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Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago

Haven't gotten too far in this game yet, but so far it definitely feels like the spiritual successor that it's supposed to be to the original Planescape: Torment.

Anyone else get this yet or play the original?

Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago
Haven't picked this up yet, will probably get it in a few months (backlog + kickstarted D:Original Sin 2). I didn't have a chance to play the original but read the novelization + everything in the wiki. Consider Vhailor and Dak'kon to be exceptional character designs.

Have heard good things about this, the ability to sidestep combat on most occasions (making this effectively a CYoA) seems interesting (and avoids Tyranny's bad combat issues).

Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago

Vhailor was about the only companion I didn't really care for in the original. I didn't even encounter him on my first playthrough since he's located in a weird area and sort of blends into the background.

Plus you sort of don't get him until near the last third of the game and by that time you're sort of set with the crew you've got. (Usually your last companion slot at this point is taken up either by Ignus or Nordom and I always preferred Ignus over Nordom or Vhailor)

Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago
That's fair, but his existence added the phrase 'Vhailor'd' to my vocabulary.

Vhailor'd - Where critical thought about your life's motives causes you to realize their hollowness and have an existential crisis.

Usage: You do realize if you ever thought about why you voted Brexit, you'd be Vhailor'd?

Wasn't he the hardest hitter when leveled right?

Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago

I've heard he was, but when I played with him a few times, he never seemed all that effective in battle. Usually got wounded easily and didn't seem to do that much more damage. You didn't really need to have a dedicated tank like character in the game anyway.

Usually The Nameless One and Dakkon were good enough to do the heavy lifting for melee combat with Annah and Morte backing you up.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

7 years ago

Well so far I’ve plunged part of the main city into perpetual darkness, released a dangerous Cthulhu like creature from its cage, sold a little girl into slavery to gain more control over my abilities and caused a group of fanatics to acknowledge me as their god.

Now this is a proper RPG experience. Totally immersive. yes

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Now that a remaster's on the way, I'll finally play the original

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

I still need to beat this new one. I think I'm about 2/3 the way done though. Still enjoying it so far.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Picked up Planescape Torment Remastered

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Have fun and enjoy the retro days before every RPG had to resemble a Harlequin romance novel.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
From before the time when they had to justify the lack of 'enough' male-male romances (because the female route had 'enough') and apologize for a badly written trans character (where they should have been apologizing for nearly every character in Andromeda being badly written/animated/made). I'm not sure even Harlequin faced those problems/madness/demographics.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
8 Hours down, finished Act 2. The game has matured fairly well, and barring the annoyance of handling runaway enemies, I can't fault it for much right now. The lore is rich, and the companions well crafted. Unlocked the 8th Circle of Zerthimon, Level 6 Fighter / Level 3 Thief / Level 4 Lawful Neutral Mage (will stay a mage for the rest of the game), off to find Pharod. 19 Int, 21 Wis, 13 Cha, 11 Con, 9 everything else.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
And complete after 40 hours. I can see why this got the enduring reputation it has, the game is magnificent and has aged particularly well (the QoL improvements help a lot in that matter). Favorite companion - probably FFG, favorite level - reclaiming Carst, favorite NPC - Fhjull-Forked-Tongue

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

So did you talk the final "boss" into submitting, beat the chicken soup out of him or take the third option?

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
All of the above (through reloads). Merging was my preferred ending.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Yeah, merging is the best since you get to resurrect all your followers to say goodbye and transport them to safety afterwards.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Yep, plus FFG resolves to find you. First end happened too fast for me (threatened-merged via the Immortal Blade), I was pleasantly surprised at how many different ways that final conversation could go down. Didn't even get a chance to hit The Transcendent One over the head with Belief-can-change-the-nature-of-a-man till my third reload

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

You can force the merging if you know your true name with the bronze sphere as well.

There was supposed to be another type of ending other than being sent to the Blood War or obliterating yourself from existence, and that was you manage to keep your immortality without The Transcendent One bothering you ever again and something about the multiverse being yours to explore and enjoy with no more torment. Something like that.

It was decided it sort of defeated the purpose of the whole story though and was probably too much of a happy ending.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Yep, did the true name merge as well. That alternate ending would have made TNO a gigantic Karma Houdini, rather jarring with the themes of the game. Plus I'm sure TNO already has had his happy travelling days in the past (the First Incarnation sounded like he had lived the vagabond life), the ending was time for the roosters to come home.

I don't know if the Plane war was a major point in the Planescape Lore, and though it did get reflected in the words of many people met across the story, I honestly felt like I didn't get a good feel of its magnitude in the game proper. Would have liked a quick chapter / glance at the eternal battlefields - they sounded epic, and all we see of them is the final cutscene.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Here's where I saw that ending mentioned. A lot of other stuff too. (Pgs 44-45 are the endings mentioned)

https://www.rpgwatch.com/files/Files/00-0208/Torment_Vision_Statement_1997.pdf

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Oh this is excellent, thanks for the link!

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Highlights:

In this game, every inch of the game world will be sculpted by an artist. It's going be unique, and it's going to make our competitors cry - Well, they did nail the world art

SPELLS THAT MAKE YOU PITY THE TARGET. “Fireball” can go hide in the fucking corner when you unleash your arsenal - Too true, the animations for the higher level arts were well thought out FMVs

Equip stuff that scares small children. - I love the clarity of this one

No more high-fantasy-ride-across-the-land-and-uphold-the-good-by-killing-the-evil-wizard-with-the-magic-sword bullshit. - lol, and true

Tons of Total Babes: This game will have lots of babes that make the player go “wow.” There will be fiendish babes, human babes, angelic babes, asian babes, and even undead babes. - It's hilarious this was a separate bullet point in the pitch list.

(Later bullet point) and more babes Babes: Think babes. Then think more babes. - Which is funny because the game didn't really come across as crass, or there being 'babes' raining from the heavens at any point of time. Both FFG's intentional chasteness and The Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts were hard subversions of the normal pandering tropes in any case. I suspect this entire line of thought was just to sell the concept to gullible publishers.

It's a spiky and jagged world… - too true, everything had spikes. Everything. Some of them weren't even gratuitous

It's interesting to see how strong common works of fiction were in inspiring/guiding this. Star Wars, LotR, Star Trek are referenced abundantly. I didn't like how Trias was discount Lucifer though (with a bonus sent him to heaven for apologies option). Still, Trias probably informed the design of Revan, who remains one of my favorite characters in a fictional setting, so some good did come out of him. TNO's magnetism which attracted characters was expanded in KoToR2 as the Exile's trait (though they explained that one very well)

Your items have personality. Some of them even talk to you. - I loved that axe that commented on your companions, but holy hell was it a guide-dang-it event to find (that, or you'd have to be nicking items of everyone you'd met till you got that unexpectedly)

Your actions in the game are the character creation process. - Too true, the game was the grandfather of Quality Based Narrative before that even had a name.

I love how irreverent the whole write-up was, and how thorough.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Yeah the Blood War was a pretty big deal in the Planescape setting, and it also ended up getting mentioned in other settings from time to time since the war tends to spill out into all sort of worlds. Became a staple in the 2nd and 3rd edition of D&D.

An example would be the Forgotten Realms setting. In fact part of what sets the gears in motion for the Icewind Dale game is the initial conflict going on is between a Tanarri and Baatezu stuck there and still marshaling their forces against one another.

Of course nobody really knows this at first and just know there are a bunch of organized monsters suddenly popping up.

Not sure if they still have the whole Blood War going on in the D&D stuff anymore I know in the 4th edition they got rid of it, but maybe they brought it back in the 5th edition.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Commended by mizal on 8/19/2021 8:06:35 AM

Okay so I finally had time to finish the last third of this game and got a few of the different endings.

It goes without saying that this RPG excelled in the story and the writing department though given that it was really trying to recapture the feel of Planescape: Torment, the results were hardly surprising in that regard.

At times it felt like a complete reboot since the while the story isn’t the same, there are more than a few concepts in it that are very similar. In some ways it’s a little better than PT since they created their own unique setting and told a story in it (Even if it was similar to the original) rather than telling a story in a pre-made setting that wasn't theirs.

The only real draw back to the unique setting is that they put in so much background lore in it to flesh it out as much as possible that sometimes you feel like you’re missing out on some of the game.

You’re not though, because there’s usually stuff that is just mentioned in passing and then it’s never visited again because well it isn’t the focus of THIS story. Basically they really liked a lot of background fluff, even more than PT since that was a pre-existing setting and while it wasn’t exactly mainstream, it probably had more than few players that knew some of the basic concepts of it so there wasn’t as much need to go into details on various things.

Plus it’s emphasized in the game that there are just a lot of mysteries that go unsolved in this universe by most anyway, so the player is no different in that regard. Still, there’s a lot of interesting stuff so you kind of start wondering about things that don’t get mentioned again.

I probably wasn't quite attached to the followers like I was in PT. They weren't bad by any means in this game and they obviously put a lot of thought into them but I sort of saw them all as useful tools as opposed to “OMG These guys are my best friends forever!”

Though to be fair, I often feel that way about most followers. They're usually just there for me to exploit their abilities, use as meat shields and/or fuck if I get really bored. Speaking of which, it was a nice change of pace to have a RPG that didn't waste valuable coding space with badly written romance shit.

Most quests have more than one way to finish them based on your various abilities. In general it seems like the intellect stat is going to help your character the most, but I managed to raise them all up fairly high where doing different approaches to things wasn’t going to be a problem.

They had the 3 traditional classes (Warrior, Wizard, Rogue) though they were called Glaive, Nano and Jack. Jack  was the most versatile (Obviously) since you don’t really need to fight all that much in the game if you focus on the “talky” abilities. (You can easily get by with the one follower glaive in the game) and you get the choice of two nano followers right from the beginning of the game (You can only travel with one since they don’t like each other though) and you can get by with them.

The exploration aspect isn’t something you could compare to say a Bethesda game, but all the main locations are interesting enough and filled with a lot. It’s basically on par with PT in that regard. The first bit takes place in one big strange city and then later you travel to a couple of other places.

All of that was fine, though it played out in a linear fashion. Basically you really had to make sure you did everything you were going to do in a particular “hub” because you weren't coming back.

That was true for even the first city you start in, and I sort of thought I might be coming back there. I read that initially they sort of intended for you to come back to the first city which would have changed based on what you did the first time you were there, but there wasn't any time I guess. Sort of was disappointed you didn't get to return, but it didn't matter too much.

Combat is turn based. Everyone got 2 actions though I wasn't really fond of how it was set up since you never felt like you could do enough. For example, you could use both of those actions to move farther than you normally could, but you couldn't say attack twice in a row.

Being able to use your actions to attack twice (or use an ability/item) would have come in a lot more handy once you were already up close to the enemy (or standing back and just shooting at them with a laser gun)

It wasn't horrible, but it obviously was the weakest aspect of the game, but then of course you could pretty much avoid combat completely for the most part.

Finally the whole “choice and consequences” aspect. Well it pretty much excelled in that. More than I thought it was going to actually.

There were several things you could do in the game from major to seemingly insignificant that will get mentioned in the ending. All the followers get different endings as well. (Based on how you interacted with them, did their personal goals, etc)

It’s also not a case where you’re able to reload before the last encounter and just pick a different choice to eventually get all the different endings. I mean you can still do that to a certain degree, but as I said a lot of the smaller things you did all the way back in the first part of the game get mentioned too, so in order to get all the different outcomes, you’d really have to play through it again a few times.

If I was going to compare it another game, I’d say it rivaled Fallout 2, Arcanum or some of the Geneforge games with all the different ending combos. Actually, it might have had even more.

There was one major ending I did where some of the minor outcomes didn't make as much sense given the wide repercussions, but that was a minor flaw in what was otherwise being spoiled for choice.

Anyway I wouldn't mind seeing another RPG in this setting, though I doubt if that'll happen. Still, it was one of the better RPGs I've played in awhile.

I liked it a lot.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Final playtime?

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Final save I did before the last encounter said I played for 55 hours 23 minutes.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
Hmm, that's really substantial. I logged 40 for PS:T:EE. Still, while it sounds excellent, I doubt I'll be going for it for another year or so.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago

Yeah, I think I still missed a couple areas to explore too. Not major ones just little extra places in the game.

Torment: Tides of Numenera

6 years ago
I'd recommend you play Knights of the old Republic 1 and 2 if you haven't yet. KotoR 1 is on mobile now and save files don't carry forward, so no issues there. You'll want to play 2 on a PC for the restoration patch, but thankfully being a 10 year old game, I'm certain whatever toaster you have can run it. Both games are around 40 hours apiece, and while part one is the complete experience as intended by the designers, part two transcends the genre after it's restored to its intended design via The Sith Lords Restoration fan-patch (the game goes from an 8 to a 9.5, passing familiarity with the Star Wars original trilogy is a bonus). Chris Avellone improved his stories from PS:T in a major way in KotoR2, and I'd strongly recommend you check it out.