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The Impact of Planescape Torment
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."
There are a lot of things one could say about Torment - whether the interface worked, how well the rotating class system worked, etc. I'm focusing on the writing. For me, the fun of Planescape is wrapped up in the atmosphere of Sigil and how well written the whole adventure is. Sigil and its denizens are genuinely, entertainingly bizarre without being excessive (unless of course they have to be). The writers dropped Heaven only knows how many tidbits of history, culture, and glimpese of life on other planes, etc. I especially appreciated the way the writers used progressive exposition regarding the major characters, particularly D'akkon. To a certain degree, Torment so successful because Sigil is like a number of other settings, and like none of them at all. The game is one grand riddle. Granted, some of the fetch-and-carry tasks can be tedious, but solving the main puzzle was fun. Heck, even the order and nature of the fetch-and-carry stuff is left up to the player. Help and join the Dustmen. Or don't. Or join the Dusties after you've joined the Sensates. Or the Chaosmen. Or sell your party into slavery and become totally evil. The possibilities are endless. Torment is the only crpg I've actually finished. I gave up on IWD during the final battle. The party combat system was fun, but the story stopped. I gave up on Diablo and Dungeon Siege just before the final battle. With Diablo, the story wasn't hardly there and the combat got repetitive... With Dungeon Siege, the combat system was cool for quit a while, but the story stopped. I lost interest.
I loved Torment. That game is definately up there in the best of all-time. Not only did it have the most interesting and complex storyline I've ever seen in a game, a cast of interesting characters that you can actually talk to, (not just this banter and occasional stuff like BG2 had), and excellent graphics and music, beyond all that, it made you think and it made you believe. And that is what Planescape was all about. Torment was a game that gave you choices. Lots of choices. Sure, the over-all storyline was rather linear, but there were many different ways to get there, and no two peoples' paths would be the same. You had to create your character from nothing more than a beat-up undying amnesiac, and by the end, that character was you. Your character reflected the choices you made, and those choices were created from your thoughts and beliefs about the scenarios presented in the game. Well, if you cared while you played it, of course. Torment asks one fundamental question: What can change the nature of a man? What did you tell Ravel Puzzlewell? What did you tell the Transcendent One? What was your answer? Or were you too concerned with flashy lights and box art know or care? The game has a lot of dialog, narration, and description in it. Thousands and thousands of lines of it. So what? Take a look at the work of Josh Mandel, quite possibly one of the best writers adventure gaming ever had. He wrote thousands of lines of narration for Space Quest VI, so that you could click on everything and get something funny back. He wrote Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, another game with thousands of lines of narration, and no narrator for it. Mandel made you laugh, and Torment's writers made you think and believe. There's so much there that you're going to miss some of it, so you'll play again and again. Unless of course, you're too concerned with the box art to play in the first place. Torment is a game that you have to spend some time with to understand. You have to read and you have to think. What's wrong with that? Besides, it's been years since I've read one of those Star Trek novels.