Highlight (use your cursor to draw a box around) the.package files in the folder and then right-click on them and select 'cut'. Now you'll need to navigate to your Sims 4 Mods folder. To do this, go to Documents Electronic Arts The Sims 4 Mods. Once you're in that folder, simply right-click anywhere and then select 'Paste.' How to use mods in sims 4. The Sims 4 launched on September 2nd, and one of its most notable differences from The Sims 3 is the loss of the Create-A-Style function. With Create-A-Style, players could recolor almost any texture in the game to express their personal creativity with custom clothing and furnishings. For as little as $4.00 per month you can become a VIP member. This lets you use our service free of all ads and unlocks access to our popular Download Basket and Quick Download features. Become a VIP member now. How to Install CC and Mods Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4/Mods is the folder you need in order to install mods and cc. Sims/lots go inside the Tray folder. Installing Mods in The Sims 4 The process for downloading both CC and Mods is the same, so we will cover them both at once. They are installed in Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 4. How to install mods, hair, clothing, objects, sims, houses, etc. Into The Sims 4. If you're still having trouble after watching the video, please go through all of the extra information.
One 4am nearly five years ago I ended a Skype call and went to sleep, but two of the people I was chatting to stuck around. They were Chris Avellone and Colin McComb. I had been speaking to them, and others, about Planescape: Torment, a game they all helped make. And it was a really good game. A legend, if you like.
We'd assembled for a Planescape: Torment postmortem podcast, and now, five years on, we're here to look back on the development of Torment: Tides of Numenera for a podcast - and written article - too.
Back then no one had any idea Torment: Tides of Numenera was going to be made. McComb didn't know he would be creative lead and Adam Heine didn't know he was going to be design lead. They weren't even really in the business of making games anymore - Heine lived and still lives in Thailand raising orphans, and the reason McComb had stuck around was to ask Chris Avellone about getting a job, writing for Wasteland 2.
Well, McComb got it, and not long after he got a phone call from inXile boss Brian Fargo. 'So Colin,' Fargo said. 'I've registered Torment as a trademark, I managed to pick that up. And I was curious if you would be interested in working on that.. as the creative lead?
'Holy crap, Brian!' was McComb's reaction. 'I can't believe what you're asking me to do here. I know how people feel about Planescape: Torment - I know how I feel about Planescape: Torment. If you screw that up then your reputation is ruined forever.'
But he agreed, emailed Heine - 'do you want in?' - and the rest is a history I will be going over in detail here. Be warned! There are massive spoilers ahead. Oh, and there is talk of the missing stretch goal content - so hold your horses, it's coming.
Where do you begin making a successor to Planescape: Torment when you don't have the weird Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting of Planescape? You go big. You create your own world and as ambitious a story as you can manage.
That story had a Changing God even back then, although as an actual god rather than a man who discovered a kind of immortality through cloning and consciousness transfer. 'He basically fractured,' says McComb. 'Your job was to go and retrieve his pieces before the Angel of Entropy - which became the Sorrow - destroyed them all and wiped out .. the universe.' Problem was, 'it was too epic', he adds. 'It's not just save the world, it's save all of creation.' It just wasn't Torment. But then, what was?
In pondering the answer, McComb and Heine created their design pillars and nailed their essential question, 'What does one life matter?' (Planescape: Torment asked 'What can change the nature of a man?') McComb also realised the Numenera RPG he was helping his friend Monte Cook with might make a fantastic setting for his own game. Things started falling into place, and after weeks of working on spec, the Kickstarter make or break day arrived. Would Planescape: Torment fans go for it? 'Or,' McComb says, 'would they say, 'Oh my god you guys are just vultures picking at a carcass?'
The campaign went live on March 6th 2013. Adam Heine was watching the 1996 Tom Hanks film 'That Thing You Do' at the time it all started. 'There's a montage scene in that movie where the band is just skyrocketing and they're jumping up the bestseller charts,' he says. 'And I'm watching the scene, and I'm watching the Kickstarter on the screen right next to me, and the numbers are going up and I was just like, 'Holy crap! What's going on?!'
Torment: Tides of Numenera was funded in six hours, smashing its $900,000 goal. Money flooded in so quickly the team struggled to keep up. 'We didn't even have enough stretch goals ready so we were just scrambling to get stuff put in there,' says McComb - a point which came back to bite them in the bum. It was also clear from the record-breaking final take of $4.19m that no way was this suddenly much bigger game coming out in a year.
After the madness of Kickstarter, McComb, Heine and team had roughly three months to whip up a plot for a writers' meeting in July 2013. And this is where we begin venturing into spoiler territory.
'The player still falls from the sky, lands in a junk heap, gets picked up by a guy called the Clock Maker, who sort of rebuilds you and nurses you back to health. You head up to an aldeia [a village], you meet some Aeon Priests who tell you about the Sorrow that's chasing you. You board The Catena, the one that crashed into the Bloom, and you take it and you crash it into the Bloom.
'You do some Bloom stuff and you climb up the mountain to Sagus Cliffs, and you do a whole bunch of Sagus Cliffs stuff. You travel from there along the shores of the sea. You hit the Valley of Dead Heroes, you go into a library, then you go into the Castoff compound and that's when the Sorrow comes in. And from there you take an airship up to the Oasis, and from the Oasis you head over to Ossiphagan, and from Ossiphagan you had to..'
It was bam, do a thing, bam, do another thing, bam, etc. Your motivation was always to go somewhere else, never explore, never get to know an area as with the city of Sigil in Planescape: Torment. 'If we could make a 200-300-hour game it would be cool,' Heine jokes. But they couldn't so it had to be trimmed.
'We went through seven or eight really major iterations,' says McComb, 'and each time the pace and experience and the delivery of everything we were trying to convey became much more focused and concise.'
Which graphics card is the better choice?
What remained constant was the idea of the Changing God, falling from the moon after an attack by the Sorrow, departing the body you are suddenly awoken in. But there were some major differences about where the story would end up. Another spoiler alert!
Originally, you were going to meet the Changing God, and come face to face for a showdown. 'You were going to finally meet him at the House of Empty Time,' says McComb. 'We salvaged that into something else. It was originally his home on an eyrie some place. And you and the First [Castoff] would both be transported there and you were essentially trying to get through his futuristic fortress as he's trying to [race] you back to where the Resonance Chamber crashed. There would have been a great big confrontation there. But again, it was wildly ambitious and way out of scope.'
Back then The Specter was intended as something unrelated. 'The Specter was originally going to be a memory virus,' he says, 'growing and taking shape in your head, and would eventually be born into the real world.' But then someone said, 'Well what if the Changing God actually didn't get driven out of your body?' And then came the question-slash-realisation, 'Holy shit! What if The Specter is actually the Changing God?!'
Except, is he? I interrupt McComb and Heine here, because in the game you discover The Specter is not really the Changing God but a copy. One that's constantly updated, and one that's incredibly complex, but not the real deal. And I wanted more than anything to meet the real deal. 'Well,' says McComb, blindsiding me, 'it could be you.'
The ambiguity is absolutely intended, and actually if you look through the game there is a solid path available to role-play as the Changing God. 'If you make the case that you're the Changing God throughout the game, if you say to yourself, 'I am the Changing God,' then it actually becomes more real,' says McComb.
Think about it. If the Changing God were not you then where is he? The Specter lives inside your head, and you can enter the Changing God's memories from inside there. Why? You can also merge all Castoffs into your consciousness, exactly as the Changing God wanted to, thereby satisfying the Sorrow and ridding yourself of her relentless menace forever. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Oh and talking of the Sorrow, did you know she is non-organic? 'She - sorry, it - is a biomechanical creation that is essentially a generated energy field,' explains McComb. A kind of extremely advanced security program to protect the Tides, which are the currents of human emotion Castoffs are destroying.
Originally the First Castoff was different too. She isn't actually the first Castoff at all. 'She's definitely not,' says McComb. 'One of the original ideas for her is that she went around hunting down older Castoffs to eliminate them.' Consider the Changing God is several thousand years old and the First Castoff is several hundred years old, and that the Changing God casts off a body every couple of decades, and there must have been many Castoffs by the time the so called First awoke.
What's more, the First Castoff was nearly someone else, someone close to you. Not Callistege, which was my guess, but Matkina, your Castoff assassin pal. 'The original design for Matkina had Matkina as the First,' reveals McComb, 'because she was an assassin in the shadows and her name was derived from the Vietnamese word for 'mask', 'mat na'. We also discovered 'matkina' means 'mother's' in Slovak, and thought that was a cool extra layer of meaning.'
The stretch goal content that didn't materialise includes three companions, a crafting system, and an area called The Oasis. InXile has publicly apologised about this before.
The tricky thing in talking about the missing companions is that at least one of them, Oom, the Toy, will reappear. InXile announced this recently. So McComb and Heine don't want to say too much.
Oom is a blob of a creature from a prior world, maybe a byproduct of an ancient experiment. He could change shape as he levelled up, but into what would depend on you. If you kept telling him to be quiet, for example, he might become invisible, wrote Adam Heine wrote in an Oom blog post.
Heine tells me now: 'We have a lot of design for him and we have some words written for him. The issue is that he's.. different than all the other companions. There's a lot of custom stuff that has to be made for this guy.'
'He's got five different shapes,' adds McComb. [He has clarified since that Oom will have not five shapes but 'multiple'.]
The other companions who really nearly made it in are Riastrad and Satsada, the star-crossed lovers. 'Riastrad is mentioned a couple of times in the game,' says Heine. 'When you find the Magmatic Amulet and you're reading the Changing God's journal of what happened to him in that lab .. that is Riastrad's birth you're witnessing.'
'His backstory,' continues McComb, 'is the Changing God fell into a dark place in the Ascension, with all the crystal and stuff around there. Crystalline spiders started coming out of the woodwork and the Changing God was like, 'Screw this! I'm out of here.' And Riastrad awoke.'
Excitingly, Riastrad was to have his own reusable merecaster - a device the Last Castoff uses to time travel via memories, and even alter reality - and it was intrinsically linked to his character development. 'You could change his history throughout the game and basically use that to change his abilities,' says McComb.
Talking of meres, they were originally going to be fully realised scenes rather than picture book interactions, and the team used to refer to them as Quantum Leaps!
Beside Riastrad, Satsada and Oom there were companions who weren't as developed. In the original conception, The Specter was one, would you believe. There was a crippled beggar, too, who had a floating cart and collected numenera, the mysterious magical items of the world. The beggar went quite far through development, as first a companion then a major NPC, then a minor NPC, then 'he sort of slid on out of the game', says McComb. 'The problem with him was we looked at the party composition and we were like, 'Crap, we're overloaded on nanos.'
The Oasis - The Oasis of M'ra Jolios to give it its full name - was to be a huge aquatic dome of a city in the middle of a desert, and the game's second major hub. It was a $4m stretch goal but it never made it in. Well actually that's not correct - it sort of did. Right at the end of the game you can visit a small part of the Oasis in a Fathom portal in your mind labyrinth. It's the Fathom you swim around in, as you would have the Oasis.
'See, the swimming was really cool but it was also a lot of trouble,' says Heine. 'If you watch carefully when you're in that scene, you'll notice that a lot of animations you have [normally], you suddenly don't have - which is not noticeable in that Fathom because it's a very short time and there's no combat in it.
'We were like, 'OK, well, we could build this up into a big city and make the game extra long at the cost of the Bloom and Sagus and all of this other stuff we have in, or we could streamline it and make what we have in here a lot better.' The Bloom, especially the Bloom Depths, would not have been what they are if we had kept the Oasis - it would have been a really tiny scene without a big battle.'
Nevertheless, the Oasis went through a lot of design, says Heine, and had several areas and its own faction. Whether it will return is a trickier prospect. 'I don't think the Oasis will come back as DLC, though some of us hope maybe we could do an expansion or something,' he says. 'Who knows? I wouldn't hold up my hopes.'
Crafting, meanwhile, was one of the first systems Heine designed. 'It wasn't like a recipe system where you were crafting your own cyphers,' he says, 'it was almost like modding your weapons and armour. But the Numenera aspect of it was that as you attached things there would be side-effects because the numenera interact with each other in weird and different ways. It was trying to create a crafting system that felt Torment and especially Numenera. I really liked the system, it could have been a lot of fun - but it did not fit the game.'
Which graphics card is the better choice?
Foci are phrases that describe - and grant - character's abilities in Numenera. I was 'a graceful jack who masters defense', for example. 'Graceful' was my descriptor, 'jack' was my class and 'masters defense' was my focus, which granted me the Counterattack and Shield Master abilities. But whereas the Numenera game offers loads of brilliant-sounding foci - 'Bears a halo of fire', 'Controls gravity', 'Explores dark places', etc - in Torment: Tides of Numenera you as the Last Castoff can choose between three (your companions each have their own unique focus).
'In everything I would like to have more!' says Heine. 'We did design more in the beginning, but then as we got into implementing.. The class has a bunch of abilities at each tier, the focus has a bunch of abilities at each tier, and then the companions each have their own focus. It was getting really spread out. It was getting really hard to figure out what does this ability do that's different from this ability? Especially in a game where there's a lot less combat, or it's a lot less priority..
'You may not always realise when you're playing an RPG just how many of your abilities affect combat and only combat,' he adds. 'But in Torment the game is something else, so if we throw in a bunch of abilities that affect only combat, a lot of players, they're not going to care about this stuff because they're not fighting.
'Again, hard decision,' he says, 'but what we ended up with is - ahem - more focused foci, and the classes are a lot better too. The abilities you can get from the class are a lot better than they would have been because of it. The companion abilities are a lot more unique also.'
Five years later what was an exciting possibility - what seemed like a dream when I last recorded a Torment podcast - is now a reality. The taboo has been broken, a successor to Planescape: Torment has been made. And it's a good game, too. Of course there are criticisms, and I talk about mine with McComb and Heine in the longer recording, but let's not lose sight of what has been accomplished.
'I'm overjoyed with what we've done here,' says McComb. 'I'm really happy with the way this game has turned out, and I'm really happy with the way people are responding to it, because it makes me feel like we did our jobs - and we surpassed our jobs. But at the same time there's a lot of little things that obviously I would love to fix up. In retrospect there's decisions that were made that we could have made better or made differently that would have improved the quality of the game even more. But that ship has sailed.'
Where the Torment idea goes from here remains to be seen. InXile has shown Torment can flourish as a theme independently of Planescape, and there are no shortage of ideas about where that theme could go next: somewhere else in Numenera, a new setting, a world created by inXile? That was the original idea after all. But whether there will be a next time depends on you. If the world wants a Torment 3 I have no doubt it will be made. I just hope it doesn't take 16 years this time to come about.
In the first location you can rest, for example, at Tranquility's. It costs 20 shins per person.
One of the things you must do in the game is frequently resting and regenerating the main statistics of the character. These statistics enable you to fight, perform all effort throws in the game etc. Because of that, you must regularly replenish the pool so that you successfully progress through the game. There are two main methods of regenerating your stats:
You must rest and allow your party to regain their strength. Usually each larger location has a few places where you can rest. In Sagus Cliffs such place are Tranquility's Rest or the camp of the Disciples of the Changing God. By resting you will regenerate stat points of your whole team. Additionally, you will obtain a positive fettle Rested, which provides you with +5% critical success chance for any action. Usually resting isn't free, so make sure you have shins.
You can use items to replenish the pool of one of the main statistics.
You can use items and ciphers that regenerate selected stat pools. It is a fast way, perfect when you are far from a potential resting place. You can also use such items during battles, but you should keep them for dangerous situations.
Remember to regularly rest and regenerate stat pools. It is especially important when you start a new quest or after you've had a few fights. Additionally, make sure you have some reserves of items that will quickly regenerate your might, speed or intellect when you need it.
Resting is a very important element of the Torment: Tides of Numenera game. Unfortunately, in the 'starting' city of Sagus Cliffs, it could be considered a luxury, which you can only afford after spending a substantial amount of shins (the team cannot rest in random locations within the game world).
Here is a list of steps, which you should take in order to unlock a free resting spot in Sagus Cliffs:
1A) Get to The Changing God Cultists camp in Circus Minor (M3.2). During your first conversation with Casmeen and Mimeonchoose the following dialogue options and wait for the moment when you are asked whether you are The Changing God or not (this moment is shown on the picture above). Choose the first option to confirm this fact. From now on you can rest there for free.
1B) During your first meeting with the Cultists tell them that you are not The Changing God (the second dialogue option). If you want to get the free rest option you must make a few steps, described below (2-5).
2) Complete the Fallen to Earth main mission, the last objective of which is to repair a clock in the encampment of the Cultists of the Changing God on the Circus Minor (M3.2).
3) Talk to Casmeen and Mimeon (they are standing next to the clock) and express your willingness to join the Cult of the Changing God. Thanks to that, you will unlock the side mission Disciples of the Changing God.
4) Complete the newly acquired mission - Disciples of the Changing God. It concerns identifying another castoff, who is unknown to the cultists.
5) After the mentioned quest is completed and you will join the brotherhood, ask for an opportunity to rest once again (as shown in the picture above). From this moment forward, you will not be required to pay any fees (you can rest as many times as you like, with any number of characters in the team).
“We’ve seen a lot of people who have said, ‘This is exactly what I was looking for. This feels just like Planescape: Torment’” says Colin McComb, creative lead on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Let’s not dance around the topic, then: it does feel like Planescape: Torment.
Planescape: Torment is among the best old PC games that are still worth playing.
Except, that’s a knotty statement. What did that famously revered RPG actually feel like in the first place? One of its most commonly cited qualities is that it feels so different. In contrast to its contemporaries past and present. You’re not on a quest to save the world in Planescape: Torment. Nor do you visit any cosy taverns in woodland villages, slay any dragons, or romance your Elfin companions. The one bar in the game is called The Smouldering Corpse, and it’s more than just a foreboding name for its own sake. It felt strange and singular when Black Isle released it in 1999, and that hadn’t changed when I went back to replay it in 2014, just before the isometric RPG renaissance we’re enjoying just now.
So yes, Torment: Tides of Numenera feels just like its precursor: completely different.
To put it less facetiously, Tides of Numenera summons a recognisable atmosphere to veterans of Planescape with its art direction, characters and the strange, darkly philosophical conversations you have with people you meet along the journey. At the same time, its cast, setting and systems feel fresh. Fresh next to Planescape: Torment, and fresh next to the genre’s output in 2017.
You are The Last Castoff, once the vessel for an ancient and immortal being able to transplant his consciousness from one meatsack to the next. Trouble is, so were a lot of other people. Unbeknown to your god-parasite (who’s male in this story, though you choose your own character’s gender) every time he hopped from one vessel to the next he left that castoff being with its own consciousness, and a lot of questions.
You can draw parallels with Planescape: Torment here if you want to underline the similarity angle, and I do, because in that game you played the opposite: an immortal being who unknowingly sacrificed souls to fuel his own resurrection. The experience of playing these two characters is broadly similar: you’re confused and isolated, in search of answers about your nature and identity. But the implications are vastly different.
I begin my playthrough within The Bloom, a city-sized organism full of fleshy tunnels, pustules and tentacled maws, whose interior vastness houses an actual populated city. Understandably, The Last Castoff and her pals aren’t content to sit out the rest of eternity within its fleshy walls, so first on the order of business is talking to a heavily defended leader about getting out.
Actually, first on the order of business is getting to know my party a bit, since I’m starting the playthrough several hours into the game. Their personalities are quickly recognisable and clearly defined: Erritis is the light entertainment, just as Morte was in the last game. Matkina is a cold and slightly unnerving woman with whom Erritis seems quite taken. Callistege – well, she’s less clearly defined. Literally. She’s several different incarnations of herself at once, an experimental entity pulled together from different planes of existence. She’s quite chatty, considering.
Taking my first tentative steps along the fleshy tunnels of The Bloom, I stumble upon one of Tides of Numenera’s new systems: Effort. When you’re performing an action in-game but within the text box – something bespoke like interacting with a unique object – you might be presented with a set of nodes and asked to spend a number of them to increase your chances of succeeding in a particular task.
“These are translations of what happens in the new tabletop setting,” McComb explains. “Essentially we have difficult tasks of varying degrees. Essentially, you’re saying, ‘Okay, how important is it to me to succeed at this thing?’, and so you apply points of Effort. Depending on what tier or what level you are, [and] you can put more points into it. These are resource pools that are replenishable, but you have to rest, and when you rest, time moves on.”
Possible actions that require a certain number of effort points to guarantee success might not stick around forever, is what McComb implies. There’s a secondary system within that, too: Edge. “Edge essentially just gives you a free point or two points, or three points,” says McComb. “Free effort. You’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna spend three effort on something, but I’ve got two Edge”, so it’ll cost you one point of effort.”
Like so much of Tides of Numenera, it’s designed to slow the pace of gameplay down to a more thoughtful, calculated cadence. Pillars of Eternity offered something similar in its descriptive prose, in which you could choose to use certain inventory items or perform actions based on character stats, but this is a more dynamic system.
In my case, I choose to guarantee success while reaching into a mysterious statue to grab an object which feels like it doesn’t belong there. After doing so, my Last Castoff is sent swimming through the fragmented memories of others, trying to sort through their pain and anguish and make sense of it. Again, this is a very Torment principle: dealing with the metaphysical through extended interactive prose passages for tangible rewards in narrative and character progression.
That might not sound like a whole bunch of fun. And in less capable hands, it wouldn’t be – Tides of Numenera lives and dies on the quality of its writing, and in a two-hour chunk of hands-on I found that writing held my attention with a vice-grip. You do have to make a conscious effort to stretch your attention span with this genre, because it’s almost entirely comprised of reading text, but once you do you’re rewarded by playing a more active role in every character and room description. The isometric perspective only casts so much detail on the world, so InXile’s words, and your imagination, fill in the blanks.
It’s while I’m asking about the process of writing that world in such granular detail that McComb and lead writer Gavin Jurgens-Fhyrie get to talking about the Genital Naming system, or GNS. “We didn’t want any characters to feel the same,” says Jurgens-Fhyrie. “You’ll feel the same way once you play through this game, you’ll see that a lot of the characters are unique and odd.”
“One character [in particular], his line, I think it was, ‘Grim and weathered visage – it looks like he has lots of tales to tell’. I was like, ‘Colin, I think I’m gonna have to tell a lot of tales in this one’. He tells a lot of damn tales. So we started talking, and as we do when we talk, we inevitably skew dirty. So started on/talking about his ‘grim, weathered pecker’.
“So we were like, ‘Is he really a pecker talker?’” says McComb. “Then we realised: wait a second. If he calls it his pecker, what does his companion call his dick? The way one talks about their genitalia, the pair realised, is a real window into the psyche.
In other words: they’ve got the writing covered. It’s in safe hands. What about the combat, though? In truth I didn’t exchange a single blow with anyone in two hours, which is as telling in and of itself as this trailer InXile releases to explain Tides of Numenera’s turn-based mechanics.
It appears combat and the Effort system are closely linked, in that failure to put in the required Effort often leads to a combat outcome. So you could say I just grafted my way to a pacifist playthrough. I’m glad there’s such room for varying approaches, though: fighting was one of the less imaginative elements in the 1999 game and owed more to Infinity Engine stablemate Baldur’s Gate than the Planescape universe itself.
2017 is looking like a vintage year, almost of late nineties calibre, when it comes to isometric RPGs. But is the genre merely enjoying a bubble created by a fleeting nostalgia, or is it here to stay? “I certainly hope so,” says McComb. “I’ve really enjoyed doing writing-focused, story-focused, character-focused games.”
As for whether the principles of the genre might be applied to modern RPGs with their visual splendour, Jurgens-Fhyrie doesn’t see much cross-pollenation happening: “ I think the challenge is always that you’re gonna run into games that have become more advanced, where the game design itself is going to contradict that level of writing. With isometric, there’s just something about it that makes you want to sit down and read more. When you’re playing a [game like] Skyrim, for example, there’s something about it that gives you more urgency, so it’s harder to focus on the writing.”
Torment: Tides on Numenera releases on PC this February 28.
“We’ve seen a lot of people who have said, ‘This is exactly what I was looking for. This feels just like Planescape: Torment’” says Colin McComb, creative lead on Torment: Tides of Numenera. Let’s not dance around the topic, then: it does feel like Planescape: Torment.
Planescape: Torment is among the best old PC games that are still worth playing.
Torment Tides Of Numenera Achievements
Except, that’s a knotty statement. What did that famously revered RPG actually feel like in the first place? One of its most commonly cited qualities is that it feels so different. In contrast to its contemporaries past and present. You’re not on a quest to save the world in Planescape: Torment. Nor do you visit any cosy taverns in woodland villages, slay any dragons, or romance your Elfin companions. The one bar in the game is called The Smouldering Corpse, and it’s more than just a foreboding name for its own sake. It felt strange and singular when Black Isle released it in 1999, and that hadn’t changed when I went back to replay it in 2014, just before the isometric RPG renaissance we’re enjoying just now.
So yes, Torment: Tides of Numenera feels just like its precursor: completely different.
To put it less facetiously, Tides of Numenera summons a recognisable atmosphere to veterans of Planescape with its art direction, characters and the strange, darkly philosophical conversations you have with people you meet along the journey. At the same time, its cast, setting and systems feel fresh. Fresh next to Planescape: Torment, and fresh next to the genre’s output in 2017.
You are The Last Castoff, once the vessel for an ancient and immortal being able to transplant his consciousness from one meatsack to the next. Trouble is, so were a lot of other people. Unbeknown to your god-parasite (who’s male in this story, though you choose your own character’s gender) every time he hopped from one vessel to the next he left that castoff being with its own consciousness, and a lot of questions.
You can draw parallels with Planescape: Torment here if you want to underline the similarity angle, and I do, because in that game you played the opposite: an immortal being who unknowingly sacrificed souls to fuel his own resurrection. The experience of playing these two characters is broadly similar: you’re confused and isolated, in search of answers about your nature and identity. But the implications are vastly different.
I begin my playthrough within The Bloom, a city-sized organism full of fleshy tunnels, pustules and tentacled maws, whose interior vastness houses an actual populated city. Understandably, The Last Castoff and her pals aren’t content to sit out the rest of eternity within its fleshy walls, so first on the order of business is talking to a heavily defended leader about getting out.
Actually, first on the order of business is getting to know my party a bit, since I’m starting the playthrough several hours into the game. Their personalities are quickly recognisable and clearly defined: Erritis is the light entertainment, just as Morte was in the last game. Matkina is a cold and slightly unnerving woman with whom Erritis seems quite taken. Callistege – well, she’s less clearly defined. Literally. She’s several different incarnations of herself at once, an experimental entity pulled together from different planes of existence. She’s quite chatty, considering.
Taking my first tentative steps along the fleshy tunnels of The Bloom, I stumble upon one of Tides of Numenera’s new systems: Effort. When you’re performing an action in-game but within the text box – something bespoke like interacting with a unique object – you might be presented with a set of nodes and asked to spend a number of them to increase your chances of succeeding in a particular task.
“These are translations of what happens in the new tabletop setting,” McComb explains. “Essentially we have difficult tasks of varying degrees. Essentially, you’re saying, ‘Okay, how important is it to me to succeed at this thing?’, and so you apply points of Effort. Depending on what tier or what level you are, [and] you can put more points into it. These are resource pools that are replenishable, but you have to rest, and when you rest, time moves on.”
Possible actions that require a certain number of effort points to guarantee success might not stick around forever, is what McComb implies. There’s a secondary system within that, too: Edge. “Edge essentially just gives you a free point or two points, or three points,” says McComb. “Free effort. You’re like, “Okay, I’m gonna spend three effort on something, but I’ve got two Edge”, so it’ll cost you one point of effort.”
Like so much of Tides of Numenera, it’s designed to slow the pace of gameplay down to a more thoughtful, calculated cadence. Pillars of Eternity offered something similar in its descriptive prose, in which you could choose to use certain inventory items or perform actions based on character stats, but this is a more dynamic system.
In my case, I choose to guarantee success while reaching into a mysterious statue to grab an object which feels like it doesn’t belong there. After doing so, my Last Castoff is sent swimming through the fragmented memories of others, trying to sort through their pain and anguish and make sense of it. Again, this is a very Torment principle: dealing with the metaphysical through extended interactive prose passages for tangible rewards in narrative and character progression.
That might not sound like a whole bunch of fun. And in less capable hands, it wouldn’t be – Tides of Numenera lives and dies on the quality of its writing, and in a two-hour chunk of hands-on I found that writing held my attention with a vice-grip. You do have to make a conscious effort to stretch your attention span with this genre, because it’s almost entirely comprised of reading text, but once you do you’re rewarded by playing a more active role in every character and room description. The isometric perspective only casts so much detail on the world, so InXile’s words, and your imagination, fill in the blanks.
It’s while I’m asking about the process of writing that world in such granular detail that McComb and lead writer Gavin Jurgens-Fhyrie get to talking about the Genital Naming system, or GNS. “We didn’t want any characters to feel the same,” says Jurgens-Fhyrie. “You’ll feel the same way once you play through this game, you’ll see that a lot of the characters are unique and odd.”
“One character [in particular], his line, I think it was, ‘Grim and weathered visage – it looks like he has lots of tales to tell’. I was like, ‘Colin, I think I’m gonna have to tell a lot of tales in this one’. He tells a lot of damn tales. So we started talking, and as we do when we talk, we inevitably skew dirty. So started on/talking about his ‘grim, weathered pecker’.
“So we were like, ‘Is he really a pecker talker?’” says McComb. “Then we realised: wait a second. If he calls it his pecker, what does his companion call his dick? The way one talks about their genitalia, the pair realised, is a real window into the psyche.
In other words: they’ve got the writing covered. It’s in safe hands. What about the combat, though? In truth I didn’t exchange a single blow with anyone in two hours, which is as telling in and of itself as this trailer InXile releases to explain Tides of Numenera’s turn-based mechanics.
It appears combat and the Effort system are closely linked, in that failure to put in the required Effort often leads to a combat outcome. So you could say I just grafted my way to a pacifist playthrough. I’m glad there’s such room for varying approaches, though: fighting was one of the less imaginative elements in the 1999 game and owed more to Infinity Engine stablemate Baldur’s Gate than the Planescape universe itself.
Torment: Tides Of Numenera Review
2017 is looking like a vintage year, almost of late nineties calibre, when it comes to isometric RPGs. But is the genre merely enjoying a bubble created by a fleeting nostalgia, or is it here to stay? “I certainly hope so,” says McComb. “I’ve really enjoyed doing writing-focused, story-focused, character-focused games.”
As for whether the principles of the genre might be applied to modern RPGs with their visual splendour, Jurgens-Fhyrie doesn’t see much cross-pollenation happening: “ I think the challenge is always that you’re gonna run into games that have become more advanced, where the game design itself is going to contradict that level of writing. With isometric, there’s just something about it that makes you want to sit down and read more. When you’re playing a [game like] Skyrim, for example, there’s something about it that gives you more urgency, so it’s harder to focus on the writing.”
Torment: Tides on Numenera releases on PC this February 28.
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