I know what a beta tester is. If people pay for a beta test then it is your own fault, if you now dismiss the beta then it is your problem. But i judge a game once it´s completed! Pretty easy right ? no seems not today....
anyway, I didn't play MAss effect, but Dragon age was all but memorable... I mean, I've finished it 4-5 times, but then I deleted it for good and gifted it to a friend.
While immortal stuff like bg2 and torment gets replayed once every three months. And everytime I still discover new stuff. Talk about differences...
...Are you serious? My entire point was that the "note" dialogue options in Dragon Age 2 or the Mass Effect franchise translate into fully-voiced dialogues that are equivalent to the written text of Torment. When you pick "I'm hungry" in the Dragon Age screenshot, Hawke doesn't simply say "I'm hungry." Showing a side-by-side screenshot comparison is meaningless taken out of the context of full voiced dialogue.
Pillars of Eternity is fully funded so why the subtle dismiss of PoE. ?
Because they have no idea on how to make a game. They thought and claimed it would be amazing, and they even released a beta to augment the hype. Because let's be sincere, why would you be releasing a beta, if not for the users to enjoy?
And the beta turned complete crap
Edit: we also know no detail about the story... if they had something in their hands they would at least release something. Instead, complete darkness
There's actually been several interviews about the lore of the game and the bakcstories and personalities of the characters. It might help to read them.
OMG just stop it already. Your derail has absolutely nothing to do with this thread @Schneidend. Could @Dee or some other moderator please help keep this thread on topic.
Yes, but comparing dragon age' dialogues to torment. You can't be serious. Let's be sincere.
I was absolutely sincere. I find Torment to be woefully overrated and its continued cult fandom to be largely based on pretense and nostalgia. I don't have figures on hand, but I'd be willing to bet that Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2 have more words devoted to dialogue in their respective scripts than Torment. The Old Republic, certainly, has many more.
OMG just stop it already. Your derail has absolutely nothing to do with this thread @Schneidend. Could @Dee or some other moderator please help keep this thread on topic.
It has everything to do with the thread. The thread is about Torment: Tides of Numenera, and this trailer in particular, and I'm comparing games, principally this one and Dragon Age, with similar levels of dialogue, that receive very different criticism from hardcore RPG players. You not agreeing with me doesn't make it any less on topic.
I would say that beta testing means that features are already polished and you are searching for bugs, more than actively tweaking the game, but maybe I'm confusing beta for alpha...
the only difference between beta and alpha is that the alpha version is only distrubuted among the developers, while the beta might even be an open beta or a private one, but it's already out of it's alpha phase.
This is the last warning before the thread is closed. The topic is Torment: Tides of Numenaria. Keep this Thread on topic and civil, please.
If you wish to discuss Pilars of Eternity there's a thread for that already. If you wish to debate what is defined as beta software nowadays, feel free to open a new thread.
I'm anxious to see which portrait format Torment will use. From the trailer it appears to be 256x256-ish like in Wasteland 2, only round. Hopefully custom portraits don't require to be round as well. 'Cause cropping them like that would be a royal pain in the neck.
I would say that beta testing means that features are already polished and you are searching for bugs, more than actively tweaking the game, but maybe I'm confusing beta for alpha...
It depends entirely upon the developer. In the Destiny beta, the random event missions where you have to kill an enemy Ultra (mini-boss, basically) before he can reach a series of checkpoints was a lot easier, but in the retail version the event became a lot more difficult with the Ultra regaining health and shields at insane rates or sometimes even instantly.
To be clear, here, my example was meant to show that games get tweaked, and not just bug fixed, during the beta phase all the time.
Having watched the trailer once more at this weekend, I gotta say I'm so excited. I paused the trailer every time the new dialog appeared, to read it through and to get all the small details.
I have to say I like the art-style very much. The areas look stunning. I've fallen in love with Matkina already. Very untypical picture, yet stylish and somehow intriguing. And her cloak...
And music! Have you heard that? That's beautiful! The composer is Mark Morgan, who has created soundtracks for Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Fallout 2 among others.
And then I went to their site and found these mind-blowing concept art pictures:
I would like to live at Sagus Cliffs
I can't even understand now how I didn't pay attention to this project before. It looks so promising.
One thing that did bother me about the new trailer for TToN is the full voice acting. I really liked how in Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape Torment only certain lines had voice acting, so that made those lines more memorable. Full voice acting won't ruin the game; I just prefer partial voice acting.
Chris Avellone, the creative director in Obsidian Entertainment, has recently given an interview to the Scripts & Scribes that has 2 questions regarding Torment: Tides of Numenera.
Question: Torment: Tides of Numenera is scheduled for release in late 2015 and is a “spiritual successor” to the hit 1999 video game PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, which you also designed. How will Tides of Numenera draw from its predecessor and in what ways will it be unique?
Chris Avellone: It draws a number of things – the game makes the examination of themes through character interaction and narrative one of its pillars (which is rare in a title), there is a cast of companions with at least the same level of depth and complexity as the original, and we have a deep, no-holds-barred story like the original that you can sink your hands into. The development team also consists of a number of the key people from the original – Creative Lead Colin McComb, and programmer Adam Heine as the Lead Designer (Adam writes better than me, btw, so he basically does everything better than me), and Aaron Meyers, who did environment art for the original Torment.
In addition, developers from Obsidian who developed Mask of the Betrayer (commonly held as a fantasy RPG with the same depth as Torment) are present on the team as well: Tony Evans, George Ziets, and Kevin Saunders and more. They understand the heart of the license, and they know how to make it even better. That said, Torment: Tides of Numenera differs in significant ways – combat is much improved, there is a non-judgmental alignment and development system (called “the Tides,” colored variations of psychic physics the player can mold and be molded by) and the context of the world, while sharing some hallmarks with Planescape in terms of richness, is notably different in that it takes place in the Numenera pen-and-paper game world, a world that’s built on the technological wreckage of nine worlds. This mess of technological ruin forms the principal of magic, exploration and areas in the game… with the guiding premise being that technology, when it reaches certain heights, becomes indistinguishable from magic.
Question: Along the same lines, what can you reveal about the story, characters and world of Torment: Tides of Numenera in terms of its development into other ancillary outlets – such as films/TV, novels and/or comic books?
Chris Avellone: Torment: Tides of Numenera got much of its lore start by having five of the designers each writing a novella set in the world of Numenera. These lore pieces factor into the game’s area design, in some respects acting as narrative lore pieces for designers to build on in when doing level design. The first area, the Bloom, has ample evidence of this – it draws from one of the first Torment: TON novellas by Mur Lafferty for much of its foundation, which allows readers to see key insights that other players may be unaware of.
In terms of other outlets, Numenera itself is already a setting that was developed for pen-and-paper games by Monte Cook, and it was leveraged for the Torment: TON game much in the same way the original Torment game leveraged Dungeons and Dragons’ Planescape license. So in essence, both iterations of Torment were born from pen-and-paper gaming… from there, prose works are part of that process, and there has been discussion concerning other media aspects (graphic novels, for example). Time will tell, but for now, the focus is on making a great title.
Because the Pillars of Eternity thread here is being updated everytime any news is out, I think it's a good idea to develpp this thread in a similar way.
Let me start
One of the latest news regarding Torment: Tides of Numenera is that there will be NO XP after kills in this game, just as it's in Pillars of Eternity - but with difference in the details.
Adam Heine, the Lead Designer:
"First, you get XP when you solve problems, complete quests, and make discoveries—not for individual kills. Second, XP is spent, not accumulated – like cyphers, XP are a resource not intended for hoarding. Most of the time, you’ll have less than 4 XP, because that’s how much most character advancement steps cost. Third, you can also spend XP on short-term benefits—on things other than character advancement.
That last one raises a couple of obvious questions. Why would you spend XP on short-term benefits when you can give your characters lasting benefits like new abilities (or flipped around: what happens if you spend all your XP on short-term benefits and get to the final confrontation with a 1st-Tier character)? Also, if the game has enough XP such that players can spend some on short-term benefits and max their Tier by the end, what’s to stop them from spending all their XP on advancement up front, basically maxing out their Tier halfway through the game? How could we balance the game like that without scaling?
Our answer to these questions is what we are, in Torment, calling Discovery Points (DP). Throughout the game, you will gain both XP (per character) and DP (for the party).
Experience Points are gained primarily by accomplishing critical path tasks: progressing quests and solving Crises and other major encounters. Each character gains their own XP individually, though usually if the party completes a Crisis or a quest, all party members will gain the XP. (SIDEBAR: Sometimes you can leave a Companion behind and pick them up again later in the game. In these cases, they will gain their own XP outside of your influence (they don’t just sit around waiting for you, after all). So if you pick them up again, you will find them close to your level.)
Each character spends their own XP on character advancement steps, each of which cost 4 XP. These advancement steps include:
1) Increased Stat Pool 2) Increased Stat Edge 3) Increased Maximum Effort Level 4) Additional Skill Training 5) Improved paincasting ability (Last Castoff only) 6) Additional Class Abilities (beyond what you get for your Tier) 7) Reduced Armor Penalties
Every four advancement steps, the character will advance to the next Tier. The first five can only be advanced once per Tier, and #5-7 are really optional steps (the Last Castoff’s paincasting ability will be improved in other ways in the course of the game).
Typical character advancement might look like this: (gain 4 XP) add a new Skill, (gain 4 XP) increase Might Edge, (gain 4 XP) increase Maximum Effort Level, (gain 4 XP) distribute 6 new Stat Pool points. Then as soon as the fourth one is done, that character advances to the next Tier—they gain new abilities from their Focus and choose new abilities and Skills from their Type (glaive, jack, or nano). They can also then use XP to purchase any of the advancement steps again toward the next Tier.
We’re planning on balancing the game out to 6th Tier (the maximum Tier in the Corebook), though completionists may still be able to purchase certain advancement steps beyond that if they collect enough XP.
Discovery Points are primarily gained through (wait for it) discovery: figure out how to communicate with an ancient (and alien) intelligence, access a memory abandoned by the Changing God in your brain, or decipher the tale told by an ancient set of moving cave drawings.
DP can also be gained by accepting Intrusions. These are opportunities to make an easy encounter more interesting, rewarding the player for dealing with an added complication. For example, say you’re taking on the Sorrow directly (it’s not a good idea, but let’s say that you are). You discover it’s weak against fire damage and, with the help of a flamethrowing artifact you found, are actually doing pretty well against it.
Then an Intrusion occurs. The Sorrow begins to shifts its own molecular make-up so that it’s weak against something else but fire barely hurts it. This Intrusion won’t always happen: most Intrusions will only trigger when an encounter is already proving easy for you, and many of them have additional conditionals that must be met. Now that this one has triggered, you have a choice: you can spend 1 DP to stop the Intrusion (how that works out narratively depends on each Intrusion, for example maybe you strike a lucky blow, doing little or no damage, but disorienting the Sorrow long enough that it can’t finish the shift), or you can let it happen to gain 2 DP.
DP is gained and used by the whole party, and it is spent on short-term benefits. We haven’t finalized what all those benefits will be, but some examples might include:
• Refusing an Intrusion • Making a recovery roll without needing to rest • Gaining an extra level of Effort on a task for free • Taking extra movement during a Crisis • Performing an extra action during a Crisis • Retrying a failed action during a Crisis • Crafting special items that require a crafting cost
The goal here is to maintain the mechanics that make Numenera fun, to keep Torment balanced (so we can estimate approximately what power level characters will be in a given Zone), all while doling out frequent and exciting rewards."
Looks interesting... The crisis system reminds me of the old DC Heroes RPG system where you could spend hero points to change reality in your favor... Having a bottle of acid in reach of your hand during a fight, for instance.
One thing I'm wondering is if experience points have some sort of tangible form in the game. It feels weird when in a game you do a quest for a poor person and when you complete it you get like 1000000 experience, but your character is outraged at the person not being able to "give a good reward," even though your character just got a better reward than any item the person could possibly have given.
The stretch goal time limit was extended till the end of the month, and it got very nice growth spur from the new KS update too. It's 92% done now. This is probably also the only chance to get a Torment T-shirt, or a poster, as both of those options are scheduled to disappear on October 31st.
Comments
And let's also keep things civil.
If you wish to discuss Pilars of Eternity there's a thread for that already. If you wish to debate what is defined as beta software nowadays, feel free to open a new thread.
To be clear, here, my example was meant to show that games get tweaked, and not just bug fixed, during the beta phase all the time.
I have to say I like the art-style very much. The areas look stunning. I've fallen in love with Matkina already. Very untypical picture, yet stylish and somehow intriguing. And her cloak...
And music! Have you heard that? That's beautiful! The composer is Mark Morgan, who has created soundtracks for Planescape: Torment, Fallout, Fallout 2 among others.
And then I went to their site and found these mind-blowing concept art pictures:
I would like to live at Sagus Cliffs
I can't even understand now how I didn't pay attention to this project before. It looks so promising.
Please!!!!!
Shut up and take my money!!!
Question: Torment: Tides of Numenera is scheduled for release in late 2015 and is a “spiritual successor” to the hit 1999 video game PLANESCAPE: TORMENT, which you also designed. How will Tides of Numenera draw from its predecessor and in what ways will it be unique?
Chris Avellone: It draws a number of things – the game makes the examination of themes through character interaction and narrative one of its pillars (which is rare in a title), there is a cast of companions with at least the same level of depth and complexity as the original, and we have a deep, no-holds-barred story like the original that you can sink your hands into. The development team also consists of a number of the key people from the original – Creative Lead Colin McComb, and programmer Adam Heine as the Lead Designer (Adam writes better than me, btw, so he basically does everything better than me), and Aaron Meyers, who did environment art for the original Torment.
In addition, developers from Obsidian who developed Mask of the Betrayer (commonly held as a fantasy RPG with the same depth as Torment) are present on the team as well: Tony Evans, George Ziets, and Kevin Saunders and more. They understand the heart of the license, and they know how to make it even better.
That said, Torment: Tides of Numenera differs in significant ways – combat is much improved, there is a non-judgmental alignment and development system (called “the Tides,” colored variations of psychic physics the player can mold and be molded by) and the context of the world, while sharing some hallmarks with Planescape in terms of richness, is notably different in that it takes place in the Numenera pen-and-paper game world, a world that’s built on the technological wreckage of nine worlds. This mess of technological ruin forms the principal of magic, exploration and areas in the game… with the guiding premise being that technology, when it reaches certain heights, becomes indistinguishable from magic.
Question: Along the same lines, what can you reveal about the story, characters and world of Torment: Tides of Numenera in terms of its development into other ancillary outlets – such as films/TV, novels and/or comic books?
Chris Avellone: Torment: Tides of Numenera got much of its lore start by having five of the designers each writing a novella set in the world of Numenera. These lore pieces factor into the game’s area design, in some respects acting as narrative lore pieces for designers to build on in when doing level design. The first area, the Bloom, has ample evidence of this – it draws from one of the first Torment: TON novellas by Mur Lafferty for much of its foundation, which allows readers to see key insights that other players may be unaware of.
In terms of other outlets, Numenera itself is already a setting that was developed for pen-and-paper games by Monte Cook, and it was leveraged for the Torment: TON game much in the same way the original Torment game leveraged Dungeons and Dragons’ Planescape license. So in essence, both iterations of Torment were born from pen-and-paper gaming… from there, prose works are part of that process, and there has been discussion concerning other media aspects (graphic novels, for example).
Time will tell, but for now, the focus is on making a great title.
http://www.scriptsandscribes.com/2014/09/qa-with-chris-avellone/
Let me start
One of the latest news regarding Torment: Tides of Numenera is that there will be NO XP after kills in this game, just as it's in Pillars of Eternity - but with difference in the details.
Adam Heine, the Lead Designer:
"First, you get XP when you solve problems, complete quests, and make discoveries—not for individual kills. Second, XP is spent, not accumulated – like cyphers, XP are a resource not intended for hoarding. Most of the time, you’ll have less than 4 XP, because that’s how much most character advancement steps cost. Third, you can also spend XP on short-term benefits—on things other than character advancement.
That last one raises a couple of obvious questions. Why would you spend XP on short-term benefits when you can give your characters lasting benefits like new abilities (or flipped around: what happens if you spend all your XP on short-term benefits and get to the final confrontation with a 1st-Tier character)? Also, if the game has enough XP such that players can spend some on short-term benefits and max their Tier by the end, what’s to stop them from spending all their XP on advancement up front, basically maxing out their Tier halfway through the game? How could we balance the game like that without scaling?
Our answer to these questions is what we are, in Torment, calling Discovery Points (DP). Throughout the game, you will gain both XP (per character) and DP (for the party).
Experience Points are gained primarily by accomplishing critical path tasks: progressing quests and solving Crises and other major encounters. Each character gains their own XP individually, though usually if the party completes a Crisis or a quest, all party members will gain the XP. (SIDEBAR: Sometimes you can leave a Companion behind and pick them up again later in the game. In these cases, they will gain their own XP outside of your influence (they don’t just sit around waiting for you, after all). So if you pick them up again, you will find them close to your level.)
Each character spends their own XP on character advancement steps, each of which cost 4 XP. These advancement steps include:
1) Increased Stat Pool
2) Increased Stat Edge
3) Increased Maximum Effort Level
4) Additional Skill Training
5) Improved paincasting ability (Last Castoff only)
6) Additional Class Abilities (beyond what you get for your Tier)
7) Reduced Armor Penalties
Every four advancement steps, the character will advance to the next Tier. The first five can only be advanced once per Tier, and #5-7 are really optional steps (the Last Castoff’s paincasting ability will be improved in other ways in the course of the game).
Typical character advancement might look like this: (gain 4 XP) add a new Skill, (gain 4 XP) increase Might Edge, (gain 4 XP) increase Maximum Effort Level, (gain 4 XP) distribute 6 new Stat Pool points. Then as soon as the fourth one is done, that character advances to the next Tier—they gain new abilities from their Focus and choose new abilities and Skills from their Type (glaive, jack, or nano). They can also then use XP to purchase any of the advancement steps again toward the next Tier.
We’re planning on balancing the game out to 6th Tier (the maximum Tier in the Corebook), though completionists may still be able to purchase certain advancement steps beyond that if they collect enough XP.
Discovery Points are primarily gained through (wait for it) discovery: figure out how to communicate with an ancient (and alien) intelligence, access a memory abandoned by the Changing God in your brain, or decipher the tale told by an ancient set of moving cave drawings.
DP can also be gained by accepting Intrusions. These are opportunities to make an easy encounter more interesting, rewarding the player for dealing with an added complication. For example, say you’re taking on the Sorrow directly (it’s not a good idea, but let’s say that you are). You discover it’s weak against fire damage and, with the help of a flamethrowing artifact you found, are actually doing pretty well against it.
Then an Intrusion occurs. The Sorrow begins to shifts its own molecular make-up so that it’s weak against something else but fire barely hurts it. This Intrusion won’t always happen: most Intrusions will only trigger when an encounter is already proving easy for you, and many of them have additional conditionals that must be met. Now that this one has triggered, you have a choice: you can spend 1 DP to stop the Intrusion (how that works out narratively depends on each Intrusion, for example maybe you strike a lucky blow, doing little or no damage, but disorienting the Sorrow long enough that it can’t finish the shift), or you can let it happen to gain 2 DP.
DP is gained and used by the whole party, and it is spent on short-term benefits. We haven’t finalized what all those benefits will be, but some examples might include:
• Refusing an Intrusion
• Making a recovery roll without needing to rest
• Gaining an extra level of Effort on a task for free
• Taking extra movement during a Crisis
• Performing an extra action during a Crisis
• Retrying a failed action during a Crisis
• Crafting special items that require a crafting cost
The goal here is to maintain the mechanics that make Numenera fun, to keep Torment balanced (so we can estimate approximately what power level characters will be in a given Zone), all while doling out frequent and exciting rewards."
http://tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/99667129375/updated-our-journal-34-only-5-days-for-the-gullet