Torment: Tides of Numenera - Third Alpha Systems Test Released, Crisis Gameplay
 

Another update on Torment: Tides of Numenera from InXile.

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Crisis Combat Alpha Video






More information.

I don't really like the UI and the colors seems off but otherwise it looks
weird in really good tormenty way.
Looks Like beta isn't far off based on the vid assuming they made enough content.

The graphics are looking cool and imaginative, and yet make some sort of internal sense that fits the world. I especially liked the levitating cube, kind of reminded me of the cube in the Hellraiser movies.

One aspect I didn't like is the transparent combat log. I can't stand transparent interface overlays, honestly. I hope they have an option that we can tweak the user interface elements, and I could have the combat log set on a solid background. As well as resize it, and move it around, that would be nice too.

Looking very good indeed :)

The characters and environments look better than I expected. I had somewhat low expectations due to them using the Unity engine, but I like what I'm seeing here.

The setting also appears more sci-fi than I thought it was going to be, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Am I the only one who misses action points in turn-based combat, which is so often replaced these days by this two-action simplofication I suppose we can thank Firaxis and the new Xcom game for?

By definition, an anoetic action is unthinkable. Heh.

defensive maneuvers sound good in that they are tied to role, though I don't really know if those pre-set behaviors/ AI decisions will be worthwhile.

UI is pretty terrible, but combat looks interesting.

There are some tricky concepts to capture there from a ui perspective. What would you change and why?

I would start by not taking up 40-50% of the entire screen by using transparent panels, with adjustable opacity for people who don't mind :)

I think the panels should auto-hide until a conversation or ui element is required. That way you get to admire the backgrounds without the ui getting in the way. Its difficult to get right the size of the ui because if you adjust the size of the ui according to the amount of text displayed maybe that would be more distracting for the player then keeping it one size.

Allowing players to lock or unlock ui elements into hide/no hide would be cool as well as the ability to move them around. I'm biased toward skeuomorphic ui so I like that it looks part of the world design but it should also be as hassle free as possible. I'm glad I don't have to design it. :D

My problem is that the panels completely block half the screen, which is ludicrously bad UI design in my opinion.

There are several ways to solve this, including speech appearing above the head of the speaker and what not.

But the BARE minimum would be to have the ability to make the panels transparent. I'd go with a proper scaling option for the font/UI overall, as well.

I simply don't get how this could pass for a proper UI anywhere.

I didn't really notice it until now, but yeah…that dialogue box is massive. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume there's going to be an option to adjust the size of that thing.

Scaling and transparency is relatively trivial to implement, so it's possible. But I don't understand why they keep demonstrating the game like this as if it wasn't an issue.

Maybe I'm the only one who prefers to look at the world instead of huge text panels for half the game :)

I was thinking they had it set to the largest size to make sure everyone could read the text options during the gameplay demo.

If not, they seriously need to make some adjustments.

Well, game looks interesting aside from that, so I hope you're right.

D&D had it for 30 years. It has nothing to do with Xcom

The new X-Com made it popular, which is the point. D&D never had a "two-actions" system.

I happen to agree it's a weak system.

The Numenera setting is complete pretentious, insufferable garbage filled with incomprehensible mumbo jumbo to make it look "edgy". None of the people I know who play the PnP game are any interested in it anymore after having briefly tried it and abandoned it very quickly.

I don't see what is so special about these "crisis" events, other tactical games have had them before. It's not like you're going to get the flexibility of a PnP system because every special event is going to be scripted and predefined.

There's our little sunbeam!

At least HHR will have Grimoire to play very soon now :)

I've heard the same complaint about Age of Decadence, and I prefer a heavily scripted game with a lot of options over one with more free-form gameplay without options. Because that's the two choices we have been offered so far.

D&D always had it, but not as limited as new Xcom. Numenera is based on D&D rules, so I don't see a problem with them implementing it this way.

Why am I not surprised that you don't know the D&D rules :)

Maybe you're thinking of full-round actions, move actions, standard actions, free actions, swift actions, immediate actions and so on?

Not only is that something that was introduced much later in the history of the system, it's also anything but a two-action system.

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Action_Types

I played D&D from AD&D and it had move + attack or move + cast spells. After that it got even more like that with 3.0e where they put even more sub actions.

The main point that you managed to ignore to appear like you know what you are talking about was that this was all before new Xcom, so new Xcom cannot be blamed for TToN.

I played it from before AD&D :)

In AD&D, you were free to move back and forth during a round, for instance. It was nothing like this new trend of limiting players to almost no choice at all.

The main point that you've chosen to ignore, as well as being factually incorrect, is that the new X-Com seems to have made it popular.

No one claimed that X-Com "invented" a two-action system.

As such, it's arguably to blame for the TREND not the system in itself.

Clear?

Many things, especially the combat log, but also stuff like the tooltips and names/bars/etc. above enemies, are obviously unfinished art not far above debug levels. They're in there solely for testing functionality.

The demo and KS update both repeatedly note that the UI is in a WIP state. We'll be tweaking things plenty from here.

Totally.

What are these shiny bright colours doing in a Torment game? :-)

Obviously, it's not obvious exactly how you intend to change it.

But you're saying the interface won't take up that much of the screen at release? Cool - that's all I wanted to know :)

I can't specifically say that, I'm not involved enough to make comments there (though as I move off of Wasteland 2 I might end up working more on Torment directly). But:

We previously noted in other alpha updates that the dialog box was being redesigned - in part because we are switching our GUI system over from NGUI to UGUI, due to many bug fixes and improvements made in Unity 5's built-in GUI system vs. in Unity 4, which the game used to run on.

While I still suspect the conversation window will be "big" compared to some games, the styling and sizing, like anything else, is still be subject to change.

So, nothing is obvious after all ;)

In any case, I think the game looks interesting - though I was never a big Torment fan.

But I tend to greatly enjoy TB combat.

As such, I really hope you will let me watch the world as I talk to people and interact in general.

Knowing myself, I'll probably get this regardless, out of sheer curiousity, though.

I do enjoy the LOOK of the UI, as in I find it aesthetically interesting. I just think it's a little ridiculous in terms of size.

The HUD elements appear to me to be of a reasonable size. The larger dialog interface that autohides also seems to change size as required, depending on the text. Seems fine to me for text-heavy game.

I think this looks so boring and bland compared to the original Torment. Combat looks much more fun though… but that part really sucked in the original so it is not hard to top.

I agree. The environments are looking very bland, sterile and generic. No contest with the nice painted backgrounds of PST (and that game is 16 years old!). There is just absolutely no "atmosphere" coming through from anything that has been shown so far while PST was oozing atmo.
I wish that inXile would have put more emphasis on attention to detail and really fleshed out the locations.
It remains to be seen but I fear they might have chosen a quantity over quality approach, i.e. a massive game world with many locations but a lack of detail in the locations. I prefer if it's done the other way around. But that might be just me.

And the mega-intrusive UI is definitely one of those things they should not copy from the old Infinity engine games. Just like Obsidian they seem to forget that they are supposed to only bring back the good parts but improve upon the bad and clunky crap from that era.

I doubt that since the game seems to be built around replays.

*All this is my opinion, please don't take it personally*

Well, I generally like reading what HHR has to say, but nothing wrong with poking a bit of fun. One thing you can depend on though, is the guy usually has a solid and deeply held opinion, and that makes his posts interesting. And I can see what he means by "pretentious". Yea, there is a bit of a whiff of that in this game, in the writing. But I can overlook it. To a point.

And about the gigantic dialog UI - there was a recent video not too long ago which showed the opening of the game, and it contained basically 5 novels of reading before you got to do hardly anything. I complained about it in the thread at the time. So that is one concern, that these writers think every word they write is golden, and so there is a danger the game will have too much text. Now, maybe I'm out of step with others expectations in this, I admit that.

But I have read tons of books and to be honest, video game writing is often very amateurish, and I don't find it interesting most of the time. So I just hope they get a merciless editor, who will force those writers to cut some of their "brilliant" stuff they are cooking up. You know, maybe instead of the equivalent of reading 5 novels at the start of the game, they can cut it down to only one novel before you get to do anything. ;)

Anyway, that is why I'm guessing they need a gigantic dialog UI, because they know the game is basically riddled with text to wade through. I will probably be skipping a lot of it, to be honest, unless they cut some of it to a reasonable level, and not make it so it gets really boring and tedious, and yes, pretentious.

par for the course for a Torment game IMO

Top-notch graphics and beautiful non-combat GUI. Excellent and clear writing! The combat GUI is better than W2's.