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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Pre-Release Thread [ALPHA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

veryalien

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This^
And I really like the rest system in the tabletop, where you get like max two instaheals per day (one from taking a one action rest, and another from healing), and the three other rest periods require increasing blocks of time to achieve the same effect. I hope they leave that rest mechanic the way it is.

What hurt Icewind Dale for me was the rest mechanic. Queue up spells in spell book. Fight encounter. Click on rest. Repeat. I know it's D&D and they had to do that but I'm hoping Adam has more sense and does away with resting.
 

Ismaul

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Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech A Beautifully Desolate Campaign My team has the sexiest and deadliest waifus you can recruit.
Effort in Numenera is spent -before- the roll. It's a way of spending finite points you have between rest periods to increase your chances at things you are not particularly good at.
Sounds to me like they changed it for the computer adaptation. Spending Effort before the roll makes sense in a tabletop rpg, because there's a tangible roll with spectators around, making the risk taking into an interesting and fun mechanic. But on the computer, the roll is in the background, with no spectators, so spending Effort before isn't really interesting, especially since you can still fail while spending Effort, and it feels like a waste of points, or you'd win anyways and the points are still wasted. As a reroll after the fact, it becomes a strategical decision about when and where to spend your finite resources, what decisions are important enough for you / your character to spend points to back them up, etc.
 

DalekFlay

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All of these games, every single fucking one of them, is going to suffer from the fanbase's high expectations. Every single one will have a passionate group of people screaming to high heaven that the game is a massive disappointment.
 

veryalien

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*sigh* When will KS projects learn not to give exclusives like this? Your backers should be able to access this information.
 
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Serpent in the Staglands Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
All of these games, every single fucking one of them, is going to suffer from the fanbase's high expectations. Every single one will have a passionate group of people screaming to high heaven that the game is a massive disappointment.

And everybody expects the worst from Dragon Age: Inquisition, but it will probably wind up being decent.

Surprise upset twist DA:I Codex RPG of the Year 2014.
 

jdinatale

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If the final release of Divinity: Original Sin is anything as good as the beta is, it will set the bar for what to expect from Kickstarter games. It's excellent, no disappointments so far. (Unless Larian decides not to patch in day/night in the future)
 
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All of these games, every single fucking one of them, is going to suffer from the fanbase's high expectations. Every single one will have a passionate group of people screaming to high heaven that the game is a massive disappointment.

Exactly. There's a big difference in how you approach a game when you don't have any expectations, and discover that it's good, compared to when you're going in demanding brilliance. People are going to give these games serious penalties for everything that doesn't match their expectations, without giving them credit for the things they do well.

I find that even knowing a game's mechanics and style too thoroughly in advance tends to kill it - you lose any sense of mystery, and kill that feeling of 'wow, that's neat' that you get when you (say) find out for the first time that you can shoot Agent Navarre instead of the prisoner.
 

StaticSpine

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If the final release of Divinity: Original Sin is anything as good as the beta is, it will set the bar for what to expect from Kickstarter games.
but it was not made from scratch using the Kickstarter money, they made the campaign to get some extra cash to finish the game, make some additions and advertisement, you can't compare it to the games which were totally made on KS funded money.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Exactly. There's a big difference in how you approach a game when you don't have any expectations, and discover that it's good, compared to when you're going in demanding brilliance. People are going to give these games serious penalties for everything that doesn't match their expectations, without giving them credit for the things they do well.

I find that even knowing a game's mechanics and style too thoroughly in advance tends to kill it - you lose any sense of mystery, and kill that feeling of 'wow, that's neat' that you get when you (say) find out for the first time that you can shoot Agent Navarre instead of the prisoner.
So if someone told you could shoot people in Deus Ex (the mechanic you've described) or that it's a cyberpunk themed game (the style of the game) that would have ruined it for you?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Adam Heine talks about what game he'd like to make: http://www.adamheine.com/2014/04/ama-if-you-could-make-any-game.html
AMA: If You Could Make Any Game...

The aftermath of my trip to California has kept me ridiculously busy, but I've finally snuck a little time to answer another question. And it's a good one.

Samuel asks:
You are currently the project lead for Torment: Tides of Numenera for InXile Entertainment. With that in mind, if you could be the "boss"/project lead for any type of Compute role-playing game, and decide everything about it's setting and design, what would you make?
(Clarification: I am not Torment's Project Lead. That distinction belongs to Kevin Saunders. I'm not even sure it's a job I'd want. I am Torment's Design Lead, in charge of gameplay systems and Numenera adaptation. And sometimes Colin and Kevin even let me write stuff.)

With that clarified, I'd make the game that I started 11 years ago: a space tradergame set in my own Air Pirates world. If you know what both of those are, you can skip to the end. Otherwise...

A space trader game is an open-world (or at least pseudo-open world) space simulator in which the player is the pilot of a relatively small, outdated starship and must work his way up to some awesome, customized super star destroyer of his own design, by trading goods, accepting missions, and taking risks.

Often the game world has a number of factions the player can take missions for, gaining the goodwill or ire of each, and unlocking special missions, ships, weapons, etc. Many such games also have a story you can follow (or ignore). My favorite space trader games, in reverse chronological order, have been: Wing Commander: Privateer, Escape Velocity, and the BBS text version of Trade Wars.

Air Pirates is the world in which my single published story "Pawn's Gambit" is set, as well as the novel that got me my agent.

Air Pirates is not set in space, and it has almost nothing to do with space. It's really all about the airships and the pirates (hence the name). So that's the first thing I would change from the space trader formula: it would be set in a world and not in space.

The second thing I would tweak is I'd focus it on story and reactivity. I wouldn't remove the open-world aspect of it entirely, but for me that would be a side game. The story and the characters would be what was important, along with giving the player multiple really interesting ways to get through the game the way they want to.

Will I ever get to make that game? Probably not. But you asked, Samuel, and it's fun to dream.
 

Gozma

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Space Rangers 2 kinda felt like the last space trader I'd ever need to play, framework-wise. Beyond that it's just about better fundamentals like core gameplay stuff (which is just decent in SR2, kinda like Pirates!/Sword of the Samurai/Covert Action Microprose games) but for a big evolving world that has real meaningful game world-states with tons of player impact (e.g. Dominators contained, Dominators expanding, Dominators have almost won and the player needs to do 11th hour darkest night stuff; plus some good intermediate things) that's pretty much it and I can't imagine another game making a real leap on that in the forseeable future.
 

Crooked Bee

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Codex 2013 Codex 2014 PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire MCA Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Adam Heine talks a bit about the "Toy" companion:

http://www.adamheine.com/2014/05/ama-torment-companion-toy.html

I am fascinated with the idea of the "Toy" companion. How much "growth" will there be from when you first encounter this creature to when it is finished with you? How much influence will we as the player have on that growth? Will that "directed growth" be predictable, variable, random, feed it fire seeds and pray?

Background: Early during our Kickstarter, we announced the following stretch goal: "Our initial plans for Torment included four possible companions for the player and at this Stretch Goal, we will be adding a fifth, which we’ve nicknamed “The Toy.” (That’s not its in-game name. ;) ) The Toy is a changing ball of goo: Is it a pet, an abandoned toy, a dangerous weapon? Whatever it is, it responds to the way you treat it by changing its appearance and abilities to reflect what it perceives as your desires. Its ultimate secrets are... well, you'll have to find out."

The Toy is part of the numenera, some leftover creature from a prior world, or maybe a byproduct of some ancient technological process. Who knows? What it is now is an extremely strange and loyal pet.

I can't tell you in detail how much growth it'll have from start to finish, but it'll be equivalent to the growth your other companions go through over the course of the game. The main difference is the Toy's development will affect its form as well as its abilities.

As it's master (if you choose to be so), you'll have a decent amount of influence over it, but you won't always know what you're doing. The Toy will learn from you, from what you praise or punish it for, from what you ask of it, and from what you yourself choose to do. If you encourage it towards violence, it might get better at that and become a killing machine. If you encourage it to be quiet, it might take that to the extreme, even to the point of becoming invisible.

Or it might not. We know what we want the Toy to do, but there's a lot of design and implementation left before we know what this specific character will do.

And like all the numenera, the Toy will occasionally do things you don't understand and don't expect. Nothing about the numenera is entirely predictable, and the Toy is a major example of this. Especially if it can't make sense of your desires (or maybe even if it can), it may occasionally swallow your enemies or burp a black hole or... who knows? You just can't tell with this thing.​
 

Kem0sabe

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Torment keeps sounding from these tid-bits that it's a bit too ambitious for inxile, maybe they have bitten more than they can chew with all these promisses and descriptions.
 

Sensuki

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Codex 2014 Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong A Beautifully Desolate Campaign
They do however have a fair bit of money. And probably haven't chewed through much of it yet, due to only having skeleton staff on Torment.
 

StaticSpine

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Torment keeps sounding from these tid-bits that it's a bit too ambitious for inxile, maybe they have bitten more than they can chew with all these promisses and descriptions.
Still the dev team is just great.

I truly believe they can nail it. Besides, they have time and money.
 

StaticSpine

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Besides, they have time and money.
I bet they already wasted the Torment money on Wasteland 2 development, booze and hookas.
Maybe, but they got a shitton of extra money from beta selling.
Didn't they go Early Access and Torment Kickstarter to cover the fact they wasted the provided money in the first place?
one can only guess
 

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