PlaneScape: Torment - Sweet, Beautiful Torment
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Curious why you didn't mention Dan Castellaneta's voice work... I mean a game with Homer Simpson voicing one of the characters should be noted in any review...StewShearer said:
Yeah that really is the trouble with stepping so close to perfection....everything afterwards becomes...meh.Clive Howlitzer said:
The only RPG I can think of that has the chops to stand toe to toe with Planescape (although in its a bit more focused on combat....) is Baldurs Gate 2.
I absolutely love both these games to death, and I've replayed BG2 lots of times. Maybe the time has come to replay Planescape. I've only solved it once.
Torment truly is a gaming classic, it has its flaws but in terms of narrative there are few games of any genre or platform that can compare. There are games I consider better, Baldur's Gate 2 gets mentioned often when Torment is brought up and for good reason, but for anyone with any interest in gaming as a means of storytelling has to play Torment as it truly is easily among the greatest in that regard.
High hopes for Tides of Numenera, if that game manages to achieve even a fracture of what made the original Torment so amazing we're in for a real treat.
High hopes for Tides of Numenera, if that game manages to achieve even a fracture of what made the original Torment so amazing we're in for a real treat.
Yeah, I really enjoyed the Planescape storyline and background, but the text can get a little bit exposition heavy. If you recognise the limitations of the technology at the time, it's fine, but it's not easy to get into if you're used to the modern RPG.Signa said:
The best thing about this game, that puts it streets ahead of anything else I've played, is the almost 4th wall breaking way the game deals with rezzing. When you die and just get up again as if to say "Meh", often with a snarky comment from Mort or one of the other characters, it's not only part of the game world but also takes away a lot of the frustration and need to save-scum.
I really need to play this one of these days. It's been on my computer for a couple of years just waiting. My main concern was that it would be a bit over my head since I have no experience with D&D and very little experience with CRPGs. I'll get around to it eventually though.
This game irritated me for reasons that are completely my own fault.
I don't want to play the game multiple times, I want as many options available to me at any decision point and I don't want to make mistakes. As a result, I extensively used a walkthrough and destroyed my own immersion. I didn't get very far as a result.
It felt so promising and I know it is but I stonewall myself at each decision, unable to free myself from the metagame.
I don't want to play the game multiple times, I want as many options available to me at any decision point and I don't want to make mistakes. As a result, I extensively used a walkthrough and destroyed my own immersion. I didn't get very far as a result.
It felt so promising and I know it is but I stonewall myself at each decision, unable to free myself from the metagame.
Totally agree with your review man..it's my favorite RPG ever from a story standpoint.
This game felt like reading a great huge book (finished it with minimal amount of fighting via dialogue only with max Wisdom and Intelligence).
This game felt like reading a great huge book (finished it with minimal amount of fighting via dialogue only with max Wisdom and Intelligence).
One of the strangest paradoxes of this game brought about entirely by the engine is that the mage is the most powerful class in this game, but because the screen is so zoomed in compared to other Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, even as a mage you are forced to use close combat.
This is where if you now play the game with the WEIDU widescreen and resolution mods, that allow you to play it on a 16:9 screen at 1920x1080 or whatever, the game really is different than the original since you can actually plan your attacks ahead.
This makes all combat easier actually.
It's also amusing that the devs chose to not include swords. I can't think of any other western fantasy games where swords simply don't exist as player weapons.
And it's one of the very few games where you can completely miss out on several party members, with no indication you did so unless you know this from other playthroughs or external sources -- and still be able to play until the end.
Lastly, as others mentioned, this game is getting a spiritual sequel called 'Torment: Tides of Numenera' by the same guys that brought us the excellent Wasteland 2.
This is where if you now play the game with the WEIDU widescreen and resolution mods, that allow you to play it on a 16:9 screen at 1920x1080 or whatever, the game really is different than the original since you can actually plan your attacks ahead.
This makes all combat easier actually.
It's also amusing that the devs chose to not include swords. I can't think of any other western fantasy games where swords simply don't exist as player weapons.
And it's one of the very few games where you can completely miss out on several party members, with no indication you did so unless you know this from other playthroughs or external sources -- and still be able to play until the end.
Lastly, as others mentioned, this game is getting a spiritual sequel called 'Torment: Tides of Numenera' by the same guys that brought us the excellent Wasteland 2.
Yeah, the modern gamer in me kept me from getting into PS:T. Knowing you're making long lasting decisions and locking out content at almost every turn hurts the completionist in me. Also, the reading overwhelmed me a few hours in. I've only made one attempt so far though. I'm going to try again and just role play a guy and try to relax into the story next time.-Dragmire- said:
Some background on the Planescape setting should help understand the game. In Planescape, belief creates reality. If enough people believe in something, then it becomes true. This is heavily thematic in Torment. If you tell enough people that your name is Adahn, eventually, a bloke named Adahn will show up. The game provides ample opportunities to completely change your direction. Perhaps the nameless one, after having lived so many lives, can call up his mindset from that time. At times, this can mean changing your alignment to fit the current need.
The combat is rather dull if you are used to playing a modern game - that is to say, its the same combat from Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. The game is also very text-based. I do not believe they would have made a game with this story if all their efforts were going into improving the combat and making the game more inviting. Instead, we'd have received a comparatively shallow game like DA:O.
On a side note, I think the best artwork ever introduced into a fantasy setting is in all the old Planescape source material. The style is incredible both in scale and theme. My only real complaint about Torment is that the format of the Infinity Engine didn't really allow Torment to capture the artistic themes used in the tabletop setting.
The combat is rather dull if you are used to playing a modern game - that is to say, its the same combat from Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. The game is also very text-based. I do not believe they would have made a game with this story if all their efforts were going into improving the combat and making the game more inviting. Instead, we'd have received a comparatively shallow game like DA:O.
On a side note, I think the best artwork ever introduced into a fantasy setting is in all the old Planescape source material. The style is incredible both in scale and theme. My only real complaint about Torment is that the format of the Infinity Engine didn't really allow Torment to capture the artistic themes used in the tabletop setting.
Very true, and I'm a backer of the upcoming game, however it should be noted this will be using the Numenera setting as opposed to the Planescape setting which could be hit or miss. While Numenera gets a decent amount of praise there isn't as much material to draw on, nor does it have quite the same following, probably due to the state of PnP RPGs in general.erbkaiser said:
*THAT* said you can very much blame Wizards Of The Coast, and perhaps more specifically one man named Ryan Dancey, for what happened with this game, and to a lesser extent PnP RPGs in general, and it's quite possible because of them that damage was actually done to the genera of computer games as a whole.
To set the wayback machine, I was a member of the RPGA back when "Torment" came out and I was on their forums. This was a time when someone at WOTC decided that PnP gaming needed to be dumbed way down and they wanted the 3E rules to become more approachable than ever before, despite claims that they would lose none of the depth that exist in 2E. Early versions of the rules got leaked and at one point Ryan Dancey in a thread dedicated to me claimed he could accurately translate any 2E character into a 3E equivalent even if I broke the rules. Unsurprisingly he couldn't do it.
At any rate, at the time this was going on Ryan was the designated axeman who was running around killing off all the material and campaign settings which were too smart for their desired audiences despite massive protests from the fan bases. In reality his desire was at the time to pretty much axe everything except Greyhawk (which they wanted to make the game's new focus) and The Forgotten Realms (because the novels alone were a massive cash cow even WoTC wasn't dumb enough to slaughter all at once, though they intended to gradually poison the setting in hopes of getting people to transfer interest to Greyhawk and focus their audience. Events like "Threat From The Sea" were set up to destroy what a lot of people liked in an epic finale in hopes interest would fade... Waterdeep, Halrua, Baldur's Gate, and other locations were more or less flattened).
This brings us to Planescape, a setting that was quite profitable and had a dedicated following, having seen the successful publication of numerous boxed sets, modules, and full-color softcover books, as well as being popular enough where it was being crossed over into other campaign settings due to people liking the ideas. When Planescape was on the chopping block Ryan Dancey tried to talk crap about a lack of interest and said flat out that if "Torment sells well the setting will be spared". Let's just say that Torment went gold in pre-orders alone (trust me, I was there), and a lot of people even purchased multiple copies. Ryan of course lied about this and axed the setting anyway, but not before one last adventure/supplement called "Faction War" which took a giant sized dump on everything that made the setting awesome (kicking all the factions out of Sigil for example), pretty much the same thing they tried to do with "Threat From The Sea" but a lack of further publication and novelists writing dedicated Planescape novels prevented a recovery.
At any rate this is why Planescape is viewed as an "obscure" or "cult classic" game despite it being one almost everyone has played, bought, or was going to play, and being on almost every list of computer games. The thing moved truckloads of copies, but the guys holding the IP rights were insane and somehow thought it would be in their best interests to kill a product line that was making them money, so deliberately sabotaged themselves in the press. This is why the game is everywhere, despite everyone acting like it should be obscure.
The domino effect this caused of course is still being felt. It's arguable that the alleged "failure" of Planescape lead a lot of the gaming industry to believe that games like this just didn't sell. Likewise at the time when the RPG producers themselves were selling simplicity, and face it, most RPG mechanics with computer games and such go back to D&D in some form, the game developers of course did the same thing. RPGs, both computer and PnP, thus began a downward spiral of alleged simplicity and accessibility, while of course the original audience that made them popular largely moved on, or kept playing using previous rules and game systems. The "young, stupid, audience" that they were banking
on never really came out in force, and those that did, didn't stay so RPGs became a dying genera.
Some might of course think I'm overstating the case, and probably can't believe that a company would actually sabotage things that were making them money in hopes of MAYBE making more money if they went down a different avenue, but it did happen, and I actually talked to/confronted the guy who was running point for it.... and pretty much every prediction I made happened.
The irony here is that there is still a profitable niche waiting to be mined out there, but it's not big enough to get the attention of anyone that can do it right, meaning that "real RPG gaming" mostly stays at a low level, catered to by people that just don't have the resources to get it going again in anything approaching a big way.
As far as the combat in Planescape went, a big part of the problem I think was that the engine was just too old and it wasn't capable of achieving the level of complexity that later-era 2E could. Things like intergrating NWPS (the skill system) advanced weapon mastery and combat proficiencies, and similar things. The problem as I saw it was that by the time Planescape: Torment came out people were already getting tired of "Quarterback" type infinity engine combat, and some of the changes (as people point out with the view style) actually didn't mesh well. That and the game didn't make very good use of the magic rules for the setting which is why Magic seemed overpowered. Basically it seemed very little had magic resistance, and when you visited other planes the game didn't make you worry about obtaining the right keys/rituals/etc... to use magic in that dimension without suffering a huge penalty. Magic is powerful when you can
get it to work, but arguably brute force was king for a lot of adventuring because hitting someone with a big rock is universal (so to speak). It's also why a lot of wizards that are high level tend to stay in one place/dimension in Planescape and use adventurers to roam the planes, because if most of them travel they wind up losing X number of casting levels if they don't know specific things (and you never know the first time you go somewhere, and sometimes those keys change), it's easier to send adventurers since he'd likely be even weaker than they are if he went through gates randomly and he's a dedicated mage. Clerics likewise also tend to get screwed, and don't have the same kind of work around, basically the more planes between them and whatever plane their deity calls home, they more casting levels they lose, and there really aren't tricks (other than gaining multiple patrons) that can help. I might be forgetting something but basically being a mage was the best (after getting a few level of figher for hit points) because you didn't have to worry about say losing 10 levels of casting ability (say going from 12th level to 2nd level). That would have made the game annoying mind you, but it did lead to certain things being a lot more convenient than they should have been.
Well... A shame and a waste.Therumancer said:
That said, I'm ready to believe this, since it appears some are foolish enough to go this way in the broader video games business. Dumbing down and pissing off historical fans. Cutting stuff and dumbing down to appeal to a "new demographic" that won't materialize in numbers big enough to justify kicking out the old guard.
Tides of Numenera backer as well here. Though I'm not even sure I fully remember my logs, but then I prefer not to take part in the advise/decision-making process, I prefer to let them decide what seems better since they're pros and created awesome games before - something I can't say about me. I'll see what they've come up with when the game will be eventually released - and will bother getting my logs back at this moment.
That was my main issue with this game. It might just have to do with me not having very much patience with top-down isometric RPGs.GrimSerious said:
Honestly, I think this game could use a remaster. Make it a bit more accessible to people unaccustomed to games like this.
Or I can just wait for Tides of Numenera to get something similar. One of my favorite authors (Patrick Rothfuss) was a writing consultant and even wrote some of the dialog, so I know it's gonna be good.
I just wish they hadn't pushed it back almost a full year.
Well, you haven't missed much. Torment was put on hiatus while they worked on Wasteland which took far longer to develop than they planned given that the product's stretch goals ballooned it into a rather huge product (though it's a good one, I'm slowly playing through it now). Serious development on Numenera just started supposedly, and I guess they are out to get more funding since they were mentioning some area called "The Gullet" they wanted to develop (basically a dungeon level inside of a living creature) which is being cut for size constraints, yet apparently if people come running up to put in more money it will be put back into the game and fully developed. I'm guessing this worked to some extent on Wasteland 2 since it was getting funding almost until release, with thing after thing being added. For example originally the game wasn't going to involve any kind of crouching or cover mechanics apparently, but both of them were added into the game mid-development. Prone positions were never added however.Random Gamer said:
That's what I've picked up from my updates and the general chatter, though I haven't been following it that closely so there might be more recent news.
As far as the other stuff, The Escapist is one of the few sites I call anymore, and really I'm getting close to retiring my Therumancer identity (I always get talked out of it). I've been around a long time and spent years running around trading jabs with game developers and such. One of the big draws for RPGA membership at the time when this went down was that their forums had a lot of the TSR/WoTC big wigs present on the forums, especially since the RPGA set up con events and such. Ryan Dancey was there because he was "the man" for the upcoming 3E and the restructuring changes and was supposed to be sort of selling us paid insiders, and it kind of backfired. I went on that long ramble because with "Planescape: Torment" in particular there was a big rally for it specifically because strong sales were supposed to save the Planescape setting. It should also be noted that their next big game the "Pool Of Radiance" remake (which was mentioned in the D&D game retrospective here) embraced their attitudes about what they felt was going to expand their audience, it and a lot of the other big D&D game flops from that point on were because of that attitude, and you'll notice around this time a lot of other cRPGs were playing "follow the leader" with what the D&D games were doing since things like "Baldur's Gate" sort of set the standard. They crashed and burned, so they took cRPGs following suit with them, as nobody bought games that sucked.
While sort of irrelevant to what's being discussed another side point to this is an RPG system few people now probably remember called "Alternity" which was actually doing pretty well at the time. That one got axed because WoTC decided to pick up the "Star Wars" license and try and do it with the 3E rules. The irony being that they destroyed one of the better science fiction games on the market, even cutting a pretty good series of novels (they never finished the Dark Matter series to my knowledge), for a Star Wars game where some bright boy decided that Jedi would not be proficient with lightsabers at 1st level (don't ask... they later revised it). I mention this because oddly the only real success to come out of this era's cRPGs is "Knights Of The Old Republic" which was a licensed 3E product, which ironically managed to succeed by not being very much like the actual RPG it was borrowing some of the mechanics from. Personally I would have found it hilarious if in the first one you changed class to Jedi got all excited and then were told "yes, and when you gain your next feat you'll actually be able to use your light saber...".
Ah well I'm rambling. The funniest part of the thing though is that right before they basically sabotaged Alternity (rushing out the last couple of supplements like Klick Klack so they could transfer the writers to Star Wars and then complaining the books didn't sell... probably because they were shoddy pieces of crap) they had negotiated a deal with Blizzard to do RPG books based on it's IPs. They actually released little known 2E and 3E supplements based on Diablo including versions of all the character types from those games, monster lists, and treasure generators. For Alternity they apparently paid up the nose to get the rights to do "StarCraft". Oddly one of those things people spent years wishing their was an RPG version of. Well there is a little published RPG translation of it rushed out the door as little more than an adventure and some pre-made characters for Alternity. They literally wiped their butt with that whole license after begging to get it.... which probably explains a lot of Blizzard's attitudes about RPG products and letting others have a license to develop things.... but again it all comes back to WoTC management and their boy Ryan Dancey (who himself later got cut, but not before he did all kinds of damage).
Ahh well, I really shouldn't be rambling about this. I'm just kind of bored, and I figure not many people care. It would be impossible to prove nowadays anyway unless some old school RPGA forum veterans happen to remember it all, but even so it's not like there are archives sitting around from members only forums for a relatively obscure RPG fan club.
I just beat this game tonight, and seeing this retrospective motivated me to make an account on here. It was my second attempt, and I had to start from scratch since my hard drive died on my first one, but it was worth all the back-tracking. Especially since I installed the mods this time around.
I've seen a lot of people talking about how this isn't really for modern gamers. I can see that point, since it uses an overhead-perspective, and the play is a bit slow (though the Widescreen mod really helps to curb some of that). But the mechanics are pretty user-friendly, and it doesn't seem as impregnable as, say, the Ultima games.
Also, I wonder if better combat would REALLY have detracted from Torment's message the way I've seen some suggest. The game's structure already provided plenty of incentive to forgo combat in favor or negotiation and quest completion. But at the same time, combat was hardly infrequent; for much of the game it's expected, if not always absolutely required.
I really like systems that feature a real/quasi-real-time with optional pausing, especially the Infinity Engine. I don't think that's necessarily the issue, where the streamlining of combat options and resources played a bigger part in PS:T's fights often feeling "shallow".
It feels like Torment gives you a better playground with some decent toys , where Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale give you a better toybox and a decent playground.
I've seen a lot of people talking about how this isn't really for modern gamers. I can see that point, since it uses an overhead-perspective, and the play is a bit slow (though the Widescreen mod really helps to curb some of that). But the mechanics are pretty user-friendly, and it doesn't seem as impregnable as, say, the Ultima games.
Also, I wonder if better combat would REALLY have detracted from Torment's message the way I've seen some suggest. The game's structure already provided plenty of incentive to forgo combat in favor or negotiation and quest completion. But at the same time, combat was hardly infrequent; for much of the game it's expected, if not always absolutely required.
I really like systems that feature a real/quasi-real-time with optional pausing, especially the Infinity Engine. I don't think that's necessarily the issue, where the streamlining of combat options and resources played a bigger part in PS:T's fights often feeling "shallow".
It feels like Torment gives you a better playground with some decent toys , where Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale give you a better toybox and a decent playground.