Posted on: March 2, 2017
benzeneboy
Games: 102 Reviews: 6
Broken promises, content - buyer beware!
I was very excited for this game when the kickstarter was announced (4 years ago!!!) and backed it for $250 dollars. I have been playing isometric crpgs since the 90s, and have always loved games like Baldur's Gate 1&2, Icewind Dale 1&2, and of course Planescape: Torment, the game that originally inspired this one. This review is both a commentary on the game itself, as well as inExile as a company. First, to inExile - you can skip a few paragraphs below if you're just interested in the game. In 2013, inExile was happy to take backers money to make this game, and slated the delivery for T:ToN in December of 2014. They made about four times as much money as they set their funding goal at, and as stretch goals made many promises about added content to their backers. Ultimately, it seems that many of those promises have not been kept, which is disappointing, but forgivable if the game is well-made at the end of that process and the company is communicative with the people who helped to fund the project. However, after the kickstarter funded and pledges from people like me were locked in, inExile announced that they were changing the combat system from Real-time-with-pause (RTwP) to Turn-based (TB) mechanics. They announced that this was to better fit the mood of the game. That claim is very dubious, as the 90s game that they are basing this sequel off of (Planescape: Torment) has a RTwP combat system. "What can change the nature of a game?" Well, an obvious answer would be to change one of the fundamental mechanics of the game. Personally, I would never have donated money to inExile for Torment had I known they were planning to make a TB game. But why would inExile make such a fundamental change for a fan-funded game that so many people felt so passionately about? At first, this was not obvious, and it really wasn't until the game was coming close to release that I really understood. From a business standpoint, RTwP combat-based games have one major issue. They require a mouse and keyboard, and are therefore mostly a PC-friendly market. TB games, on the other hand, are easily adaptable to controller-based game play and have a wider distribution on consoles. Since inExile is releasing XBox ONE and PS4 adaptations of this game, it is fair to say that they chose to screw their fan-funders for a market friendly combat system. Adaptations to new systems cost money, and so it is even more frustrating to find that inExile has cut a massive amount of content from this game that was promised during the fund-raising phase on kickstarter. Over a four year development cycle, they made no announcements to their backers about cut content, even though it is now clear that they spent a lot of that money that was supposed to be used to create that content on console ports, and actually only let backers know that anything had changed in the game about a month before the game released. The cut content included promised characters, an entire city, and while I personally have not finished it, reports indicate that the game is relatively short for a crpg. During that time without communication to their fans about the dropped content, inExile raised millions of dollars from two other crowd-funded projects - Bard's Tale IV and Wasteland 3. In addition to cuts from the game, inExile also gave a worse deal to fans who purchased a collectors edition during the kickstarter than those who purchased it at release, and also cut a promised Italian localization in order to ship this game to consoles. Game Review: Story 9/10: This is where this game shines - it is well written and the interactions between objects/characters in the game is fascinating. In places it is badly in need of an editor, but after playing for about 5 hours, it is clear that the game story lives up to - but does not surpass - the game that it is trying to emulate. The protagonist is not as well characterized as the Nameless One from PS:T, which detracts from the immersion. The major focus of this game is to tell a unique, strange story in as much depth as it can, and it succeeds in keeping your interest. If you like to read, 95% of the game play is reading text in the vein of a choose your own adventure novel. Well done here. Graphics/Interface 5/10: There is no way to change how fast the interface moves with a mouse scroll - presumably because the game has been adapted for console-controller play. This is inexcusable, as the game is run on the Pillars of Eternity engine, a game that was released in 2015, and that game had the option to adjust the mouse scroll. The 2D backgrounds are beautiful, the character models and animations are not. Character's momentum/inertia during movement is incredibly distracting, and the strange need for the camera to follow your character is very odd for this style of game. Altogether, these things add up to a very frustrating interface that slows the pace of the game down. For a game with a 4 year development cycle, it feels like I am playing an alpha build. Combat 2/10: Even for a TB game, the combat mechanics are incredibly weak. Divinity OS, which I played for a very short amount of time, had an excellent TB system that used action points to define your movement and abilities. You could do anything in any order, so long as you had sufficient AP to perform the task. Torment uses a simplified mechanic where each character gets one movement and one action. When you choose an action, or move your character, there is no way to confirm it or take it back, so if you misclick, you are screwed. By modern standards, this is just pathetic. Additionally, in virtually every combat you will find yourself highly outnumbered, and this is the game's way of telling you that you should just settle everything with conversations. If you do find yourself in combat, you need to win on the first round, as the enemies will simply target your protagonist on their first available turn and kill him/her, sending you to the mind labyrinth. Additionally, because combat is fairly rare, you will most likely have no idea how to use your abilties to their full effect. This is incredibly disappointing, as the other crpg revival game that is currently on the market, Pillars of Eternity, has a very innovative RTwP combat system that is a true spiritual successor to other isometric RPG games. My other personal beef with TB-combat is that it is SOO SLOOOW!! RTwP battles can be finished in just a few minutes, even when the combat is challenging. TB always takes considerably more time, even for trivial battles. Torment is no exception to that rule. Torment is not a bad game, but it doesn't feel like it is a finished game. It would be an excellent game if it had been released 20 years ago, but compared to all of the other crpg nostalgia releases that have come out over the past five years, it is one of the weaker ones. This is many due to clunky interface, and poor combat mechanics. I'm very disappointed that inExile chose to enhance their distribution instead of trying to stay true to what their fans wanted. This half-baked game is the result. I will not be supporting them in the future.
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