Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Night Goat]

Getting beaten by a train simulator. Ouch!

 

[Fairfax]

For what it's worth, I think Fairfax's explanation about individuals having a specialized background doesn't seem applicable to TTON. I'm not challenging the criticism (to invoke my favorite line from The Red and The Black, "Argue himself back into being loved? What could be more absurd?"), but the facts don't work here. Colin is not a "pure writer" in the sense you use, Adam certainly is not (his game experience was more as a scripter/designer), obviously the criticism doesn't apply to George or Kevin. I'd like to think it doesn't apply to me -- though I think I am more of a writer than a designer, I have done lots of design over the years. I don't know Gavin or Leanne's backgrounds well enough to say for them.

I didn't mean to say that Colin was a pure writer, but that perhaps he's not at the top of his game as he used to be in the late 90s. Like I said, he designed good modules, which means he knows a lot more than just writing, but that was 20 years ago. Fenstermaker acknowledged this issue in his Codex interview, for instance:

It's too verbose in many places. The beginning was egregious. I'm to blame for a lot of that. Part of it was that I hadn't written prose in a long time. I found my stride later on. I am very sorry.

And his "long time" was just 4 years from FNV to PoE. Even if one believes both Colin and Adam are much more skilled than Fenstermaker, both hadn't worked on a game in 13-14 years. It's reasonable to assume it took them some time to "find their stride".

I do think generally a single creator will yield a better product in some ways, and probably a worse product in others. The major upside for me is that the very best you can hope for is that each writer knows what the other writers' know about their own writings. (E.g., "Hey, Colin, just to let you know, my thinking with Inifere is....") But underneath that is what the writer doesn't know about his own work. The same subconscious that produced* Inifere produced the Council Clerk produced the Blue Mere. The same conscious said, "I am going to explore these particular themes in each, in the following way," but the subconscious was supply the materials to me with its own mysterious purposes. When a single author makes the whole thing, not only is the superstructure coherent, but also the foundation is coherent. And so the player/reader imbibes not just what the writer intends to say but what he didn't intend to say but said nonetheless. That's sometimes what gives the whole its wholeness. I really don't see a way to replicate that with a team. Of course you'll never have a true "wholeness" because the visuals, voice over, music, etc. will have their own separate foundations -- on Primordia, Victor and I had different foundations and the result is that the visuals and the story probably tug in different directions sometimes notwithstanding our constant communication.

Obviously, you can have even worse scenarios where the writers aren't fully aware of what each other are doing, and I suspect that happens on larger projects. In this case, I think that George, Colin, Adam, and Kevin/Chris all had a god's-eye view on things to maintain that kind of coherence, but I'm sure there are even larger projects where that doesn't happen

I'm not sure the area designer/writer divide is that big of a problem, but I see how it could be. I'm fortunate that most of my work was contained enough that I wouldn't have had to deal with that problem, but that makes me ignorant of it in any case.

The difference is not necessary problem, it's just a different skillset. One area where I do think the D&D buffs are better is their awareness in regards to boring players to death. If dump a shitload of lore on your players instead of letting them play, you'll get your feedback right on the spot. If you don't notice and/or don't adjust it, they won't come back for more.

PnP sessions are all about keeping players motivated, and being good at that is a very valuable skill. As MCA puts it:

Player motivation. This isn't the same thing as character motivation (see above). What you want here is to be able to provide the player with enough teasers to keep him going throughout the game, either by revealing critical information, introducing cool, new companions, acquiring new special abilities, and so on. Basically, each stage of the game should ask the question, "Why should the player care?", and each stage of the game should answer it. It is difficult to make the player care about saving some generic fantasy realm if the designers haven't constructed a way to make the player care about its inhabitants, the political situation, or the events that are playing out there?

That approach could explain the difference DeepOcean pointed out:

NumaNuma worries alot about informing the player while Planescape Torment worries alot about luring the player and on the process inform him very, very slowly, on a much more passive way.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Getting beaten by a train simulator. Ouch!

Blame it on the Germans:

 

[MRY]

I don't totally understand the context of the quote from the interview -- what does writing prose have to do with writing expository dialogue? Or is he using "prose" to mean "game stuff"?

Anyway, I don't really have the knowledge to debate the substance of this, and even if I could, it probably wouldn't make sense for me to do so. Selfishly, I'm much more interested in concrete, "This specific thing didn't work, and here's why" than I am in, "The whole thing didn't work, and here's a guess at the personnel causes." Ultimately, I'm never going to be in a position to make personnel decisions, since the only games I want to make are those I write myself (not because TTON was a bad experience, but because it was the best experience I could hope for in this domain), but I am going to be in a position to make decisions on how to write and design things. I've always found the Codex a free repository of detailed design analysis, but for the most part I don't think the TTON threads have hit that stride yet. Right now it's a little more conclusory or visceral. I can understand why that is, and I've been in the position of enjoying expressing such reactions myself, but, like I said, selfishly I'd like to hit the fast-forward button for a little while.

 

[GloomFrost]

Getting beaten by a train simulator. Ouch!

Hey what the hell is wrong with the train simulator??? At least the developers didnt have to ask players for money to make it!!

 

[pippin]

The key to success is having a gynoid with a big ass. I knew it!

 

[Parabalus]

The combat is agonizingly slow. The creatures that come out of the mirror in the hidden sanctuary (much less awesome than it sounds) took forever to make their turns.

Cheat Engine 10x speed. I wish I was kidding. Wait until you get to one of the bigger ones with The Sorrow, you can go to a store, buy a rope and hang yourself before the enemy turn is done.

 

[Fairfax]

I don't totally understand the context of the quote from the interview -- what does writing prose have to do with writing expository dialogue? Or is he using "prose" to mean "game stuff"?

Yes, he uses "prose" when talking about the game's writing in other questions as well. Here's the context:

There are some who claim that Pillars of Eternity's writing is overly verbose - not just compared to modern voice-acted RPGs but even compared to the text-based classics that inspired that it. In particular, they claim that its dialogue contains too many "exposition loredumps", an assessment that is particularly surprising considering that Josh Sawyer opined heavily against such loredumps early in the game's development. Do you agree with that assessment? Was there perhaps a deliberate effort to add expository dialogue to Pillars of Eternity, to help introduce people to the new setting? (As opposed to the Infinity Engine games that could rely on a large audience of Forgotten Realms aficionados.)

It's too verbose in many places. The beginning was egregious. I'm to blame for a lot of that. Part of it was that I hadn't written prose in a long time. I found my stride later on. I am very sorry.

A separate, but equally large part of it was the exposition. Nobody likes writing exposition. You feel unclean when you've written it. It's boring and it doesn't advance plot or do anything worthwhile at all. Unfortunately, in this case, there was a lot that had to be conveyed for you to even understand what was going on. You had to know what a bîaŵac was before it struck. You had to know what adra was. You had to know what a Watcher was very shortly after becoming one. You had to know who Glanfathans were and why they would be mad at you for being in their ruins. You had to learn about animancers and the Saint's War and a slew of other things that led to the world being in the state it was in.

Later on in development, we got kind of a hyperlinked tooltip system that explained certain highlighted words when you'd mouse over them. This was used to explain systems primarily, but if I'd have known about the system early on, I think I could've made a lot of the early dialogue cleaner by offloading those explanations into some database the player has to opt into. Wouldn't have solved everything, but wouldn't have hurt.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

I didn't mean to say that Colin was a pure writer, but that perhaps he's not at the top of his game as he used to be in the late 90s. Like I said, he designed good modules, which means he knows a lot more than just writing, but that was 20 years ago. Fenstermaker acknowledged this issue in his Codex interview, for instance:

And his "long time" was just 4 years from FNV to PoE. Even if one believes both Colin and Adam are much more skilled than Fenstermaker, both hadn't worked on a game in 13-14 years. It's reasonable to assume it took them some time to "find their stride".

As MRY pointed out, by 'prose' Eric meant, well, prose, not dialogues. There certainly wasn't much prose in NV.
You may remember that PoE had a lot of it in the dialogues. Eric was talking about that, not writing in general.

 

[Luckmann]

Getting beaten by a train simulator. Ouch!

To be fair, it's 10% off.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I don't totally understand the context of the quote from the interview -- what does writing prose have to do with writing expository dialogue? Or is he using "prose" to mean "game stuff"?

Anyway, I don't really have the knowledge to debate the substance of this, and even if I could, it probably wouldn't make sense for me to do so. Selfishly, I'm much more interested in concrete, "This specific thing didn't work, and here's why" than I am in, "The whole thing didn't work, and here's a guess at the personnel causes." Ultimately, I'm never going to be in a position to make personnel decisions, since the only games I want to make are those I write myself (not because TTON was a bad experience, but because it was the best experience I could hope for in this domain), but I am going to be in a position to make decisions on how to write and design things. I've always found the Codex a free repository of detailed design analysis, but for the most part I don't think the TTON threads have hit that stride yet. Right now it's a little more conclusory or visceral. I can understand why that is, and I've been in the position of enjoying expressing such reactions myself, but, like I said, selfishly I'd like to hit the fast-forward button for a little while.

I'll bite. One thing is the wrongly set expectations. And I don't mean expectations about matching PS:T, I mean expectations about what kind of a game this is going to be. Seems like they just didn't communicate that very well. I enjoy T:TON a lot, but I've read plenty of bizzaro/new weird style of fiction in my day, so it's a lot of fun to explore that kind of a setting where basically anything goes. I poke around, I read weird shit, and that's something I enjoy doing outside of gaming too. Others, probably not so much. It was communicated as some deep philosophical bruhaha. It should've have been communicated as Weird Shit:The Game.

Secondly, there's a strange lack of consistency between the style of main plot and everything else. Sagus Cliffs is like a Disney theme park, set in Numenera. Hey you, player! Come here and read weird shit! Hey, here's a machine that looks like a giant dick! Wanna turn it on?! It encourages slow, meticulous gameplay, poking around, exploring, reading everything. The main plot though? Main villian busting out of nowhere right at the start, slaughtering bunch of poor dudes. Sense of urgency. Big bad is after you and he's doing evil shit. Push push push, there's a plot to do here, you better solve this quick. It's like two different games clashing with each other.

Thirdly, some seriously fucking poor judgement in areas where veteran devs should really know better. The first two companions you meet have an unmistakable stink of Bioware. Big Heart Tank and Scheming Wizard, give me a break. Maybe there's more depth to these two, but they didn't stick around in my party long enough for me to find out, because I ditched them at first opportunity. At that point you're in the game 20 minutes and you've already been served an instant turn off.

Lastly, dialogues are often superbly done in how a lot of intricate detail can be revealed if you just poke the NPCs around and try things. Different answers to the same questions asked twice. NPCs sneering if you ask too much or just refusing to talk to you at first. Perception (and Scan Thoughts from what I heard) giving additional information. It's often so subtle it's easy to miss, but that must have took a fuckton of manhours to write and test. But how many people can really appreciate that kind of thing? I kind of wonder if it was worth it - perhaps they should've simply had more game in the game, instead of all this dialoguey wizardry.

Edit: and of course elephant in the room, the cuts. It's obvious the game has been gutted even if you're like me and rigidly avoided any spoilers including any Kickstarter updates. I still don't even know wtf foci is or isn't. But I can see that something's missing.

 

[Night Goat]

So, these tides the game is named after. Do they ever actually do anything?

 

[agris]

I would like some examples of games with good combat from the people stating the combat of this game is bad? PS:T? Clicker hero? KotOR 1 and 2?

fallout

I love fallout but save scuming invincible one man versus armies is not good combat.

lol savescumin

In fairness, if you use luck as a dumpstat without thinking about what you're doing, there's really no other way to handle combat because of random critical-hit kills.

I'm curious about what you mean with that statement. I've beaten FO1-2 >10 times and my Luck has always been at the 1-3 range (I'm a munchkin) with combat and game difficulty cranked up to max. I don't kite enemies, I don't roid out on pyscho more than a few times a game, I don't stimpak assassinate NPCs beforehand to make it easier, the game just isn't that hard.

If you mean drop your luck, max your str and end while minimizing agility and intelligence and trying to rambo every encounter, well.. it's hard for evolution to work if the unviable don't cease to exist.

As Roguey would input, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[FeelTheRads]

Sometimes (like 2 times in Sagus?) you click on options with the tides. Didn't really seem to do anything of note. Hell, the tips when the game loads pretty much tell you that they don't do really anything and they're just flavor.

I'm curious about what you mean with that statement.

FAKE NEWS.

But who knows, there are people who think reloading at all is savescumming. So, we should decide what's savescumming first.

 

[MRY]

Thanks, IHaveHugeNick. I found that helpful.

 

[TT1]

You guys are so cute

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Secondly, there's a strange lack of consistency between the style of main plot and everything else. Sagus Cliffs is like a Disney theme park, set in Numenera. Hey you, player! Come here and read weird shit! Hey, here's a machine that looks like a giant dick! Wanna turn it on?! It encourages slow, meticulous gameplay, poking around, exploring, reading everything. The main plot though? Main villian busting out of nowhere right at the start, slaughtering bunch of poor dudes. Sense of urgency. Big bad is after you and he's doing evil shit. Push push push, there's a plot to do here, you better solve this quick. It's like two different games clashing with each other.

Original Planescape: Torment occasionally spawned shadow that was practically 0 threat, but reminded that you were searching something specific.

 

[MRY]

I'm curious about what you mean with that statement. I've beaten FO1-2 >10 times and my Luck has always been at the 1-3 range (I'm a munchkin) with combat and game difficulty cranked up to max. I don't kite enemies, I don't roid out on pyscho more than a few times a game, I don't stimpak assassinate NPCs beforehand to make it easier, the game just isn't that hard.

If you mean drop your luck, max your str and end while minimizing agility and intelligence and trying to rambo every encounter, well.. it's hard for evolution to work if the unviable don't cease to exist.

It's been a long time, but my recollection is that when I first played the game, I put luck at 1, and went pretty low on endurance and strength, operating on the assumption that the others would give me more interesting gameplay options and that I would be able to manage things with shooting from a distance. With low HP and bad luck, it was very common for a critical hit to one-shot kill me, which led to my savescumming.

In later play throughs I figured out that that was not a viable playing strategy. I think it's a great system, but the critical hit risk with low luck is likely to produce save scumming in a lot of players who would rather just power through than acknowledge the errors of their build.

 

[Terpsichore]

Mother Temaz is such a poor attempt at copying Ravel, pathetic. The same goes for that Fith Eye bar and the mysteriously edgy "O", did they think that trying to recreate iconic stuff from PS:T is a good idea?

I'm not enjoying the writing so far, every single NPC tries too hard to be clever and edgy but only ends up sounding tiresome, just like the rest. The companions are also extremely bland and unmemorable.

 

[FeelTheRads]

O is intentional. It was one of McComb's characters in PST and wanted to have him here too, but I have to say, even with the same writer he was better in PST. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[DeepOcean]

I remember when I played Planescape Torment:

"Cool, there is this entity, the Lady of Pain that rules this city, it is said she can cause immense pain towards anyone that pisses her off and that she already fucked up gods badly for crossing her."
Me: "Nah... this is just useless lore... can you bet I can pretty much do anything and absolutely nothing happen to me like on 99% of the RPGs."
After being a major douche bag: Lady of Pain stares at you ready to make you bleed from every orifice. "Fuck for me trusting on developer lazyness."

It is cliche to make jokes about Planescape Torment as just an storyfag RPG but it was moments like this that made it go on the Top 10. Why can't I have this again?

 

[Bleed the Man]

I remember when I played Planescape Torment:

"Cool, there is this entity, the Lady of Pain that rules this city, it is said she can cause immense pain towards anyone that pisses her off and that she already fucked up gods badly for crossing her."
Me: "Nah... this is just useless lore... can you bet I can pretty much do anything and absolutely nothing happen to me like on 99% of the RPGs."
After being a major douche bag: Lady of Pain stares at you ready to make you bleed from every orifice. "Fuck for me trusting on developer lazyness."

It is cliche to make jokes about Planescape Torment as just an storyfag RPG but it was moments like this that made it go on the Top 10. Why can't I have this again?

Early game overs are in Tides, though. Maybe not in this freeform manner, but hey, you can still fuck it up.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Secondly, there's a strange lack of consistency between the style of main plot and everything else. Sagus Cliffs is like a Disney theme park, set in Numenera. Hey you, player! Come here and read weird shit! Hey, here's a machine that looks like a giant dick! Wanna turn it on?! It encourages slow, meticulous gameplay, poking around, exploring, reading everything. The main plot though? Main villian busting out of nowhere right at the start, slaughtering bunch of poor dudes. Sense of urgency. Big bad is after you and he's doing evil shit. Push push push, there's a plot to do here, you better solve this quick. It's like two different games clashing with each other.

Original Planescape: Torment occasionally spawned shadow that was practically 0 threat, but reminded that you were searching something specific.

Yeah It would really have benefited from having a PS:T style of plot. As it is, a lot of writers have done a lot of brilliant work in this game, but it just doesn't click together. DeepOcean described it best, there's all these NPCs name dropping references to the main plot, Sorrow this, Castoffs that, wink wink nudge nudge do the main plot, but you end up being to drawn to some of the good side quests instead. The gameplay encourages exploring the world at a relaxed pace, instead of running around with your hair on fire trying to fix some ancient machine. It's like the whole thing went through a gigantic rewrite at some point and lost focus.

I've yet to reach Bloom though, so hopefully Ziets can do some magic there. But first half of the game, while still enjoyable, has a lot of lost potential.

 

[agris]

I'm curious about what you mean with that statement. I've beaten FO1-2 >10 times and my Luck has always been at the 1-3 range (I'm a munchkin) with combat and game difficulty cranked up to max. I don't kite enemies, I don't roid out on pyscho more than a few times a game, I don't stimpak assassinate NPCs beforehand to make it easier, the game just isn't that hard.

If you mean drop your luck, max your str and end while minimizing agility and intelligence and trying to rambo every encounter, well.. it's hard for evolution to work if the unviable don't cease to exist.

It's been a long time, but my recollection is that when I first played the game, I put luck at 1, and went pretty low on endurance and strength, operating on the assumption that the others would give me more interesting gameplay options and that I would be able to manage things with shooting from a distance. With low HP and bad luck, it was very common for a critical hit to one-shot kill me, which led to my savescumming.

In later play throughs I figured out that that was not a viable playing strategy. I think it's a great system, but the critical hit risk with low luck is likely to produce save scumming in a lot of players who would rather just power through than acknowledge the errors of their build.

I need a "that'll play" button.

 

[Iznaliu]

You won't get get an intelligible answer. The only thing liberal marxists are consistent in is that they're inconsistent. Double-think is a very real thing.

A mistake since I was churning out shitposts at an amazing rate: "HURR DURR LIBRULS ARE ALL LIARS".

By the way, Luckmann, liberalism and Marxism are almost exact opposites. At least I know my enemies.