Torment: Tides of Numenera Update #59: Interface Improvements

While they have their hands busy with the Wasteland 3 Fig crowdfunding campaign, the developers at inXile still found the time to push a new Kickstarter update for Torment: Tides of Numenera. The update focuses almost entirely on Quality of Life improvements, especially concerning the interface, so there’s nothing particularly fancy to read.

That said, I’ve spent 15 minutes with the current Early Access build, enough to acclimatize myself but not enough to spoil myself on the story, and all the improvements listed sound like very good things indeed. An excerpt:

Crisis and Combat Updates

But conversation isn’t everything. We’ve also been taking strides in making combat easier to understand and displaying more information about your characters, abilities, and the battlefield’s overall state. This was one of the things that wasn’t quite at the level we wanted it, and many of our backers agreed judging by some of the comments we received! As a result, we’ve added far more information to the Crisis HUD.

To start, you might recall we previously talked about anoetic and occultic actions in earlier updates. Now, we’ve renamed them to your “move” action and “attack” action to make their uses clearer, and given them appropriate icons that display under your current party member (and turn grey when they’ve been used up each turn). This hasn’t altered or simplified any of the previous gameplay or mechanics at all – for instance, abilities can still consume movement in some cases, or no movement in others – but it’s much easier to keep track of which actions are which now.

Additionally, our engineers have rebuilt our tooltips when you mouse over an ability. The system we have now is incredibly robust, showing detailed information which also automatically populates and formats itself based on some simple tags the designers can write. Even special statuses and fettles will auto-fill their effects, so that when designers start doing balance changes, they don’t have to manually go in and change the text for everything affected. You’ll also see how the action cost is also more clearly indicated, tying in with the changes I mentioned above. On the whole, these tooltips are just more readable, more accurate, and a bit prettier looking than what we previously had.

Expanding on our improved tooltips, we have also added a right-click popup window to every ability in the game which allows you to inspect their full details just like in the Infinity Engine RPGs, and each has more flavorful long-form descriptions we’ve penned for them for you to read.