Torment: Tides of Numenera

[daven]

So I finally bought the game after all these years since it was the cheapest i've ever seen it on GOG recently. Only in the first room and I quite like the character model, i'd only heard bad things about it and when I saw screens of the game it looked a bit naff, but I like how there's some kind of momentum to start running and stopping. Unlike POE where they just stop and start instantly into a run animation. I like how close you can zoom it, I gues they did that since Planescape was a lot more zoomed in than BG and that.

I'm not expecting much, I've actually skimmed a lot of the text already since it just throws so much at you straight away. Let's see how I get on with it.

What about your thoughts? Nobody seems to mention it much on here.

[Sarex]

 

[Skarpen]

Finished it once before the big patch with extra companion so maybe I will one day play it again. Overall not the most memorable game. 

[bugarup]

The game has a pretty cool setting ruined by prose that couldn't be purpler if it was a "Saints Row" character dressed for respect and singing "Start wearing purple". Also, the protagonist is a personality vacuum who can only pester other characters with "Tell me about X" endless lists. Combat was so rare I didn't even bother to understand it beyond "It sucks". 

[ShadySands]

I barely remember anything about the game other than it had overwhelming amounts of not that interesting text to sift through and the combat was pretty not good. Thankfully you could skip most of the combat but I think I gave it like a 6 or 6.5/10. IIRC it had some interesting ideas just poorly executed.

[melkathi]

I never got out of the first city. That zone had the problem that it seemed like random things thrown together. It gave no image of the location I was. And that hurt the immersion too much to go on.

[Wormerine]

Meh. The overall "story" didn't grab me, though it had potential. The only parts that annoyed me, were pretty obvious attempts at recreating "Tormement" - the game has it's "What-can-change-the-nature-of-the-man" moment, which falls so very very short. 

I felt the game got better once you reach the flesh city thing. Overall, it's full of irrelevant wall of text, which while sometimes entertaining don't add up to a cohesive whole. 

[Hawke64]

I quite liked it (3 playthroughs). Combat encounters were rare, but meaningful and diverse. While there were few option for visual customization of the avatar (only gender and equipment), there were many (9?) combinations of classes and skills. Dialogue option allowed a lot of RP and the alignment system was somehow better than the classic D&D (though, alignment systems in general don't work well in games, telling every NPC you meet your motivation is weird).

The only negative aspect I can recall is skill checks in dialogues - if I have 10% to succeed, I will succeed.

[majestic]

The game gave me the strangest dreams I ever had. Reading all them overwritten descriptions about how weird the world is before going to bed left their mark.

For that alone it's probably a 10/10, but that might not work for anyone else.

[kanisatha]

I'm also in the 'liked it' group. The setting was very interesting and I liked the lore and the characters and the story even though I can agree the written material was often pedantic. Yes combat was rare, but for me as someone who hates TB combat that was a HUGE blessing. I LOVED that you can work around almost every single combat encounter, including even the final boss encounter, and feel that's how it ought to be in every cRPG. I think it suffered in people's minds for two main reasons: (1) people's constant nostalgia-goggles comparisons to Ps:T (and why I believe no developer should ever claim their game is a 'successor' of any kind to some beloved old game), and (2) a way-too-small development budget.

[ShadySands]

I also still need to play the original game but I've never been able to get past the first 15 minutes of the game without losing interest

[Lexx]

The game is the perfect example that players didn't want "lots of text" .... they just wanted good text. I remember very well how we all back in the days were super hyped for "lots of text", because the original Planescape had "lots of text" as well. At least in the Fallout modding community, everyone wanted to make the next Planescape... and of course that meant lots of text (the mods all failed btw).

It took me till Numenera to learn that it's really about the quality. I mean, Fallout 1 didn't have that much text either, but it feels great and to the point. Numenera however .... it's so convoluted and ugh. There's so much crap that could be cut and nothing of value would be lost. All these super detailed descriptive texts, etc... just pointless and annoying. After a couple dialogs you will automatically start skimming the text and then just outright skip the lines that aren't marked as essential. Pillars of Eternity did exactly the same mistake, PoE2 made it better... looks like Obsidian learned from it.

 

Other than that, I actually really like the Numenera world and the ideas behind it.

[Orogun01]

After 2 playthroughs I can recommend the game; full disclosure I played Nano, I think that it is probably the best class. The game is good, I like the edge/skills system way more than I like random rolls for skills. Quite the unique story and setting, characters as well. It is very much the spiritual successor of PS:T.

Now if only we could get a spiritual successor for Arcanum I could die a happy man.

[kanisatha]

17 hours ago, Lexx said:

There's so much crap that could be cut and nothing of value would be lost. All these super detailed descriptive texts, etc... just pointless and annoying.

And the worst part is that those resources spent putting in this crap, as you appropriately call it, could have been spent on other parts of the game that would've made the game so much better. So much unrealized potential in that game. But because it performed so badly we are not very likely to see a second stab at it, which is so very sad.

[kanisatha]

12 hours ago, Orogun01 said:

I like the edge/skills system way more than I like random rolls for skills.

Yes this was a major highlight of the game for me too. And I completely agree that it is so much superior to random dice rolls.

[Chilloutman]

I think mine drawback of setting was... it was all over the place. Sigil was weird but still quite.. I dont know i just felt like Numenera was like for kids when lazy parent dont know what more weird his good night tale can be because he already gone through too many

[Orogun01]

2 hours ago, Chilloutman said:

I think mine drawback of setting was... it was all over the place. Sigil was weird but still quite.. I dont know i just felt like Numenera was like for kids when lazy parent dont know what more weird his good night tale can be because he already gone through too many

My good night tale is Moby ****. It's about young nubile sailor that's in a ship full of older more experienced "seamen" and they all are chasing for a "giant sperm whale" that's named "Moby ****".
Like, people praise this book for his symbolism but I think it's a bit too on the nose.

[algroth]

I found it to be quite a pleasant surprise myself. I went into it hearing about how it didn't stand up to Torment and how it fell off after a decent first half after Sagus Cliffs, yet my experience was actually the opposite. I thought the Sagus Cliffs section was alright but it was following it that the game really picked up steam, and whereas I expected to dislike the Bloom based on initial art and concept, I found myself quite enthralled with it. I went with middling expectations and they were easily surpassed.

I played the game a while ago so I cannot recall the specifics right now with too much detail, but some general impressions are as follows: contrary to the rest here, I was expecting the game to be *very* flowery with its text, essentially trying to one-up Torment's writing and using word-count as a bar and the likes... And I was glad to find it wasn't really the case. I thought the text in Pillars, Torment, Tyranny or Disco Elysium was much more laboured for instance, and there were also some touches to facilitate comprehension that I quite appreciated, such as making a point to always offer a more succinct and straight-forward summary of what was being told upon asking for clarification; but at the same time these games are more effective at bridging the conflict and backdrop early on than Numenera is, thus making the exposition feel a lot less superfluous by extension. To exemplify: in Pillars you're introduced to the Saint's War and the meaning it has to the present day the moment you step into Gilded Vale and see the corpses hanging on the tree - as a player you are offered an immediate hook relating to a very current conflict, you're prompted to ask yourself why they're being hanged and why are you asked to move on, and the lore regarding the War, the suspicions that those being hanged aided Waidwen, the fears regarding Waiden's Legacy and so on is therefore justified as backdrop to that conflict; in Numenera you arrive to a massive town square and find this ancient soldier caught in time whose only real purpose is to stand around and explain why he's there and what happened hundreds of years ago - it's not until much later that you really connect the Eternal War to the Changing God and the Castoffs and start understanding its purpose or importance in the story. A lot of stuff in Sagus Cliffs is relevant but is introduced as flavour text and little else, making the game feel rather scattershot and indulgent early on. It's through the bottleneck at the mid point of the game that things really start falling into place and the focus feels that much clearer, and where the very Blade Runner-esque existential and humanist themes start to solidify, and from that point on I was very taken by it.

Other small tangential bits... I love the area design and music in this, quite like the setting, the characters are rather memorable and interesting, the in-dialogue mechanics are very good and probably a better attempt at this sort of roll-based system than Disco Elysium's... But the turn-based mechanics and encounter design is a very mixed bag, which can at times be quite creative (like the heist sequence somewhere in the latter half) and at others plain horrible (most instances of actual combat). You might say it's not unlike Torment in that regard, but I'd argue that Torment's combat is easier to forgive because it's never really hard or prolongued enough to really sour the experience, whereas Numenera's can frequently be frustrating and excessively dilated through the sheer number of enemies and figures given individual turns.

Edited April 13, 2020 by algroth

[algroth]

On 4/7/2020 at 8:45 PM, Wormerine said:

Meh. The overall "story" didn't grab me, though it had potential. The only parts that annoyed me, were pretty obvious attempts at recreating "Tormement" - the game has it's "What-can-change-the-nature-of-the-man" moment, which falls so very very short.

Oh, that's another point: the game doesn't do any favours to itself citing and recycling Torment in several instances. I don't recall all of them but I do remember some cases acting as very blatant references to the original game. It doesn't help things because to me Numenera works better as its own individual thing opposite to a spiritual successor, and yet it also never truly wants to leave its antecessor's shadow.

Edited April 14, 2020 by algroth

[Orogun01]

2 hours ago, algroth said:

Oh, that's another point: the game doesn't do any favours to itself citing and recycling Torment in several instances. I don't recall all of them but I do remember some cases acting as very blatant references to the original game. It doesn't help out because it works better as its own individual thing opposite to a spiritual successor as such, but also never truly wants to leave the its antecessor's shadow.

Just because O was in both games it means nothing, get the Easter egg reference and enjoy it.

[algroth]

2 minutes ago, Orogun01 said:

Just because O was in both games it means nothing, get the Easter egg reference and enjoy it.

O, the Bronze Sphere and a few other things too. I recall there being more egregious references than either, however, but already these were a bit jarring. I'd have to replay it to properly recall the events or situations that left that impression on me, however.

[joels344]

I played about 10 hours of the game sometime last year, but stopped it for no reason other than just getting busy with life. I'll hopefully return to it soon, because it seemed quite interesting and beautifully designed. 

[Lexx]

To be honest, one big part of why I lost interest in the game was due to the early access / beta phase. When I played the beta - despite the mentioned issues with the text from above - I really enjoyed it. And when I got this small ball with a hamster in it, THAT KEEPS FLOATING AROUND ME, I totally lost it.

So then the beta chapter ended and I had to stop playing. Then months later when the final version was released, I tried to pick it up again, but now suddenly the flow was gone. I had to force myself to keep going more than anything. Well, and then just as above, out of the blue I stopped booting up the game and lost even more motivation to continue with it.

 

tl;dr - the early access / beta killed the game for me otherwise I very likely would have played through it fully. This was when I realized, that I will NOT do these kind of beta shenanigans ever again. It just sucks reaching the end while you really want to keep playing.