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

[Florian Gheorghe]

Love the voice!

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Good trailer and a nice voice. Presentation is fitting for a narrative driven game: only one battle in the whole trailer.

 

[Bubbles]

Sankarihauta

 

[vortex]

Love the voice!

He could narrate chapters intersections like in BG2. It would be cool.

 

[HoboForEternity]

holy shit! 4 posts after new trailer and nobody is raising their pitchfork?

codex, i am so disappointed.

 

[J_C]

Sankarihauta

In other words, create artwork for InXile for free which then they will use commercially.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Come on, J_C, didn't you want to donate your grandma's wheel-chair or whatever to work with these guys?

I'd assume they don't mean to use it for free, but probably hope to get cheaper work for those comics they need to do from fans than hire actual comic book artists.

 

[Infinitron]

They're probably going to release a Kickstarter update today to point people at Wasteland 3, with the new trailer in it.

 

[Trodat]

Nice trailer, made me want to play the game.

 

[Daedalos]

Very nice trailer, can't wait for the release!

 

[Infinitron]

UPDATE - and it's more than just a Wasteland 3 ad: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/posts/1699659

Updated Our Journal (59): Polish & Interface Improvements, Looking Forward

Hello Exiles,

Eric here. We're in the home stretch on Torment, and in the last few months we've been working hard to refine and improve the game. My main role has been to work with our artists and engineers to make our user experience as good as it can be. We are in that magical time when a game goes from being something simply playable but rough, to being truly enjoyable, and that's a wonderfully creative period where iteration abounds and we have the time and energy to really identify all those little things that add up to make a great game.

In addition to all the requisite bug fixes and art updates, our efforts have largely centered around putting in additional layers of polish to make the game look and play better. Many of these features are requests directly from our community, so I'd like to thank you all for writing in and giving us feedback on the improvements you wanted to see.

Conversation Updates
The conversation screen in Torment is one of the most important parts of the game, because you will be spending so much time using it. As a result, it was critical to make it as polished and enjoyable to use as possible – a goal we have had throughout development. Without a doubt, our conversation UI has gone through more versions than any other interface element for that same reason.

First up, one of the biggest concerns we saw in the beta was that the text scrolling needed to be improved. In earlier versions, text would always appear at the bottom of the interface, which could lead to a lot of extra scrolling or manually expanding the whole conversation screen to read it. As a result, we re-designed this text behavior and engineer Matthew Davey spent many hours re-writing it.

Our revamp for conversation text scrolling now has text appear at the top of the interface rather than appearing near the bottom, so you don't find yourself scrolling nearly as much. When we need to show lots of text all at once, we also added a "Show More" button and a little down arrow indicating that there is more below. Instead of manually scrolling when there's lots of words on screen, now you can just keep hitting the Enter key, Spacebar, or clicking the button, which means that you can focus more on the contents of the conversation rather than getting pulled out of the narrative.

That said, a text box isn't in and of itself the most interesting thing, and for Torment we wanted to do something a bit more special. So, we decided to include additional notifications, audio cues and special effects while you're in conversations in order to highlight key moments.

A great example of this is the new "Item Gained" prompt. All of our items in the game are hand-designed and often written with lots of detailed lore and story elements, and so we wanted it to make it feel like a great moment when you found something interesting. Since so many of these items are given out during conversations or scripted interactions, it made sense to devote a portion of the conversation interface to them.

Whenever you find or receive an item while the conversation screen is open, the game will now highlight the occasion by showing you a special panel on the right side of the window. This has a purpose, too – you can also mouse over the item to view its info in a tooltip, and right-click to bring up its full detailed description just like you would see in the inventory screen. This means when an NPC gives you a cool new piece of numenera, you don't have to wait another five minutes to look at it. It was one of those little things we never realized we wanted in an RPG until we went to implement it.

We've also made improvements to the fanfare when you get other rewards or status changes. Now, we have animated visual effects that play in key instances – most notably, when your Tidal Affinity changes (it is Tides of Numenera after all), but also for other things like XP gains.

Crisis and Combat Updates
But conversation isn't everything. We've also been taking strides in making combat easier to understand and displaying more information about your characters, abilities, and the battlefield's overall state. This was one of the things that wasn't quite at the level we wanted it, and many of our backers agreed judging by some of the comments we received! As a result, we've added far more information to the Crisis HUD.

To start, you might recall we previously talked about anoetic and occultic actions in earlier updates. Now, we've renamed them to your "move" action and "attack" action to make their uses clearer, and given them appropriate icons that display under your current party member (and turn grey when they've been used up each turn). This hasn't altered or simplified any of the previous gameplay or mechanics at all - for instance, abilities can still consume movement in some cases, or no movement in others - but it's much easier to keep track of which actions are which now.

Additionally, our engineers have rebuilt our tooltips when you mouse over an ability. The system we have now is incredibly robust, showing detailed information which also automatically populates and formats itself based on some simple tags the designers can write. Even special statuses and fettles will auto-fill their effects, so that when designers start doing balance changes, they don't have to manually go in and change the text for everything affected. You'll also see how the action cost is also more clearly indicated, tying in with the changes I mentioned above. On the whole, these tooltips are just more readable, more accurate, and a bit prettier looking than what we previously had.

Expanding on our improved tooltips, we have also added a right-click popup window to every ability in the game which allows you to inspect their full details just like in the Infinity Engine RPGs, and each has more flavorful long-form descriptions we've penned for them for you to read:

One more thing we weren't indicating properly in earlier builds of the game was the maximum range of attacks, as well as the radius of any area-of-effect type abilities. Now, we've added visuals for those so you can clearly see exactly where your abilities will land, letting you line them up just right. Below you can see an example – the thin, orange outer ring shows the maximum range, and the smaller orange circle is the area the ability will affect:

Help & Tutorials
We have also been working on some less exciting but no less important elements to give players a helping hand, if they want it.

When a Crisis encounter starts, we now display a small panel on the side of the screen to signal your main objective and some optional possibilities. We won't tell you every route available to resolve an encounter, so there will still be things to discover and experiment with, but this will serve as a reminder in case you aren't sure what your goal is. If you're the type that doesn't want any assistance at all, you can simply hide this popup at any time by clicking the arrow button on it.

On a similar note, we've added tutorials to the early game that will help explain some of the finer points of the Numenera game mechanics, as well as basic control and interface details. These will also show when you encounter something new in the game, such as when you pick up a cypher for the first time. But, we also know that there are those of you who want to figure out the mechanics on your own, so these tutorials can similarly be disabled with a single button press.

Art! Art Everywhere!
It wouldn't be a complete update about the user interface without mentioning that we've gone in and done a huge art pass. We let Charlie, Alisha, Daniel, William, and others run wild adding layers upon layers of extra detail. Every individual element and screen is hand-drawn, and it has been a huge amount of work, but this sort of physical-feeling, ornate and detailed interface is something we expect from a classic-style RPG and we hope you appreciate the extra attention we've given it.

The screens for Character Creation, the Character Sheet, Merchants, and many more have all been polished up with plenty of extra details and visual effects. You can see a few of them below, although keep in mind that the screens are not necessarily final and might still get a few more updates by the time the game ships.

And of course, there's dozens of other little details all over the place. For example, it wouldn't be an RPG without a cool level-up effect:

Pay no mind to the huge amount of XP I gained out of thin air and definitely didn't use cheats to add. Nope.
All of these types of little tweaks and additions add up to making the game go from good to great, and this is exactly the kind of polish and iteration that your feedback has helped enable. We always know we can make things a little better and more fun to play, and we'll continue adding touches like this up until release.

Of course, that begs the question – when will you be able to get your hands on it? We hope to have a new beta update prior to release that will debut all of these improvements and give you a close-to-final look at Torment. Keep an eye out, as we'll have more news about this coming.

News & Updates
Things have been busy with Torment beyond just development as well. First, we've got a brand new trailer for the game introducing the Ninth World, you can see that below.

Next, Colin McComb and Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie were in town recently and decided to answer some fan questions from social media. Both videos are now available for your enjoyment!

Additionally, Colin flew off to merry England recently to visit EGX 2016, where he gave a talk about Torment's narrative design. If you would like to see him go into a huge amount of depth about building the world of Torment and its characters, including walkthroughs of the creation of certain in-game quests and content, you can see it all here.

Next, we recently ran a fan art contest! We had many amazing entries, but one in particular caught our eye, and that was this excellent drawing of a nano by Anastasia Prokofeva (Sigurn), which we felt fit right in with Torment and Numenera. You can see her art above (and the rest of the contest entries here).

 

[FeelTheRads]

Sea is doing great work on that UI.

I see he is a Sonique fan.

 

[Bubbles]

To start, you might recall we previously talked about anoetic and occultic actions in earlier updates. Now, we've renamed them to your "move" action and "attack" action to make their uses clearer

For example, it wouldn't be an RPG without a cool level-up effect:

We've also made improvements to the fanfare when you get other rewards or status changes. Now, we have animated visual effects that play in key instances – most notably, when your Tidal Affinity changes (it is Tides of Numenera after all), but also for other things like XP gains.

 

[Kem0sabe]

That entire dev post reads like 'nunanuna the console Polish update'

Most of the added features list wasn't necessary for the pc and was mostly added to make the game more appealing to console players.

 

[Bubbles]

What the hell, I read right past this:

When a Crisis encounter starts, we now display a small panel on the side of the screen to signal your main objective and some optional possibilities. We won't tell you every route available to resolve an encounter, so there will still be things to discover and experiment with, but this will serve as a reminder in case you aren't sure what your goal is.

But... but... why?

 

[Jarpie]

What the hell, I read right past this:

When a Crisis encounter starts, we now display a small panel on the side of the screen to signal your main objective and some optional possibilities. We won't tell you every route available to resolve an encounter, so there will still be things to discover and experiment with, but this will serve as a reminder in case you aren't sure what your goal is.

But... but... why?

Because of the decline, like fucking always. Gotta get the dollars from the idiots too!

 

[Kem0sabe]

Dumbing down for peasants... And these inxile cucks are all happy and excited to announce this as if these features are the bestest thing ever.

With each passing game inxile will dumb the experience down until they end up with a corridor filled with cutscenes.

 

[Athelas]

Sounds like it's compensating for bad prop placement. Maybe they should make the turret purple and the energy glowing instead.

 

[FeelTheRads]

What the hell, I read right past this:

When a Crisis encounter starts, we now display a small panel on the side of the screen to signal your main objective and some optional possibilities. We won't tell you every route available to resolve an encounter, so there will still be things to discover and experiment with, but this will serve as a reminder in case you aren't sure what your goal is.

But... but... why?

I'm sure it had nothing to do with the console development.

No dumbing down here, no sir.

With each passing game inxile will dumb the experience down until they end up with a corridor filled with cutscenes.

Well, W2 was already a corridor. It was just filled with crap.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

That's a lot of casualisation to pack into one update

 

[FeelTheRads]

Can't wait for the "wait and see" dumbfucks to show up again.

Come on, tell us how that's not dumbing down and how we need more proof.

 

[Bubbles]

That's a lot of casualisation to pack into one update

Still a couple of months left until release. By the time they're done "polishing" the game, it's going to be a visual novel.

 

[Infinitron]

Can't wait for the "wait and see" dumbfucks to show up again.

Come on, tell us how that's not dumbing down and how we need more proof.

The part that Bubbles didn't quote provides some proof.

 

[Bubbles]

Can't wait for the "wait and see" dumbfucks to show up again.

Come on, tell us how that's not dumbing down and how we need more proof.

The part that Bubbles didn't quote provides some proof.

Yes, I can close the pop-up after it has opened. That doesn't change the fact that it's telling me how to beat the encounter.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Proof of dumbing down, you mean?

Yes, the tutorial can be disabled, and those crisis helpers can be closed with JUST ONE CLICK.
Wanna bet you need to click every one of them and by the time you do that you already read it?

You know what else can be disabled? The quest compass.