Torment 2

King of Posters
#1

the writing in the first half hour is fairly strong and the eurogamer and RPS reviews were both cautiously optimistic (albeit neither made allowances for people like yours truly who still find the original unplayable despite its reputation because infinity engine). it’s so nice to have RPGs worth playing on a somewhat regular basis.

I have a nine hour early morning flight back from Poland tomorrow so I’ll have more impressions then, despite the game throttling my poor Y series laptop CPU to the point that I’m probably not going to be able to go back to playing it on here once I’ve returned to my desktop

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#2

yeah, I would strongly recommend getting this. the combat is by all accounts not quite original sin good but the writing, skilling, and art design make an immediately positive impression, and there seems to be widespread agreement that this is a lot less limp than pillars or wasteland 2 if you wanted to like either of those but couldn’t be persuaded. it may not turn out to be fantastic but after the first hour I’d be very surprised if it weren’t at least great.

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#3

So far I’ve been intrigued and a little disappointed at the same time.

(I wish Read Thoughts was cooler than it is)

#4

Not to rain on anybody’s parade, but I understand the game diminishes in richness as it progresses, apparently? The word is that they were running out of budget, and sacrifices had to be made. I’m still on board either way, assuming I can ever afford this.

#5

Right off the bat this is less panic-inducing than Wasteland 2 or Pillars because it doesn’t dump you into a maze of character creation choices. I’m OK with making choices that lock me out of future opportunities, but building characters with no context and praying that you’ve got the right combination in a combat-heavy game sucks.

The aesthetic is good pulpy heterodox fantasy.

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#6

It’s my understanding that there’s not a lot of combat in the game, so hopefully this is less of an issue. Basically all of these games other than Divinity 2 had far more combat than its systems could handle. I definitely dislike the character creator in Pillars, mostly because the D&D magic system is garbage in any world where you fight more than once a day (and every videogame, from Baldur’s Gate to Pillars and right on forward, always has far, far more combat than this - far more than it has ever needed for storytelling).

#7

I actually liked the combat in Wasteland 2 quite a bit once it received a few patches to fix glaring errors (infinite AP on certain enemies)

But I also liked that it was a combat rpg that didn’t rely on having the perfect combination to get through problems, just clever resource usage.

#8

I’ve started Wasteland 2 three times now and never really get much past the beginning for whatever reason. It’s a weird sort of frustration, though I think it had less to do with the combat and more my desire for it to be more like Shadowrun and less like… well, itself. So probably just don’t dig the setting, if I had to guess.

#9

I just couldn’t care about being an apocalypse cop. and the game was not great looking, like some fischer price my first 3d studio max looking thing. looked like something where if the physics were more glitchy and the color palette just had some more pink or teal it’d be on some tumblr of weird looking 3d art

#10

yeah, a lot of devs went pretty placeholdery on their first unity projects, it bothered me more in UIs than character models.

#11

I think part of it is that most people don’t actually remember the original Wasteland and assume it was closer to Fallout than it actually was. As it stands, Wasteland 2 is a strangely faithful hybrid of Fallout combat and Wasteland writing. Wasteland writing is uneven (and it isn’t remembered as such because at the time the best a cRPG could hope to be is unevenly written but ambitious, which it certainly was)

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#12

I spent close to 90 minutes in the first big area of the first town

hell yeah

for how many cRPGs have just terrible gameplay loops and shit pacing, the hugely overwhelming first town is a very welcome trope

#13

Such towns are best subsidized by also being extremely inefficient for reasons never fully explained.

#14

up to 5 hours now still in the first town, with minimal progress on the main quest

loving it

the sheer quantity of interesting writing is kind of ridiculous

like, it’s very probably too much to appreciate and is arguably even a pacing issue in and of itself? but at the same time the average nobody quest-giver NPC is more evocative than entire dragon age plot arcs (not an exaggeration) and that’s hard to dislike

4 Likes
#15

is it though? do I need one million words of the life story of every bullshit NPC in a video game?

I mean, this game is obviously not for me, but I’m kind of curious what brings people to the point where that sounds appealing as a general principle. I tried to play the original torment several times. each time I went in the idea was that I was going to ignore/stomach the fact that the game was 1) fucking ugly and 2) played like garbage, and each time I quit when I realized that the parts people actually liked involved every sprite you find engaging you in an elaborate whack-a-mole discussion on your Important Life Philosophies under a maze of I put on my robe and wizard hat flavor text. Isn’t that just…juvenile? I dunno, team. what are these games.

#16

Yeah, hearing someone say “I’m still in the first city after five hours!” is one of those things that’d convince me to never play the game myself.

#17

I thought the original was quite surreal and it was the oddity a minute situationism of the thing that kept me going. As for it playing like garbage, I can’t really deny that any IE-based games tended to be pretty easy as games go, but I don’t really think it played poorly compared to any of its contemporaries. I’m not sure either of the games are ever so absurdist that they fall into retreading old memes though.

Then again, I’m also not terribly convinced that most current game systems aren’t just whack-a-mole of a different sort. And I guess if I’m forced, I’d rather the interaction be reading than punching/shooting/slashing.

#18

Torment is notable because its conversation trees, unlike almost all other entries in the genre, are not designed to be exhausted. If you try, you end up talking in nested circles with everybody. The game is actually best played by only talking to people about stuff that you actually want to talk about. You know. Roleplaying.

That said I never beat the game so what do I know. Apparently the other thing everyone loves about it is the ending twist about who you are and why you’re immortal and I never even found that out.

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#19

these are the two main reasons I never got into the original and the two primary things fixed in this one as far as I can tell

(I’ve had three battles in those 5 hours btw)

#20

Nah, I think only super boring dnd lore nerds care about this. What you describe the dialogue trees as is actually 100% right. Like, as a game it’s the exact opposite of the austerity of Fallout 1 and it flourishes in the linearity and bloat because you really do get a chance to play a character that you define. They put in so much actual choice in the dialogue trees that basically anything you are likely to think of will be represented as an option.