It compares very poorly. It also compares poorly to most other games.
Disclaimer: I very likely hate the game much more than most people. I've also only played about 20 hours of it so I have no idea if it gets better later (it does, slightly, supposedly). I also don't know if any of the patches fixed it but I find that unlikely.
I made a long post explaining why I don't like the game very much a while ago, so I'm just going to copy/paste it here:
1.) The RPG systems are among the worst I've seen in any game. Initially, they seem mostly fine: you get three major stats of the typical strength/dexterity/intelligence variety and a bunch of different skills that all belong one of those stats. However, the skills barely matter since they only provide a minor percentage buff/debuff to each skill check. This wouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't for the effort mechanic: each character gets a pool of points for each stat (depending on his level in that stat) that can be spent to increase the success rate of each skill check. Additionally, there's an "Edge" stat for each of the three major stats that you can level up, which gives you free points for the effort mechanic. The problem with the edge stat is that it makes it incredibly obvious how you should build your party. Since you get 4 character, and can use each of them for any skill check the only thing that makes sense is to specialize each of them into a different stat. If you do that, you can pass pretty much every skill check with a 100% success rate, regardless of everything else.
This means that the RPG mechanics are completely pointless - you figure them out in about 5 minutes and then just completely ignore them. I honestly don't think anything would change if they were completely removed from the game. The main problem isn't that the mechanics are broken, it's that they are also so incredibly simple. With something like Arcanum, the broken mechanics are forgivable since the game genuinely tries to do some cool things with them. In Torment, they are just so incredibly simple that them also being so broken is just baffling.
2.) I really dislike the structure of the game, which is pretty much the following:
- You open your map to locate the nearest person
- You talk to that person, which usually takes an eternity as each NPC has a lot to say
- You open your map, locate the nearest person, walk for about 10 seconds and trigger another really long conversation
- Occasionally you get a quest which requires you to talk to a specific person (or, if you really want to, engage in the game's terrible combat, which I'll get to later)
It's honestly just kind of exhausting. There's nothing to break up the extremely long conversations except for 10 seconds of walking. There's not exploration, there's no interesting quests, there's just nothing really. It's just a constant barrage of walls of text broken up by nothing, and the text often isn't very interesting. This made me almost dread clicking on NPCs, since I knew doing so would, without exception
, result in an incredibly long conversation that would only have a very small chance of being interesting.
Which is a real shame honestly, because the world of the game is really interesting and I'd love to explore it - apart from it's wonderful writing, this is where Planescape really delivered. But Torment just doesn't let you do that. And I very much do understand reading was meant to be the core of the game, but even in that aspect it's painfully repetitive since it's just one monotone conversation (often almost entirely filled with exposition) after another. It just doesn't make for very fun reading.
3.) And related to that, for a game that's 100% about the writing, the writing itself just didn't work for me. There's a lot of exposition describing the world of Numenera, but it's all delivered in a really wordy, monotone, almost encyclopedic tone which is consistent across every character. The NPCs genuinely don't come across as actual characters but more like Wikipedia entries. There's just no real personality to them. And the wall-of-text thing needs repeating. I mentioned before that every NPC has
a lot to say, but that's not really true: every NPC does say a lot, but a lot of it is just boring descriptions with superfluous adjectives, or just stating things in a very long-winded way. The game even conveniently greys out most of such text so that you can avoid it if you want to, almost as if it knows it's really not worth reading.
I'm not against long-winded text on principle. If used sparingly it can be effective, but when every conversation is like that it just gets tiring. It almost feels like the game is hiding the good stuff behind pages and pages of text. It's also distinctly not how Planescape was written, and the companion Avellone wrote for Tides of Numenera is an incredibly effective reminder of that: his text is both much shorter and much more interesting than anything else in the game.
4.) The combat just isn't very good. There are two main problems:
- The encounters don't have much care put into them (a concrete example is an empty field where your party is surrounded by about a dozen identical enemies - this just isn't very fun). This means it's tactically not very interesting.
- They are mostly optional, which also means they are so much more trouble than resolving the situation with dialogue. After all, as mentioned above, you're guaranteed to succeed at every skill check anyway. Therefore, when combat is involved, you can almost always just pick a dialogue response to instantly win it. This also means it's poorly balanced: the encounter mentioned above had every one of the dozen enemies capable of instantly killing my characters, while resolving the situation with dialogue was a guaranteed success.