Don't let the screaming that riots within have a voice"
Faith and the Muse - The Red Crown
I'm giving Torment: Tides of Numenera a third go before uninstalling it in favor of... hopefully Cybepunk 2077 or V:tM-B2... soon... soon, I'm sure. I've talked quite a bit about TToN here before (it has a tag, people; uuuuse, the, tags, Luuuke!,) It was in many ways an excellent roleplaying game with lots of skills checks, resource management, a heavily interwoven main plot which attempted to bring roleplaying back into line as consistent characterization and meaningful decision-making, with very few quests requiring a combat solution. Unfortunately, if you did want to fight, its combat side was rudimentary at best, awkwardly imprecise and frequently buggy. Still, its "crisis mode" interspersing combat with dialogues makes it a hopeful vision of cRPG player interaction for the future.
Unfortunatelier, Tides sacrificed its own stated goal as a spiritual successor of the classic Planescape:Torment. Not from lack of skill but obviously a conscious choice on the developers' part to pull the usual "bait-and-switch" of sequels: they wanted to be bankrolled by fans of an 18-year-old title while at the same time appealing to 18-year-old gamers. This unfortunately meant trying to adapt what was once a fatalistic, depressive, grim, bleak, morbid and gruesome tale of futile aborted redemption, a tale of bitter regret, hope lost before it ever breathed, and inescapable mazes... to the tail-end of the millennial generation... to snowflakes... to a generation of preening facetious self-righteous narcissists incapable of either admitting the inherent darkness of human nature and the universe's futility or of objective ethical evaluation. Perhaps inevitably, Tides came across as a watered down version of Torment's themes, where your moral choices rarely connected. For a fairly concise example (and one of Tides' worst-written chapters) you can take a look at the obligatory RPG tavern in the first act.
Dominating its corner of Sigil's expansive slums, The Smoldering Corpse Bar provided exposition, ambience and a couple of recruitable companions, as well as a variety of exotic drinks to help carry the point of Planescape's vast, otherworldly setting. Its counterpart location from Tides, the Fifth Eye... also serves drinks.
You meet O from the original Torment once again, just to cement the two locales' reiteration, and he pulls the same inscrutable cosmic consciousness routine.
The expository Candrian and Creakknees are replaced with Arthour, but where Ebb Creakknees' dialogue had a wistful, bittersweet air and Candrian served as object lesson as to the planes' dangers, Arthour is just devoid of personality. Ysg, overtly suffering the same affliction as Candrian, is even more pointless.
Where the Corpse's patrons bristled a bit at your approach, the Eye's supplicate themselves for your assistance. Instead of demons in disguise growling at you about the Blood War you get a gratingly upbeat recruiter telling you about the Endless Battle.
In the Corpse you were tasked with getting rid of the deadbeat barfly Mochai by either paying off her considerable debt (for that point in the game) or poisoning her to death, which netted you some cash in addition to free drinks. This was a valid roleplaying choice: stroking your own ego by playing the hero should cost you. Mochai's counterpart in the Fifth Eye (female, alone in an alcove in the same relative position) turns out to be a damsel in distress, part of a quest which can only be completed by playing the knight in shining armor.
The worst of the worst are the five without original Torment counterparts, lifted from any number of Young Adult Fiction stories in which utterly unsympathetic boogeymen are defeated by a plucky five-man band simply by passing some mental purity tests, proving themselves pure of heart, by being mentally "special" while bypassing intelligence. Granted, my distaste for these "psychic veterans" stems largely from the focus on telepathy/telekinesis, a dead end crutch for lazy writing which has little place in SF in the first place and which Tides' writers abused to an immoderate extent even by the standards of pulp video game fiction.
But even ignoring their science fantasy brain wizardry, it's their infantile moralism that grates. Planescape: Torment ran you ragged through a world of bad and worse choices, with many of your best options being merely to minimize the suffering - inflicted as often as not by you yourself. Tides' Erritis, brainchild of Chris Avellone who headed Torment's scripts, unsurprisingly remains a rare example of this principle. The Fifth Eye's "psychic veterans" on the other hand stumble cliché after cliché into adolescent incompetence.
Their quest has nothing to do with the rest of the game but is utterly overblown in its world-destroying scope, especially for the first act.
Their antagonist is referred to as "The Adversary" and even Tolkien barely pulled off such stentorian grandiloquence. These days you'd have to play it tongue-in-cheek as Neil Stephenson did with Hiro Protagonist, a level of genre awareness utterly lacking here.
Their dialogues' unabashed self-aggrandizement would sound more appropriate in the mouth of Conan the Barbarian: "We keep the minds of Sagus Cliffs safe from threats they don't even imagine."
Token heroic sacrifice included, natch.
Worst of all, their enemy is worst of all and juxtaposed with cozy plains-ape normalcy: "Inhuman, with no negotiation." Hilariously, Tides itself presented a much better version of the same idea just one act later, in a quest chain written by a fanboy of the old Torment. The Endless Gate cult culminates in an encounter with Lovecraftian monstrosities on the same malice and power level as Malaise the Adversary - but those horrors from beyond were illustrated largely by their human followers. They were shown to exploit all-too-human despair, human bloodlust, human viciousness, human sadism, human cowardice, human servility, human hatred and self-hatred. In contrast, Malaise's defeat is a cheap fairytale dichotomy with unambiguous heroes standing for the plains-ape status quo, to be reinstated by defeating the unknown.
All this adds up to a noticeable absence of Ignus. For all the Fifth Eye tries to evoke the Smoldering Corpse, it lacks said smouldering corpse, or any attempted facsimile of Torment's unforgettable sadomasochistic mono-pyro-maniacal loose cannon of an underling. (If anything, that glowbug Erritis again comes closest.) To me it's an admission of both defeat and guilt, an admitted break in the spiritual succession. For those of you who've played Torment, think back to Ignus' very first action upon being reawakened... yeah, the very first thing he does... yeah, THAT. Try selling THAT as a companion to snowflakes. Try getting them to admit they want that companion.
The worrllld will end they say
So why not watch it buurrrn?
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