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

[Fry]

Works fine for me. Performance seems improved from what I remember, and they've done some paintover passes on the backgrounds.

Still hate the herky-jerky movement feel.

No mouse capture to active monitor... sigh.

 

[throwaway]

I got half a mind to start playing the beta around mid January so that I will finish its content around the time of the release and smoothly move to the rest of the content. How has beta-to-gold compatibility of save games been in the other Kickstarter projects?

 

[Bester]

How has beta-to-gold compatibility of save games been in the other Kickstarter projects?

Inexistent, afaik.

 

[Prime Junta]

Initial impressions of this build (very brief, gotta go off to work now):

Pro: a great deal more polished; the UI looks solid, performance is much improved, jaggies eliminated, etcetera
Con: a lot of the changes are obvious dumbing down -- the health bar instead of stat pools, that "Current Objective" pane that pops up during crises (and no, there's no option to disable it)

I'm not sure how it was before, but the way the screen centres on whoever's turn it is during a crisis is distracting and feels console-y.

We'll see how it feels when I get a bit further, but initial impressions are ... not altogether good. It's like somebody on high has told them that this is too hard for the modern gamer so make it 'more accessible.'

 

[jaydee2k]

Is controller support inculding the Power Glove?!

 

[HoboForEternity]

 

[FeelTheRads]

that "Current Objective" pane that pops up during crises (and no, there's no option to disable it)

Of course not. The current thinking is that it's better to force information down the player's throat than having to deal with those who are too dumb to play the game but also turn off helpers because they think they're smarter than they are. And of course they'd lie about them being optional.

In short, sea is a faggot and a shitslurper.

P.S. None of these changes are because of console development. Honestly.

 

[Prime Junta]

Okay fired it up again.

Clearly not perfected yet. I saved my progress in the morning, but can't continue -- the Load Game screen hangs and the Continue button is grayed out. So starting over.
...
Camera is awfully lively. It zooms and pans on its own whenever I focus on something significant, with "kinetic" acceleration too, instead of being only crisply mouse-controlled. Would work great on a controller, mouse and keyboard, not so much...
...
Made a Wrathful Glaive. Wanna see how that plays out. Conversation with the Spectre was more infodumpy than I remember it from the last build. Lots of "What are you?" and "Who's hunting me?" and "So this is my mind, huh?"
...
Yuuuuge "Crisis Initiated" notification, with "Current Objective: Kill the reflections anchoring the Sorrow to your mind" in a panel. FUCK FUCK FUCK this is SO non-Torment. Fuck console kiddies to Baator and InEptile with them. This is NOT what I Kickstarted!!!
...
Camera is jumping around a LOT during the crisis. Very irritating.
...
This does look pretty though. The UI, icons, and environment art blend together a lot better than before, and the pretty-boy Last Castoff portrait fits well too. Visually it's quite close in style to the Numenera sourcebooks (which is not a bad thing).
...
Voice acting is still bad. Actors carefully reading their lines from a paper, enunciating clearly and speaking slowly.
...
Big "Quest Received" notification. What's wrong with "Updated my journal" FFS?
...
Aligern's and Callistege's new portrait art looks gud. But man this start is infodumpy. A bit less than in the first beta, for sure, but still this is no Mortuary with its glorious sense of WTF and mysteries everywhere.
...
Taking a look at the character sheet. It looks very pretty and Numenera. Cyphers are arranged in two rings with nodes, some of which are locked. The inner ring represents cyphers I can carry without cypher sickness, the outer ring, with cypher sickness. Guess my absolute, hard cypher limit is the number of empty nodes, but I'd probably be dead of Hiroshima syndrome before I hit that anyway. Hooly shit, Aligern has a cypher limit of 5 already, what an awesome mule, I know whom I'm gonna dump out of the gate.

They've tinkered with the basic Cypher System mechanics a quite a lot. There are four new stats: Health, Resistance, Evasion, and Willpower; each of the Pools affects these stats. Don't know yet if these secondary defensive stats will go down as my pools drain. I never was a huge fan of the Numenera mechanics, but I still think this is a bit of a shame -- they were different and these changes dilute this uniqueness quite a bit as well as making things murkier overall. Perhaps they were necessary for gameplay balance reasons or something though. There's no indication of how Health is calculated, other than that Might contributes 1:1. I have 28 Heath and 8 Might so that 20 Health came from somewhere.

I have a bunch of abilities not from the PnP game, like Opportunist that lets me forgo an attack on my turn to get an AOO with bonus on the enemy's turn, if applicable. I also picked Hook which lets me pull an enemy to me. Could also have picked Taunt which does what you'd expect it to. Other than that I'm good at Intimidation and excel at Smashing and Heavy Weapons.

Max Effort is 2 right out of the gate. That is in my opinion rather derp as Effort tends to trivialise things anyway. IMO would've been better to leave it at 1 like in the rulebook.

My Journal is 100% new-skool modurn. Neatly organised into Main Quest, Secondary Quests, with Quest Objectives listed in 3d grade English.
...
Loading screens look purty.
...
Bloody hell this self-moving camera is annoying. When the clock spouted those energy things, the camera just HAD to centre on each of them at a time, to make absolutely sure I noticed.
...
I really don't like the moment-to-moment interaction here. It's that camera and the way it stops taking inputs whenever there's an animation of something happening. It makes it plod, and takes away the feeling of being in control. Pillars got this bit perfectly right (basically by carefully imitating the Infinity Engine). Why did they feel the need to change it? I suppose it'll look cool on a Let's Play video and of course it'll work better if you're playing with a controller rather than a mouse that lets you pan with a flick of the wrist. It even does it in mid-conversation if there's more than one character involved -- every time one of them speaks (even if there's no VO), the camera centres on them.

Also, the UI animation when I interact with things is starting to grate. It's very smooth and all, but it is much more intrusive than a UI that just mostly stays put. That pretty UI is very much in-your-face actually, like when you hold down the Tab button to highlight interactables, the icons for Look and Interact are really huge and obvious, much moreso than the subtle highlight used in the IE or Pillars.

The whole thing is really busy and really, really idiot-proofed.
...
And they still didn't find the time to fix those flagstones.
...
Okay, that's enough for now, that self-moving camera is giving me a migraine.

tl;dr I am not a fan of where this thing is going. The stuff that was good is still good (lotsa writing, some of it pretty neat, quest resolutions etc), but apart from general polish (which they've done a lot of) this isn't any more enjoyable to play, the opposite in fact.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts/1769123

Updated Our Journal (62): Tidal Surge Update for Early Access

tl;dr: Our last big update before release is here!

Greetings Exiles!

Hot on the heels of our release date announcement (it's February 28th, 2017 in case you missed it!), we're pleased to announce our last big beta update for the Steam Early Access version of Torment on Windows before the final game is out. In celebration of this last stretch towards release, we're calling it the Tidal Surge Update!

We know many of you have been waiting for this update, and now we're very happy to be able to deliver a much-improved version of Torment for you to enjoy. Like previous builds, this one will allow you to play the game's first major chunk, taking you through Sagus Cliffs and some parts of the Castoff's Labyrinth – the remaining content will come with the final game, as we don't want to spoil everything, after all!

Update Notes
The Tidal Surge Update includes literally thousands of changes from the last version. There's simply far too many to show you as we'd probably start to approach the word count of the entire game just in version notes, but the highlight features are:

• Voice-acting has been added to key characters and conversations.
• Huge balance improvements across combat, loot and economy.
• Tweaks and adjustments to character stats, such as armor and resistances.
• Many interface art and functionality improvements, fixes and other refinements.
• Improvements to visual and sound effects, especially combat abilities.
• Reworked early-game crisis flow.
• Game settings such as key rebinding and text size are now available.
• Added tutorials and other helpers (optional).
• Hundreds of bug fixes and performance optimizations.

For a list of known issues with this build, please see this thread.

We still have a bit of time left on the game, so we encourage you to check out our forums and let us know of any bugs or issues you run into, as well as for your general feedback!

News Time!
We also have a few bits of news to share as we near the end of 2016. First up, creative lead Colin McComb held a live Q&A session from Techland's offices in Poland. You can watch the full stream here, where he answered as many questions as we could fit in!

Next, you might remember a couple of updates ago we showed you our trailers for the Glaive and Nano types. The final one, for the Jack, is now available, and you can view it right here to complete the trio.

Last, we wanted to let you know that inXile CEO Brian Fargo will appear on Unlocked: The World of Games, Revealed, a new documentary series that dives deep into the world of gaming's biggest icons, celebrities, consumers and experts across all fields. You can see a teaser featuring Brian above, and if you are interested, you can take a closer look at the show over here.

Until next time,
Thomas Beekers

 

[Infinitron]

sea responded to a Codexoid poster on the inXile forums: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=16931

game loves taking control of the camera away from you, was this the intent? and what's up with the hand-holdy god awful Crises Objective hints. it's like playing a point-n-click with the hints forced on. DECLINE

Heya! I saw your comment on Kickstarter, but happy to reply here:

• The Crisis Objectives can be hidden by using the arrow button on the panel.
• You can turn on "Free Combat Camera" in the game's Options menu to remove the auto-centering in Crisis mode.
• You can also change the camera behavior in the Options - default is Hybrid (auto-follows with movement, plus edge-scrolling), but you can change it for pure Edge Scrolling (Infinity Engine style) or fully locked Follow mode.

Regarding the Crisis Objectives in general, those are intended to surface possibilities you might miss, but they do not reveal every possible option outright. You might notice the first couple of encounters are a little more directed, that's by design so people can smoothly learn the system. Later ones show fewer details since we can rely on players having more sense of how the game works.

I'll post Prime Junta's post there.

 

[One-and-a-half-Ivan]

And they still didn't find the time to fix those flagstones.

So many delays and still no fix? That's unacceptable.
Jokes aside, your impressions worry me a lot What the hell, I want Torment experience, for ~cool~ console-style faggotry I have freaking console games.

 

[Prime Junta]

I just tried switching on the "Free Combat Camera" option. It does change the way it behaves in crisis mode, but not out of crisis mode. Whenever Something Happens (tm), the camera centres on it. It's annoying as fuck, I'd rate it as a bigger problem than the crisis camera since most of the time there's no crisis on.

Seriously, there has been no progress since the last beta when it comes to moment-to-moment playability, the reverse in fact. All that effort has gone into making it look pretty. Which it does, for sure, but I'd much rather they'd left it like it was and focused on making it fun to interact with.

Edit: okay that wasn't 100% fair, they have done a lot of rebalancing, adding new abilities, cyphers etc. which is fab but still, overall, it plays worse. They've seriously compromised usability to get something that looks good on YouTube, directs dumbfuck players' attention at what they're supposed to be looking at next, and works well on a TV and a controller. Darn them to heck.

Edit edit: and no being able to close that crisis objective pop-up is not an acceptable substitute for being able to disable it for Christ's sake. I am seriously butthurt about these changes. I'll give it another spin when I've calmed down about this and have time, which may not be until next week, but feh. At least Obsidian --generally speaking-- makes an honest attempt at fixing their clusterfucks, this is going in the opposite direction.

Edit edit edit: tried another camera setting, "edge scrolling," and while it helps a little -- the camera no longer auto-pans when you approach the edge of the screen -- it does nothing to change the main problem, i.e. the way it jumps around every time something happens. How in the name of Mog can they fuck up the camera on a 2D isometric game????

 

[Infinitron]

I just tried switching on the "Free Combat Camera" option. It does change the way it behaves in crisis mode, but not out of crisis mode. Whenever Something Happens (tm), the camera centres on it. It's annoying as fuck, I'd rate it as a bigger problem than the crisis camera since most of the time there's no crisis on.

What about this?

You can also change the camera behavior in the Options - default is Hybrid (auto-follows with movement, plus edge-scrolling), but you can change it for pure Edge Scrolling (Infinity Engine style) or fully locked Follow mode.

 

[Prime Junta]

See "edit edit edit" above. It does very little to address the main problem.

 

[Fry]

I'm not sure what you're seeing free camera even changes in crisis. Still loves to re-center for me.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not sure what you're seeing free camera even changes in crisis. Still loves to re-center for me.

Which crisis? If it's the first one then yeah I see that too. Could be they're forcing it there because it's a scripted tutorial where plot events(tm) are happening in rapid succession.

 

[FeelTheRads]

It's like somebody on high has told them that this is too hard for the modern gamer so make it 'more accessible.'

Btw, you can be sure of that. Unless sea has any power of decision (I would expect a popamole faggot like that to push "features" like these) then it most likely comes from Techland. Otherwise there would be no reason to so refuse to add the option of disabling them. Adding that arrow to hide them individually is almost like it's done sarcastically, to laugh at the players.

 

[Fry]

I'm not sure what you're seeing free camera even changes in crisis. Still loves to re-center for me.

Which crisis? If it's the first one then yeah I see that too. Could be they're forcing it because it's a scripted tutorial where plot events(tm) are happening in rapid succession.

Just looked at the second crisis, and it appears to be a tutorial thing. If you turn those off, the centering on characters at the start of the fight goes away.

e: But PH is right. Outside of combat, the centering on whichever character is speaking in dialogs is annoying AF.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, better post that in the inXile forums.

 

[Ivan]

keep up the good work bros.

 

[Infinitron]

heh check out this guy: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=16931#p178164

I only played the first beta for a couple hours, and then briefly dipped into this one to see the changes.

WOW. MUCH BETTER. That was my first impression. So seriously, well done, this really is a massive step up.

Reading this post, though, I can see people's points on further reflection. So let me add a few things for the devs...

I consider myself somewhat hardcore (not to the extent of some here), being 32 and gaming since I was 2 and growing up with old, dense games etc. and never owning a console. I will say that I actually APPRECIATED a lot of the new interface and design work, and I think there is room for both. The last beta was really annoyingly difficult to discern information clearly, so the new larger fonts in Crises, much better graphical display of information, etc. is very welcome to me. The graphics also look much sharper and smoother, and the UI was light years better in terms of design.

The new beta made me much more excited for the final release. I can't wait.

AND TO CLARIFY: I didn't get too far as I am saving my experience for the actual release, so I can't comment on where some of the improvements might go wrong later, like the camera jumping around like a rabbit on crack or what not. These are just initial impressions of the new visual design etc.

That said, GRIEVANCES - and this comes from reading here and relating to people's feelings on some of these:

1.) I noticed the options menu was relatively sparse, and when I wondered what some things meant on mouse-over (Feedback on Tides, for example), there was no tooltip. Where are the tool tips?! Yes, I can guess what this means or look it up easily, but that's not the point. EVERY MENU OPTION NEEDS TO HAVE A TOOL TIP! I want to have this explained, right there in the game. Second, WHERE ARE ALL THE OPTIONS? Objective markers, camera centering, etc. all should have options so that people can tweak and customize to their preferences. That would solve so many of the gripes here and easily make everyone happy. And they should all have a good tool tip explanation. (Though I am of course not discounting disabling options in lieu of *FIXING* the problems with good new features, such as sporadic camera or something. It just seems some people want a much more stripped down experience, or would prefer to hide all markers, or remove some visual feedback or decrease font sizes etc.)

2.) I actually wish some of the information was a little bit clearer still. For example, I noticed this right away on the first crisis. The information for "double move" where the line changes to purple isn't super clear. Don't get me wrong, I spent a minute or two on it and it makes sense, but it wasn't "Blizzard" or "XCOM" level of clarity. It just felt a level down in polish. The purple line is thin, the visual feedback not quite as strong as it could be. A little pop up along with this and/or a thicker purple that indicates very clearly would be a step up in polish. I felt like I had to work to discern the interface more than I should. I want to work hard on a game, but I want the hard work to be on story, choices, strategy - not at figuring out what is going to happen if I click a button because I don't feel the game/interface design is making that sufficiently obvious.

Same for when I went to use the glass shard, I had to double check and was unclear after clicking on it if in fact it was active. I clicked, and clicked again, with no visual feedback. Was the glass shard selected? Was I now going to attack with the glass shard? Well, I assume so. So I clicked, and yes my character threw it. I wasn't entirely sure if he was going to throw it, or move in for melee range and stab. I'm sure this is obvious if you have spent hours with the game, but compared to most modern games it's poor design. The glass shard icon should have had some sort of animated glow to it to indicate it was active. My cursor should have perhaps had some sort of feedback (either text or visual) as to what would happen "throw glass shard, 80% chance of hit? 100% chance?"

I would give this some thought.

////

So to balance out some of the feedback here, as a long time gamer who isn't one that plays old school isometric RPGs all day but still appreciates them, the added visual feedback and some of the more modern mechanics are actually very welcome to me - not because I don't want depth (I most certainly do, and do not want "dumbing down"), but because I do not want to be fighting lack of clarity in design and UI. Blizzard is such a master of this. Overwatch and SC2 are both very deep in mechanics, but insanely easy to understand. The Overwatch HUD and menu designs are master class. For a game with so much going on, it's ridiculously easy to understand. Same with SC2, and Firaxis XCOM 2.

'fraid Prime Junta may be fighting an uphill battle here.

 

[FeelTheRads]

That guy is not necessarily saying bad things. There is a difference between UI clarity and on-screen walkthroughs even though he's pushing it a bit. And he's arguing for making these thing optional which is what any reasonable company would do, unless they are publisher slaves like inxile.

 

[MRY]

Regarding the Crisis Objectives in general, those are intended to surface possibilities you might miss, but they do not reveal every possible option outright. You might notice the first couple of encounters are a little more directed, that's by design so people can smoothly learn the system. Later ones show fewer details since we can rely on players having more sense of how the game works.

This was never my argument. I prefer the CYOA design because it gives you more freedom not less. Also, I disagree that the player is doing any figuring out worth a damn. All quest solutions are scripted, so it's either "do you either do A, B, C or D" or "do you either do A, B, C or D but you have to find them first". The latter is never a real puzzle but basic interaction (click on the lockpick button then on the door) or legwork (run to the guy who has the key). Might as well present all *logical* options and hide the rest (options that actually require some thinking), which is what we did in AoD.

Finally, developers are listening to VD!

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yeah, VD master game designer.

 

[Grotesque]

Okay fired it up again.

Clearly not perfected yet. I saved my progress in the morning, but can't continue -- the Load Game screen hangs and the Continue button is grayed out. So starting over.
...
Camera is awfully lively. It zooms and pans on its own whenever I focus on something significant, with "kinetic" acceleration too, instead of being only crisply mouse-controlled. Would work great on a controller, mouse and keyboard, not so much...
...
Made a Wrathful Glaive. Wanna see how that plays out. Conversation with the Spectre was more infodumpy than I remember it from the last build. Lots of "What are you?" and "Who's hunting me?" and "So this is my mind, huh?"
...
Yuuuuge "Crisis Initiated" notification, with "Current Objective: Kill the reflections anchoring the Sorrow to your mind" in a panel. FUCK FUCK FUCK this is SO non-Torment. Fuck console kiddies to Baator and InEptile with them. This is NOT what I Kickstarted!!!
...
Camera is jumping around a LOT during the crisis. Very irritating.
...
This does look pretty though. The UI, icons, and environment art blend together a lot better than before, and the pretty-boy Last Castoff portrait fits well too. Visually it's quite close in style to the Numenera sourcebooks (which is not a bad thing).
...
Voice acting is still bad. Actors carefully reading their lines from a paper, enunciating clearly and speaking slowly.
...
Big "Quest Received" notification. What's wrong with "Updated my journal" FFS?
...
Aligern's and Callistege's new portrait art looks gud. But man this start is infodumpy. A bit less than in the first beta, for sure, but still this is no Mortuary with its glorious sense of WTF and mysteries everywhere.
...
Taking a look at the character sheet. It looks very pretty and Numenera. Cyphers are arranged in two rings with nodes, some of which are locked. The inner ring represents cyphers I can carry without cypher sickness, the outer ring, with cypher sickness. Guess my absolute, hard cypher limit is the number of empty nodes, but I'd probably be dead of Hiroshima syndrome before I hit that anyway. Hooly shit, Aligern has a cypher limit of 5 already, what an awesome mule, I know whom I'm gonna dump out of the gate.

They've tinkered with the basic Cypher System mechanics a quite a lot. There are four new stats: Health, Resistance, Evasion, and Willpower; each of the Pools affects these stats. Don't know yet if these secondary defensive stats will go down as my pools drain. I never was a huge fan of the Numenera mechanics, but I still think this is a bit of a shame -- they were different and these changes dilute this uniqueness quite a bit as well as making things murkier overall. Perhaps they were necessary for gameplay balance reasons or something though. There's no indication of how Health is calculated, other than that Might contributes 1:1. I have 28 Heath and 8 Might so that 20 Health came from somewhere.

I have a bunch of abilities not from the PnP game, like Opportunist that lets me forgo an attack on my turn to get an AOO with bonus on the enemy's turn, if applicable. I also picked Hook which lets me pull an enemy to me. Could also have picked Taunt which does what you'd expect it to. Other than that I'm good at Intimidation and excel at Smashing and Heavy Weapons.

Max Effort is 2 right out of the gate. That is in my opinion rather derp as Effort tends to trivialise things anyway. IMO would've been better to leave it at 1 like in the rulebook.

My Journal is 100% new-skool modurn. Neatly organised into Main Quest, Secondary Quests, with Quest Objectives listed in 3d grade English.
...
Loading screens look purty.
...
Bloody hell this self-moving camera is annoying. When the clock spouted those energy things, the camera just HAD to centre on each of them at a time, to make absolutely sure I noticed.
...
I really don't like the moment-to-moment interaction here. It's that camera and the way it stops taking inputs whenever there's an animation of something happening. It makes it plod, and takes away the feeling of being in control. Pillars got this bit perfectly right (basically by carefully imitating the Infinity Engine). Why did they feel the need to change it? I suppose it'll look cool on a Let's Play video and of course it'll work better if you're playing with a controller rather than a mouse that lets you pan with a flick of the wrist. It even does it in mid-conversation if there's more than one character involved -- every time one of them speaks (even if there's no VO), the camera centres on them.

Also, the UI animation when I interact with things is starting to grate. It's very smooth and all, but it is much more intrusive than a UI that just mostly stays put. That pretty UI is very much in-your-face actually, like when you hold down the Tab button to highlight interactables, the icons for Look and Interact are really huge and obvious, much moreso than the subtle highlight used in the IE or Pillars.

The whole thing is really busy and really, really idiot-proofed.
...
And they still didn't find the time to fix those flagstones.
...
Okay, that's enough for now, that self-moving camera is giving me a migraine.

tl;dr I am not a fan of where this thing is going. The stuff that was good is still good (lotsa writing, some of it pretty neat, quest resolutions etc), but apart from general polish (which they've done a lot of) this isn't any more enjoyable to play, the opposite in fact.

All these great posts will be lost in time to no avail, like salty tears in the rain...