Torment:ToN - Sales Disappointing but Why?

I haven't played it yet, but this reception is such a disappointment. I was really hyped last year.

I felt much the same but I played it 2 weeks ago and I loved it. Definitely a love it or hate it kind of game. Make sure you put the effort in to read a good chunk of the dialog if you get round to playing it.
 
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I've played the PNP. I like the setting, but the system isn't that great IMO. I've always been a bit hit and miss with Monte Cook's stuff.
 
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I'll never get the extreme praise for PS:T. It was a good game, but it's not the Holy Grail of crpgs like some try to make it out to be. The story was great for a game, but the actual gameplay left a lot to be desired.

Haven't played ToN yet so I can't compare. I lost interest after hearing there's virtually no combat in the game. If I wanted nothing but dialogue, I'd play a classic adventure game.
It was a Holy Grail in whatever year it was released.
Today it wouldn't be, technology went forward and stuff like bink'n'smacker compression is not something you want to hurt your game quality with.

Your statement is very odd considering how many times you mentioned Chrono Trigger or something like that - the thing I've never heard of before you brought it up and a title that's unknown also to people I socialize with in RL.

Is it a matter of tastes again?
PST, with antihollywood protagonist, ugly and zombified creature that's deeply flawed with every "reincarnation" yet knew what love is in the past but forgot all about it could never be mainstream. The game's philosophical question about man's nature is linked to it's story yet applicable elsewhere and anywhere, etc - the parade of crazyness was PST's forte and if you were drawn into it's story there was no way you'd care about clicky-clicky rubbish. It was not Tetris.

Games with plastic boobs or cute heroes sell. Doesn't mean we shouldn't praise diversity.
 
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It was a Holy Grail in whatever year it was released.

It was most certainly not.

From a technical perspective, it was outdated even when it came out.

From a design perspective, even Guido Henkel admitted in several interviews (and in the game's manual!) that PS:T was much more an experiment, and no one knew how would it fare with the public.

Tellingly, GH's own PS:T spiritual sequel pitch failed on Kickstarter, so….
 
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PST was a mess. A failed attempt to sell a visual novel before those became a thing. The writing was mediocre at best; at least in comparison to fantasy novels of the time. Morte was amusing though. The Githyanki...I wanted to kill that guy permanently after the 2nd paragraph of text. Fall from Grace needed CBBE to be interesting ;)
 
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In my opinion, it didn't sell that well because it requires an 64 bit OS. How many gamers have that by now ? And how many casuals aka non-gamers ?
 
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I just want to say that, why not give this game a chance if you at least like reading or exploring a fantasy setting with RPG elements to make choices, etc.? It seems like if you're into that, this game would be Godlike.

I recently played Planescape: Torment for the first time ever, the recent Enhanced Edition, completed it and did think it was a masterpiece. I mean, shoot. It was great. I pretty much loved everything about it, BUT I would have liked to have seen more open exploration. And more portals in the City of Doors, really, maybe secret portals that weren't necessary to progress the story but led you to some interesting areas. I would have liked to have explored other Planes, too, and in general just have a larger area to really explore. Kinda felt cramped a bit in The Hive. :p

But for me, I loved the combat too. I actually thought combat had a lot of potential to be great. I liked the RTWP system they used which was actually almost a bit closer to the Konung series in execution than Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. I just wish there were more hardcore options or higher difficulty levels, and less items overall. I had so many buff items, etc., that weren't really balanced to be necessary. I would have liked to just have seen a stricter and more meaningful/impacting amount of items. They can keep the RTWP fine as-is, just make it tougher.

Otherwise, it's a masterpiece. It's a very rare RPG for me in that, after 90 hours and beating it, I damn near immediately restarted and ran through it again! And after playing a few hours on the tablet version (which is pretty nice btw), I was already seeing several things that I didn't see in the first game, just in the first hour! So many choices to make in that game, different ways to handle things and little details to see. It's remarkable.

Numenera seems like it does some of that but even has less combat, which I admit I'm not big on (I like combat and using my character that I developed for combat, complete with my magic spells, weapons, armor, buff items, etc. etc.), but in terms of just a straight storybook RPG with a bunch of choices and interesting setting to explore, it seems like a winner. IF you're into that sort of thing. And I don't think it could personally top PS:T for me simply from the lack of combat it has, but it should still be worth a play for me.

Sorry for wall-o-text. I have to pick this game up, just been procrastinating on that. Peace!
 
I think it might be something as simple as people don't like to read that much.
 
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I think it might be something as simple as people don't like to read that much.

Probably. Or when playing a video game they expect more action. Which is why I'd probably only recommend checking this game out if...wait for it...you like reading. :D
 
I didn't really fall in love with PST either. I think you had to "be there", with an old Win98 PC, 17" CRT, and Sound Blaster card to really enjoy it. I played it for the first time much more recently, and the effect on me was just not the same.

I played & enjoyed the original. The experience was so much more than Bumdog's EE update.
 
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I think it might be something as simple as people don't like to read that much.

I like to read, but I prefer to do so from a book or other written media. Lengthy exposition in a computer game is equivalent to towing your car with a horse -- slow and plodding. Flow-wise, it's just not a good fit for the otherwise rapid presentation of visual and aural information found in a modern PC game. Besides, extensive reading from a video screen tires the eyes. It's better in smaller, bite-sized chunks.
 
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The answer is very easy to see and I've posted about it before. All you have to do is go to the store page and see. It's the asking price of $45. Once you've been around games as long as we all have you can start to judge what a fair asking price is. Even if a dev misjudges and asks too much they should be paying attention to their sales numbers and slashing the price accordingly. It should have launched at $30 and should be $20 at the moment. This is based on a multitude of factors including the genre, game size/content and the wildcard factor that the game requires a lot of reading. Not every classic is meant to be recreated but if you are going to do it, do not overcharge for it.

I think the devs saw Pillars did well at $45 and thought they could pull it off but they are different games. Also, when your sales are slow in early access they will be slow after launch. That has been proven already with data mining.

Obsidian ran into this problem themselves with Tyranny. Devs get greedy and don't always comprehend what price point their game belongs in.

An example of a dev that always gets it right is Runic Games. They specialize in the $20 price point and every couple of years they release a solid game that does well. Not saying every dev should sell at $20 just make sure what you are creating fits the price point you desire.
 
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In my opinion, it didn't sell that well because it requires an 64 bit OS. How many gamers have that by now ? And how many casuals aka non-gamers ?
By now? Man, I thought you switched 3 years ago already… Anyway, last statistics on Steam:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
Windows 7 64 bit 64.90%
Windows 10 64 bit 28.81%

Makes it 93.71% total.

No, I won't bother adding x64 win8 and similar trash, those are definetly not gamers.
 
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Obsidian ran into this problem themselves with Tyranny. Devs get greedy and don't always comprehend what price point their game belongs in.

Come on now, these devs are not greedy. They're crumb snatchers in the grand scheme of things, trying to somehow survive just to make their next RPG. If they were greedy they could have sold their souls to EA or some other entity long ago. Or not even develop ultra-niche games that barely make them any money in the first place.

Let's keep things like that in perspective.

The game market is flooded and gamers are cheap. The game is worth $45 but in this market, will people pay it? Probably not. But a lot might not even pay $30 either, so where do you draw the line?
 
As of ToN, my highly unpopular personal rant is this:
I think PS:T's acclaim among certain fans is more likely fueled by snobbsim than actual merit.

^ While I mostly agree with this…

Since PS:T was never a huge success, creating a spiritual sequel is downright suicide, business-wise -- because the game has obviously not enough fans to warrant a development.
… we should remember here that ToN was at its time the no. 1 most successful Kickstarter project ever with nearly $4.2 million.

To this day it appears to be the third most successful video game KS project ever only trumped by Shenmue III and Bloodstained (JRPGs as opposed to western RPGs).

ToN raised more than PoE, Wasteland 2, both Divinity Original Sins, BT4, the Shadowruns, System Shock remake etc.

It was most certainly not.

From a technical perspective, it was outdated even when it came out.

While I once again agree with the first part and also think that PS:T is way overrated…

From a design perspective, even Guido Henkel admitted in several interviews (and in the game's manual!) that PS:T was much more an experiment, and no one knew how would it fare with the public.

Tellingly, GH's own PS:T spiritual sequel pitch failed on Kickstarter, so….
… I can not possibly agree with this last part. Deathfire was supposed to become vastly different from PS:T.

Here is a snip from an article on the Guido Henkel website titled The Conception of Deathfire

The vision I had seen in my mind’s eye was a role-playing game game that was electric and right in your face with action. Instantly, I knew that the only way to make this happen was with a first-person view, where the player is right in the thick of things.



While I love the artistic possibilities that isometric games afford us, there are a few drawbacks that made me dismiss the approach offhandedly. For one, the amount of work that is required to make a solid isometric game of any size is enormous, but what’s more, in this case in particular, is the distance it creates between the player and the game. In an isometric game you are always an observer. No matter how well it was done, every isometric game I have played has a God-like quality to it, where I am the master moving chess pieces around, typically without too much emotion involved.



This is great for a lot of games and has tremendous tactical advantages for the player, but for Deathfire I want something that is a bit more gripping. Like reading a good thriller, my idea is to create a real-time game in which the player is fully invested, where he feels the environment, where he feels the pressure, the suspense and the menace. It may not give the player the opportunity to strategize and analyze a situation in too much detail before on ogre’s spiked club comes smashing down on his head. Instead, it replaces the moment with an incredibly visceral experience that can range from startling the player all the way to downright frightening him when foreshadowed properly.


[…]


Running in a first-person view, it is a party-based real-time role-playing game with a focus on the story. It is not an open world design. Instead, it is very focussed to create maximum impact for the player. Therefore, we will very tightly control the environment the player moves through so that we can manipulate it as best as possible. This also means that it is a stepped role-playing game, by which I mean that there will be no free roaming the 3D environment. The player will take one step at a time as he explores the world. Not only does this help us to maintain a high level of quality in the overall experience, but it is in many ways also more reminiscent of many traditional pen&paper games where you’d use graph paper to map out the game.
^


Pretty much all of this except for the "party-based-ness" and the story focus is totally different from Torment.


In fact, he mentions several inspirational influences a little later on…


When we think of first-person stepped role-playing games, two candidates come to mind, immediately, I think. The first one is Dungeon Master, the granddaddy of all real-time first-person roleplaying games, and the second one would be the games in the Wizardry series. Deathfire will be like neither of them. It will be so much more.



It will be as gripping as Dungeon Master – or Grimrock if you’re not old enough to have played the original Dungeon Master upon which it was based – but it will have the depth of a real role-playing game, putting it more in line with the Wizardy games, perhaps. It will be a completely amped up affair. It will be more intense and deeper than either of these games. We have completed the character system design at this point and I can tell you that there are enough character attributes and stats to rival the Realms of Arkania games.



Well, not exactly, but we’re not too far away from its depth. Our intentions are to push the envelope on what has been done with stepped role-playing games in the past. I feel that there is a huge untapped potential how that gaming experience can be enhanced.
Deathfire was never meant to be anything like PS:T at all.
 
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Would have liked to have played Deathfire. Ol' Guido seems like a real RPG nerd.

Snobbism for PS:T, though? Eh.. not sure about that. But then I don't really concern myself with that sort of thing. To me, I really enjoyed the story, the choices and consequences and the lore of the setting. Exploring the areas that *were* there was great, and I liked meeting all sorts of weird, deformed and crazy characters and learning more about the Multiverse. :)
 
Snobbism for PS:T, though? Eh.. not sure about that.

I'm not 100% sure what duerer meant but to me PS:T snobbism means that it sometimes seems to me that some gamers (not everyone, of course) like to put PS:T on a pedestal or claim it is their most favorite game ever just in order to make themselves appear like super-intellectual video game connoisseurs.
In some cases it might even be kiddies who never played the game but feel like they must hop on the bandwagon to hang with the kewl kids.

You know, people who never even played the classics but who feel they must tell everyone that they find certain games cool just because the game is held in high regard in certain (more or less elitist) circles.
 
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