CottonWolf said:

I don't know how you feel about Planescape: Torment, but that was a game actively made worse by the inclusion of its combat sections (ridiculous spell animations notwithstanding), cutting it all out and focusing on the story sounds great to me.

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Regginator said:

"(modern) retro sci-fi", isn't that just a fancy word for steampunk? Especially looking at the screens gives me a steampunk feeling, besides that it isn't set in Victorian England, but still.

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More_Badass said:

Doesn't seem like it. Steampunk tends to be very mechanical, steam/gas/coal/copper, and all that. This is looking like 1920/30s but more futuristic, like with the look of the cars

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Dark_castle said:

I think 99% of us read it as furries.

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Patterbits said:

I believe then this would be dieselpunk?

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CottonWolf said:

They describe it as "fantastic realism". It's definitely not traditional dieselpunk. Some of the art's things like log cabins next to lakes, etc.

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CottonWolf said:

Yeah, I know very little about that book (as it's in Hungarian). Is it actually fantasy? Or is it an imaginary world without magic?

Sacred and Terrible Air sounds at least quasi-fantastical.

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Staccat0 said:

Ya'll should play Apocalypse World. No fooling.

http://www.rpgmusings.com/2011/08/apocalypse-world-an-introduction/

This reminds me a lot of AW. I'm in.

That game essentially governs Combat and Conversation with the same core mechanic and it revolutionized table top games

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More_Badass said:

I'm playing Planescape for the first time, and it's only made me wish it had no combat and was completely focused on talking and learning about the world. So yeah, my excitement for this has only increased thanks to that

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More_Badass said:

I seriously love titles that are phrases and sentences

Gods Will Be Watching
The Flame in the Flood
House of the Dying Sun
Everybody's Gone To The Rapture
A Knife Made Of Whispers
The Sun Also Rises
We Shall Wake
I Shall Remain
That Which Sleeps
The Last of Us
All Is Dust
Beneath A Steel Sky
The Static Speaks My Name
My father's long long legs
No Truce With The Furies

Titles like that have almost an elegance to them, the sense of a thematic subtext

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In character creation you decide your Attributes. These 4 scores represent both your natural aptitude and learning cap in the 24 Skills that cover everything a human being needs to function. The rest of the game is spent fleshing out – and struggling against – these limitations. There are unexpected ways to overcome yourself. And inversely, being talented at something comes with a price.

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INTELLECT

A high Intellect makes you overly confident – a cocksure intellectual. You’re vulnerable to flattery, and easily lose yourself in details. (The game becomes longer). While having a low Intellect makes you dim and superficial, prone to superstition and being plain wrong.

PSYCHE

A high Psyche comes with emotional turmoil – an unstable psychophant. Great willpower clashing with wild imagination. You may even lose your mind. While a low Psyche makes you uninspiring, inept at influencing people. Unsavoury things come out of your mouth.

PHYSIQUE

Okay, you’re strong but so is your death drive – a mad man and a psycho killer. A high Physique needs to be tested, needs addiction, sex and physical confrontation. You lose your shit over small things. While being un-physical means vulnerable, un-streetwise. Lacking in animal cool.

MOTORICS

A Motoric character is too high strung – a bit of a cokehead. A quicksilver superdetective focusing fast and then reacting (too) sharply. While being low on Motoric means you’re locked into yourself. The world has trouble finding you. You’re clumsy and slow.

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Purkake4 said:

New blog post on the "Metric", the RPG system they created for the game.



Some tidbits:

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More_Badass said:

I like that double-edged sword approach. I can't think of any other RPG where high stats can also be a weakness

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Hektor said:

This game is getting more interesting with every update

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New initiative brings developers together with Humble’s over 10 million customers; Humble will be evaluating games to publish during GDC and PAX East

San Francisco, CA February 9, 2017 – Humble Bundle announced the launch of a multi-platform publishing and funding initiative. The starting lineup includes seven games across a range of genres and styles, for PC, console, and mobile platforms.

No Truce with the Furies – An isometric role playing game that blends cop show antics with a genre busting “fantastic realism” setting, offering absurd new heights of non-combat gameplay for RPG fans

Publishing Lead John Polson says, “Since Humble’s launch in 2010, we have earned the trust of over 10 million customers across our products. In a time when it’s harder than ever for games to find their audience, publishing feels like the next logical step in the services that we can offer to our developer partners.”

“All of our games will be ‘presented by Humble Bundle,’ carrying a seal of quality and curation that fans have come to expect. For each aspect of publishing, developers can choose the services they need, making Humble Bundle a truly modern and adaptable publisher.”

–

There you have it. Now we have a publishing and funding partner to fight the good fight along side us. That is: to bring No Truce With The Furies to you at the end of 2017. It’s shaping up to be a real treat for fans of story and roleplaying.

Lets end by wishing the best of luck to all the games sharing that cool-as-a-cucumber line-up with us, especially Scorn. A lot of Scorn fans here.

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More_Badass said:

Actually the way they describe it, reminds me of the scrappy encounters in NEO Scavenger

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Mr. Tibbs said:

"Humble Bundle will publish No Truce With The Furies. Releasing Late 2017"

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In Metric (our character system) there are six skills that comprise your Intellect: Logic, Rhetoric, Drama, Encyclopedia, Conceptualization and Visual Calculus. They are represented here by their work-in-progress portraits.

So to wrap it up – Intellect does not make you get on well with yourself, or with other people. It lets you peel off layer after layer from the world, getting to its inner workings, modelling its events and bending it’s structures. If that’s what you want, stick five or six points into it at character creation and later buy two or three skills to boot.

(Next time we’ll introduce the Psyche skills to you. Inland Empire is my favourite.)

LOGIC

Logic is raw intellectual power. If you want to analyze the living daylights out of the case, take Logic. Formulate theories about what happened, or detect inconsistencies in the statements people make to you. It’s useful for not getting bamboozled.
Logic loves being right, however. To a fault. It’s a brilliant lie detector until faced with intellectual flattery. Then it starts tooting its own horn. Your Drama skill might interfere: people are pretending, manipulating you, while Logic – blinded by its own brilliance – yammers on about how infallible it is.
In heroic difficulty rolls, Logic can induce near-transcendence-like pleasure from performing raw operations on events and numbers. (It also does maths for you.) And it states the obvious. Logic loves an easy challenge, whatever it’s claims.

RHETORIC

Rhetoric is your ability to debate. Nitpick, make intellectual discourse. It doesn’t need to be an argument, you can just shoot off your mouth and take hearty pleasure from it. But let’s be honest – mostly Rhetoric just bickers. About politics.
All political discourse falls under Rhetoric. You can mold it into a weapon of fascist sable rattling, evicting potato-loving kojkos and deformed himean pygmees left to right. Rid Revachol of aliens in transit! Or become the ultimate liberast (perpetrator of the sin of liberasty), extolling free trade and slimy personal freedoms at the expense of the downtrodden. This is achieved through researching political projects in your Thought Cabinet, then having them supercharge your Rhetoric skill.
A souped up, ideologically informed Rhetoric is an impressive beast, but it gets you into trouble. The twist here is that Rhetoric – our persuasion ability – doesn’t really persuade anyone. Most of the time it just makes you new enemies. While your beliefs calcify.

ENCYCLOPEDIA

Encyclopedia is your knack for trivia. It’s perhaps the talkiest of all the skills, pulling out drawers of fascinating if questionable tidbits of knowledge. Sometimes real nuggets of gold too. It’s up to you to discern between the two.
Encyclopedia adores brands, marks, makes of pistolette and motor-carriage, street names, addresses, species of cockatoo, Great Century military leaders, rock music icons, Messinian ceramic manufacturers … Buy it and max it out, if you want a deluge of lore.
You may even find special, reoccurring places within your Encyclopedia. Like visions: a blackboard of names with all the cops in East Revachol on it, with all their confirmed kills and cases solved. Or a mysterious index of radio frequencies…

DRAMA

Drama is a god damn liar. Deliver believable deviations from reality, sometimes with the goal to deceive people, but not necessarily. You may just want to entertain as well.
We thought long and hard about how deceit is handled in RPGs and decided it needs to be more about performance in No Truce With The Furies. We want each of the skills to be a little world of it’s own, an investment worth considering. So lying became stagecraft, an amalgam of fourberie and deceit, with entertainment – and even singing. You can do karaoke with Drama, or perform spot on imitations of people.
Drama is also the counter to Drama. It informs you when Drama is being used on you. And although Intellect skills in general are more mentally oriented, Drama has its uses in combat as well. Feign death. Do drunken fighting. Maybe even quadrupedal movement…

CONCEPTUALIZATION

Conceptualization is your capacity for original thought. Make fresh associations, really delve into the concepts of the world – from Jan Kaarp’s postmodernist karperie, to Revachol’s arabesque architectural style dideridada, or even the concept of hardcore as deployed by the burgeoning dance music scene – then add your own contribution to these works! It’s your general purpose cultural theorist, used for both criticism and creation.
Okay, I’ll level with you. Conceptualization makes you into an Art Cop. You get extra lines of description in scenes, and you get to come up with stuff like poems, one-liners and a cool nom de guerre for yourself. An artist’s name, if you will. Conceptualization is the difference between hanging yourself and jumping into a live volcano. (No literal live volcanos are present in No Truce With The Furies for the time being.)

VISUAL CALCULUS

Visual Calculus is your forensics skill. It represents your grasp of the laws of physics, motion particularly. Create models of past events in your mind’s eye, trace dotted lines across the room, read tire tracks to recreate an automobile accident. Even notice tactical opportunities in combat situations – then take advantage of them. (Perception + Visual Calculus = the ultimate sniper)
We’re building a special, stylistic overlay that covers the world when certain Visual Calculus checks succeed. This lets us visualize shards of glass falling out of the window, a car backing into the fence, or political prisoners standing in front of a firing squad, half a century ago… all painted into the isometric world around you.

It looks great and I’m really sorry we haven’t shown it off yet. Just a few more tweaks first though…

I’m going to be candid and say Visual Calculus is a really cool skill and you should probably take it if you don’t want to miss out on all the cool. The only reason not to take it is that it’s a luxury. You need more essential stuff to stay alive and on top of things.

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More_Badass said:

Skill portraits. Idea is for them to evolve and grow more abstract as you level-up your skills
http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2017/01/13/sketches-skill-visuals/
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=52246.msg1309681#msg1309681

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More_Badass said:

New update on skills related to Intellect. This game is either going to really impressive or a really ambitious disaster; that Humble picked up them up makes me optimistic that it's leaning towards the former (I imagine the devs had to show them the game in action)

http://devblog.fortressoccident.com/2017/02/13/meet-skills-intellect/

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Purkake4 said:

I don't see Humble taking on anything they didn't have absolute faith in for their first batch of games to publish.

RPS also wrote a nice article about NTWTF, and put "procedural" in the title for some added title confusion. Good read though.

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Nikodemos said:

Isn't 'procedural' a TV term for a particular type of series about police officers?

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CottonWolf said:

Yeah, I'm becoming increasingly sure that this can't become anything but a really interesting disaster. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

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CottonWolf said:

Yeah, I'm becoming increasingly sure that this can't become anything but a really interesting disaster. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

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The Estonian studio ZA/UM has boundless ambition, battling impossible odds with nought but passion, raw talent, and a clarity of vision I haven’t seen in computer games since Chris Avellone in his prime. Their first game, No Truce with the Furies, is in full production, with a staff of twenty-five banging away late into the night in a run-down Neoclassical building in old Tallinn, where Reval melts into Revachol.

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No Truce is to be just the beginning, too: a first, brief foray into the isolas of a world gradually eaten away by the pale, with the real thing to follow its inevitable triumph. The real thing? The Return. (Of what? The Commune? On investment? Views differ.) That brief foray? Perhaps half of Planescape: Torment, think the Hive plus half the Lower Ward.

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I got to play a half-hour or so of an early pre-alpha build, and while the road ahead is long and hard, this is not just a pipe dream, a pitch, or a tech demo. This is already a game. Moment-to-moment gameplay is fluid, natural, and polished; some scripting lacunae and missing puddle reflections aside, it looked, sounded, and played better and glitched out less than, say, Pillars of Eternity in its first beta build. It looks achingly beautiful, with a tree casting a shadow on a flaking plaster wall, raindrops spotting and darkening the pavement as the weather changes, ice floes undulating on a congealing sea, bringing to life a pastel-toned painting of beautiful decay, rich with texture, form, light, and depth. Ambient sound is already in, and there were snatches of the soundtrack composed and performed for the game by the UK group British Sea Power, ready to out-rock, out-karaoke, and out-disco anyone out there.

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The core gameplay in No Truce is a hybrid of point-and-click adventure and RPG dialogue. There is no pixel-hunting; all interactable objects light up with the tab key, and observations brought up by successful (passive) skill checks show up as little thought bubbles you can click on. However, all interactions more complex than a single-line tooltip happen through the dialogue interface, dubbed the Feld Playback Experiment, itself an in-world mystery. Underneath ticks away a robust and parsimonious system of RPG mechanics: what appears in the dialogue interface is a product of your stats, your skills, your thought inventory, your history tracked in behind-the-scenes counters, and die rolls – subtly but effectively represented by a brief sound effect and animation of a spooling tape. Some checks are passive: a line appears in the Feld if you succeeded in an invisible stat check – for example, a successful Empathy check will have that part of your mind inform you that your interlocutor seems to have a thing going with the person they’re talking about; pass an Esprit de Corps check when you do something particularly stupid, and your partner will have your back. Others are active: you make the roll when picking the choice, with the odds displayed in a tooltip.

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Boem said:

As someone who loves adventure games and who gets bored by RPG-style combat very quickly, this looks amazing. Going to keep my eye on this.

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No Truce with the Furies is not some piece of forgettable East European shovelware. It is a work of art in progress, by a movement, of writers, musicians, artists, and programmers, at the same time madly ambitious and wildly sprawling, and invested with tight, coherent systems, an equally tight, coherent aesthetic vision, and an elegant and parsimonious core interaction design that just might suffice to keep the wild outgrowths of its dialogue trees within the realm of the achievable. Disco dancing on the ragged edge between madness and sanity, the possible and the impossible, it is at once a re-invention and a return to the roots of the genre.
...If it ever is completed, even as a barely-playable bug-ridden mess in the vein of Troika in its prime, it will be a truer spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment than any game advertised as such, a moment of beautiful lunacy hearkening to simpler days when people were able and willing to take real creative risks. I want to, nay, dare to believe.

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More_Badass said:

A detailed and very positive preview from RPG Codex
http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10564

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