Watch a Crisis in Torment: Tides of Numenera
A rare glimpse of the not-so-far-away RPG.
Because you don't directly earn experience points for combat in Torment: Tides of Numenera - you may as part of a quest - it means combat is handled a little differently.
On the one hand it means solutions other than killing are worthwhile, as beating the encounter is the point, but on the other hand it means combat has to work harder to keep your attention and be worthwhile, because that base XP reward has been taken away.
Torment: Tides of Numenera handles combat encounters by divvying them up into Crises and Tussles, and hand-crafting both. Tussles are the smaller, incidental skirmishes, but Crises are major set-pieces - experiences that should pull you, engagingly, through the world.
It's with that in mind I share the below video, a rare glimpse not only of Torment: Tides of Numenera but of a Crisis encounter itself.
This is an alpha video so things aren't final but it gives an idea of the open-ended Crises encounter approach. It also highlights another major area of distinction for Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is the Numenera ruleset upon which it is based. Yes there are dice rolls to determine outcomes but there are other different systems at work too.
I played the pen-and-paper Numenera game earlier in the year, led by none other than Torment: Tides of Numenera creative lead Colin McComb. It was a memorable few hours of haphazard exploration and children's heads on tentacles. Needless to say that it being set a billion years in the future from now, after many civilizations beyond our own have risen and fallen, made for a strange new place in which to play.
Torment: Tides of Numenera was once the most funded video game on all of Kickstarter, raising more than $4m, although now it's been surpassed by Kogi Igarashi's Bloodstained gothic platformer, and Yu Suzuki's fairytale pitch of Shenmue 3.
It's a tonal-successor to Planescape: Torment, hence the Torment, and is in development at Wasteland 2 studio inXile. It has a tentative and hopeful release date of Q4 2015 but I'd be surprised if that happened.