Torment:ToN - Review @ RPGCodex

For the Codex Torment: Tides of Numenera is mostly a game of broken promises:

RPG Codex Review: Torment: Tides of Numenera

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The fatal flaw of Torment: Tides of Numenera is timidity. It is terrified of stepping out of the shadow of its ancestor, to proudly do its own thing. Instead, it imagines Torment can be captured in a formula. It apes its forms without understanding its substance. If Planescape: Torment is a monk struggling with a kôan, "What can change the nature of a man?" a red-hot iron ball in his throat which he can neither swallow nor spit out, Tides is a philosophy freshman crying into his red wine, in love with the profundity of his navel. Planescape: Torment's characters embody that central question: the succubus who took a vow of chastity, the enslaved warrior-monk from a people defined by their escape from slavery, the fragment of a collective consciousness who developed a sense of self. Tides' characters... talk about it. They're painted sticks parroting lines written for them, not flesh-and-blood characters living, breathing that question.

[...]

The game falls far short of its promise. The Kickstarter campaign and its subsequent updates showed off carefully-crafted, dynamic scenes with animated elements, parallax layers, dynamic lighting, an old-school UI, full, competently-acted voiceover, and hand-painted, beautiful and characterful concept art and portraits. All of this was watered down or removed outright. We were shown a rotating water wheel; we got a few animated, looping textures; parallax layers were replaced with a hastily-cloned background image masked with a quick fog effect; moody, dynamic lighting by even, flat illumination. Standards everywhere are appallingly low. This does not look, sound, feel, read, or play like a five-million-dollar labour of love by veteran industry professionals. It is not the Planescape: Torment successor we were hoping for. It is not even a tribute. It is barely even a pastiche. Only time will tell if we ever will see one. In the meantime, the Brothel for the Slaking of Intellectual Lusts remains open for business, as Ravel spins her webs in her maze and the Dustmen silently toil in the Mortuary, and in the Fortress of Regrets transcendence and a ghost of unrequited love await a grim planewalker scarred with a thousand deaths.

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More information.

Too high expectations are setting you up to disappointments...

HiddenX said:

Too high expectations are setting you up to disappointments…

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Expectations that were clearly the aim of the developer.
The reviewer isn't at fault here.

If you expect a budget game to have AAA qualities all around, then you are an idiot.
But here, as stated in the review:

They had the budget. They had the talent. They even had a ready-made isometric cRPG engine and asset production pipeline. What happened here?

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The game does not even come close to what it set out to do.
Nor to what was promised.
If people are not upset about their money being used in a way other than what they've been promised, then they deserve to be ripped off.

That's actually the funny thing, the reception to the game is mediocre at best (except the typical "journalism" reviews that will praise anything if they got enough coke at the booth). And they all point out the same faults.
But: It should score even less, because it fails even harder than many realize.

The review seems to be largely based on graphics and complaining about cut content. I couldn't give 2 shits about the graphics, even though I found them perfect for an isometric crpg. Regarding the cut content they have already announced that the 2 most complained about pieces are being added in via an update.

bjon045 said:

The review seems to be largely based on graphics and complaining about cut content.

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Please read the actual review before posting such utter nonsense.
People could follow your example and make themselves ridiculous.

There is one paragraph in the review about the graphics. Not even a large one.
Two (rather short ones) about cut content.

TheSHEEEP said:

There is one paragraph in the review about the graphics. Not even a large one.
Two (rather short ones) about cut content.

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There is actually 2 paragraphs about graphics. Perhaps I read it in more detail than you? And then there is another one about the soundtrack. Most cRPG's I play don't even have soundtracks, that is how little I care about them.

The review also seems to think 5 million dollars is a large budget? Maybe if your a teenager? I'm in the software industry and a million would have barely covered myself for 4 years. Guess what? They probably spent twice that and if the reviewer even had an inkling of the economics of running a business they would be able to roughly cost it out themselves.

A good start would be to come clean: to candidly explain what went wrong and where, how that five million in crowdfunding money was spent, and how a group this good could have such low standards for the quality of their work, and ultimately produce so little. They had the budget.

This does not look, sound, feel, read, or play like a five-million-dollar labour of love by veteran industry professionals

A mystery: how could a five-million-dollar Kickstarter executed by veterans of the industry with so much experience and talent result in a fiasco of this magnitude?

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Reviewer mentions 5 millions dollars 3 times like it is an amazingly large amount of money. Cue austin powers pinkie moment.

I see they're busy brutally reviewing the brutal review.

Mechanically Torment might as well not have mechanics. Nice story through and some good choices and consequences. The game might have been better off as a Quest for Glory style rpg with puzzle-adventure elements.

There will always be people who enjoy the game while others don't. Can't say review is incorrect just because you don't agree as long as reasons are well stated out.

TheSHEEEP said:

Expectations that were clearly the aim of the developer.
The reviewer isn't at fault here.

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I think it is a bit of both... expectation was set by developers, yes, but PrimeJunta sounds like a big fan of people behind TToN so it is rather obvious he had a little too high expectation for his own good.

They had the budget. They had the talent. They even had a ready-made isometric cRPG engine and asset production pipeline. What happened here?

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This is how I felt about PoE pretty much lol. Ah well, so long as it will help developers to come up with next BG2 or Witcher 3, suppose that's good enough for now.

Whilst I'm enjoying the new Torment, the caustic reviews indicate that there's a market for a point and click adventure with stunning visuals and dialogue by Slavoj Žižek. Kickstarter anyone?

purpleblob said:

This is how I felt about PoE pretty much lol. Ah well, so long as it will help developers to come up with next BG2 or Witcher 3, suppose that's good enough for now.

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Or the next Planescape: Torment. Oh wait...

bjon045 said:

The review also seems to think 5 million dollars is a large budget? Maybe if your a teenager? I'm in the software industry and a million would have barely covered myself for 4 years. Guess what? They probably spent twice that and if the reviewer even had an inkling of the economics of running a business they would be able to roughly cost it out themselves.

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There is a very large difference between software industry and games industry. Games industry just pays flat out worse (been there, done that, and as a programmer=high wage no less).

5M is not a AAA title, no doubt. Not even 10 is (as you said, you can assume they have spent double).
But it should be more than enough to stem a project like this.
Also, the games biggest flaws (as pointed out by the review) aren't even related to the budget. Many graphics are just shoddily done, and no budget is a real excuse for that, not once we reach the funding levels >1M.

Graphics in the end did not inspire me as much than the ones I saw during the campaign or even during the development. I agree with the reviewer on that point: It looked a bit bland in the end.

I don't mind the brutality of the Codex. I think it's beneficial for everybody in the long run. That said, I agree with many issues raised in the review. Especially in that a resource mechanic undermines traditional character building (!). I still think this is 3X the RPG Pillars has been. The writing, dialogue and C&C are just so much better imho. And the environments are gorgeous in their weirdness.

PS and it's not as if PST hasn't had bad reviews at launch.

"The Kickstarter campaign and its subsequent updates showed off carefully-crafted, dynamic scenes with animated elements, parallax layers, dynamic lighting, an old-school UI, full, competently-acted voiceover, and hand-painted, beautiful and characterful concept art and portraits. All of this was watered down or removed outright. "

So basically people get tricked and cheated, but still they say its ok, no big deal, who cares about graphics. Then why make game, make book insted!
But it is not about graphics, its about attitude and how easy some "big guys" can get away with it. Imagine if some new "small guys" would do like that, they would be bashed to dust in no time!

While I don't want to even peek on their boards, usually I do read Codex' reviews.
Because I'm about to start this game (couldn't before as I was on SD playthrough and can't play several titles paralelly or I lose concentration) this one I'll skip. But will return to it after I'm done with the game, ofc.

However…

hairyscotsman2 said:

Whilst I'm enjoying the new Torment, the caustic reviews indicate that there's a market for a point and click adventure with stunning visuals and dialogue by Slavoj Žižek. Kickstarter anyone?

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There is a market for adventures, yes. But there is even wider market for new type of adventures, openworld ones. Environment puzzlers like RotTR shouldn't fail on KS and I'm not sure why noone tried a project like that. Maybe everyone thinks racing boredom sim is more desirable (GTA5)?

Stunning visuals and dialogue, erm… You mean stunning both? Both stunning is very hard to make, especially when a publisher decides against the audience, remember cut away visual spectacle from Watch Dogs on PC for the sole reason it looked 100 times better than on consoles? Perhaps I took a wrong example as that game didn't have stunning dialogue, but you get the point I guess.

Wait… That's not what you said. You said "stunning visuals and dialogue by Slavoj Žižek". Žižek is not into visuals. So you ment only stunning visuals, but dialogue doesn't have to be stunning, only written by a certain person? Right?
Couldn't disagree more on the writer. Apart from original PST writers, I can think of only two people who make scripts for visuals (but not games) and who's wild imagination can be dark enough yet stunning to fit a Torment game. Yea, mentioned them before. Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fabien Vehlmann. Maybe, just maybe, Junji Ito, but I'm unsure if that guy is still alive. Žižek should never write anything for videogames, leave him to criticize the society in ways he already does, he's good at it.

bjon045 said:

The review seems to be largely based on graphics and complaining about cut content. I couldn't give 2 shits about the graphics, even though I found them perfect for an isometric crpg. Regarding the cut content they have already announced that the 2 most complained about pieces are being added in via an update.

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Well, the review is so unconvincing that it looks like its partially (or mainly?) based on something completely different - on the fact that Techland/Inxile (probably Techland) refused to do interview with Codex some time ago. Did someone tried to finally strike back? What we have here… review claiming that how specialisation in party is extremely awful (its hardly new thing in party RPGs), how writing is extremely terrible (its usually worse in other games) and how everyone involved is extremely bad now and miraculously lost all talent. Welcome to reviewer's fairy tale with Codexian dark flavour.

1.2 million words excites me as 100+ hours.

Guess I'll wait for patches/more content. Large doesn't mean good.

I had to take the review with a bit of salt knowing the codex have a broom up their butt over InXile cancelling an interview with them. Seems like folks there, as well as here on the watch, often let their feelings towards developers influence their feelings towards a game. Consequently its like reading a research article on smoking and lung cancer that was paid and managed by the tobacco industry. Hard to not suspect some influence there.

While it is impossible to do would be interesting to see reviews from people who had played the game with no clue who made it. Also seems to be that sense of nostalgia in play for some with expectations set rather too high. I don't recall a lot of Planescape and wasn't familiar with InXile until I started to follow ToN so I didn't really bring any expectations with me when I started playing.

I viewed it based on what I had seen on websites (official or otherwise), some PR stuff, etc. It seemed interesting and what little I recalled of Planescape from years ago I felt it had a little of that flavor I liked. Coming in with that attitude, and little bias influencing my view because of issues with the developer or nostalgia from the past, I found it a great game. Aye the graphics could use some polish but considering that I expected this to be an old style "2D" top-down type of game I wasn't expecting a lot to begin with. Combat was clunky and slow but bearable once I got a hang of it - could certainly use some work.

Voice acting was terrific though - thought that was very well done and liked all the voices. Story was gripping and excellent - sucked me right in so I was playing every night to see what happened. Many different ways of solving things, lots of approaches and tools, and great character development. I think, again, the combat parts were weak but overall liked all the options in making a character.

Cut content? It didn't feel like the game was gutted to me. Oh I read about things having to be cut and all and that was disappointing. But I have been playing games since they came out for computers and I am aware sometimes things have to be cut. I also know that InXile didn't communicate this well and perhaps over-promised on what they could deliver (which happens)… but the game itself still came out nice. Plus they are working on patches and adding in content as a follow-up - something many developers do.

I suspect this is a downside to current technology. In the old days if you wanted a patch for a game you had to contact the company and get a disk sent to you or hope for some way to get one from the early internet . In other words the game was pretty much sold a - and hence seemed a lot more complete and polished. Perhaps developers now know that everyone is online these days and so get a little lazy on polish knowing patches can easily be added later. Or perhaps its that games these days are WAY more complex then in the past. Or a combination of both.

Whoa. I wonder if this is how Fluent feels every day? There's truth and valid points in much of the criticism, especially the part about character building, but it still feels like the author played a different game than I. Maybe I just have lower standards when it comes to writing?