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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

Zombra

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Make the Codex Great Again! RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Sure, but I'm not just talking about forum heroes and professional rage-quitters, which I agree may be an insignificant segment. I'm also talking about a generally sophisticated PC RPG audience share (not "most" PC consumers, but a share) which "silently" exists out there, off the Codex, off the message boards, just normal people shopping for games and seeing Chris Keenan say things like "Wasteland 2 was too complex. Wasteland 3 will be dumber and easier!" Then these people tune out and look for better RPGs and stop thinking about inXile at all.

Is that a significant market share? Who knows, it's not for me to say or even guess. I do think on the Codex we're a little too quick to assume that everyone else out there is a thumbsucking couch potato. Anyway, if we agree that western RPG console sales aren't inherently that profitable, it doesn't make sense to (even subtly) alienate the more natural and far better-selling audience to try and cultivate a poor fit for a few lousy $.

To use a cheap, simple example, if inXile announced that their next game was going to be another complex, text-heavy party RPG, but based on the official Barney franchise, they might pick up some sales among moms who don't know what RPGs are getting it for their kids, but most of their current customers wouldn't even think about buying it. I think they'd lose more than they gained, and I think they're risking something similar in reality.
 
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Iluvcheezcake

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I guess the general idea at the Inxile base is that PC customers are given - just port it to consoles for the extra $$. Huzzah!

Dunno what the result will be long term tho
 
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Lurker King

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My impression is that the most important thing for them are the game journalists. They set the tone of the music and keep the machine working. The Codex is just a small fish in the greater scheme of things or a stone in the shoe. If we had no Codex fundraiser or backers, they would still receive millions of funding. If we keep trashing them, nobody will care. I think that some people still don’t understand that what makes the Codex special is not the way is supposedly perceived by some developers, interviews with developers or a scoop about a new game, but the sheer concentration of knowledge and experience of posters that you won’t find nowhere else. The perception of the world outside the Codex, or developers pedigrees, shouldn't matter, as far as cRPGs are concerned.
 
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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
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-22-watch-us-play-torment-tides-of-numenera-on-ps4

Watch us play Torment: Tides of Numenera on PS4

Funny to think a brand new Torment game is nearly here. Four and a half years ago it was a dream, an exciting idea, but on 28th February, Torment: Tides of Numenera lands.

I went to London last week to play the finished game but on PlayStation 4 rather than PC. I wanted to see how the simultaneously released console versions (PS4 and Xbox One) held up. They weren't always part of the plan you see; they're a happy consequence of Techland signing as publisher last summer.

The good news is, the PS4 version works perfectly well, a bespoke radial menu mapping controls comfortably to the controller. It can feel odd directly controlling characters in what is a click-to-move game on PC though, especially when you snag on bits of environment or struggle to interact with things because you're standing in the wrong place. Pathfinding would normally sort that out for you.

Torment isn't quite as responsive on console as on PC, either. Areas load slower and menus are more sluggish to navigate. Minor niggles, albeit ones that could mount over the course of a long game. But otherwise there's no missing content and it's nice to see Torment: Tides of Numenera offered on console.

The footage in the video comes from the Bloom part of the game roughly two-thirds in. It's an area not currently in the Steam Early Access build of the game.

jpg

Quick comparison: Here's Torment in Early Access on PC now...

jpg

And here's Torment in Early Access this time last year.

The Bloom is a living creature serving as a gateway hub between dimensions and places, and gruesomely, it eats its occupants. It's very much typical of the weird world of Torment, which plumbs philosophical depths and goes via text, a lot of text, places other games do not.

Once Torment is released, what happens next depends on how well the game does. "We have plenty of ideas for expansions or standalone content or new games or follow-ups to this game," creative lead Colin McComb told me at the event.

"We've got plenty of ideas for expansions or ways that we could improve on it, or if we just want to patch it and add more content in, we've got ideas for that. If Brian [Fargo - inXile boss] wants to do a different Torment game - still use the Torment franchise but in a different world - we've got ideas for that. It could keep jumping between licensed properties; it could jump into a wholly original world that we create."

It's all speculative talk at the moment, and a decision is obviously pending. Until then, Colin McComb and others will go onto work on Wasteland 3.

http://www.pcgamesn.com/torment-tides-of-numenera/torment-tides-of-numenera-gameplay-combat-systems

Torment: Tides of Numenera feels just like its 1999 ancestor - totally different

“We've seen a lot of people who have said, ‘This is exactly what I was looking for. This feels just like Planescape: Torment’” says Colin McComb, creative lead on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Let’s not dance around the topic, then: it does feel like Planescape: Torment.

Except, that’s a knotty statement. What did that famously revered RPG actually feel like in the first place? One of its most commonly cited qualities is that it feels so different. In contrast to its contemporaries past and present. You’re not on a quest to save the world in Planescape: Torment. Nor do you visit any cosy taverns in woodland villages, slay any dragons, or romance your Elfin companions. The one bar in the game is called The Smouldering Corpse, and it’s more than just a foreboding name for its own sake. It felt strange and singular when Black Isle released it in 1999, and that hadn’t changed when I went back to replay it in 2014, just before the isometric RPG renaissance we’re enjoying just now.

So yes, Torment: Tides of Numenera feels just like its precursor: completely different.

TToN_Preview_Screen_01.jpg


To put it less facetiously, Tides of Numenera summons a recognisable atmosphere to veterans of Planescape with its art direction, characters and the strange, darkly philosophical conversations you have with people you meet along the journey. At the same time, its cast, setting and systems feel fresh. Fresh next to Planescape: Torment, and fresh next to the genre’s output in 2017.

You are The Last Castoff, once the vessel for an ancient and immortal being able to transplant his consciousness from one meatsack to the next. Trouble is, so were a lot of other people. Unbeknown to your god-parasite (who’s male in this story, though you choose your own character’s gender) every time he hopped from one vessel to the next he left that castoff being with its own consciousness, and a lot of questions.

You can draw parallels with Planescape: Torment here if you want to underline the similarity angle, and I do, because in that game you played the opposite: an immortal being who unknowingly sacrificed souls to fuel his own resurrection. The experience of playing these two characters is broadly similar: you’re confused and isolated, in search of answers about your nature and identity. But the implications are vastly different.

TToN_Preview_Screen_02.jpg


I begin my playthrough within The Bloom, a city-sized organism full of fleshy tunnels, pustules and tentacled maws, whose interior vastness houses an actual populated city. Understandably, The Last Castoff and her pals aren’t content to sit out the rest of eternity within its fleshy walls, so first on the order of business is talking to a heavily defended leader about getting out.

Actually, first on the order of business is getting to know my party a bit, since I’m starting the playthrough several hours into the game. Their personalities are quickly recognisable and clearly defined: Erritis is the light entertainment, just as Morte was in the last game. Matkina is a cold and slightly unnerving woman with whom Erritis seems quite taken. Callistege - well, she’s less clearly defined. Literally. She’s several different incarnations of herself at once, an experimental entity pulled together from different planes of existence. She’s quite chatty, considering.

Taking my first tentative steps along the fleshy tunnels of The Bloom, I stumble upon one of Tides of Numenera’s new systems: Effort. When you’re performing an action in-game but within the text box - something bespoke like interacting with a unique object - you might be presented with a set of nodes and asked to spend a number of them to increase your chances of succeeding in a particular task.

TToN_Preview_Screen_04.jpg


“These are translations of what happens in the new tabletop setting,” McComb explains. “Essentially we have difficult tasks of varying degrees. Essentially, you're saying, ‘Okay, how important is it to me to succeed at this thing?’, and so you apply points of Effort. Depending on what tier or what level you are, [and] you can put more points into it. These are resource pools that are replenishable, but you have to rest, and when you rest, time moves on.”

Possible actions that require a certain number of effort points to guarantee success might not stick around forever, is what McComb implies. There’s a secondary system within that, too: Edge. “Edge essentially just gives you a free point or two points, or three points,” says McComb. “Free effort. You're like, "Okay, I'm gonna spend three effort on something, but I've got two Edge", so it'll cost you one point of effort.”

Like so much of Tides of Numenera, it’s designed to slow the pace of gameplay down to a more thoughtful, calculated cadence. Pillars of Eternity offered something similar in its descriptive prose, in which you could choose to use certain inventory items or perform actions based on character stats, but this is a more dynamic system.

TToN_Preview_Screen_05.jpg


In my case, I choose to guarantee success while reaching into a mysterious statue to grab an object which feels like it doesn’t belong there. After doing so, my Last Castoff is sent swimming through the fragmented memories of others, trying to sort through their pain and anguish and make sense of it. Again, this is a very Torment principle: dealing with the metaphysical through extended interactive prose passages for tangible rewards in narrative and character progression.

That might not sound like a whole bunch of fun. And in less capable hands, it wouldn’t be - Tides of Numenera lives and dies on the quality of its writing, and in a two-hour chunk of hands-on I found that writing held my attention with a vice-grip. You do have to make a conscious effort to stretch your attention span with this genre, because it’s almost entirely comprised of reading text, but once you do you’re rewarded by playing a more active role in every character and room description. The isometric perspective only casts so much detail on the world, so InXile’s words, and your imagination, fill in the blanks.

It’s while I’m asking about the process of writing that world in such granular detail that McComb and lead writer Gavin Jurgens-Fhyrie get to talking about the Genital Naming system, or GNS. “We didn't want any characters to feel the same,” says Jurgens-Fhyrie. “You'll feel the same way once you play through this game, you'll see that a lot of the characters are unique and odd.”

TToN_Preview_Screen_06.jpg


“One character [in particular], his line, I think it was, ‘Grim and weathered visage - it looks like he has lots of tales to tell’. I was like, ‘Colin, I think I'm gonna have to tell a lot of tales in this one’. He tells a lot of damn tales. So we started talking, and as we do when we talk, we inevitably skew dirty. So started on/talking about his ‘grim, weathered pecker’.

“So we were like, ‘Is he really a pecker talker?’” says McComb. “Then we realised: wait a second. If he calls it his pecker, what does his companion call his dick? The way one talks about their genitalia, the pair realised, is a real window into the psyche.

In other words: they’ve got the writing covered. It’s in safe hands. What about the combat, though? In truth I didn’t exchange a single blow with anyone in two hours, which is as telling in and of itself as this trailer InXile releases to explain Tides of Numenera’s turn-based mechanics.

It appears combat and the Effort system are closely linked, in that failure to put in the required Effort often leads to a combat outcome. So you could say I just grafted my way to a pacifist playthrough. I’m glad there’s such room for varying approaches, though: fighting was one of the less imaginative elements in the 1999 game and owed more to Infinity Engine stablemate Baldur’s Gate than the Planescape universe itself.

2017 is looking like a vintage year, almost of late nineties calibre, when it comes to isometric RPGs. But is the genre merely enjoying a bubble created by a fleeting nostalgia, or is it here to stay? “I certainly hope so,” says McComb. “I've really enjoyed doing writing-focused, story-focused, character-focused games.”

As for whether the principles of the genre might be applied to modern RPGs with their visual splendour, Jurgens-Fhyrie doesn’t see much cross-pollenation happening: “ I think the challenge is always that you're gonna run into games that have become more advanced, where the game design itself is going to contradict that level of writing. With isometric, there's just something about it that makes you want to sit down and read more. When you're playing a [game like] Skyrim, for example, there's something about it that gives you more urgency, so it's harder to focus on the writing.”
 

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
lol, the XBox site previews are terrible:

The combat, on the other hand, isn't particularly enjoyable. Percentage chances of even successfully striking an enemy seem nonsensical, giving you a 65% possibility when you're stood right in front of them. And even then you're still likely to consistently miss your target, which is hugely frustrating.

It seems like random number generated madness, and it made me feel incredibly hard-done-by on innumerable occasions. Battles lack the immediacy and intuitive controls of a modern-day RPG too, leaving a mind-boggling array of options, skill, abilities and items to wade through, as the turn-based action unfolds. It all feels a bit too convoluted.
 
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Lurker King

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No doubt, mastering combat in Torment requires careful, considered forethought and a chess-like approach to tactics, which unfortunately just isn't my cup of tea. I'm sure it's definitely to a lot of people's tastes, though, if not necessarily mine. There are other stat-based elements to take into account at certain dialogue or story junctures, again dictated by a skill level and RNG that determines your chance of success or failure.

Torment strikes me as the kind of game that will reward anyone willing to put in the time and effort with something that's worthwhile and unfathomably deep. Hopefully this won't be too high a barrier to entry that puts players off and a broad audience will get the most out of what Tides of Numenera has to offer, which is a hell of a lot.

:lol::lol::lol:
 

FeelTheRads

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mind-boggling array of options

At some point that would've been a quote on the back of the box. Now it's a negative.

mind-boggling
 

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
All of these previews are in the UK, with Colin and Gavin. But Brian Fargo and George Ziets met with press in the US too. Perhaps those previews are timed to release later.
 

Rahdulan

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lol, the XBox site previews are terrible:

The combat, on the other hand, isn't particularly enjoyable. Percentage chances of even successfully striking an enemy seem nonsensical, giving you a 65% possibility when you're stood right in front of them. And even then you're still likely to consistently miss your target, which is hugely frustrating.

It seems like random number generated madness, and it made me feel incredibly hard-done-by on innumerable occasions. Battles lack the immediacy and intuitive controls of a modern-day RPG too, leaving a mind-boggling array of options, skill, abilities and items to wade through, as the turn-based action unfolds. It all feels a bit too convoluted.

I wonder what these people thought about Wasteland 2 and Divinity: Original Sin.
 
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Lurker King

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The main complaints will be:

- Not enough stuff to kill, combat is weird. (Community manager: have in mind that this game is not FO4, bla bla bla)

- The game is too short, I want my money back. (Community manager: please notice that the game provides different choices).
 

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Though irrelevant as far as the games actual quality goes, it always reads favorably when console reviewers get confused or frustrated.
 
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Lurker King

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The machine will do its part. The question is whether it will be enough to achieve good numbers, because it's a tough sell.
 
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Irenaeus

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera
lol, the XBox site previews are terrible:

The combat, on the other hand, isn't particularly enjoyable. Percentage chances of even successfully striking an enemy seem nonsensical, giving you a 65% possibility when you're stood right in front of them. And even then you're still likely to consistently miss your target, which is hugely frustrating.

It seems like random number generated madness, and it made me feel incredibly hard-done-by on innumerable occasions. Battles lack the immediacy and intuitive controls of a modern-day RPG too, leaving a mind-boggling array of options, skill, abilities and items to wade through, as the turn-based action unfolds. It all feels a bit too convoluted.

Tell him to stick to Halo and Captain King.
 

Kev Inkline

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A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
You know, I can't understand why people react negatively if they happen to be puzzled about things.

For me, figuring things out in the beginning of a game is quite often the best part, both story and mechanismwise.
 

Kem0sabe

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The console version has terrible performance for the visual fidelity it provides, much ineptness from inxile in their second unity game on consoles, should be much better.

Also, its clear to see why the inventory and skills full screen UI came to be, clearly designed for consoles from the start. I hope this constant shitting by fargo on the pc user base has some drastic repercussions for inxile sooner rather than later.
 

Kev Inkline

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A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-01-22-watch-us-play-torment-tides-of-numenera-on-ps4

I went to London last week to play the finished game but on PlayStation 4 rather than PC. I wanted to see how the simultaneously released console versions (PS4 and Xbox One) held up. They weren't always part of the plan you see; they're a happy consequence of Techland signing as publisher last summer.

If there is a world championship in euphemism forming, this would be quite a contender.
 

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