PS:T was one of the most amazing game experiences I have ever had.
You need to be in the zone where you really want to read every scrap of text and want to explore every conversation tree to its end; but it's a thought provoking, thoroughly enthralling journey.
Yes, combat has been done better in a lot...well, most games. But I still had fun throwing spells and smacking stuff to death on occasion. It's not horribly broken and is still fun as long as you aren't playing in a Diablo mood where all you wanna do is fight.
Candidus said:
It's a fantastic game and most of what you're going to hear from those who recommend it is going to be spot on, but add a pinch of salt to any raving you hear about its philosophical merit. It hangs around the college A-level / early university zone philosophically.
Don't get me wrong, it's thought provoking, particularly if existential, ethical and political concepts haven't made it on to your list for higher education. The way these subjects are included is entertaining all on its own- the writers occasionally make very sophisticated use of the game setting to demonstrate ideas, as well as just describing them.
Obsidian, Bioware and Bathesda are no longer capable of writing on this level. They've been demonstrating their concept-famine for years and years now. TES has never been a high-brow experience (just an awesome one), Obsidian has been producing garbage since (and including) NWN2 and Bioware is a lost cause as long as The Helper is waiting in the wing, with a pen full of effluent and a memory laden with BL visual novel endings (and Twilight).
So if anything, get it because it's a game that has no modern equivalent, which represents a narrative zenith from which we are still descending toward some horrific sub-fanfiction quality nadir (Dragon Age 3, probably).
While I agree on most of your sentiments, you truly sell the metaphysics of the game short.
Planescape has real philosophic inspiration - it doesn't didactically indoctrinate you in the 'viable alternative' views and criticisms that you are permitted to accept in 'modern philosophic thought' (read: fashion), it just presents you with thought experiments, and ideas! Oh ideas, some of them dangerous, some of them disturbing. Many of these ideas may have been done to death in philosophic academic study - but reading and writing essays is one thing. Role playing and living a character to explore those ideas is QUITE another. It may well be seen as before its time, as the future of exploring philosophic ideas through interactive media.
Examples:
* There is a brothel in this game, where you can go. This was pretty avent-garde and risque for a computer game in the mid-90s, many a year before Hot Coffee and Mass Effect Alien-boob inured us all to nasty computer sex /sarcasm. Except, this brothel doesn't really cater to physical needs. It's called the Brothel of the Slaking of Intellectual Lusts. It's a brothel your wife will be happy to pay for you to go to. Your poor fish-wife can't satisfy you intellectually - so go there and play chess and have an engaging conversation with one of the beautiful courtesans. It's run by a succubus in a chastity belt. Yes, it's that sort of game.
* Your main character is immortal, but not omnipotent. What sort of life that entails is not really what you may expect.
* Your past lives, whose memories have been on occasion obscured by more violent 'deaths' (which are merely slightly inconvenient setbacks) may tell you that you were a very, very different person to the character you are playing now. This doesn't mean you are WRONG in how you are playing - the game is asking you to consider the experience/essence question on a deeper, more personal level than you could get in a philospohpic doctorate paper. Because you are playing the role.
I've done enough higher philosophy to realise that most everything beyond first year is pretty much fundamentally broken and incompatible with practical human nature. Any lingering faith I had as to the relevance of higher phil study went out the window with a course in Virtue Ethics... let me summarise what I learned from 2+ year phil:
ie "relativism is fundamentally bad, you aren't allowed to disagree, and we can argue anything that isn't fashionable/accepted currently is basically relativism in sheep's clothing. And spirituality is out. The greatest minds in history cannot solve the problems of human nature and God, but God and the soul don't exist even metaphysically because you FLUNK THE COURSE if you say otherwise, as you have failed to properly regurgitate what you have been fed, despite the fact that you would be taking the approach from which everyone you ever studied, from Aristotle to Kant, based their investigations on. Coz we're so much smarter now, and what those poor guys believed is clearly silly, but we still study them anyway."
Ahem.
