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+--- Thread: Torment is finally out! (/showthread.php?tid=7026)
Torment is finally out! - Dark Jaguar - 28th February 2017
Yay!
Torment is finally out! - A Black Falcon - 28th February 2017
Oh right, it's actually done! By trying to make a sequel to Torment they've set a very, very high bar. It's been a long time coming, given that the kickstarter was a full four years ago already (it's been that long?), but I hope that the effort was worth it because the original Torment is amazing and I'd love to play another game like it. The game sounds like it's pretty good going by reviews, the writing particularly, so that's good. I haven't redeemed my key for the game yet, but probably will soon.
On the other hand though, there are a few significant issues I need to discuss. I was thinking of making a thread for this, but it's related to this game, so I'll just put it here. First, the first thing about this game that disappointed me was when they chose to go with turn-based combat. That's fine, but I'd have rather seen real-time-with-pause, which overall is the better system for this kind of game. I'm sure this works, but RTWP would have been great...
More importantly, have you been following any of the complaints some backers of the kickstarter have? There have been many. First, some people are upset that during development they cut or scaled back some of the content they promised in stretch goals... and then didn't talk about some of it. Those changes were only discovered when people started data-mining the data as they started to get it closer to release. InXile has apologized for that, but that's not great. I fully understand why the changes happened, and don't mind them; games change during development. The problem with very specific Kickstarter stretch goals is that you're committing to a specific featureset before you've gotten far enough in development to know how the game will actually end up once you've worked on it more. You see this in plenty of Kickstarter games both major and minor. It's always unfortunate, but this stuff always happens in games, it's just better known here because Kickstarter is publicly open in a way that game development almost never is. So yeah, while it's too bad, I don't mind these changes if the final game is great. I'm not sure how developers can avoid this problem; specific stretch goals help drive excitement and increase funding, which helps regardless of if that goal's text is reached, but there's no way to know which ones are actually deliverable that early... so yeah, not sure there, but again personally I don't mind this.
The other issue is that they made a deal with Techland for console and physical PC releases of the game, and also allowed Techland to make their own collectors' edition of the game... which is cheaper than the one backers were offered and, depending on who you asks, might come with better stuff. Since the backers collectors' edition is not out yet it's impossible to directly compare them, but this definitely does not exactly encourage me to back more Kickstarters/Fig campaigns/what have you, if what you're getting is kind of worse than something that costs less and doesn't require you paying for something long before you know how good it will actually be. In Torment's case, the biggest difference between the two versions is that the backer CE includes a thicker manual, cloth map, and printed collection of some/all of the novellas written in this games' world, while the Techland retail CE includes a thinner manual (difference is not clear yet), paper map, steelbook case, and a statuette. The statue is smaller than the statue that you could get in the Kickstarter, but you had to back the game at the $1200 level to get that backer statue, while the retail one is in a box that costs less than the statue-less backer CE. I do like the extras only included in the backer CE and don't collect game statues so this isn't a huge issue for me personally, and I understand how it happened, but still it discourages me from backing future InXile games when I know that I'm likely to get something about as good for less money when the game releases, and by that point you can know if it's a game you really want to play anyway, something much harder to do before it's been made.
On that note, did you back the kickstarter? If you've mentioned it before I forget. I did, at the collectors' edition tier, which after shipping costs cost me $135 (for the $110 collectors' edition tier, since the first collectors' edition tier at $95 sold out before I backed it, and I didn't want to wait... which is good, considering they kept raising collectors' edition prices as each tier sold out until it was $135 by the end of the kickstarter...). This is one of only two Kickstarters I backed at over $100, and ... well, the results are mixed, not just here but generally. While I still like Kickstarter, it has some issues.
1) You will usually pay more than you would for the same game if you get it on sale sometime after launch. This we've always known, but for games that have succeeded in meeting their funding goal and thus are sure to see development continue, it discourages me from backing them because what's the benefit to me for doing so now? Not much, really, unless you're backing a Fig game with enough money to actually get returns, but even there the economics are apparently not great unless the game in question sells very well.
2) If you back the game at a physical-product tier, there is no guarantee that there won't be a better physical product released around time of launch that costs less, but you won't get unless you buy the game again. See Torment above for an example of this.
3) Physical backer copies of Kickstarter games often take quite some time to arrive, so your "reward" for backing the game at that tier is either having to just play the game digitally, or wait weeks or more before you can play the game. I know there are good reasons for this, but it is annoying. I waited what, months for the physical box (regular, not collectors') backer-edition copy of Pillars of Eternity to finally ship? They had promised a fully DRM-free game you could just install from the disc and play, so they wanted to not ship it until after the first big patch was done so that could be included on the disc, but between producing copies and shipping them this led to delays. You could just install the Steam/GOG key and play that in the interim, but then what was the point of spending enough to get a box? The solution here is to not promise a DRM-free copy that isn't on Steam or GOG of course, like Torment: Tides of Numanera does -- physical copies of the game will be just a disc that requires you to input a Steam key and install it in Steam, apparently. That's worse than Pillars on a DRM standpoint, but better from an addons standpoint, because at least you won't have the problem here that that game does. And I see that PoEII does not promise "DRM-free" in its physical-box tier, so they're clearly giving up on it too. That's kind of too bad, since tying your game to a digital store that may or may not continue to exist is kind of annoying, but with all the integration those stores have, what choice do developers have? Buying addons, DLC, playing multiplayer, etc. in a truly separate DRM-free copy of the game would require the dev to set up a whole separate infrastructure for that after all, which both kind of defeats the purpose of having everything on the disc and may be impossible depending on the developers' financial condition. It's kind of sad that modern gaming is so deeply tied to these systems which can just go away, but you can't just ship everything on a disc at launch and be done with it anymore and retail expansion packs are a thing of the past, so what can you do...
4) Because you're backing a game before most of its development, there's no way to know if the game you are supporting will actually end up being any good or not, or if you will actually get everything you paid for or not. Sometimes you don't, and unless you sue over it there's nothing you can do about that. There are some Kickstarter games that totally collapse and fail to amount to anything, but I've avoided those. Apart from that, the best example of a failure of this point is of course Mighty No. 9. The game did come out... but backers who backed the project at physical-product tiers? They never actually shipped most of that stuff, the physical boxes and such for example that they claimed they'd make. Sorry, you wasted your money and got nothing for it if you backed those.
5) Physical backer editions of games often take longer than retail copies to get to backers, and they sometimes have issues. I mentioned this above in point three, but I think it's worth mentioning on its own too, because shouldn't the reward for getting in early in these projects be getting the game early, not late? And yet due to understandable issues, it's often the other way around if you wanted anything more than just a digital key. Sure, I understand why putting together that stuff takes time, but this does not exactly encourage me to back things early when it doesn't get you the game sooner, unless you back at a beta tier in games with such offers of course... but I'd generally rather play the finished game than that, so I don't usually do that.
So, in the past year-plus I've backed almost nothing on these services, versus a bunch of stuff in the years prior. I don't regret backing most of those things, and some did get me exclusive physical rewards you can't get elsewhere, but between the costs, risks, and issues with some of those physical rewards, it's usually not worth it, I think. I will back a kickstarter if it's something really interesting and the campaign is maybe not going to make its goal, because if it fails maybe that game never gets made at all, but something like a Wasteland 3 or Pillars of Eternity 2? I backed both of the previous games in those series, but not the new ones for those reasons.
Torment is finally out! - Dark Jaguar - 28th February 2017
I was totally cool with turn-based combat, since I consider this sort of game to be more thoughtful than intense and I think chess style works better.
Indeed I did back it, getting pretty much every bit of ancillary material, digital-only (I got an e-ink reader). So far, pretty good, but I fear I won't be able to really dig into this game yet.
Here's the problem, there's too much I want to play right now, like right just now. Breath of the Wild, Torment, and the upcoming final DLC for Dark Souls 3 (a game I haven't played yet but intend to now that it's "finished"), and in that storm I'm forgetting some other titles. Breath of the Wild is a game I'm going to disappear into, as I did Phantom Pain, so the others will have to wait their turn.
Torment is finally out! - A Black Falcon - 28th February 2017
If you've only backed stuff at digital tiers and not physical, then you've avoided a lot of the issues I mentioned... though I'm sure that CE will be cool even if there is an alternate retail physical one. (On that note, one thing I didn't mention is that the physical PC release of Torment: Tides of Numanera is only releasing as a physical package in Europe, since there is more of a business for physical PC games there than we have here, so anyone who does want that will need to find one from there...)
Quote: Here's the problem, there's too much I want to play right now, like right just now. Breath of the Wild, Torment, and the upcoming final DLC for Dark Souls 3 (a game I haven't played yet but intend to now that it's "finished"), and in that storm I'm forgetting some other titles. Breath of the Wild is a game I'm going to disappear into, as I did Phantom Pain, so the others will have to wait their turn.That does seem to be an issue right now, yeah, between Zelda, Horizon, Ni-Oh, Yakuza 4, and what have you... though none of those are things I really want to play for sure, since those four are all open-world or Dark Souls-styled. Still I guess I'd like to play Zelda sometime, though I imagine it'll be another of those open-world games I don't stick with, since I've never stuck with one for long... and Horizon could be alright I guess, who knows.
Quote: I was totally cool with turn-based combat, since I consider this sort of game to be more thoughtful than intense and I think chess style works better.Torment was never exactly big on combat though, so how much does that matter? And from what little I've seen this game sounds like it continues in that tradition. Combat might even be even more de-emphasized this time than it was in the first game in fact... which is great, that's what Torment should be, but what's the point of having a strategic turn-based battle system then? And it is inaccurate to the style of the original game. But really, it's mostly that the Infinity Engine is my favorite RPG gameplay engine. I love that style.
Torment is finally out! - A Black Falcon - 28th March 2017
So it took a month, which is way too long, but the Torment boxed Kickstarter reward games have finally shipped, and mine arrived today. And... hmm. Well, the outer box of the Collector's Edition version is pretty nice -- it's a big box with a simple but nice design on it. There isn't as much inside as the size of the box suggests, though -- a lot of it is just air and some cheap paperboard parts blocking off part of the box.
Inside is:
- The game on a DVD in a little folder, with the Steam key and DLC (backer costume) key on a piece of paper also in the sleeve. The disc version is not DRM-free, it requires Steam. As I said about PoE though, while a DRM-free disc option would be better (through GOG perhaps?), that's not all bad -- see PoE's patch/addon issues in the DRM-free version. Having a disc copy of the game is nice regardless. There is one issue though, on the sheet of paper with the keys they got them backwards -- the game key is the one labeled "DLC" and the DLC key is the one labeled "Game". Heh.
- The game soundtrack, in a paper/cardboard case with some nice art on the cover. Mark Morgan did the games' soundtrack, so it's fantastic. This is nice to have.
- A hard-bound artbook, showing off some of the really good artwork for this game. Torment: Tides of Numanera has some really fantastic art done for it, and you see quite a bit of it here, which is great... except for one thing: the art book is smaller than it should be. Seriously, make the pages in this thing bigger! For the kind of money this cost, you really should get a bigger artbook than this. That would justify the large box too, instead of having no point for using such a large box.
- A manual, titled the "Torment: Tides of Numanera Travel Guide". It's not especially long, at 36 pages, but it's on decent-sized paper, similar to the size of the artbook except in length, but the original PS: Torment didn't need the largest manual either, so this is probably as much as you need. It's a nice manual with some good background information about the game and Numanera world in it.
- And last, a nice cloth map. This is a sizable cloth map, larger than other ones I have such as the one from the regular edition of Wasteland 2. Good stuff, this at least is all around pretty nice.
- Additionally, probably because of some of the prerelease complaints, they gave backers some points in their Kickstarter rewards store, which I used to get the Torment: Tides of Numanera poster for "free". The poster is large and has a nice if monochromatic image from the game on it. It's not some of my favorite art from this game for sure, but it is weird in a way that it quite fitting for a Torment game. Written in small print all across the poster are the names of many backers. You don't notice it from a distance, but it's a nice touch. This poster is pretty cool and definitely helps a bit with the value proposition here.
So overall what do I think of the backer reward here? Basically, it's good, but could have been better. It really is not a good look when there is another collector's edition, the one from Techland for the European PC/console release of the game, which costs less and has more extras, such as a statuette and metal token thing. This does have the poster and cloth map as exclusive extras, so there are plusses to each and in some ways I probably like this more as I am not a statue collector but do sometimes like posters, but still, they could have done a little more here. Even so, I'm not really disappointed, for the most part this is a nice package. It's overpriced, but most games you get by backing them on Kickstarter is going to be overpiced versus buying them later once they release, which is one of the major reasons I've cut back significantly in backing Kickstarter stuff over the past year or so. It is nice to have helped fund this game, and I got some neat stuff from that.
As for the game itself... well, I decided to wait for the physical version before playing it (and was fine with that decision), so I've finally installed it now. Haven't actually played it yet though. :p
Torment is finally out! - Dark Jaguar - 29th March 2017
I dunno, that sounds like a pretty good box set if you ask me.
Torment is finally out! - A Black Falcon - 29th March 2017
Depending on how soon in the Kickstarter people bought the CE version, though, people paid between $115 ($95 + $20 shipping) and at least $155 for this, though. What is there is pretty good -- the soundtrack is indeed great, Mark Morgan's still a really good composer! -- but shouldn't it be reasonable to expect at least an art book that actually fills the box? (And if not for those points they gave me [and other backers] that I got that poster with, it wouldn't be as good of a value either. I do like the poster enough that I put it up though, so I like having it. :))
Torment is finally out! - Dark Jaguar - 30th March 2017
Maybe it's not that the art book is too small, but that the box is just too big?
Torment is finally out! - Great Rumbler - 26th April 2017
This is a really good game, probably the best to come out of Kickstarter.
Torment is finally out! - A Black Falcon - 26th April 2017
Right now I'd lean towards saying that Yooka-Laylee is the best game to come out of Kickstarter, but yeah, this is really good as well.