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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

Gunnar

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
819
Callistege has nothing of importance to say throughout the game and spends all of her time patting you on the head and going on and on about how great she is. Her extra content isn't anything you need, either.

None of them were fine, unfortunately.
Rhin - somewhere between dull and below average, useless tit

No wonder it took you 46 hours to finish when you dismiss by far the strongest NPC as useless. She's arguably stronger than the Last Castoff.

She's a weak, miserable wretch for the majority of the game, her gods are stupid rocks and she has nothing interesting to say throughout the game. People, sell this kid into slavery immediately.
 

Azarkon

Arcane
Joined
Oct 7, 2005
Messages
2,989
I still haven't finished the game. I've had to force myself to sit through much of the first city. It's just not engaging enough on its own merits.

Major Problems

* Boring Characters: most of the characters in this game add very little to the experience. Having been warned about Aligern and Callistege, I decided early on to drop them and get Matkina, Erritis, and Rhin instead. In theory, I have the best cast the game has to offer, yet even so, it feels banal, which a Torment game never should. Again, we have the 'ask me for a lore dump of my entire life' conversation style, and once again it has the same effect as it did in Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny - that is, talking to your party members feels more like an up front chore. This is made worse by the fact that they rarely have anything significant to say about what's happening around them, and too little happens to them, which might make them stand out. The fact that you can use them to pass skill checks might be a down side, in this respect, as it takes away from a sense of independent agency and removes any possibility of the player being appreciative of their help. The characters are more like tools than persons.

* Uninspiring Quests:
almost all the quests in the first city have a messenger structure of the form: "Talk to A. A tells you to talk to B. Talk to B. B tells you to talk to C. Talk to C. C tells you to talk to A. Quest complete." You can replace 'talking' with 'interacting' in cases where it involves objects. Most of your time, as such, is spent traveling from one end of the city to the other. This is not only time consuming, but it does fuck all to keep interest. The lack of innovative quest structures can be excused in other CRPGs by falling back on tactical combat. But this can't be done in Numenera due to the combat being bad. Thus you're stuck with a game that has terrible combat, on one hand, and poor quest design, on the other. That is the entirety of its gameplay.

* Tedious Writing: it is very, very easy to lose track of what the hell is going on narratively in a quest, and a lot of that is due to the overly descriptive and tedious writing. But blame is also to be placed on the setting for its anything goes attitude towards logic and consistency. Near the end of my stay in the first city, as I was wrapping up my quests, I've had more than one occasion in which I simply could not remember why I was doing what I was doing, probably due to the fact that I didn't pay enough attention to the dialogue text from previous sessions. The sheer overloading of the player with Numenera lore contributes to this effect, as a quest to insert a Blerbuglubage into a Aeeniertic Viereaxxa to cause Mneiesisi is a lot harder to keep straight than a quest to stop local bandits from attacking merchants.

I can't even be bothered to write about the minor problems and issues that I experienced. Instead, I'll just say that this game manages to be even less engaging than Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny, which is an amazing achievement considering I was not all that engaged with either of those games.

As for positives, like most people I found a few stand out moments, though almost all of them were emotionally manipulative:

* The robot underground that wanted to create its own children, but kept failing

* The minor quest involving fishing for Crooked Qeek

* Rhin's brain damage and her interactions with Ahl

I also liked the fact that you could avoid combat much of the time, which made those few cases in which you couldn't, all the more annoying.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
66
She's a weak, miserable wretch for the majority of the game, her gods are stupid rocks and she has nothing interesting to say throughout the game. People, sell this kid into slavery immediately.
She would be useless if you're trying to bonk everyone you come across on the head (then again in this game being the designated cypher user seems to make anyone strong), otherwise she works wonders as support. Doesn't matter if one companion can't fight for shit if she can hide and run and be sent to do her own useful thing while the rest fight or whatever. Bought her back and got her back home, no regrets.
 
Last edited:

Gunnar

Arbiter
Joined
Jul 10, 2016
Messages
819
She's a weak, miserable wretch for the majority of the game, her gods are stupid rocks and she has nothing interesting to say throughout the game. People, sell this kid into slavery immediately.
She would be useless if you're trying to bonk everyone you come across on the head (then again in this game being the designated cypher user seems to make anyone strong), otherwise she works wonders as support. Doesn't matter if one companion can't fight for shit if she can hide and run and be sent to do her own useful thing while the rest fight or whatever. Bought her back and got her back home, no regrets.

Any of the companions can fill a support role, in addition they have other useful abilities, whereas Rhin doesn't. It's the same with her questline, you keep waiting for a payoff that happens so late it's a small reward for lugging her through the game.

The companions are all so uninspired. I want to recruit the tortured levy, the cursed tabaht commander, a psychic warrior, the deformed stichus, a visitant from the Anchorage, etc.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
Messages
66
Any of the companions can fill a support role, in addition they have other useful abilities, whereas Rhin doesn't. It's the same with her questline, you keep waiting for a payoff that happens so late it's a small reward for lugging her through the game.
Fair enough. This game doesn't have the best companions (though honestly Erritis was good comic relief) and the payoff for Rhin is indeed too little too late. She was useful to me in gameplay, though.
And I'm biased because I liked how she actually
comes back years later from her perspective if you send her home.
At that point she was truly useless, though. Might as well have saved herself the trouble cause I didn't need her by then but I felt bad about telling her.
 
Last edited:

ShadowSpectre

Arbiter
Joined
Mar 11, 2017
Messages
333
Location
Limbo
I just finished Tides of Numenera today and it was overall okay, but it's nowhere near Planescape: Torment. Your mileage may also highly vary on it. The second half of the game (post Miel Avest) is far more inspired than the first half (although that doesn't make up for the shortfalls about the game in general).

Some gripes:
- Very buggy. It's a good thing I played a talker with little combat, because the game would crash 50% of the time when a crises would first begin. No joke.
- The companions were "meh" and have very little personality going on with them. In fact the archetype assassin Matkina probably has the most environment/person induced lines of the bunch which is not to the game's credit. Look up PST character interactions on YouTube, there is a very nice video of how much is actually VOICED in that game. Some NPCs had more personality and dialogue than the companions
- Speaking of companions and bugs, adult Rhin came back in the end but bugged out when I asked her to join me. I had saved with her on the screen but apparently reloading that save did nothing as she had disappeared???
- Erritis also bugged out into paths I never picked for him
- The story did not have good flow and just about everything surrounding the Changing God and how he did what he did made little sense really. The writing is often excessive which convoluted the story in a way that was unnecessary.
- It feels like parts of the game were removed.
- For some reason the best environments were left out until the very end??
- Combat is complete shit
- The character screen interface
- The numenera setting

Things I liked:
- Fifth-Eye Tavern
- General idea and look of the Bloom
- Environments into the end game (should have been included THROUGHOUT the game instead)
- Meres were sometimes interesting (and more coherently written and better described than the rest of the game)
- Foreman quests
- Spots where the writing was solid
- The non-combative approach as a reliable possibility
- The Laaskar ship crisis

Overall verdict? The game was a neutral positive. Maybe 3/5, some people will like it more than others. The game was not what it was projected to be. To say the least, I won't be kickstarting or fig-starting anything else. A game can get released, get fixed, go on sale, then I'll see if it's a worthy purchase. Too much out there; not enough time for mediocre stuff.
 

l3loodAngel

Proud INTJ
Patron
Edgy
Joined
Nov 19, 2010
Messages
1,452
In a vacuum I would say the game is a solid 7/10. Outside the vacuum, it is a major disappointment of cataclysmic proportions.

To provide context, it's better than PoE* and better than Shadowrun:HK. It's worse than Shadowrun: Dragonfall and it comes nowhere near the brilliance of AoD.

I don't compare it to Wasteland 2 because apples and oranges in my opinion.

*Yes, it's better than PoE and your impotent screams of primal rage and incontinent asshurt don't change that. You know who you are...

Of course I don't compare it to PST because... well, it doesn't come close. At all. Ever. Not even a fraction.
How is it better than POE? They both are mostly the same, but for different reason though.
But better than SR? hahaha, oh wow. SR provided full games with combat, character development, story and etc. The difference between TToN and SR is so big I wouldn't even start comparing them (WL 2 is also leagues above).
 

Lord Andre

Arcane
Joined
Apr 11, 2011
Messages
3,716
Location
Gypsystan
In a vacuum I would say the game is a solid 7/10. Outside the vacuum, it is a major disappointment of cataclysmic proportions.

To provide context, it's better than PoE* and better than Shadowrun:HK. It's worse than Shadowrun: Dragonfall and it comes nowhere near the brilliance of AoD.

I don't compare it to Wasteland 2 because apples and oranges in my opinion.

*Yes, it's better than PoE and your impotent screams of primal rage and incontinent asshurt don't change that. You know who you are...

Of course I don't compare it to PST because... well, it doesn't come close. At all. Ever. Not even a fraction.

How is it better than POE? They both are mostly the same, but for different reason though.

It's better because I hate lore dumps less than I hate copy pasted trash mobs. It's better because if I strip down the main story of all balast and do the same to PoE and compare, I like nuTorment's more because you actually can participate in the plot instead of being a point of view, a camera that the game moves from plot point to plot point.
It's better because the trial scene in PoE ends with the villain cock-blocking you via cutscene deux ex machina while the equivalent in nuTorment (the Sorrow busting in on Miel Avest scene) ends with you cock-blocking the villain by using info about him you uncovered, previous psionic fight experience, the words of Qra from your mental inventory and concentration skill if you have it, making it seem that your victory is legitimately earned through your past (player) actions.
On top of that I believe Numenera ultra-weird setting is bad but still more interesting than PoE's realistically done by "history buff" setting with magic and psionic shoe-horned in with a crowbar.

I post edgy but what I say I mean, don't get things twisted.

But better than SR? hahaha, oh wow. SR provided full games with combat, character development, story and etc. The difference between TToN and SR is so big I wouldn't even start comparing them

I said SRR:HK < nuTorment < SRR: Dragonfall . Which is true, SH:HK is warmed over slop of Dragonfall, trying to ape its good story with wordy loredumps, uninteristing characters and combat encounters of the copy pasta variety. I love Hairbrained but sometime you have to call it like you see it.

I intentionally left out the first Shadowrun Returns because I personally love it to pieces because of the detective noir feel in the first half of the game but others have legitimately criticised the second half of the game so whatever... it's a coin toss.

(WL 2 is also leagues above).

Wasteland 2 is a different type of game better to be compared to Underrail for example, a comparison that brings to light WL2's mediocrity.

I hope I don't have to explain why Age of Decadence is in a league of it's own compared to the kickstarter disappointments...
 

Jarpie

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 30, 2009
Messages
6,603
Codex 2012 MCA
I still haven't finished the game. I've had to force myself to sit through much of the first city. It's just not engaging enough on its own merits.

Major Problems

* Boring Characters: most of the characters in this game add very little to the experience. Having been warned about Aligern and Callistege, I decided early on to drop them and get Matkina, Erritis, and Rhin instead. In theory, I have the best cast the game has to offer, yet even so, it feels banal, which a Torment game never should. Again, we have the 'ask me for a lore dump of my entire life' conversation style, and once again it has the same effect as it did in Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny - that is, talking to your party members feels more like an up front chore. This is made worse by the fact that they rarely have anything significant to say about what's happening around them, and too little happens to them, which might make them stand out. The fact that you can use them to pass skill checks might be a down side, in this respect, as it takes away from a sense of independent agency and removes any possibility of the player being appreciative of their help. The characters are more like tools than persons.

* Uninspiring Quests:
almost all the quests in the first city have a messenger structure of the form: "Talk to A. A tells you to talk to B. Talk to B. B tells you to talk to C. Talk to C. C tells you to talk to A. Quest complete." You can replace 'talking' with 'interacting' in cases where it involves objects. Most of your time, as such, is spent traveling from one end of the city to the other. This is not only time consuming, but it does fuck all to keep interest. The lack of innovative quest structures can be excused in other CRPGs by falling back on tactical combat. But this can't be done in Numenera due to the combat being bad. Thus you're stuck with a game that has terrible combat, on one hand, and poor quest design, on the other. That is the entirety of its gameplay.

* Tedious Writing: it is very, very easy to lose track of what the hell is going on narratively in a quest, and a lot of that is due to the overly descriptive and tedious writing. But blame is also to be placed on the setting for its anything goes attitude towards logic and consistency. Near the end of my stay in the first city, as I was wrapping up my quests, I've had more than one occasion in which I simply could not remember why I was doing what I was doing, probably due to the fact that I didn't pay enough attention to the dialogue text from previous sessions. The sheer overloading of the player with Numenera lore contributes to this effect, as a quest to insert a Blerbuglubage into a Aeeniertic Viereaxxa to cause Mneiesisi is a lot harder to keep straight than a quest to stop local bandits from attacking merchants.

I can't even be bothered to write about the minor problems and issues that I experienced. Instead, I'll just say that this game manages to be even less engaging than Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny, which is an amazing achievement considering I was not all that engaged with either of those games.

As for positives, like most people I found a few stand out moments, though almost all of them were emotionally manipulative:

* The robot underground that wanted to create its own children, but kept failing

* The minor quest involving fishing for Crooked Qeek

* Rhin's brain damage and her interactions with Ahl

I also liked the fact that you could avoid combat much of the time, which made those few cases in which you couldn't, all the more annoying.

The robot in the underground who wanted to have own children was IMO pretty much missed chance, could've done a lot more with it. Does it even have its own ending slide?
 

Lord Azlan

Arcane
Patron
Shitposter
Joined
Jun 4, 2014
Messages
1,901
I still haven't finished the game. I've had to force myself to sit through much of the first city. It's just not engaging enough on its own merits.

Major Problems

* Boring Characters: most of the characters in this game add very little to the experience. Having been warned about Aligern and Callistege, I decided early on to drop them and get Matkina, Erritis, and Rhin instead. In theory, I have the best cast the game has to offer, yet even so, it feels banal, which a Torment game never should. Again, we have the 'ask me for a lore dump of my entire life' conversation style, and once again it has the same effect as it did in Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny - that is, talking to your party members feels more like an up front chore. This is made worse by the fact that they rarely have anything significant to say about what's happening around them, and too little happens to them, which might make them stand out. The fact that you can use them to pass skill checks might be a down side, in this respect, as it takes away from a sense of independent agency and removes any possibility of the player being appreciative of their help. The characters are more like tools than persons.



I also liked the fact that you could avoid combat much of the time, which made those few cases in which you couldn't, all the more annoying.

Not really a fan of talking to companions as I have never found a game where it works or feel natural. I think talking to companions in PoE felt slightly natural. Hated talking companions in Baldur's Gate which is part of the reason I never got far with that game.

PST companions were mostly useless and I did not like the sort of camping and talking to them one after the other to see if they had anything of interest. The payoff with Morte, Dakkon and Vhailor came from unfolding their history and how they were connected to you.

Didn't really rate Annah or Grace.

I suppose unlocking the trick to making this work is one of the next challenges for RPG developers.

In Tides I thought Rhin was off interest at least as she was not a typical companion in combat - but since there is so little combat...

Her story was of moderate interest.

The Tattoed Aligern story arc had PST potential where you find out it was a Cast Off that helped set his life down the path but I think the pay off in the end was lame.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
Joined
Apr 5, 2015
Messages
1,870,124
This entire argument is silly. PS:T magically became a huge commercial hit on the Codex the moment in turned out T:TON isn't selling well, because reality around here tends to get warped towards whatever is the current narrative, in this case that T:TON is a -10/10 game and that's why it bombed, and not because narrative-heavy text-based games generally don't move truckload of units, even if it they're 10/10 classics.
 
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Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
This entire argument is silly. PS:T magically became a huge commercial hit on the Codex the moment in turned out T:TON isn't selling well, because reality around here tends to get warped towards whatever is the current narrative, in this case that T:TON is a -10/10 game and that's why it bombed, and not because narrative-heavy text-based games generally don't move truckload of units, even if it they're 10/10 classics.
They sell well enough, its just smaller markets with tiny costs and one men crews.
On an unrelated note: The sheer amount of text thats made irrelevant in the game by what you can actually see happening, and the amount of text that replaces cool shit the game should actually be showing you is insane on TToN, these people obviously dont know what the fuck they are doing.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,653
This entire argument is silly. PS:T magically became a huge commercial hit on the Codex the moment in turned out T:TON isn't selling well, because reality around here tends to get warped towards whatever is the current narrative, in this case that T:TON is a -10/10 game and that's why it bombed, and not because narrative-heavy text-based games generally don't move truckload of units, even if it they're 10/10 classics.

Wonder why Master Businesssman Brian Fargo gave ToN a significantly higher budget than the original Torment then. :M

(note I'm not talking about the money they crowdfunded but the "multiple millions" they had to add on top of that)
 

Lhynn

Arcane
Joined
Aug 28, 2013
Messages
9,824
Wonder why Master Businesssman Brian Fargo gave ToN a significantly higher budget than the original Torment then. :M

(note I'm not talking about the money they crowdfunded but the "multiple millions" they had to add on top of that)
Are you for real? here i thought most of the kikestarter funds went to wl2 and to pay other stuff. very hard to think ToN costed more than 2 mill.
 

Fairfax

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2015
Messages
3,518
Are you for real? here i thought most of the kikestarter funds went to wl2 and to pay other stuff. very hard to think ToN costed more than 2 mill.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-tides-of-numenera.114144/page-3#post-5011108
Huh. Vindicated once more? :obviously:
First part, at least:
The beta will start you right in the beginning of the game and is quite lengthy for an early beta.

Since InXile has decided to completely thrown out the meaning of beta, how are they now using the term? Being in beta just means "it now feels beta-ish enough for us"? Or perhaps more likely, "people will be pissed that it's not even in beta yet so let's start calling it a beta"?
They definitely (100%) ran out of KS money, so they're selling a half-assed version of the early game to get more money and fund the rest, just like they did with WL2. I'd bet that's why Fargo fired Kevin, he looks like someone who would fight against that sort of thing.

With $5 million from KS + "multiple millions" of their own funds + console port costs, it could be pushing $10 million indeed. Best case scenario is around $8 million, or the "multiple millions" quote would seem unnecessary. Considering the almost-million-seller PoE has generated $16.5 million in revenue to date, TTON at ~105k is very far from breaking even.

For better or worse, this was probably the last attempt at a Torment-like game.
 

IHaveHugeNick

Arcane
Joined
Apr 5, 2015
Messages
1,870,124
This entire argument is silly. PS:T magically became a huge commercial hit on the Codex the moment in turned out T:TON isn't selling well, because reality around here tends to get warped towards whatever is the current narrative, in this case that T:TON is a -10/10 game and that's why it bombed, and not because narrative-heavy text-based games generally don't move truckload of units, even if it they're 10/10 classics.

Wonder why Master Businesssman Brian Fargo gave ToN a significantly higher budget than the original Torment then. :M

(note I'm not talking about the money they crowdfunded but the "multiple millions" they had to add on top of that)

Probably because it was in development hell and they had to adjust the budget just to get it over the finish line.
 
Self-Ejected

Lilura

RPG Codex Dragon Lady
Joined
Feb 13, 2013
Messages
5,274
The sheer amount of text thats made irrelevant in the game by what you can actually see happening, and the amount of text that replaces cool shit the game should actually be showing you is insane on TToN, these people obviously dont know what the fuck they are doing.

That doesn't stop them patting themselves on the back, telling us how good they are, and how good the uncritical media think they are, though.
 

Malpercio

Arcane
Joined
Dec 8, 2011
Messages
1,534
Why are you guys even comparing sales, the market isn't the same at it was 17 years ago, TToN has far bigger reach. It also bombed because everyone is playing Nier, Zelda, Horizon or the bazillion of games that just came out. The game can't even benefit from word of mouth.
 

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