Torment: Tides of Numenera Preview

The folks at RPGWatch have published a preview of Torment: Tides of Numenera as part of their coverage of the various RPGs shown at Gamescom. They seem really impressed with the title and seem confident that the announced console versions won’t negatively impact the PC, Mac and Linux versions that were first promised via Kickstarter. A couple of snippets:

Colin went on to provide some examples of the weird things in the game like in Planescape: Torment, dying is different from other games. When you die, you unlock the ghosts with your mind and you can get those ghosts to share the secrets that their living counterparts would not tell you in person. You can enter someone’s memory and change their past history. Not their memories of that history, but the actual history itself. When you come back from those memories, reality will have shifted around you. You can sell a companion to a robotic slaver, who will harvest that companion for its youth. You can unlock a puzzle box that is literally made out of music. You can help a giant robot give birth and after that you can steal those babies and use them for explosives. You can get cybernetic implants in the middle of a town square without anesthetic. You can feed your friends to a predator with the size of a city. You can talk to a man who waged war on your creator and who was trapped in time for his crimes against humanity.

Then we got to see some footage. We were taken to the Valley of the Dead Heroes, a millions of years old burial ground, used by countless civilizations. It is filled for hundreds of kilometers with sarcophagi and tombs. Memorialists have come there to study the place and a murderous cult have come up here to follow those memorialists, to open their guts and to use those for their own needs. These guys demand from us that we find their prey for them. They control the area, so we need to deal with this situation. You get different options to choose from in a dialogue. You can accept it, but you can also try to intimidate them. The different members of your party, will have more or less chance for the intimidation to succeed, so you can select the one with the highest chance. Upon succeeding, they will report back to their boss about who you are and what you have done, which will have a big impact at a later stage of the game. Each of the options, will have a different result on how events will play out, both in the short term and in the long term.

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As far as the announcement for a console release is concerned, Colin specifically stated that the game was not dumbed down for consoles. This was not the case, the PC version is the same as it would have been if there were no console release. They wanted to make sure that what they were doing on PC would not be compromised by the console version. This is also why they have created a separate UI for consoles that does not influence the PC UI. If you would play the game on a PC with a controller, you would get the console UI with radial menus. If you play with keyboard and mouse, you get the, very different, PC UI.