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A Retrospective on Planescape Torment
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Sep 27, 2007 01:34 AM
from the man-that's-a-good-game dept.
from the man-that's-a-good-game dept.
Despite the cult status of Planescape: Torment, it was one of the least successful entries in the Baldur's Gate family of games. At the Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog Keiron Gillen has a great look back at the game, with a specific emphasis on the connection between the game mechanics and the story, and the importance of Torment to games as a medium. "While we're a long way from the videogame equivalent of a Tolstoy or a Dostoevsky, for what it's worth, Planescape is as close as we've come, and worthy of real literary consideration. Of course, such dry analysis always turns people away from the Great dead Russians - when it should be remembered these are works full of life and joys and - yes - deep sadness. The same is true here. It's a philosophical buddy-hatey road movie based around the search for the self and the endlessly reiterated question "What can change the nature of a man?". And you find yourself lingering on that. Not just what can change the nature of your character - but what made you and what manner of man are you anyway."
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Interview With Team Behind Planescape Vengeance 24 comments
Humby writes "The BG2 Add-on CZ site has posted an interview with a member of the team behind the Planescape: Vengeance conversion for the Planescape: Torment Role-Playing Game. This is going to be an all new Planescapes game made using the original."
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The Impact of Planescape Torment 94 comments
The ever interesting Escapist has a piece up examining just why Planescapes\ Torment is such a perennial favorite among gamers and designers alike. From the article: "The strangest, and one of the least successful RPGs from Black Isle (the company that brought you the Icewind Dale series), Planescape: Torment, which was released in 1999, took a risk by using the alternate Dungeons and Dragons campaign of Planescape, a not-really-fantasy, not-really-futuristic world that's mostly defined as unstable and bizarre. Strange and unruly dimensions intersect at the city of Sigil, where most of the game takes place, and your character, portentously called The Nameless One, wakes up in a mortuary with amnesia, a battered shell of a body that cannot die, and just one friend: a flying, talking skull. And the game gets stranger from there."
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This Game Really Was Great (Score:2)
The first time the insane Ignus started muttering about killing the rest of the party I knew this game was different. The floating skull, Morte, was funny. The entire cast was well-acted, and believable to an extent I hadn't seen before.
It remains a high point in my gaming past. It's also the
Agree! Planescape Torment - best game ever? (Score:2)
IMO, PS:T is the hands-down best game I've ever played.
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Anything like Murry the Demonic Skull [wikipedia.org]?
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They're both talking skulls who accompany the protagonist. There the similarity ends. Murray is a wannabe demon monstrosity. Morte has been to hell and knows what demon monstrosities are actually like, and is absolutely terrified that some incarnation or other of the Nameless One will eventually send him back where he belongs...
What can change the nature of a server? (Score:4, Informative)
Always great that PS: T is acknowledged.
If you liked it, or get curious about it, you may want to look at the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion Mask of the Betrayer which is released tomorrow in Europe and in a couple of weeks in the US. Many of the same people who worked on PS:T have worked on this. Also if you just loved the Planescape setting, there is Rogue Dao's Planescape Trilogy [planescapetrilogy.com] for NWN2, first episode will be out in a month or so.
I thought NWN2 was a good game, but it was a resource hog and did contain bugs that turned some people off it. Now that it has been out a year and 8 or so major patches have been out, it is polished enough that you should definitely consider picking it up. They have promised that Mask of the Betrayer will have a much more dark and personal storyline and much more polish too.
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Unreliable narrators (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I have great hopes for Team Gizka's [team-gizka.org] restoration project.
Rest of the post contains plenty of **SPOILERS**.
Like the fact that Chris likes to take the RPG/CRPG conventions and turn them into plot elements - for instance in PS:T, the fact that your character in computer games always is immortal (since you can just reload) - there you play the Immortal One.
Same with KOTOR 2. We choose to ignore the fact that our characters in RPGs gain godlike powers in very short time. If this was normal, wouldn't everyone be doing it - be out whacking rats and progressively more difficult wildlife to gain robust health, superstrength and intelligence? Here it is suddenly part of the plot - no, not everyone can do it. It seems that you, and you only, have a rather sinister power to gain supernatural strength by absorbing the life force (XP) of those you kill. The character might have thought a lot about this, but since there is no voice over a la Blade Runner, the player doesn't know it.
Sounds like he MAY be going down a similar path with the soul eating in Mask of the Betrayer. But we will see.
Bioshock might have been taken a leaf out of the same book. Some people have complained that "it is so unrealistic that the player injects himself with a syringe that is just laying there in the beginning of the game, ruined the immersion for me". Well, it turns out later that he was compelled to do it. The character might have fought against it, filled with horror, but again, this the player does not know until later in the game. So they use the literary device known as "the unreliable narrator". The reader/player identifies with the character (even more so in games of course), but it later turns out he/she did not tell everything.
Parent
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Oh good, I'm not the only one! I've read the film was based on a short story written by the director's brother. It would be interesting to hear if he had played the game. I guess it is not impossible to come up with the same concepts independently, but still, there is an AWFUL lot of similarities.
Amnesia -> writing down everything -> safest place to write something permanently: tattoo your own body -> if you don't remember how you got
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I too liked the old characters and would have liked to have more adventures with them, but unfortunately, no. The same old reason - there were maybe a hundred slightly different outcomes depending on who you spent time adventuring with and who you chose to gain influence with, and if you played [good|neutral|evil][lawful|neutral|chaotic][smart|stupid][wise|unwise][charismatic|unpleasant]
Best CRPG ever (Score:2)
Like the article says:
For those looking to play the game (Score:5, Informative)
PS:T was the single greatest gaming experience I have ever been a part of. When people complain that games aren't art, it is obvious they have never played this.
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It was not part of the "Baldur's Gate family". (Score:2, Insightful)
Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil have more in common than the Baldur's Gate games and PST, and nobody would say they're in the same game family.
PST is barely even a CRPG. It's more like a throwback to interactive fiction. It's mostly an adventure game.
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I'll admit I didn't play all the way through PST (my attention wandered after being in that big city for so bloody long) but it's as much as CRPG as the Baldur's Gate games. Thinking maybe I didn't really know what CRPG meant, I looked it up. http://www.angelfire.com/hero/tjekanefir/crpg.htm [angelfire.com]
Yup, that's what I thought. BG and PST are both on that list, as well.
same engine, same family (Score:2)
Their father (Bioware) is the same
Btw, they has more than the engine (.exe) in common, lots of data files were inherited by PS:T.
PST IS a Computer Role Playing Game, more so than BlackIsle's next creations (Icewind Dale series).
Arcanum used tile based graphics, TOEE used pre-rendered graphics, maybe they had more in common elsewhere, but the graphic engine is different.
PST and BG2 uses exactly the
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Too bad there's no xbox version. I usually like to play these things on the couch with the GF watching.
The very best (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to admit that I only played Planescape for the first time as recently as last year, but I was adicted instantly. I've never ever seen a game with such an incredible amount of dialog, nor have I ever seen this kind of quality dialog in any other game. It is deep, philosophical and you actually have meaningful choices that often have subtle nuances to them - for instance you may have the same sentence as a choice twice, but with one option lie and with the other actually mean what you say. There are not many stats, but what stats are there play a big role in dialog, and I can only think of a very few games that come even close in this regard. (mostly the Fallouts)
But the artistic achievement of this game is not limited to dialog. The art in this game is superb. AFAIK no other (significant) game has tried to recreate the world of the Planescape universe, but if they had, I'm sure they would never come as close as PS:T. It's so beautiful it makes you wheep. And the score by Mark Morgan is just perfect and one of the best games scores in general that I know.
If you haven't played this game yet, get it right now.
PS: Since when is PS:T a game of the Baldurs Gate series? It may use the same engine, but that's where the similarities end...
series != family (Score:2)
80% of the PST game could be moved under the BG2 engine without change, this entitles us to say they are of the same family.
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A great story (Score:2)
While the Final Fantasy series are often lauded as having great stories, I consider them pretty trite.
I ki
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Games that tell a good story, like you intend, are the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Day of the tentacle, and the rest of the lucasarts adventure games. KotOR does, too. You decide if they're great or not. But again, I enjoy a good game story, even if the main character has to slug its way through it. It
Re:A great story (Score:4, Insightful)
Or in other words, suppose you copied the backstory to Halo to Space Invaders. Evil covenant thingamabobs are invading Earth, and you have to kill them. You still couldn't say that Space Invaders had a great story.
Parent
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Many games tell a story not exactly through what the main character does (which, in every case, could be reduced to what the interface allows us to do), but through what you call "back-story". Most role-playing games try to make you believe that you're really unfurling the story, while what you really are doing, if we get to it, is
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Only insofar as I don't count backstory. What the player/character *does* in the game, what story it tells, is the important thing. That's why space invaders could never have a great story, even though a person could write a novel as a backstory for it. The mode of the game isn't that important -- you can tell a story in a FPS. There's a difference between Halo and Bioshock in storytelling, but even Bioshock is more about discove
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The problem with the plot/story telling in the Halo series is that if you don't pay attention to it (which is relatively easy to do) it easily boils down to the "run around shooting aliens" concept. One might even be able to argue that this is the reason that Halo is so succ
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While the posters above hit two of the most important ones, with Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey, I'd also add (and I'm kind of shocked that it hasn't yet been mentioned here) Deus Ex. Talk about intricate plot! Also, the Myst games get an honorable mention, though with those (especially the first) you get more of a sense of being an intruder in an already-passed story than a part of one yourself.
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I would rate PS:T as a better game, but Dreamfall is very impressive. The game elements are pretty minor, but the story and characters are fascinating. The writing and voice acting were notable. Highly recommended.
Stands the test of time, worth of a remake (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus how could a fantasy roleplaying game voiced by Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpsons) be bad?
the commercial problem was that the Planescape setting was so outrageous and out of the ordinary field o
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Planescape was a great game.... (Score:2)
Recognizing sci-fi/fantasy (Score:2)
Well, mostly. There's still a gap between the 90% that's crap and the 1% that's celebrated. The literary world only celebrates the great science fiction and fantasy, and tends to lump the merely good stuff in with the crap. Even then, half the time it tries to pretend that the books aren't really science-fiction, in order to avoid removing
Seminal? (Score:3, Insightful)
The great tragedy with this game is that it wasn't followed up with a sequel, nor did Black Isle go on to make anything like it again (Icewind Dale was basically a snowy version of Baldur's Gate), nor was there a sizeable shift in the output of "western RPGs" to be more role / story based. To misquote wikipedia: it isn't "a work from which other works grow".
IMO, since then we've had a gradual erosion of the place the story occupies in the makeup of an RPG (Dark Alliance, Oblivion, Dungeon Siege, Dark Messiah).
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed Oblivion, but it was built on technological advances and genuinely fun gameplay, not on the foundation of the story, without which even Torment would have sucked.
I'd even go as far as to say Diablo was the seminal game which blended with traditional western RPGs to open the gates for our current run of best sellers...
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Re:Seminal? (Score:4, Interesting)
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
Before going to "hell" as it may be, Fall From Grace tells The Nameless One that if there is any way to get him out, she will do so. I mean, main party members include a ghost, a demon, a floating skull, and a tiefling (half-demon). Something tells me they wouldn't have much trouble getting to that plane and getting him out. Of course, that game would largely be focused around the other chars, rather than TNO himself, though he could still be part of the story.
Also, I must say: the ending video of this game was the one time a game has ever brought tears to my eyes. He wakes up, looks out into the field of endless demons and devils fighting each other, then looks to the side and calmy pulls a mace from a body laying to his side. Picks it up and slowly looks at the head as the begging question "What can change the nature of a man?" echoes in the background. Though his face shows almost no emotion there is this absolute wave of sadness that you can feel, then it pans out with him slowly walking towards the battle accepting his fate. The music really helps set the tone here, and I have all of the PS:T sound track on my computer and still listen to it quite often
I've played other games that were fantastic - heck Baldur's Gate 2 was great, as was KOTOR and Jade Empire, but NOTHING quite measures up to Planescape Torment. It's a shame that a sequel will likely never come out. If it had the depth and play time of the original I'd gladly pay ten times what a normal game costs.
Parent
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Hmm, all the characters of the first game would
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Maybe you were accepting your fate. Personally, I was on my way to kick ass and take names. All three major previous incarnations: absorbed. The Transcendent One: absorbed. The golden sphere: opened. Name: remembered. Character level: astronomical. Charisma stat: maxed long ago, 'You could lead the planes to war'. Bring it the fuck
Played it before? Play it again - you missed a lot (Score:2)
And I know I'm still missing some... apparently whenever you make a choice - pick a faction, have a character join your party, some
Re:I Would Love to Play It (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
If I cancel my gametap subscription... (Score:2)
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It sounds like I should dig out those CDs and give it a try.
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In the gaming section, the rules lately is "whatever sony do is evil; praises to microsoft for the xbox!" An attitude you can see along all medias, from comics to generalist news, including slashdot.
Of course, it has nothing to see with the big pie that is halo marketing campaign.
The problem is not that sony is or not doing wrong stuffs, the problem is that both are doing that kind of stuff, but both don't receive the same traitment.
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