Disco Elysium vs Torment Tides of Numenera

[كريس]

These games are pretty similar, perhaps not surprising because Torment was supposed to be a spiritual successor to Planescape Torment and Disco is also supposed to be similar.

Personally, I thought Torment ToN was underrated. I think a lot of people were put off by the amount of reading. The writing probably isn't as good as Disco, but I think I will replay it after finishing this.

[Me]

Disco feels like more of an actual story to get invested in. ToN was more just a tour of one wacky character or place after another. The actual plot felt almost irrelevant and is certainly not what you remember after you finish the game. I really did like the wacky setting though, much more so than Disco. But technically, a setting should be there for the plot to happen in, it shouldn't be the main focus of the story, which I felt it was in ToN.

[Etagloc]

hmm, I honestly feel Disco does it better, I somehow feel more connected to the characters in DE, than in ToN. And therefore feel more connected to the story.

I really don't know why people get these games if they don't like the reading. I very rarely buy a game without doing basic research (litteraly 2 minuts), any review will tell you it has ALOT of reading.
Stop mindlessly pressing the buy button on a game that has a good rating :)

[holy-death]

Originally posted by كريس:

Personally, I thought Torment ToN was underrated. I think a lot of people were put off by the amount of reading. The writing probably isn't as good as Disco, but I think I will replay it after finishing this.

Exposition dump was what killed Numenera for me. It was supposed to be strange Brave New Universum, so I understand why they felt the need to bombard you with information, but the fashion in which they did it was wrong.

Disco presents information in smaller chunks, which makes it a lot easier to swallow and a lot of stuff is known to you by its nature, even if you don't have the Encyclopedia to know that a car has this or that fancy name, so you don't have to sit down and learn everything simply to follow some made-up names that you're apparently supposed to know.

Interjecting stats in form of inner voices further help to break down the walls of text into what resembles a dialogue, rather than a monologue.

The last thing is the presentation: Numenera had a window crammed into the middle and text felt small and the window packed with it. Disco has way larger side panel, with bigger letters, which helps reading.

Another thing is the strangeness of the universum - in Numenera it's supposed to be strange, but it failed to capture what made Planescape: Torment setting interesting in the first place. Numenera feels... Sterile? Strange for the sake of being strange? I don't know how to say it beter and it might have been just me, but I really didn't feel interesting in learning about it after being exposed to the initial exposition dump and I am not the kind of person to hate reading. I guess it says something about how unengaging the writting was for me at some personal level that I simply stopped and didn't come back to it.

In Disco your thoughts make interacting with the world (or with your mind) interesting. It's strange, but in a way that's exciting. It's like hearing Prattchet's voice that speaks to you when you're reading a book and having a conversation with it. It flows naturally and makes it easy for you to keep going.

Also, I am liking how they did the skill checks in Disco better than the ones in Numenera.

In Numenera it felt like you were losing a resource, which made doing checks feel bad either way. If I succeeded a check I was still worried that I won't have points later on, if I failed the check I felt punished for trying by not gaining anything and still not having the points to use later.

In Disco failing a check doesn't feel like a punishment because it's not exactly a resource, so I can roll with it. Especially when the character I am played as is presented a failure for the most part. Plus I can attempt some skill checks again, if I invest points in that particular skill check.