Torment: Tides of Numenera

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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

It's really not as bad as all that. Suppress Affliction has average cast time and is reactive but Prayer Against X spells are fast and preemptive. The former can be useful when you're going into fights blind and the latter can trivialize encounters once you've seen what kind of spells and attack riders various critter types are packing. I mean, obviously priests aren't mandatory--after all, the game can be soloed, ffs--but there are some really strong "wind up and go" auto attack heavy party comps out there that can reliably math hammer everything to death as long as they're not blind and covered with bees and Priests mesh well with such parties. I would say that Priests are weaker now than they have ever been in previous patches, but that's only because way more enemies are immune to Prone than in the past. Also, Durance suffers from a mildly shitty build--high Resolve is cute and all but on a class with a bunch of Average or slower cast times you don't really want to be treating Dexterity as an afterthought.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

That feeling when your game is so garbage, that someone creates a thread about it, and in less than a page, it's already about how to optimize a different shitty game that is still less shitty than your game.
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Post by Longes »

Kaelik wrote:That feeling when your game is so garbage, that someone creates a thread about it, and in less than a page, it's already about how to optimize a different shitty game that is still less shitty than your game.
Numenera has like three mandatory combat sequences, all of which are super easy. So there's basically no point in discussing optimization. You pick Intellect - you are the winner. And if you picked Perception, Scan Thoughts, and Lores, then you are the super winner who doesn't have to replay the game to see all of the content.

Out of companions I really liked Erritis. Erritis was written by Chris Avellone and in Avellone's usual style is super meta.
Rhin (written by Pat Rothfuss) was okay but didn't have much to say, Aligern was neat, Callistege was too suspicious and untrustworthy for my taste, and Tybir is Han Solo. Matkina was great in combat and didn't annoy me.
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Post by Voss »

Longes wrote: Out of companions I really liked Erritis. Erritis was written by Chris Avellone and in Avellone's usual style is super meta.
You're being way too kind. Avellone's style is 'I took a freshman philosophy course back in college, so everything I write is preposterous, pretentious navel gazing related to concepts I only think I understand.'
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

The big thing with pausing in PoE is that the auto enemy pause does not actually pause when combat begins, so you get amusing results where you unpause to have people start casting and the computer gets the jump on you.

Probably going to finally finish PoE this weekend and start Torment, but from the bit I played I got the impression the setting was weird for the sake of weird (and because Planescape did it).
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Post by Hadanelith »

Numenera is weird very much for the sake of weird. Some of that weird is interesting, much of it is just there, and some of it just plain irritatingly pointless.
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Post by Voss »

Hadanelith wrote:Numenera is weird very much for the sake of weird. Some of that weird is interesting, much of it is just there, and some of it just plain irritatingly pointless.
It's a perennial problem for Monte. Arcana Evolved (and the revised version) suffered immensely from the same thing. And d20 World of Darkness really suffered from it.

Lots of back-of-the-napkin wacky ideas, but he never actually does anything with them. They just exist, and you're better off ignoring them, while hunting for tiny rules pieces that are actually positive refinements to 3.0 D&D. (In general, this is also not worth the effort involved).

Combat rites in AE are a great example. It was Vancian casting for martials, but they were so terribly bad with tiny bonuses to bullshit you don't care about that nothing ever justifies their existence, let alone tying them to an even shittier chassis than the fighter.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Well, restarted the game and died in the endless gate with no saves.

Time to restart.

Is there any reason to NOT be a nano?
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Post by Longes »

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Well, restarted the game and died in the endless gate with no saves.

Time to restart.

Is there any reason to NOT be a nano?
Why were you playing without saves?

A weak case can be made for being an intelligence-focused Jack, but no, not really.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

I tend to play semi-Ironman, so...
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

So, resurrecting this topic, but the Steam reviews took a massive hit over this week.

Lots of disappointed gamers...
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Post by Longes »

Personally, I blame the Kickstarter hype more than anything. Torment is an okay game by itself. It's a very solid 6/10 RPG, maybe even 7. But the kickstarter was promising Planescape: Torment 2: Numenera Boogaloo: Reckoning, and it's been delayed for two years, so people hyped themselves up for a dream game. Which it absolutely isn't.

The issue is further complicated by the cut stretch goals, the fact which was announced only a week before the release and pissed off some people, cut Italian voice-over, which was announced a month before the release and pissed off a lot of Italians, and almost complete lack of PR. There is still not one major youtuber doing a let's play of Torment. There was virtually no advertising anywhere. I don't think Torment even got a Steam front page banner.
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Post by Starmaker »

I blame Numenera. The setting is a literal dumpster fire.

Personal anecdote:
I'd backed the game for $500 when the kickstarter went live because I'd confused it with Ptolus, then noped the fuck out after realizing what it actually was and they posted their stupid update on the tides.

Some time before, I had a row with a game writer, a fan of the original Torment. He accused me of Nazism, I told him to gtfo. He then proceeded to fish for compliments/affirmation on the interwebs responding to praise of his game with things like "there's a person who thinks my game is the bestest ever, but she's an evil naughty nazi so I don't know what to even thiiiink, how can i ever accept praaaaise, i'm so traumatiiiized" (paraphrased).

In 2016, this guy emails me out of the blue, says he's been invited to write for ToN and asks me to playtest it. I write back congrats and thank you but nope.

One, I'd be one amateur "alpha tester" guinea pig / unpaid advertiser among probably thousands so my input won't count for shit (see Pathfinder). I didn't even back the game, what does one playtester matter?

Two, I don't have a PC capable of running it well enough to really test for either technical bugs or plot logic, and if there's any way to get promoted to "valuable playtester we should listen to", it's by the (disproportionately huge) amount of problems found (like it happened with his game).

Finally, I just don't think the game is going to be good because there's nothing to work with. PS:T was able to cherrypick good bits of the multi-author effort of Planescape, which was built on D&D, which was in turn lifted from decades of fantasy and sci-fi and thousands of years of mythology, all selected and compiled (however badly) on the basis of awesomeness and eventually crystallized into something playable. Numenera is pretentious literary shovelware without substance, it wasn't written with fun in mind, it's not playable and it's not going to work. He threw a hissyfit yet again -- how dare I, a thankless [EDITED], scorn his noble savior efforts to lift me from my miserable and hopeless third world white trash existence into a once-in-a-lifetime communion with TRUE ART.

Fast forward to 2017, he's palling around with actual Nazis (maybe "The Bell Curve is factually true but not politically correct so we don't acknowledge it" should've been advance warning) and saying exactly the same things.
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Post by Longes »

The tides aren't even a part of the tabletop Numenera. But what's even weirder to me is just how little the tides matter in the game. Like, it's built up as this huge important thing and the castoffs' Tidal Surge should in theory be important. But there are very few places where you can use the Tidal Surge, and the only tide that matters is Blue/Silver combo because it unlocks the Changing God ending.

"What does one life matter?" is another strange one. For the supposed theme of the game it really doesn't show up much. Compare it to Pillars of Eternity for example. PoE declares its theme as "Is it better to know the horrible truth or live a comforting lie?" and sticks to it. From small things, like a sidequest about getting a placebo medicine to a pregnant woman or telling her that survival of her baby is based on luck, to big things, like the overarching plot and gods. Torment is nothing like that.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

I only got to Act 2? (after you get off the airship) before not caring, and I'm legitimately not sure what the fuck the tides even are. I see they're kinda like a reputation system, and that you can apparently get a later-game ability to force people to do things with them...but I legitimately have no idea where the hell you get training to do that and now I don't actually care.

I will agree that Numenera is a bizarro world of not making sense and me not caring, which is part of the reason I'm so dissociated with the setting. (it also doesn't hurt that there's time-fuckery, which is a major turn-off to me in fiction).

There is definitely a lot of "we are doing this because PS:T did it first" vibes I'm getting from the game, and that really doesn't impress me either.
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Post by Longes »

You can get Tidal Surge in Act 1 by doing the quest that gets you Rhin, and you can upgrade it in Act 4 (Bloom). But there are so few places where you can use the Tidal Surge that it seriously doesn't matter. And there's no consistency for what it does. Sometimes it's mind control, sometimes it's an attack, and in one place you use it to fuse a ring together.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

Numenera more of an aesthetic than a Setting. It's something You make really neat art for but not really do anything in.

When everything is a random magic item maybe, that can do whatever, whenever the end result is a lack of consistency and kinda dull.
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Post by Blicero »

I skimmed through the Numenera book. I liked how holding on to too many magic items gave them a chance to explode or malfunction or something. That seemed like an okay, flavorful incentive to use and not hoard one-shot items. Is that in the Torment game?
Shrieking Banshee wrote:Numenera more of an aesthetic than a Setting. It's something You make really neat art for but not really do anything in.
The impression I got was that you do "weird Science"-flavored OD&D/BX-style dungeoncrawls. That seems like a fairly clear and not inherently terrible directive.
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Post by Kaelik »

Blicero wrote:I skimmed through the Numenera book. I liked how holding on to too many magic items gave them a chance to explode or malfunction or something. That seemed like an okay, flavorful incentive to use and not hoard one-shot items. Is that in the Torment game?
Yeah it is. It's one of the few things that I think is actually a good idea.
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Post by Longes »

However, it still didn't make me use the cyphers. Most are combat oriented and I've had a grand total of three fights in the entire game.
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Kaelik
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Post by Kaelik »

Longes wrote:However, it still didn't make me use the cyphers. Most are combat oriented and I've had a grand total of three fights in the entire game.
Just conceptually, it's a viable way to structure items in some games of some kinds.

I gave up on playing the game literally right before walking out of the starting room. :D
DSMatticus wrote:Kaelik gonna kaelik. Whatcha gonna do?
The U.S. isn't a democracy and if you think it is, you are a rube.

That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.
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Post by Shrieking Banshee »

Blicero wrote:I skimmed through the Numenera book. I liked how holding on to too many magic items gave them a chance to explode or malfunction or something. That seemed like an okay, flavorful incentive to use and not hoard one-shot items. Is that in the Torment game?
I find it stupid and nonsensical. Because the Numanera doesn't have any history or anything behind it, your just getting stuff that fuctions or doesn't for no reason. Its patronizing.
Blicero wrote:The impression I got was that you do "weird Science"-flavored OD&D/BX-style dungeoncrawls. That seems like a fairly clear and not inherently terrible directive.
Right but even science fiction stuff interacts better with suspension of disbelief better.
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Post by Voss »

In a spate of irony (or slightly ill-timed planning to make a buck off the failure of a poor copy)*, Beamdog has announced the Planescape Torment enhanced edition:

https://www.beamdog.com/planescape_faq#15

basically it is the original plus a UI mod. Which in consideration is probably good. Beamdog's writing is kind of shit and excessively railroady. ('I'll send assassins to kill you so you'll meet with me!' 'Team up with me to defeat a great evil while ignoring the great evil that I'm doing in the process, but alas you will never come to perfect agreement with my plans so we must be opposed!' 'Alas that you could not join with me because I decided you wouldn't, so join with me, or not, to fight this end boss!')
Also they were very bad at balanced (or coherent) encounter design, especially for the areas where you couldn't have the NPCs you wanted.


On the one hand, it's nice to have a functional version for modern systems that doesn't require the same level of chicanery to run (in a slightly unstable fashion).

On the other hand, I'm not sure I care. The navel-gazing freshman philosophy 101 crib notes aren't exactly as interesting as they were when I was a teen.


*well, maybe not so ill timed. It was announced last week, and comes out next week in a blaze of next to no publicity at all. Weird.
Last edited by Voss on Wed Apr 05, 2017 10:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by RelentlessImp »

So I finally tried this out. Got it installed, loaded it up...

... and died during chargen. I thought this was something that was only supposed to fucking happen and be joked about in Traveller. Okay, so, second go, I get through chargen, and it's just a fucking tutorial for walking around and interacting with shit. You know, if you want to do an interactive chargen, Morrowind and Oblivion had you answering questions and then it set you up with a class that you could change. That works because it doesn't waste our time with nebulous bullshit. Sure, you can change literally everything later, but why not just start us off with the changes? Your writing is mediocre but worse it's goddamned boring.

What doesn't work specifically is asking us to choose between "observant", "clever", and "intelligent with a furrowed brow". Holy shit I have a lot of problems with this game, and it comes down to the same shit I said about Pillars of Eternity - complexity through fucking obscurity. What actual goddamned information are you trying to get across, assholes? Holy shit.

So I get to the first real combat encounter and zzzzzzzzzzzz. Yeah, no, uninstalled, fuck off. Your combat system is terrible, the UI is a garbage fire, and actually getting anything done in the first TEN MINUTES of your FUCKING GAME is an exercise in futility because you PROGRAMMED IT to delay your ability to input actions because you had to move the camera 3 centimeters to highlight a thing and HOLD ON IT for five FUCKING SECONDS before letting the players actually interact. And then there's the FUCKING INTERJECTIONS every couple of minutes further limiting your ability to actually, you know, play the fucking game.

Jesus christo this game actually pissed me off in the first ten minutes that I just straight up Alt-F4'd out and uninstalled it. What a dumpster fire.

PS: A 'pool system' is great in a game like Sorcery or that turn-based tabletop strategy game about being furries trying to kill a bad furry. It's not a good idea in a game involving combat where you're expected to make actions possibly dozens of times.
Last edited by RelentlessImp on Thu May 25, 2017 9:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ikeren »

I also got less than an hour in before I stopped caring, and I have a broken arm and my caring factor should be high instead of low. Instead I just want to play more dominions.
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