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A Retrospective on Planescape Torment
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."
I would love to play Planescape Torment if I could get my hands on a copy. I really liked the Baldur's Gate series (Baldur's Gate II is, I think, my favorite game in the genre, followed closely by Planeshift and Baldur's Gate I). I didn't really like Neverwinter Nights (the original; Hordes of the Underdark was great), because it seemed too limited in the choices it offers (i.e. the story is too linear). My understanding is that Planescape Torment is much better in this regard. Alas, the game seems to have failed so completely it's hard to get my hands on a copy. Ok, it's probably obtainable through file sharing, but that's not an option I'm willing to consider.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I played all of the Baldur's Gate games, and their expansion packs, but none of them held my attention as firmly as Planescape: Torment. That was the first time I played a game where the story was truly the point.
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 one and only such game that I ever played completely through more than once.
In fact, I think I'll try to find another copy of it. I gave mine to my cousin five years ago and his 3 year old daughter made swift work of the media.
Slashdotting....
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 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.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Like the article says:
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.
I hate to write a "yeah, what he said!" post but I do agree entirely with everything you've said! This game, for me, is THE high-water mark. It was a "novel set in motion" with a fantastic story of human redemption. It presented a believable world populated with remarkable characters I still think about from time to time.
IMO, PS:T is the hands-down best game I've ever played.
It is a shame that KOTOR:2 was rushed, and treated so poorly by LucasArts. That was ALMOST a truly great game.
Yes, I have great hopes for Team Gizka's 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.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
The setting wasn't the same D&D universe as Baldur's Gate. The developer was Black Isle and not Bioware. PST used a modified version of the Infinity Engine, and that's the only thing they had in common.
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.
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...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
My girlfriend asked me, when I was playing Bioshock last month, which video games had a truly great story. Not a backstory, but the game itself tells a great story. Bioshock doesn't count, since while it has an awesome backstory (which is revealed in a nonlinear fashion) the story of the main character himself in the game could be expressed in about two sentences (which I won't do, for spoiler reasons).
While the Final Fantasy series are often lauded as having great stories, I consider them pretty trite.
I kind of liked the stories in Marathon, System Shock, and Halo, but again, most of the richness was in the backstory. The actual story of the character revolved around running around and shooting things.
After about 15 minutes, I decided that Planescape Torment was the only game I could really think of that had a great story. And I still haven't thought of another game, now almost a month later.
There are two games which I hold above all others in terms of art and story, Planescape: Torment and Grim Fandango. The fact that both at their core are about characters in the afterlife trying to move on seems to be an eerie coincidence in my book.
Still to this day I havent had the luck of finding a greater game than Torment. Still to this day I utter random quotes with some friends such as "I endure and by enduring I grow stronger" (Dak'kon, voiced by one of the x-files guys) and everyone smiles recognizing immediately where it comes from :-)
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 of vision of your garden variety D&D fanboy that to some was a bit of a put off and didnt picked it up to begin with.
I dont believe that there is another game that deserves a remake more than this one. I'm sure given the dire finances of Interplay you can pick up the rights of the game pretty easily.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
PST and Fallout were very similar IMHO. They are probably two of the very few games I played through to the end and thoroughly enjoyed. I bought Fallout 2 and Tactics, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, NeverWinter Nights on the back of Fallout and PST but they failed to compell me to continue after a few hours.
3 out of the 5 games were developed by Black Isle. But this doesn't mean their engine had nothing in common. :)
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 same area formats and only very small differences in item and creature formats. By all rights, they are of the same family.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Same engine means a lot :)
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.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
...but IMO before we get to the point that games are celebrated for their literary value, we'll have to reach FIRST the point where Science Fiction or Fantasy gets any literary cred outside of their genres....
-Styopa
If you have played Planescape: Torment and Oblivion you would know what im talking about, Just remembering some planescape moments gives me chills down my spine, 2001 monolith kind of chills, just remembering some Oblivion moments makes me regret wasting time "playing" it. /rant
Todays games are all about eye candy, gameplay has been declining but story has been lost, im not talking about background story, im talking about actual story told trough the game.
Torment was a great game (to repeat what most people are saying here), but was it seminal as the article suggests?
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...
And I know I'm still missing some... apparently whenever you make a choice - pick a faction, have a character join your party, some other choices get blocked off. And many characters have their own boards and storylines once they join (Modron, Dakkon most notably) - so depending on who you have in your party, its a completely different experience!
This game was so deeply sad (in the good way).
I played it in my teens though and I don't know whether I'd still find it deep today. What do you think?
Medium cat is MEDIUM.
Is it a PC-only game? My cursory searches didn't turn up anything for consoles. I played Baldur's Gate on the PS2; I like playing PlayStation RPGs that support multiple players. I guess this isn't one of those?
I loved/love PS:T. It has the deepest, most well executed story I have ever seen in a video game. When ever I would read about Ebert saying that video games can't be art, Torment jumped to mind as incontrovertible evidence that he couldn't find his ass with both hands and a convex mirror.
I actually just loaded this back up under WinXP a couple of weeks ago and have been playing through it again for the first time in probably 5 years. Runs great as long as you patch it. Gameplay gets a little tedious to me at some points in the game, and the graphics are dated as hell now, but the story and dialogue have definitely stood the test of time.
Check Amazon if you're looking for a copy. There are a number of vendors listed there selling "new" copies at reasonable prices.
have you just recently escaped bizarro slashdot or something? 'Round these parts anything that contains the word "microsoft" must also include the overarching concept of "failure"
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Hey!
Nobody has mentioned GemRB, a promising, but as yet unfinished Linux version of the infinity engine! Download it, try it out, and contribute. This is something that needs the same level of attention as Exult. The game isn't really playable yet, but you already see that the task is possible.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemrb/
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 the "always crap" clause from their personal definition of sci-fi.
For anyone even half-interested, the original design-document (or whatever the fuck they call these things) is a blast.
http://www.rpgwatch.com/files/Files/00-0208/Torment_Vision_Statement_1997.pdf
> Despite the cult status of Planescape: Torment, it was one of the
> least successful entries in the Baldur's Gate family of games.
One of. Can't claim worst, because that'd be the last game in the series, Temple of Elemental Evil.
They actually had some superswords that would automatically counter-attack something that attacked you. If you, unfortunately, went to go hit a flame elemental or some such, which also had an automatic counterattack, the game would get stuck in its turn-based mechanism as something choked as the mutual counterattacks fed off each other and tied up the next-turn logic.
This state was easy to get into other ways, too. They never fixed this stuff. Often, you'd re-load a saved game, only to see it was stuck in such a state, the saved game beeing fubarred now.
It's too bad, because, by careful but legitimate (if unenvisioned) gameplay, you could acquire two such swords and be a dual-wielding engine of destruction. Sadly, such dual wielding lead to even worse problems because the swords choked on each other frequently.
Man, take those two swords (+ fixed programming) and roll it in with the boots of haste, spell-bouncing cloak, and dual Rings of Gaxx (also acquirable by legitimate, if unenvisioned, gameplay), and damn, you'd take out pretty much anything in, well, Marvel's list of heroes anyway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Planescape: Torment is a great game. The game is really story centered; while there is some Baldur's Gate style combat, its not the centerpiece of the game.
However, I would not reccomend the game for young children. Theres nothing wrong with the content -- but merely that the story has ideas and themes that I wouldn't expect children to go for.
Without wanting to go into the plot details: Think of it this way: Games for young kids have a Good Guy (with a capital G) and a Bad Guy, and you are *ALWAYS* the Good Guy.
However, for older kids and adults, this gets ho-hum, and things are more interesting when the lines are more blurred -- perhaps the Bad Guys motivations are explained in a way that presents his side of things. Or perhaps the "hero" is only out for himself.
Oh, the graphics are dated. Not much you can do about that. But the story and its text are the shining points anyways, so don't worry about it.
If you are a "powergamer" (always trying to play games to min/max your way to be as powerful as you can) I would seriously reccommend taking a break and just playing this game though the first time in roleplay fashion -- either answer things as you would yourself, or decide what your character would do and follow that through the story.
"The so-called CRPG isn't role-playing. To whom does one role-play in such an exercise?" - Gary Gygax
The incredibly huge mistake gamers seem to enjoy making is equating "roleplaying" with some undefinable quality of immersion, as if it meant to control a character in the context of its world, ignoring the fact that this myopic and completely wrong definition would then classify every game in existence as a roleplaying game.
"Roleplaying" actually refers to acting to an audience and is impossible in most video games (there are exceptions -- MMORPGs, Neverwinter Nights, MU* games and similar).
C RPGs are a specific genre defined by -- and I'm sorry if this rubs you the wrong way because of biases carried over from pen & paper anti-"rollplaying" sentiment -- the mechanics of P&P RPGs. P&P RPGs descended from wargaming; CRPGs hearken back to that, because they usually can't (and never can, in the case of single-player games) accommodate the roleplaying component. CRPGs are primarily complex board games; wargames backcrossed with P&P flavor.
Planescape: Torment is barely a CRPG. It certainly isn't an RPG in the P&P sense. It's exclusively single-player.
PS:T shares far more in common with the genres of interactive fiction and adventure games than it does with CRPGs. To claim otherwise is to ignore the history of the CRPG genre, which has only ever recently begun to focus on story, characterization, and other elements previously associated with IF. That's just a result of technological advances, though - every game genre has become richer.
do I keep the games I've downloaded? Or do they lock me out?
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Not in the gmaing section.
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.
Loom was far better. The Dig was, too. Really, the first two Monkey Island games were as well. Oh, and Zak McKracken. Gee, Maniac Mansion and DOTT were, too.
Grim Fandango was extremely overrated due to its 3D interface.
Good that you admit that Planescape: Torment was fundamentally an adventure game, though.