PC version be swapped out for a console version.

I noticed this as well. Much as the Codex hates it (and I don't like it either), a lot of "old school" PC gamers who lived and breathed PC games in the 80s and 90s moved onto consoles when consoles became the big thing in the 00s.

Not us, but I do think that's where a lot of the audience went. It doesn't surprise me that there are Torment fans who live on console now. They're fucking idiots, of course - console games don't appeal to those tastes - but that is where they are.

 

[Excidium II]

Some thoughts from being halfway into the Bloom:

• Writing is mostly ok/ok+/good. It gets inane at times for me but so does life
• Crisis combat is oddly satisfying and some encounters are hard, "bonus" objectives contribute to that. I find my self wanting to kill anyone I come across (which is funny for Torment) just so I can fight.
• I have no qualms about the UI. It's horrible if you have low FPS because it's terribly laggy, had to switch PCs
• Replayability seems to be there since there a many ways for quests to play out, with ambiguous reward value - PS:T didn't have much stock here
• It feels a lot more "gamey" because of the amount of hotspots which do something immediately
• Overall it's good but I'm not cumming every second

Regarding the party control out of combat, ksaun said that he was the one who decided to cut full party navigation from the game early on to save resources. It was like that from the very first alpha.

Is Kevin telling the whole truth about that? Your guess is as good as mine. Full party control was already in the engine when they got it from Obsidian though ...

I played for a while and there really isn't any reason for controlling everyone. You could use it to cheese a Crisis in which you aren't preplaced, which are few and minor, but that's about the only thing. The game just doesn't have a use for it. PS:T also didn't have out of combat uses for party splitting (except rapid transitions because it doesn't have the "You must gather..."), for combat maybe the Curst Prison, but it just doesn't affect you while you play.

The fact theres no reason to control everyone is what sucks, it's a party based game but your companions are more or less just extra effort points

 

[ArchAngel]

So how do you get access to your first Focus?
And can anyone tell us how many Focuses did they find so far?

You have to fix the big clock in the market.

As far as I know there's only 3 foci, +dialogue, +stealth and +defense. All banal shit boring passive bonuses to some stat, the rest are on companions

Can you get the companions to share their focus with you?

 

[Excidium II]

No idea but it's doubtful, foci are supposed to be unique.

 

[Belegarsson]

Did they cut the King of Dragon Pass-like sequence at the beginning where the last castoff done fighting the Sorrows for the first time? :/

 

[Bleed the Man]

Did they cut the King of Dragon Pass-like sequence at the beginning where the last castoff done fighting the Sorrows for the first time? :/

The meres? No, they're in the game, and there's a significant number of them.

I believe MRY said that the ones at the beginning of the game got moved farther into the game. I wouldn't know as I didn't play the beta early enough to see them.

 

[Excidium II]

Btw I wonder if it was a conscious effort to make practically every NPC you meet more interesting concepts for companions than the flavors of bland the castoff is saddled with.

 

[Bleed the Man]

Btw I wonder if it was a conscious effort to make practically every NPC you meet more interesting concepts for companions than the flavors of bland the castoff is saddled with.

I don't think so, no. The quirk/conflict every character has are linked to the main themes of the game in a similar way Pillars of Eternity did, but that shouldn't prevent them from being more outlandish at all.

 

[ArchAngel]

No idea but it's doubtful, foci are supposed to be unique.

Ok, hopefully someone else that played more can answer me about foci then.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

Some thoughts from being halfway into the Bloom:

• Writing is mostly ok/ok+/good. It gets inane at times for me but so does life
• Crisis combat is oddly satisfying and some encounters are hard, "bonus" objectives contribute to that. I find my self wanting to kill anyone I come across (which is funny for Torment) just so I can fight.
• I have no qualms about the UI. It's horrible if you have low FPS because it's terribly laggy, had to switch PCs
• Replayability seems to be there since there a many ways for quests to play out, with ambiguous reward value - PS:T didn't have much stock here
• It feels a lot more "gamey" because of the amount of hotspots which do something immediately
• Overall it's good but I'm not cumming every second

Regarding the party control out of combat, ksaun said that he was the one who decided to cut full party navigation from the game early on to save resources. It was like that from the very first alpha.

Is Kevin telling the whole truth about that? Your guess is as good as mine. Full party control was already in the engine when they got it from Obsidian though ...

I played for a while and there really isn't any reason for controlling everyone. You could use it to cheese a Crisis in which you aren't preplaced, which are few and minor, but that's about the only thing. The game just doesn't have a use for it. PS:T also didn't have out of combat uses for party splitting (except rapid transitions because it doesn't have the "You must gather..."), for combat maybe the Curst Prison, but it just doesn't affect you while you play.

The fact theres no reason to control everyone is what sucks, it's a party based game but your companions are more or less just extra effort points

I actually like that, just like in Arcanum, but yeah not like in PS:T.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So, does this game have barbarians?

 

[Bleed the Man]

No idea but it's doubtful, foci are supposed to be unique.

Ok, hopefully someone else that played more can answer me about foci then.

As far as I saw, only the 3 foci you have available after finishing the clock quest in Sagus are the only ones in the game. You don't get more from advancing in the game or from companions, that's all you get in my experience. They're also just mere boost to a type of gameplay, so I don't know what all the fuss is about. Are they something interesting in the PnP?

 

[Excidium II]

No idea but it's doubtful, foci are supposed to be unique.

Ok, hopefully someone else that played more can answer me about foci then.

Ask Luckmann he knows all about this shit