Torment: Tides of Numenera - Indigo Voice, Floors and a Video
 

In Kickstarter update #41 for Torment: Tides of Numenera, the pending Kickstarter for The Bards Tale IV is plugged and there is news that the second of their From the Depths novellas is released and the technique behind moving floors.

In another Kickstarter update we are presented with a new video.



More information.

I think it looks great… :meditate:

Characters and their animations doesn't look great at all - compared to PoE that is.

Environments are gorgeous. I'll assume the jerky character animations are a preliminary version.

PoE animations were also a little rough in their earlier implementations. Hopefully these will improve.

The music and narration set a good mood, but the tiny characters diminished the level of drama a bit.

Wasn't T:ToN made with the same engine as Wasteland 2? Because that game shipped with the jerky character animations.

I hope locations are coherent and not strange for the sake of strangeness.

What a deep, wet and sexy narrator voice! Who's the guy? I'm hoping to hear more of him..

Besides that, environments looks good enough, appropriately alien and fantastical, given the setting. But animations are slooow and don't look professional. Hopefully that will be improved before the game launches..

Animations are still a work in progress. Our animator Josh shared some thoughts on animation shown in the video on our forums here: https://forums.inxile-entertainment….151208#p151190

That's Alexander Brandon, who is handling Torment's sound effects and ambiance. He's also a voice actor (did some voices most recently in Skyrim, as well as some of our previous Torment clips) and was one of the composers behind Deus Ex and Unreal back in the day. He is an extremely talented and cool guy and it's been a pleasure working with him on Torment and Wasteland 2.

Did anything come of the campaign to get Vin Diesel as a voice actor, or was that just an idle notion?

I'm really hyped about it, Planescape Torment was such a jewel. I hope it is not disappointing.

Good news that a new book is available, going to start reading this weekend !

I was impressed by the video, and am pretty excited about this game. But I also think that to make things weird in the game just for weirdness sake is something to be careful about, and this is a good point a rpg watcher brought up, because too much of that can make the game seem artificial and ruin the atmosphere.

It is kind of like what has happened to many big blockbuster Hollywood movies for the past recent years. They have concentrated so much on CGI, and special effects wizardry, and action scenes, that they have lost the soul and the movies are missing something these days. A lot of these movies lately just seem like one big set action piece, where story and characters are given short shrift, and seem like afterthoughts.

Excuse my rant and digression, have been seeing some movies lately. :)

I don't agree with you. Mad max 4 was awesome and different than average Hollywood action movie.

PoE has vastly superior environment graphics to me. This is a bit of a let down. But it's an improvement from Wasteland 2 which looked quite bad.

Awesome turn based combat awaits! Interesting worlds and I already see modders modding the hell out of those ugly green-red movement+selection colors.. :D

Environments are, indeed, very interesting and attractive. Characters and combat look awkward - but I guess they've got time to improve it.

That said, game isn't really my thing - but I'm glad that fans are getting yet another fan-service throwback to the old days :)

Ok, I'm glad for the fans - but I'd obviously want something other than stagnation from these crowdfunded titles. Something is better than nothing, though.

The game promises both the depth of PS:T and good combat, something no other game has offered to date. Plus they have the Crises and Tides systems which are also new.

It's hard to take you seriously considering this. Really, what does an innovative RPG look like in your eyes? :)

Why would you taking me seriously matter?

I don't know what you mean by "depth" - but PST was rather simplistic to me. It had a lot of words to read, and a nice enough story - but I wasn't entertained by it.

Good combat is but a claim. I'm not seeing anything I haven't seen a dozen times before.

It looks like an RPG that does something significant and new, like Divinity OS that implemented a cooperative mode that fully integrated both players in all interactions. That's something I've never really seen before in a complex RPG like that.

And you saying it's like stale bread is just another claim. Why should I take your word over the devs'?

It's hard to argue that PS:T had no depth, but since you didn't bring an argument I guess that's it.

That depth came not only from the story, but mostly from choices and their underlying philosophy. I don't really like PS:T as a game, but I respect that they achieved what they wanted to achieve, and what no other RPG has achieved since then.

And I've never seen something like the Tides and Crises systems in a game either - that's why I brought those up. While a lot of RPG's track your reputations, they don't really change the way you're playing dynamically.

Why would you taking my word matter?

I'm stating my opinion - not your opinion.

I didn't say it had no depth.

What made the story deep in a way that a game like, say, Witcher doesn't have?

The amount of pre-written choices in the dialogue trees?

Lots of games have claimed to do just that, though. But we've all seen the results.

TToN will also have limited timed events. When you go to rest the world will change.

The Witcher, and very few other games outside the ego masturbation genre, pertain to matters that affect not the character, but maybe the player. In PS:T character interaction was really a vehicle to bind the player to the gameplay, not an end in itself. I hope that this will be the same with Tides of Numenera. PS:T reached way beyond escapist fantasy boundaries, something the Witcher or any other RPG I can think of haven't managed to date.

I would say this is at the very top of my list of anticipated games. :)

That sounds incredibly vague.

Are you saying Geralt, the character, wasn't affected by his actions in any of the Witcher games, seriously?

What do you mean the player isn't "bound" to the gameplay in Witcher? It makes no sense at all.

Are you saying the Witcher doesn't reach beyond "escapist fantasy"?

Could you clarify?

No, I mean that exactly, the effect was limited to Geralt. Or do you really say that you took anything away from playing The Witcher?

What I mean is that PS:T established a link between the player and the game that isn't found in most games. And that was not in the first place due to the story - it was about the very personal nature of choices and dialogue.

That's why I'm saying The Witcher is firmly in ego masturbation escapist fantasy territory. You're playing a kewl d00d who acts and affects the world around him, but it's also very game-y and limited to that fictional world. IMO PS:T transcended this and made it a very personal experience (I've also seen people claim that this is in part because the game-y elements of PS:T were admittedly weak).

The Witcher 2, definitely. I was very moved by it - and I think it had a lot of poignant things to say about how wars start and what happens during them.

Fair enough, if you think so.

I didn't experience said link, but then again - I never bothered finishing it, as the dreary and pretentious walls of text, terrible character progression, constant simplistic combat, and the off-putting locked-down avatar killed it for me.

That's certainly an opinion. One that makes little sense to me, as I think The Witcher games are way more than that.

Also, I'm a much bigger fan of blunt and overt delivery over the deliberately opaque and "mysterious" stuff in PST. I think I might have appreciated it more as a younger person, though, when I was capable of seeing depth in verbose opacity.

But that's ok, we don't have to agree.

I guess it comes down to what you, personally, got from PST - and I can appreciate that.

which still leaves the question if TToN will be innovative in any way, shape or form - I think yes, but let's wait and see ;)

I'm p certain you'll give it a go regardless and enjoy it, just like PoE.

Now that's what I'd call a stretch, to put it mildly. :)

I give almost everything a go, and yes - I did enjoy PoE for a number of hours :)

That said, I haven't even considered going back to my still-in-act-1 game that I abandoned a few weeks ago.

These throwbacks just aren't doing it for me.

TW3, on the other hand…. wow!

indeed!

You're right on both counts: no other game has offered those things, and this game promises them… but those are still just promises. Plenty of games make such promises.

So you are a full what the codex would call a pompamole games lover.

I still tend to come back to old games or new games with the "retro" feel. How good the experience will turn out really depends on your mood, probably more so than what people think..

I remember starting BG2 some 3-4 years ago and it was totally "meh", couldn't stand it for long. Then a year ago i started it again and i was totally absorbed by it from the start, it just clicked instantly because that's what i felt like playing (more than i probably understood).

Gaming is not any different than for example creating music or having sex or whatever your hobbies are :D if you're not 100% in the mood, it just won't be that great of an experience.