Upon creation, however, you only choose Type and Descriptor through a somewhat backwards and arcane process (you get assigned Descriptor first, then Type, but then you can change your Type first, and your Descriptor last). But I noticed that the CNPC:s have their full profiles, so I went looking for answers, finding precious little, but eventually I happened upon this old thread on the Steam forum for Tides of Numenera.
Playing onwards a bit after that, I realized that still, only three choices of Foci, all except possibly one being rather shallow or "obvious" (and that one being inappropriate for many character types) were in the game. Later, I also discovered that they seem to have no apparent affect on your choices of abilities per tier. Anyway, I asked Sear a question, but since I haven't gotten a reply and the Steam forum is tremendously dead, I thought I'd bring it here, either for an answer or some discussion on the matter.
Here we are, a full year later, and just over month ago, the last early access update before release came, and this was still missing.sear wrote:Foci come into the picture a bit later once you reach Sagus Cliffs proper. Only a few are in the beta, but we'll probably add more over time, and in the final game of course.
This is an intentional choice as we wanted to give people a bit more time to play around and experiment before deciding on their Focus (and, your Focus can also be changed by spending XP, whereas other options like Type and Descriptor can't be).
There's still only three incredibly shallow and one-dimensional foci/verbs, namely Brandishes a Silver Tongue, Breathes Shadow, and Masters Defense, out of the incredible wealth (54, literally 18 times more) of interesting options in the RPG itself. There's also no apparent way to change this by spending experience, which wouldn't make the system less shallow, but at least it would be more meaningful since you could adapt to a situation (at least once you know about an upcoming situation, which is pretty rubbish).
Is this something that's actually going to be rectified in the 20-or-so days before release (which makes me assume that the choice of Foci would have absolutely zero interactivity/reactivity, but I'll take what I can get), or is it just yet more silently cut key material that's been shoved under the carpet?
Because I'm not going to lie - between the extremely limited number of CNPC:s becoming even more limited, the bloated and cover-all console-y UI, this shallow character options (should there not be more than these three), and the way inXile kept cuts hidden for literal years until fans themselves discovered the cuts, my hopes for Tides of Numenera is going to be at an all-time low.
So what gives? While it wouldn't tie into the cut stretchgoals/cover-up debacle, it would be tremendously sad to hear that we're not getting more than three basic and very archetypical foci.
