DarkhoIlow said:
Another thread where I can praise one of my favorite RPG's ever: Planescape Torment.
If you are an RPG fan you should play this game and see how it's done and how good a story can be.
Captcha: no time to explain. Isn't that quite convenient, thanks captcha.
That's far, far, far from being a cult game.
One of the big things to understand about Torment, is that it came out right when TSR/WoTC was selling out 2E for 3E D&D and pretty much taking an axe to all of it's properties. Some of the atrocities, lies, and betraysls of fans from this period are epic, but one that really stands out is how they promised to "save" Planescape as it's own setting and continue to support it more or less as-is, if the property could prove that it would sell due to that game. Planescape Torment basically went "gold" in pre-orders alone being one of the most prolific AD&D titles ever released in part because of that, more than doubling the goal the company set. They decided to cut the setting anyway, ending it with the "Faction War" super adventure, which was pretty much an affront to the setting and what made it great, and reducing "Planescape" to a mere footnote, an example of a possible cosmology in the "Manual Of The Planes" re-release.
Torment makes so many "best of" lists and endures (people still play it) in part because it was so heavily released and distributed. It's one of those weird titles that seems like it should be a "cult thing" but is actually one of the more mainstream and well known RPG titles. I suspect that this is also somewhat encouraged by attempts by TSR/WoTC to claim that the game didn't sell by way of trying to weasel out of what it told fans rather clearly on the RPGA forums, albeit they didn't expect fans to actually be savvy enough to look into the market data and for there to be so many game nerds working in the game industry (at Gamestops and the like) who had their eyes directly on the data and knew how many copies were moving.
While kind of irrelevant this is also the time period where they pretty much backstabbed fans of a system called "Alternity" rather epically as well. The system was doing pretty well and had a pretty dedicated following which continues to some extent to this day. The big thing was that TSR/WoTC decided to buy out the Star Wars license and did not want to try and balance two sci-fi properties, not to mention a lot of the people assigned to Alternity wanted badly to get in on the new project, and it was apparently getting very nasty and political in the office, largely because (surprise) all the sci-fi gamers writing sci-fi RPGs were huge Star Wars fans. The result was another deceptive move where they shipped out a couple of half finished products in very limited quantities like the "Klik Clack" supplement and then said "oh well, because this didn't sell well we're now justified in closing this down". Perhaps the most insulting part of this was how at the time TSR had a big license with Blizzard entertainment having released a rather well done "Diablo" sourcebook/worldbook combo with some neat random loot generation tables and stuff from the game in it (they also did a 3E version later), but also having access to the "StarCraft" license with a much touted Alternity write up coming, when they started swinging the sell-out axe around the took this from the planned 168 page softcover (I think I have that right) to producing a weak adventure in a little box thing with a few StarCraft names plastered onto some of the gear held by pre-assigned characters (not even a character generation set up).
The point is if you've ever wondered why a lot of people hate Ryan Dancey this is why, he was their hatchetman. I could say a lot more about it, but the basic point is that "Torment" came out at that point in time, and as such was being carefully watched by fans, while the license holder actually had a vested interest in seeing it fail, or at least presenting it as a failure. That's one of the big reasons so many people were saying from the beginning there would never be a sequel, or another "Planescape" game no matter how much people wanted it, if the game hadn't been so close to release during this shake up it would have been canceled, and TSR/WoTC murdered the setting.
See, at the time of 3E there was a big movement to try and turn "Greyhawk" which had been fairly neglected, into the default setting, and focus almost entirely on that product like. Due to amazing fandoms they couldn't quite do the same thing with Forgotten Realms, and to a lesser extent Krynn, but they did try. It was argued by some (including me) that the "Threat From The Sea" event was in part intended to try and assassinate "The Forgotten Realms" so people would migrate towards "Greyhawk" or perhaps "Eberron" when that became a thing. It however did not work, which allowed them to go with "plan B" as the event provided the perfect framework to start selling books updating areas they had already covered, as opposed to fleshing out parts of The Realms that had been neglected and had outstanding promises that they would be handled.