icemann on 28/2/2017 at 11:23
Just a note that the game is now out. Enjoy.
I'm currently playing Pillars of Eternity so it will be a while until I'm onto this one. Look forward to it though.
Thirith on 28/2/2017 at 11:27
Very much looking forward to this - but I will wait a few months before playing it. Such games that involve a lot of player choice and consequence are always prone to having tons of bugs.
icemann on 28/2/2017 at 11:28
Hell yeah. Be so many different variations to go through.
Starker on 28/2/2017 at 21:56
Oh boy, I've been waiting for this. This is my highest gamble on KS. Please be worth it.
Severian_Silk on 2/3/2017 at 14:20
I really, REALLY hated the tutorial, but the game gets so goddamn good when it starts properly. Very intriguing world and story, and the throwbacks to Planescape : Torment are nicely done, too. It's also probably the closest thing I'll ever get to a "Book of the New Sun: The Game" (I remember reading on reddit that they were influenced by it and took classes on writing from the author himself).
Sulphur on 6/3/2017 at 19:41
So I've played an hour or two of it or and I have nothing substantive to mention about its mechanics or plot, as the thing's a timesink made out of lots and lots of words. Some of these words are configured in ways that give context to the sights wrapped around them, and some of these words are dry loredumps masquerading as Deep Arcane Subtext, but it's definitely an intriguing setting, though at the same time the exploration required makes for a narrative not shot through with much in the way of immediacy.
What I can say is that its aesthetic is essentially 'Sci-fi/fantasy 90s Video Game'. It's uncanny. You remember that particular look pre-rendered graphics had in the mid 90s, all fuchsia and purple and cyan washes in powdery, dithered 256-colour SVGA? This game's aesthetic is like all of those games smashed together in a hi-def upscale. It's weird and uncanny and an unabashed throwback to an age that's so clearly etched in my memory that revisiting the reality of the era via DOSBox feels like paging through a faded photo album. This, though, is like doing an honest to goodness timewarp instead, which is both good for nostalgia, and bad for being able to clearly see how compositionally flat the opening maps are, with all those hard composite edges and simple lighting and oddly low-rent 3D models. I've seen better screenshots, so I imagine it gets easier on the eyes further on in. So far, it's a tentatively engaging if uneven experience. I hope there's more character to the, er, characters as it goes along.
Sulphur on 9/3/2017 at 19:28
Well, some more hours in, and it's essentially still interactive fiction + graphics. I don't mind that at all; hell, that's the kind of game I'd want to create if I could draw. The way the RPG stats tie into the reams of dialogue and flavour text is interesting, if flawed. Skill checks work in terms of 'effort' that you draw from a limited set of pools for Might, Speed, and Intellect you can replenish by taking a rest. It's a pretty weird ruleset: you can get a case of the dumbs in a conversation because you apparently brained too hard in the last few instances where you had to jaw at some random mooks, and you can only get your smarts back after you take a nap. Yes, this is really how it works.
It's not completely faithful to Monte Cook's Numenera rules, which if I have it right, makes it so that for each depleted pool you suffer penalties; and once all pools are depleted, you die. Torment brings an HP bar into the mix and removes depleted pool penalties. When combat happens, you draw on might and speed for attacks as damage modifiers per effort level. In theory, it's interesting; in practice, it's not exactly a scintillating mix of tactics and turn-based strategy, but it's unique enough in that you can search the area and speak to people while in enforced combat if you don't want to straight up biff them in the schnoz.
But anyway, the meat of the game is reading stuff, and a lot of it's imaginative if not particularly professional in its writing or deft in its tonal choices: too many adjectives, adverbs, lots of incidental detail that fails to strike much of a chord. It says something that I still want to keep playing and discovering more stuff to see and do despite that, so it's still a tentative thumbs up for me because the world is beguilingly bizarre.
And yet, I look around and I see the player backlash is incredible. This game reviewed really, (
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/torment-tides-of-numenera) really well with the critics, but it's currently sitting on 'Mixed' reviews on Steam. There's a lot to sift through to understand why, but it's apparently a combination of missed KS goals, criticism of the Numenera implementation, gripes about the lack of combat, gripes about the combat being bad, and gripes about the story being tosh because it doesn't really change based on choices you make. I don't get the last one especially - all Telltale games railroad you into a set outcome no matter what you choose, but those review fine. It's more than a bit odd, but then Steam user reviews aren't the greatest baseline for, (
http://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/339800/) well, (
store.steampowered.com/app/313740/) anything.
SubJeff on 10/3/2017 at 17:34
Quote Posted by Severian_Silk
the closest thing I'll ever get to a "Book of the New Sun: The Game" (I remember reading on reddit that they were influenced by it and took classes on writing from the author himself).
Ah, makes sense now.
I listened to the Crate and Crowbar bit on it and immediate thought it sounded like Book of The New Sun ripoff.
I am more interested to play it now.
Those books should be films. Cronenberg directing.
Starker on 13/3/2017 at 05:53
I played a few hours over the weekend and I have to say I'm liking it so far. It's not the second coming of PS:T, but it's interesting enough on its own right. The wonder is there, the PS:T vibe is there, sort of... but above all it's wordy and it's brainy -- everything I want from a PS:T successor. And as far as Wolfe is concerned, it might as well take place on Urth, which for someone familiar with the genre is both a blessing and a curse.
Now, if I could only convince some parallel universe me to write my thesis and/or go to work for me, so I would have the time to play video games...
Phatose on 14/3/2017 at 02:55
Finished it. It's not a bad game, but it is disappointing. They sold it based on Planescape: Torment, and at first it seems like it could be a worthy successor, but it never lives up to that potential.
Your companions are far shallower then in PS - to the extent that the entire lot of them combined is maybe equal to one of PS's companions. They just don't get all that much development.
The whole mere thing is pointless - they make a big deal out of how you're special and can change the past in these choose your own adventure minigames, but they never seem to change much of anything. People who 'die' in altered Meres are still around afterward, which rather makes the whole 'changing things' hard to swallow.
Combat is uninspiring, and really needed a way to massively speed up the animations, but it's just not very deep. My nano ended up with something like 3 spell equivalents at max level, which is less then how many first level spells a mage Nameless One could use.
It's not a terrible game or anything, and it is worth a play through - but it's not one of those games you're going to insist your friends play, or that create pages upon pages of discussion. But it was sold entirely based on it's similarity to Planescape, which did have that kind of impact - and so it's a disappointment.