Torment: Tides of Numenera Released

[WDeranged]

Completed it a couple of days ago.  I thought it was a generally good game that veered close to moments of brilliance but never quite got there.  My biggest complaint is the combat.  I groaned every single time I saw the words 'Crisis Initiated', and quickly set about trying to find the shortest way out of it.

 

Combat in PS:T wasn't amazing but at least I felt a sense of progression and had some epic spells to make things interesting.

 

I'll wait for the inevitable rebalancing patches before I consider a replay...but I do at least want to replay it, which is more than I can say for most games.

[ShadySands]

Big new update out with a new companion added but I still think I'll wait until they are done adding/fixing before I do a second run

[the_dog_days]

Big new update out with a new companion added but I still think I'll wait until they are done adding/fixing before I do a second run

Even though I already bought it, I've been on hold for a first playthrough.

[kensu]

I think a lot of problems with the game are a result of the setting. A lot of why P:T was good was because of the Planescape setting, which despite its brief life was far more popular that similar attempts in D&D to create a planar campaign setting (see Spelljammer and the Immortals rules, which were nowhere as popular).  The whole thing was about belief and point of view; the one sentence summary of Planescape was: philosophers with clubs.

Numenera, on the other hand is: a world of trash-pickers. Among all the NPCs there is not a single philosopher, artist or scientist. Even the Changing God used technology he dug up and dusted off to do what he did.

And considering the game is concerned with the left-over bodies of the Changing God, it reinforces the trash motif. A more fitting name would have been Numenera:Refuse.

Yes, the game is all about trash, and that really isn't all the compelling. Perhaps if the designers had realized that, and built the game around the concept of wastefulness, I might be able to get behind it, but I don't think there was a single driving philosophy behind the whole thing, so it comes off as a bit arbitrary...