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So this whole quest was just a bunch of bullshit? Urgh. Now I feel like I gotta take my anger out on something. Like the Sorrow. Give it a one-sided masochistic rear end-beating for the ages, Castoff.
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May 25, 2020 08:16
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Oh, gently caress this game. Kill it.
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May 25, 2020 08:25
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This is an entirely new level of dumb. People complained about the ending of Mass Effect, I'm suprised no one complained about this, but then again, most likely never saw this ending. Kill the Sorrow It's the only thing this abomination of a story "deserves".
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May 25, 2020 08:40
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This story deserves multi-track drifting like nothing else how does an already bad game keep getting worse until the very last line how just Kill the sorrow and be done with this poo poo
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May 25, 2020 14:27
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My vote: 
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May 25, 2020 14:32
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anilEhilated posted:Oh, gently caress this game. Kill it.
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May 25, 2020 17:22
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There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five player characters tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that The Sorrow is on the side track. You have one option...
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May 25, 2020 17:41
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EricFate posted:There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five player characters tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that The Sorrow is on the side track. You have one option... My choice is "deltree D:\Games\inXile Entertainment\Torment - Tides of Numenera\*". Is that a choice?
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May 25, 2020 21:36
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EricFate posted:There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five player characters tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that The Sorrow is on the side track. You have one option... 
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May 26, 2020 17:39
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Burn the Trolley. If the Changing God creates a castoff whenever he body hops, then wouldn't the First Castoff be his original body? So shouldn't CG be the mother of Miikaguffin? Is this ever addressed anywhere?
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May 26, 2020 18:11
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Not The Wendigo posted:If the Changing God creates a castoff whenever he body hops, then wouldn't the First Castoff be his original body? So shouldn't CG be the mother of Miikaguffin? Is this ever addressed anywhere? The timeline looks a bit like this: -The Changing God lives in Sagus Cliffs and is a powerful not-science wizard who has a daughter named Miika -A bunch of assholes named the Tabaht show up and attack Sagus Cliffs. The Changing God beats their asses with time fuckery but Miika eats some kind of psychic illness from a Tides weapon. -The Changing God wipes out the Tabaht and kills their God-AI, but finds their notes on the Tides and concludes that they could be used to never die. -The Changing God goes to another dimension and comes back with The First Castoff. What happened to his original male body is never explained, but as far as I can tell "castoffs" are all his science created bodies and doesn't include his original human one. He tries consciousness transfer on his daughter around this time too, and this awakens the Sorrow because Tides weapons are fine but curing your sick daughter is not. Tl:dr The Changing God was a man who had Miika, then he disappeared into the Transdimensional Zone and came back with Maralel.
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May 26, 2020 19:14
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Quick question because it seems weird but typical for male writers: What about Miikas mother? No influence? No character? Here today, gone tomorrow? Nothing to say about her dead daughter?
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May 26, 2020 19:37
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I suspect she was lost in the fumes of the farts these idiot writers had to have been huffing.
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May 26, 2020 19:39
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Mr.Misfit posted:What about Miikas mother? No influence? No character? Here today, gone tomorrow? Nothing to say about her dead daughter? Miika's mother is never mentioned even in passing. I mentioned in the LP that she must have been an exceptional woman to catch the eye of The Changing God. The Changing God is described as "as an explorer and a tinkerer" by Miika and is described as the kind of man to create castoff bodies and jump into black holes, and somehow this mysterious woman got him to hang around Sagus Cliffs and have a daughter, who he - despite what Miika tells you - loved enough to risk death on multiple occasions to bring her back from the dead. Yet there's nothing about the woman who caught him as and made him settle down. We can presume she's not dead because The Changing God never tries to resurrect her in the text, but he never does anything like use Heaven's Rejoinder to undo their divorce either. Who the hell knows.
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May 26, 2020 20:44
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The voting is 11-2 in favor of killing the Sorrow. We're doing that. The final gameplay update will be up tonight.
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May 27, 2020 00:06
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Our Long Numenera Nightmare Is Finally Over Last time on Tides of Numenera we learned the real truth of the Sorrow: it's not an avenging angel, but a random death robot built by some rich assholes to genocide their own people for using Tides wrong, then it came here to gaslight us like a jealous ex. It offered us the same choice we've received all game: who should the trolley run over?   : I reject your authority, Sorrow. I will use the Resonance to destroy you, and all of us will live free. gently caress you. How many people lived in the Dalad world? If the Resonance is a scalpel as you say, why can't we cut the Sorrow out and leave the other protections? The answer, I suspect, is that this is the Sorrow's last bit of "gently caress you".  This is a very important choice. If you don't pick your dominant Tide the Sorrow kills you in the process. However, as we are Blue/Gold aligned... : [Raises Gold Tide] The castoffs are my family. I will do what it takes to protect them from you.  This is what the game developers consider to be the bad ending, as they are warning you off pretty hard here. : Unleash a Tidal Surge. Picking the right Tidal Alignment lets us shoot a big Cutscene Laser at the Sorrow, resulting in a 2 minute death animation.  The game is about to get extremely hypocritical here.  They FINALLY allowed the animators to do something meaningful.  Now you might be confused why the bad ending has a being of darkness and death exploding into light, but that's Numenera, nothing is spiritually significant or has any meaning!  It explodes into shadow dicks, I assume that's where it got all the Black Demon Seed.  Are you ready for the guilt trip?  The game starts playing background noise of a bunch of screaming and terror here. It would be moderately effective if I weren't laughing my rear end off. See how Callistege is there despite having disappeared into the datasphere in our not-romantic moment? I remember, but the game doesn't.  Remember how Callistege disappeared into the datasphere? If you're being generous you could say the Sorrow blew it up from the Labyrinth when she exploded. I am not inclined to show this game any generosity. I guess we needed that near-panty shot of our traumatized companion. She's a woman in Numenera, the game is of course going to treat her terribly.  This is probably supposed to make me feel bad that the First Castoff approves, but I have no connection to this setting or any of these characters. : Where will you go now? : Do you think the Sorrow's really gone? : Turn to Matkina. "What will you do now?" Remember when the game wanted us to believe that Matkina was a cold, calculating assassin? Matkina is a hired killer and gang enforcer. Are we really to believe she would have accepted her death at the hands of the Sorrow so easily?  These are the words of a killer for hire. Her focus is literally that she's a murderer. If I was being generous I would say that what we did is supposed to be so evil and selfish that it disgusted a trained assassin, but the Gold Tide told us that we were a charitable and empathetic person for doing this.  : Though I do like the idea of putting some space between the Sagus Protectorate and me. Maybe I'll head to M'ra Jollos. Learn how to breath water for a while.  : Leave. Figure out your next steps later.gently caress this poo poo, and gently caress this game! The Last Castoff is OUT!  No summary this time. This ending is a joke far better than anything I can conceive. Anyway, it's time for the ending slides! An "expansive epilogue" was promised for 2.85 million dollars. Are you ready? Here we go!  This is Numenera in a nutshell. We drove thousands of people mad. We were remembered for our wisdom and selflessness after inflicting madness and terrible prose on the world. Edit: I misattributed this, the Sorrow just says "thousands." The Sorrow has destroyed entire worlds. This is batshit.  Wait, I'm confused. The game uses Matkina as its mouthpiece to explain that running over the people of Sagus Cliffs with a trolley was very wrong because a bunch of people died. She then ran a campaign of mass murder to seize power in the Bloom and executed people to make examples of them. What is this poo poo?  Tybir got the bad ending. Oh no. Such a sympathetic and useful character.  All of the people on this screen were awful at their jobs. Look at the sheer amount of writers. Holy poo poo, they actually got women to sign off on crap like the Omahdon quest. I see Colin McComb is the "lead writer." Colin, I hear you're a good person, but the sheer amount of terrible prose and your inability to actually stick with a theme instead of jumping incoherently all over the place makes me never want to read anything you wrote ever again.  I guess some good came out of this? We freed Tides Dog. I feel like Tides Dog was the thread's favorite party member because he didn't spew garbage everywhere. I fully expect the next Numenera game, if there is one, to have Tides Dog come back spewing verbal diarrhea about nanomachines all over.  Rhin didn't like us for something she never saw us do, but she's happy she was able to repay us by helping us commit mass murder.  Anyway on to the sidequest characters! Aligern and Callistege do get endings, but I think Callistege is now trapped in a coma fighting her echoes forever and Aligern just died on the way back to his home planet. Zebb was one of the three little music kids who lived in the abandoned collapsing house. No idea how he didn't go insane when Aligern, a trained nano, snapped like a twig.  Wait. The Changing God is dead and the castoffs are in hiding because they can die now. What are they fighting over?  The baby robots lived at least.  We gave her leverage. She had the leverage that the city was supplying batteries. That's literally how the US foreign aid program works. We literally handed her the situation on a silver platter, and she hosed it up.   I assume Coty went to another dimension where everything was less stupid.  As all we saw of Artaglio's traditions was "sitting around and drinking until a vaguely pretty half-bald woman asks you to do something stupid" I cannot imagine their lives lasted very long.  We saved Aardiriis. She didn't die. We teleported her out. How many "reactivity" promises were in that Kickstarter?  That's it. What a piece of poo poo. This concludes the playthrough part of the LP. I am going to write a postmortem post about how this game managed to gently caress up literally every story beat it tried to hit and then clean this thread up for archives. I do want to say one thing before that: Thank you to everyone in the thread who stuck with me through this game. I can't tell you how gratifying it was to see the thread having similar reactions as I did going through this game. I'm glad for everyone who came in and voted on where the trolleys should go or just read along to see what the hell was going on with this supposedly "deep" game. This game sucked, but having you guys along for the ride was a ton of fun. Thank you, and avoid the trolleys! TheGreatEvilKing fucked around with this message at 03:52 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 01:20
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Man, that was... bad. Thanks for suffering through it, TGEK, and thank you for the brilliant decision to have those summary boxes, I don't think I could've suffered through the game's writing without them.
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May 27, 2020 01:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Man, that was... bad. Heh, I learned about the summary boxes from Ash of Gods. Speaking of, I'm going to be doing more LPs after this one, because I have learned nothing. The Last Decision Do I LP Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, a vaguely infinity engine game set in Lovecraft-generic town where one of the character options is "sex wizard", or do I LP Tyranny, an infinity engine game where you play as a secret policeman and the authors struggle with the nature of evil?
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May 27, 2020 01:49
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The thing I don't understand is why does Matkina's dialogue have 'Rhin's opinion of you worsened?'. Either they hosed up and it should be Matkina's opinion worsened (for all it doesn't matter when the game has literally ended), or they really didn't think about the logistics of how Rhin would even know you did this. It's like the Callistege part where she's not even supposed to have a body anymore, but here we have her in insanity fighting with her clones. My vote is on Stygian because apparently I want to go with the option which is probably also going to be another stew of terrible writing.
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May 27, 2020 01:57
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Sometimes one of the most satisfying things in the world is to get hold of a really terrible work, form a circle, and kick it in the ribs over and over. I am glad doing so brought some joy.
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May 27, 2020 02:04
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Stygian It honestly sounds more interesting.
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May 27, 2020 02:09
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Stygian, yeah.
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May 27, 2020 02:15
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Thanks for suffering though this. I had this game on my Steam wishlist, and I quite happily took it off. I might have suffered trying to play this game. Worse yet, I might have given the creators of this drek money. They don't need to be further rewarded for this. I'm not sure the fact that I own Tyranny and haven't yet played it means I should want you to LP it or not.
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May 27, 2020 02:17
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Oh! And in regards to the ending, this isn't the first time I've declared that the writers misunderstood their own world and got the consequences of an ending choice wrong (Prey is the most recent example I can recall, but it was of minor consequence). But wow was this one really off base, for exactly the reasons you highlighted. Even if I don't just reject what they claimed were the results of your actions out of hand (the only support for the claim that the tides were inherently polluting or whatever was like, one person claiming you unintentionally forced the breakup early on. I don't buy that either), they would have to be far more severe consequences for that to have been the wrong choice. I mean, at least Mass Effect retconned the implication that the original creators of the Reapers were wrong in their worry about synthetics. The fact that the cycle was a mistake made it somewhat more poignant. It still wasn't good, but it was a ton better than this.
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May 27, 2020 02:25
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Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones. Have some fun. Was all of Oom's stuff completely absent from the game before this? So that you could get the impression that the Sorrow is just killing Castoffs/trying to kill the not-actually-in-this-story God? Because once Oom comes in and you find out that the Sorrow is torching planets...the whole ending dilemma becomes absurd. Matkina was pretty weird to me because she's a big old edge lord in all of her banters but the end she's joking about stealing your money like some obnoxious CN rogue. Thinking about the blue/silver ending choice with the specter though...thinking about it a bit more, I will say one thing to the game's credit. If you're constantly calling yourself the changing god and acting like him, at the end of the game you're given the option to more or less absorb the Specter and then arguably reach a point where you've made the lie reality. Hypocrisy fucked around with this message at 04:19 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 03:56
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Welp there you have it. The most expensive mistake I ever made. One would hope that I have since grown older and wiser and hopefully am less stupid with my money now. This is what happens when people convince you that all that is needed to make a good game is more time and money. I guess I'm mostly just grateful I never played or cared about Wing Commander, who knows what might have happened otherwise. In summary, play Disco Elysium instead, it's the spiritual sequel Planescape:Torment deserved.
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May 27, 2020 04:06
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Keldulas posted:The thing I don't understand is why does Matkina's dialogue have 'Rhin's opinion of you worsened?'. Either they hosed up and it should be Matkina's opinion worsened (for all it doesn't matter when the game has literally ended), or they really didn't think about the logistics of how Rhin would even know you did this. It's like the Callistege part where she's not even supposed to have a body anymore, but here we have her in insanity fighting with her clones. "Mystery". It's weird, because apparently Rhin knows about it despite being in another world, but no one else knows we did this and the future healers revere us as a selfless and wise person. Really. Hypocrisy posted:Was all of Oom's stuff completely absent from the game before this? So that you could get the impression that the Sorrow is just killing Castoffs/trying to kill the not-actually-in-this-story God? Because once Oom comes in and you find out that the Sorrow is torching planets...the whole ending dilemma becomes absurd. I did track down a video without Oom because I could have sworn the Sorrow also revealed the Tides were artificial, and she still tells you that she's an artificlal monster who killed her creators at their command. I think Keith the Ghost Son from that "emotional feeding" creep was in the game, and he describes the Sorrow burning civilizations, as does Melnoth in Miel Avest. The Sorrow has killed far more people than the "thousands" we drove insane in this setting, and there are seriously transdimensional therapists and not-divine healing miracles lying around that can presumably fix broken minds. The writers just seem to have believed that this was going to be a "wow" twist - slaying the inhuman horror is actually worse! What does one life matter! Roll credits. Matkina is just incoherently written and an overall terrible character. Her torment comes from the cheap sexual assault bad fantasy writers love using, she is described as a cold, calculating jack when she's an emotional hothead, and she's an amoral assassin who nevertheless judges others for murdering people and that is played completely straight. For bonus horror points Patrick Rothfuss teaches writing for a living, and yet proudly attached his name to this piece of trash. I need to take a break from writing the postmortem, it is getting long and angry and I am going to go play a good game to cool down.
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May 27, 2020 04:56
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Thanks for the LP, TGEK!  Sure we drove Callistege insane and indirectly lead to the death of Aligern, Matkina, Tybir, and Erritis. But at least we helped Rhin get to Do Stygian next, that one sounds more fun stupid compared to the babbling nonsense that was Numenara.
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May 27, 2020 07:20
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Thanks for the LP. When I played this game I wanted to like it but between the dialogue that went on forever but never said much and the character's being less memorable (and arguably written worse) than Fallout 3's companions I just couldn't enjoy it. Well that and the godawful combat. Thanks for putting up with this terrible game.
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May 27, 2020 10:26
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Thanks for the LP. My own single run through was before Oom was available.
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May 27, 2020 10:33
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If this was the "bad" ending given all the massive guilt-tripping, what does the good one entail? Sorrow just goes poof and everyone lives happily ever after? Anyhow, I'll join the majority and vote for Stygian since what I've seen of its mechanics sounds completely awful and Tyranny - for all the questionable decisions it made - is fun enough to play.
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May 27, 2020 10:43
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The reveal of the Sorrow of having been intelligent all along just loving broke the story for me in my playthrough "[Aadiriis] passing caused children to cry and lovers to squabble" yeah? so loving what? anyone's actions have results beyond their intent or awareness. Aadiriis might just have farted near someone and ruined their day. Just because she's got some minute psychic leakage, which honestly seems like it doesn't do much more than any other factor in someone's life, is... kind of a poo poo reason to genocide people? I ended up choosing to merge everyone into his daughter, by the way, as a final gently caress you to the Changing God. Check it out, rear end in a top hat, it's the thing you could have done all along! I hope there's a real afterlife so I can kick you in your astral dick. TGEK I'm so sorry you went through this, and I hope you can still enjoy narratives. This... game is so awful, it sort of retroactively tarnishes Planescape:Torment. And it also gently hosed over Pillars of Eternity for me, which hits some similar enough story beats that I'm starting to wonder if Avellone is just phoning it in at this point.
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May 27, 2020 12:08
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I can only agree with the general sentiment. Thank you for SSLP'ing this, TGEK ^^ It was more of a blast thanks to your commentary, than it would have ever been otherwise. I know. I tried playing this game once and I failed miserably. I bounced off this soo hard. Anyway, go play Stygian, if only because I haven't played that yet and I liked Tyranny for all its weirdness surrounding the "am I bad? No it must be the original tyrant that killed millions who is bad!". Also because I LP-streamed that and rather liked the Eater-Of-Souls for all of its madness. (Guilty Pleasure!) About the ending: It's weird. The ending revelations make it clear that all of this, up to a point, was completely pointless. The writers don't get their own theme, and the supposed artifical angel-of-doom isn't because it's just "The Genocide" but also not in a spiritually significant way. Also, how did this have a head writer, yet no one who actually looked into what everyone else wrote? Isn't a head writer/designer supposed to keep a theme in mind??
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May 27, 2020 12:10
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They did keep a theme in mind. It's the infinite trolleys.
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May 27, 2020 12:25
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Stygian Thanks TGEK for playing through this utter disaster of a game. This game was so incoherent I couldn't follow what was happening or why it was important most of the time. The ending was a trolley crashing into a pile of poo poo.
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May 27, 2020 14:15
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Play Stygian, Tyranny for all its stupidity and missed opportunities I at least know is decent Also thank you very much for bringing this game to us TGEK, and doubly so for the summaries. My eyes were glazing over the sheer stupidity of the summaries at the end, I didn't even bother braving the actual game text. As an aside, as it doesn't deserve much more, what the gently caress was that ending. Seriously.
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May 27, 2020 15:05
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I discovered this LP not long ago and somehow timed it to just now finish reading it as you finished writing it. I too am angry that I spent money on it. Thank you for suffering through it for our entertainment. The writing is so bad that toward the middle of the game I just started clicking through all the long exposition without reading it. I wanted to see what happened but I also just wanted my torment to end. I legit groaned whenever I saw that a new character was going to have pages and pages of terrible prose to screech at me. This game and Friday the 13th taught me to never pledge toward games on Kickstarter. Just out of curiosity, how bad are the load times on PC? The PS4 version has the longest load times I've ever experienced in any game. We're talking two to three minutes of loading during every area transition. What the gently caress is it even loading? The game is entirely text and graphics that could very generously be called "serviceable". I've always been curious if the PC version's load times are also that bad or if the devs just couldn't be assed to do any optimization at all for the console versions. At least I wasn't stupid enough to pledge toward Star Citizen unlike the many, many people who still throw thousands of dollars each toward that tire fire even though it's become increasingly clear (after nearly eight years and burning through literally hundreds of millions of dollars) that the game will never actually be completed. The pre-alpha builds they keep releasing are barely even playable. I think they began with good intentions but slowly transitioned into a straight up scam. At least the Torment people actually released a game, even if it's not a good one. Edit: But now that I think about it, I kinda got scammed with this game too. I pledged $60 when only a PC version was planned. During the quite lengthy development time, back pain caused me to slowly transition from PC gaming to consoles. When they suddenly decided to release a PS4 version, they gave backers the option of switching to it from the PC version (for a loving fee!) but only gave a very short window to do so. I, of course, missed this window because I hadn't read that particular backer update. When I asked to switch versions, I was told that I would have to purchase the PS4 version at full price. I wrote the whole thing off as a loss but eventually decided to give it a try during a sale for $10. Even that price was a ripoff. In short, gently caress these people. <  >
...! fucked around with this message at 22:16 on May 27, 2020 |
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May 27, 2020 22:04
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Bonus Update #4: Damned From The Start So, fair warning, this is kinda longer than I intended, and not really relevant to the playthrough, but I'm gonna take out some anger on this game. LP is done otherwise, I won't be upset if you skip this. I feel like I've touched on most of these points in the LP, this is just a summation. In the Part I Postmortem, I laid out my thesis that this game was damned as soon as the developers decided they wanted to tell a spiritual story of hubris in the Numenera setting, a setting characterized by having no room for gods and the only acts of worship coming from scientific ignorance. As we have seen, nearly every aspect of this game fails in some significant way, from the asinine combat to the the prose abortion to even the generic, uninspired music i didn't talk about because it was bad. The plot is confusing and idiotic. The game is unable to provide any commentary on its central issues - from the stated themes of legacy, abandonment, and mystery to the unintended themes such as the nature of gods and if one can truly transcend mortality. Part of it is that these writers just don't have the literary chops to actually comment meaningfully on any of this. Colin McComb and Patrick Rothfuss' most famous works are just male power fantasies about getting superhuman powers, laying sick burns on high school bullies and sticking your penis in attractive women. Asking these guys to tackle real questions wise philosophers have legitimately struggled with is going to be an exercise in futility and frustration, because these are hard questions that are not easily answered. Herman Melville was a great author. Melville didn't sit down and call Moby Dick forth from the deeps by an act of will and genius, but after studying the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton deeply to see what those authors had to offer and why what they wrote worked. Socrates talked to nearly everyone in Athens, and even then famously concludes he can't figure out what justice is or whether the just man is happy or unhappy. The "what does one life matter" question comes from Colin McComb's midlife crisis by his own admission, not from any deep philosophical studies. It's clear they've run out of actual answers by the first act of the game, when they just start endlessly rehashing the Trolley Problem. Is a life lived in virtue worth more than a life lived in sin? I don't know. This is something actual philosophers struggle with. Tides of Numenera doesn't know either, as it doesn't bother to examine this despite being all about what one life matters. Who defines the value of a life? God? You? Society? Posterity? I don't know. The game never bothers to explore this. In a setting like Numenera with nanomachine demons and aliens and robots, do their lives matter too? No clue! We're not going to answer this! The game never even bothers to construct a framework on which lives can be judged. How about beliefs? Belief was important in the original Torment. Are there any beliefs worth dying for? That would be pertinent to our question, but we're just not going to answer that either. The game refuses to expand on anything or probe deeply into why you would judge a life to matter or not matter. Man vs What? I'll start things off by quoting the Tides vision document, which is worth a read for how much never got translated through and how many of the ideas are bad. I want to open with their prologue. This is really what they sent their backers for donations posted:“How did you find me?” he gasped. He conjured a wall of energy between himself and the creature. “I hid myself from you!” Tell me that's not a Man vs God story. Now, it's ineptly written. The Changing God seems to represent the light of human reason attempting to elevate itself to the level of God, while the Sorrow is the avenging angel sent to punish him for his hubris. Any good character conflict is going to be a clash of ideas, not just a clash of men, but this is written like it escaped from a Dungeons and Dragons game. "Wall of Force" is even a Dungeons and Dragons spell, for gently caress's sake! I don't care about the high-ceilinged hall, clean up some of the adjectives. You're far too focused on the powers being used in battle rather than the actual ideas your game purports to explore. I digress. The problem is that this collides with the materialist worldview and collapses. The Sorrow is portrayed as an implacable enemy hunting the Changing God for his transgressions against divine law in becoming immortal and raising the dead, powers traditionally reserved for God. The problem is no other sinner gets punished for this - Omahdon is free to raise as many anime women as he needs to get his dick wet. Sylph is allowed to be an immortal sex robot with no downsides. Callistege gets to ascend to godhood for five minutes before the game forgot about it (and if you don't kill the Sorrow, she stays that way). These are peanuts, however, compared to the problem presented by the Sorrow itself. The Sorrow is presented as a powerful divine being, who has the divine authority to wield the Tides - the Law - to punish transgressors against God's will. This game is able to sustain this illusion for a fairly long time via vignettes like the Sorrow hunting Inifere for his sins or the sculptor describing the Sorrow as beautiful. This collapses as soon as the developers actually have to justify an angel in a world where, per the Numenera setting books, there is no religious and spiritual significance, and it begins as soon as the Sorrow opens its mouth. The Sorrow tells us by existing we have increased the amount of suffering in the world, but the endgame omniscient narration tells us we were remembered for our selflessness and wisdom and healers everywhere held us up as a role model. It then tells us that we are the first to hear it speak for millennia - but it spoke to Zaofi the sculptor at the beginning of the game. The Sorrow is immediately described as wearing the souls of its tortured victims like a cloak - but then it tries to get Oom to kill itself, claiming that this would be merciful oblivion and not punishment while torturing its victims for eternity. 2 Corinthians 11:13-15 posted:For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise that his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. It's like no one proofread this ending. The Sorrow appears. She claims to be a wise guardian with the authority to pronounce judgement from on high, and then immediately starts lying her rear end off about basic, easily verifiable things. I can't blame players for not remembering any of this stuff, because this game has a lot of words and really needed an editor, but if for some reason you got really invested in the story you can start putting the pieces together.  Then the Sorrow takes off the mantle of divine authority and tramples it faster than Patrick Rothfuss' pizza man praising his board game. I don't know how the writers expected the players to react to the revelation that this was just a murder robot built by rich assholes to stop sins like...constructing buildings?  Given that there were soldiers fighting for their lives against the Sorrow it's reasonable to assume that the Sorrow didn't euthanize a willing population, but committed genocide at the behest of these "masters".  Really. That's all we get for their sins. They used the Tides to build buildings, and for that their masters unleashed an evil murder robot to kill all their people. It's like they didn't understand the story they were trying to write at all - at best, the Sorrow is a false idol keeping humanity down. Hell, if you have high red and blue tide, that can be your answer you use to kill the thing! It's completely incoherent! I legitimately do not think the writers of this game read anything that's not inbred nerd literature, or they would have some inkling of the symbolism they are invoking here. I can tell from Rothfuss' writings that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and I suspect from Colin McComb expressing great admiration for Rothfuss' genius works that McComb hasn't either. The Vision Document, again posted:Torment will be irreverent and entertaining, turning classic RPG tropes on their heads when possible. Oh. Tvtropes logic. That...explains a lot. For the record, the other endings are all some variant of kneeling before the false idol and letting it kill your family and/or yourself. Really. The thing is, this could have worked wonderfully well as some kind of Kurt Vonnegut style joke, where the entire buildup is that none of this supposedly deep and personal quest actually matters and that the Changing God wasn't some great sinner, but a guy who hosed up and couldn't get his name in the sudoers file. The moral would be that none of this is about you, and that sometimes things just go wrong and that's the nature of the world, and you could play it seriously or for laughs like Vonnegut would. I would have a lot more respect for the writers if they had done that, but that would require them to actually be self aware about what they wrote, but they are convinced they created a story with "deep personal themes" Deep Personal Themes This phrase is all over the marketing materials and Colin's videos, and is announced with the pride of a three year old who poo poo in the toilet instead of on the floor. It's fair to say that the writing as a whole is desperately trying to ape what the developers think of as "good" writing, with incoherent metaphors that seem deep and serve to trick the reader by substituting a satisfying comparison with baffled incomprehension. It's about the appearance of depth, not actually conveying any kind of deep philosophical information but I digress. The authors are insistent that they've addressed the themes of Legacy, Abandonment, and Mystery and had something deep to say about them. Now, I can't dispute that they haven't included instances of these themes - you leave a legacy behind, the Changing God abandoned you and maybe Miika, and their are unimportant mysteries everywhere like "how did this man become a technolich" and "what happened to inXile's editing staff?" The problem is that none of these themes are ever addressed in a consistent or satisfying way. Much is made of handling the legacy of the past, but we don't seem to gain anything or learn any lessons by it. The Sorrow is a legacy handled down by some genocidal assholes, but there's no way to learn from the mistakes of the past and transcend the Dalad masters' bullshit. The game likes to talk about how we are forging our legacy with the Dominant Tides system, but the Dominant Tides come up so rarely it's not worth tracking. The big decision of the Tides is...what one-liner you spout off to the Sorrow, which determines whether or not you are able to kill it or you get cutscene killed. If you choose the endings where you submit to the Sorrow's "might makes right" philosophy this crap doesn't come up at all aside from the Sorrow whining that your choice doesn't match your previous actions. The game wants you to consider the value of a life, and the legitimate answer - that we picked - is that every life matters, but the ending choices are all variations on which version of mass murder you are going to commit. Resisting gets you more mass murder, and even the option where you decide to just not make a choice and leave things as they are gets all the castoffs killed. The game is trying to tell a story all about the legacy you chose to leave, but that legacy is foisted on you not by God or fate, but by some rear end in a top hat's murder robot that's stronger than you are. A Eurogamer Interview with the developers posted: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. Really. We don't even have any kind of indication that our efforts are doomed like the prophecy in Oedipus Rex, the first thing we learn from the Specter is that we can actually fight the Sorrow if we fix the resonance chamber, and the game portrays defeating the Sorrow as the end goal of our quest rather than a Norse mythology style heroic but futile stand against our doom. The game has nothing coherent to say about legacy. Abandonment is another one of Colin's beloved themes, but the game has virtually nothing to say about that. As the Last Castoff, you were supposedly abandoned by the Changing God - but later we learn the Changing God was trying to download into us before he was killed. Rhin ran away from her parents, she wasn't abandoned. Oom was abandoned not because no one liked him, but because his civilization was wiped out by the Sorrow. The word abandonment implies that the responsible party deliberately left the abandoned one, and that is just not really the case. It's not even clear that the Changing God abandoned his castoffs until they rose against him in rebellion. The only conclusion I can draw is that the remote writers decided not to actually touch this theme and just kinda drew extra trolley illustrations that someone angrily threw in the trash for not trusting in this game's writing. I won't spend any more time on this, the writers clearly haven't. The last theme is mystery, and reflecting back on this game (and reading an RPG Codex thread, to be fair) Numenera has very little mystery to it. There are a ton of incidental mysteries that this game wants you to think are significant, mostly involving flavors of extradimensional bullshit. The main plot isn't mysterious in the slightest. Who are we? The last child of the Changing God. Who is the Changing God? A man who studied ancient science until he mastered eternal life by body hunting. Why is the Sorrow after the two of you? The Sorrow disapproves of the science the Changing God is using. Boom, we learn all that in the first ten minutes of the game. The rest of the plot unfolds similarly. What are we trying to do? Repair the resonance chamber. Why do we want to do that? The Resonance Chamber can stop the Sorrow. Who do we ask about that? One of our first party members we meet after the intro knows a cult who knows a girl who knows the scientist who can fix it - and does! The game tries to pretend its mysterious with things like the baker and the levy, but when stripped down to its bare essentials the Last Castoff spends the entire plot following the Specter's injunction from the beginning of the game. The only real mystery is whether The Last Castoff is the Changing God, and quite frankly that is not so much a mystery as left to the reader's interpretation, something the developers do not believe the player of this game capable of doing. We can discuss the other themes that emerge from the work, such as whether a man can transcend mortality, but what's the point? The Changing God rose from becoming a simple man to an immortal being who constructed an afterlife for those he found worthy and who could literally edit reality to suit his whim. The Iliad, on Zeus posted:Come, try me, immortals, so all of you can learn. The game doesn't want to engage with this. The Changing God is described as someone who put himself through time loops and black holes and whatnot because he could, who has been man, woman, robot, and alien (I know, it's sci-fi, but still), who has perceived more than any human alive, offers salvation to his followers, and is described by Aardiriis as someone who could single-handedly bring Numenera out of the dark ages if he weren't pursued by the Sorrow. What keeps him human? Numenera's answer is to shrug slightly and move on to the next sidequest about trolleys. Anyway, on that note, I am finally done with this game. TL;DR Macbeth posted:It is a tale
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May 28, 2020 00:28
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:
He cared enough that he turned on the biggest badass in helltown to help us fight back. He could have just hid or something, but he joined team TLC. It's the only part of the story that actually feels human to me. This dumb bit in a pointless fight where a throwaway NPC comes back to help you out is probably the only time in this whole LP where the game itself (rather than the LP) made me genuinely smile. When I realized that fact, it was... disappointing. Anyway, TGEK, thanks for the great LP.
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May 28, 2020 03:32
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Nicely written TGEK, but I don't agree with some of your points. You say that Numenera is a bad setting for a spiritual story, and I disagree. I think it is the perfect setting for one, just not the classical type. You can straight off rip off Nietzsche - there is no objective God, there is only ideologies competing with no actual divine mandate. With no "objective" Good or Evil the setting is pretty much the best pick for going into that direction. The execution is utterly loving terrible, but the whole thing is basically completely set up for it. You're someone who follows in the footsteps of a creator of one such ideologies, a man who tried to ascend, and your role is to determine for yourself whether you think he succeeded or not (and more importantly learn through his mistakes). The Sorrow can be a multitude of things in the end, easily even a Faustian "devil" coming to collect, the Portrait of Dorian Gray or just a cosmic fact. The structure and themes are there, the problem is they're written like they randomly picked 20 people off some fanfiction site to write it. It's not like there aren't piles of classical literature to shamelessly rip off, I'd bet most of the writers haven't even read Cliff's notes though.
TitanG fucked around with this message at 15:45 on May 28, 2020 |
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May 28, 2020 15:42
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