Games

[icycalm]

http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?t=28014

Planescape: Torment: Updated Edition

-- All bugs fixed.
-- Runs in any resolution natively.
-- Content cut for time restored and added back into the game.
-- Exploits patched.
-- Graphics updated.
-- Several optional tweaks to streamline gameplay annoyances.
-- Text can be resized to accomodate larger resolutions.
-- Brand new GUI.



Followed this guide, runs swimmingly in Windows 7 64-bit, surprisingly enough.

Words cannot describe how fucking awesome this is.

Guys if you haven't played this, you need to. This game is Important™.

I think... I think I'm actually going to put off Deus Ex for this instead. At least for now.

Many people in the Half-Life thread were talking about how they like games where exploration is actively rewarded, and poking around and experimenting are key parts of the game that the player is encouraged to do. If that is the type of thing you like, there is a good chance that Planescape could be your favorite game ever and you just didn't know it yet.

[icycalm]

First part of my review. Second part coming within 48 hours.

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So the time has come to talk about Torment. Chalk it up to Brian Fargo's laughable claims that "a Torment game requires big ideas and a truly exotic setting in order to explore the underlying thematic elements". Reality to Fargo: no one who played Torment explored any "underlying thematic elements", they explored parts of an extremely dumbed down and simplified digital rendering of the city of Sigil in TSR's Planescape setting. He is planning a Torment "sequel", you see (which will be neither mechanically similar to the original, since it won't be D&D, nor "thematically", since it won't take place in the Planescape setting), and he is spouting as much PR drivel as any random PR person. And you thought publishers were evil for taking an acclaimed franchise and messing with it beyond recognition, while keeping the name intact; but look, even the devs themselves are doing it when given half a chance. And why shouldn't they? It's good business.

So this is what happens when the hype surrounding an artwork reaches such absurd and utterly unwarranted levels: even the artist himself ends up believing the bullshit that people say about him. There's a Nietzschean aphorism about that somewhere, in Human, All Too Human, I believe. And that's what happened to poor Brian Fargo, who as a result will go down in history as being just as stupid and uneducated as his hordes of mouth-breathing, neckbearded, spastic fans. Torment has "a great narrative", lol. In my essay titled "On Set Theory and The Bastardization Process" (Videogame Culture: Volume II), I quote several pages of Proust with the aim of showing people what a great narrative looks like. I actually copy-paste several pages off Swann's Way into the middle of my fucking essay, because I realize that there's no other way any of you dumb, uneducated cunts will ever come in contact with a proper narrative. That, by the way, is the essay in which I explain, among many other things, why it is stupid to expect great narratives to come out of videogames (for the same reason it is stupid to expect great music to come out of movies or great paintings to come out of comic books), and if you don't read it (and also "On Narrative Delusions", from Volume I), you will never fully understand why. Hell, most of you will never understand why even if you read them. That's how fucking dumb, insensitive and uneducated you are.

But back to Torment and its "fans'" absurd claims of narrative greatness. Torment's plot is a reworking of the basic idea behind Troy Denning's Planescape novel Pages of Pain, a decent enough yarn (***) that I read back in '96-'97, when the Planescape setting was still brand-new and TSR's hottest property. The details between the two narratives are completely different, but the setup of an immortal amnesiac hero is the same, and considering Pages of Pain was one of only four Planescape novels published, and by far the best of the lot, there's no way in hell the similarity is a coincidence. Plagiarism would be a more fitting word for it, if not for the fact, as I said, that the details of the two stories are essentially different.

But the reason I am bringing up Pages of Pain (well, apart from my desire to show off my extensive knowledge of everything TSR) is to underscore how forgettable Torment's narrative is by narrative standards (as opposed to by videogame standards). For if even the goddamn NOVEL that the game's story is based on is mediocre, it is madness to expect its videogame adaptation to be any better! Both narratives are in fact utterly forgettable (which is why I remember next to nothing of them!): there's a cool start where we're introduced to our intriguing immortal amnesiac hero, and a cool finale where we're hit by the twist ending which reveals his eternal fate, and between these two points a whole lot of fighting happens and little else -- the end. And people are calling this a "great narrative" lol! I guess in Torment there's a girlfriend somewhere in there, so that must account for it -- just as it accounts for the absurd hype surrounding Braid's narrative, which, may I remind you again, Roger Ebert called "on the level of a wordy fortune cookie". And while Torment's narrative is far from being that laughable, it's time you dumb, uneducated cunts realized that there are comic books with better narrative than Torment's. Comic books! Never mind actual books!

With that out of the way, let's try to understand what it is that made this game -- and still makes it -- so great. And to do that you have to first understand exactly what its designers did. They took TSR's newest, hottest setting at the time, the Planescape setting, and as we've seen stole the key idea of its best novel and used it as the basis for their game's plot. Then they took BioWare's excellent Infinity Engine -- the cutting-edge in isometric WRPG tech at the time -- and bumped up the resolution from Baldur's Gate's 640x480 pixels to 800x600. They used these extra pixels to make the sprites bigger and more detailed, and fleshed out the setting with some of the most gorgeous pixel art the genre has ever seen (with their choice of the Planescape setting greatly helping them here, since with its wildly imaginative locations and denizens it provided a much more effective source of inspiration for their artists than the far more frequently used, and rather bland in comparison, Forgotten Realms setting). Then they carried over the extensive dialogue-tree mechanics from the Fallout games, and restricted the character creation process -- unprecedented in a D&D game at the time -- to a single character, thereby strongly reinforcing the role-playing impact of the dialogue-tree choices. Finally they topped off the whole thing with one of the greatest videogame soundtracks ever. In short, they picked and matched the very best components available at the time for every single one of the game's aspects, and sewed them together so expertly that no one could see the seams. This is why I say that Planescape: Torment is the most complete videogame adaptation of D&D ever.

It is not, however, the best. For frankly, as awesome as this game may be, I still prefer the extra difficulty found in the gold box games, or the far greater length and scope of the Baldur's Gate saga, or the much more faithful turn-based D&D mechanics seen in The Temple of Elemental Evil. All of these games are awesome -- as awesome, indeed, as Planescape: Torment, if not more; but for different reasons, and it's these reasons we are going to be exploring and analyzing now.

[icycalm]

It's turning into a monster with no end in sight. You see why I keep putting them off: I end up spending the entire day on my laptop in bed and fucking up both my sleeping pattern and my diet (since I end up eating whatever's in the fridge instead of going to a restaurant or the grocery store). So anyway, here's the second part -- no idea how many parts there will be. If you prefer to read it in one go tough luck, it's either this or I'd never end up writing them.

-----------------------


The question then is not to find the best isometric WRPG, or even merely the best D&D adaption, but to determine the best elements of the best of the best isometric WRPGs (or D&D adaptations), and postulate how an even better game could be created by appropriately mixing and matching them -- and it's the same with all highly evolved genres. I mean think of what would happen if you tried to pick the best shooting game of all time: it'd be impossible. Or the best fighting game. Or the best platform or racing game. We are talking about genres that have been evolving for 4 to 5 decades now, each of which contains thousands of examples. Only with a relatively new genre is it ever possible to sometimes pick a clear-cut winner: as with the free-roaming genre, for example, which for a good 8 years or so was utterly dominated by GTA3, which was clearly on another level from all its attempted imitators before Far Cry 2 came out (and is arguably so still, but that's a subject for another essay).

But to return to the genre that concerns us here, and more specifically its D&D-licensed subgenre, we need to steer clear of any facile blanket generalizations of the type "PLAENESCAPE TOWRMENT IZ THE BEST ROWLPLEYING GEAM EVAR!" and instead try to home in on what this game did best, what area it excelled in compared to its numerous brethren. And, to cut this short and get to the point, this is indeed the role-playing aspect, this obviously massive effort by the developers to create a game which goes beyond a series of loosely strung-together tactical battles, and tries to give the player the sense that he's participating in something far greater and far more important than that. Just consider that all other D&D games give you a few lines of exposition at the start and then set you off on your 40- to 60-hour long exploration-, looting- and killing spree, while Torment throws you straight away in the middle of one of the heaviest dialogue trees ever with almost zero exposition. If you take the time to fully explore it, it could be a quarter of an hour or more before you get a chance to GO anywhere, let alone KILL anything -- and that's awesome. That had never been done before, and I am sad to say it hasn't been done since -- at least not in a D&D game. It may or may not have been done in a Fallout game, for example, but I haven't played those yet, so I can't comment on them (and if you are wondering how come I haven't played the Fallouts yet, or Troika's equally well-regarded Arcanum or Vampire Bloodlines, you'll have to wait for my Pool of Radiance review to understand why. In short: because there's something very special about D&D games, and because of this they deserve far higher priority than all others. But I am planning to play the rest eventually anyway, and the time will certainly come to talk about them).

It is at this point then that it becomes imperative to talk a little about the real, pen-and-paper D&D game, in order for you to understand why Torment got closer to it than any other D&D-licensed videogame. Pen-and-paper D&D is a real role-playing game. It is not as heavy on the role-playing aspect as some of the games that came after it (as I explain at length in my essay on the subject), but it's VERY far from being a full-on tactical wargame either. I mean that's how it started at first, but already from the late-'80s and early-'90s there were plenty of modules available ("module" is the D&D term for a ready-made adventure you purchase in stores -- as opposed to one created by the Dungeon Master) where the role-playing-to-tactics ratio was 50/50, and plenty of DMs were coming up with similarly role-playing-heavy adventures and campaigns of their own. By the late-90's, when Torment came out, D&D, now well in its third edition (I am counting original D&D and Advanced as separate editions here), had long reached its mature phase, and though it still featured a far heavier tactical aspect than most contemporary RPG systems, it was nevertheless a full-fledged role-playing game. Moreover, it is misleading to call the tactical aspect of D&D "tactical", because there's nothing tactical about it. Tactics refers to "the science and art of organizing a military force", and no one in a D&D game is doing that: each player has control only of his own character. There may be moments in a campaign when one or more of the players gain control of a military force, and in that case, while commanding it, those players can indeed be said to be engaging in tactics, but for the most part this simply isn't true. Nor is it usual for any of the players to boss the others around (in which case, again, that player could have been said to be engaging in tactics): both players and characters are for the most part equals; a loosely-knit party of friends and adventurers, not a military squad with a clear leader and strict chain of command.

So you can see straight away, if you have any knowledge of what D&D is and how it actually works, that the game's digital adaptions have not only failed to deliver on the role-playing aspect, but they've even perverted its wargaming side, which has never really been "tactical", but always, let us call it, "mathematical". And the mathematics -- or, the extremely deep character customization process and battle system mechanics that are represented by mathematics -- have always been a big part of D&D's attraction, even for me. For though it's true, as I've explained at length elsewhere, that to reach the pinnacle of role-playing the mathematics must disappear (as they do in the Great Game, in which absolutely nothing at all can be described by or corresponds to mathematics), I'd be a liar and a hypocrite if I pretended I didn't relish, both as a DM in the real thing, and as a player in the digital versions, all the customization and calculations that comprise such a large part of D&D's character creation and battle system mechanics.

But why did the digital D&D games latch on to the tactical aspect with so much fervor? -- indeed they created it, since it didn't exist in the pen-and-paper game! This is the million-dollar question here. And the answer is because there was nothing else to latch on to. They couldn't feature role-playing because that's extremely hard and expensive to design, and they didn't feature co-op multiplayer parties because the internet was still in embryonic form in the '80s and early-'90s and very few of the people buying these games had modems (and even LANs were extremely rare outside of universities). They could have given you only a single character to control, but the "party of adventurers" has been a staple of D&D since the beginning (since a game featuring only the DM and a single player would have been extremely dreary to run...), and it was unthinkable to call a game "D&D" if it only featured one hero (and note here that we are talking about games that tried to adapt D&D faithfully, not oddballs like Hillsfar, Capcom's beat 'em ups, or the Dark Alliance games, which simply used the license as a means to attract attention and sell copies). And that's how we finally arrive in 2012 to Project Eternity's director Josh Sawyer stating on the game's Kickstarter pitch video that the tactical combat was one of the draws of the genre. Indeed, it was their only draw! For if you took it away from them, you would have practically nothing left! At best a superior Diablo clone where instead of Blizzard's laughably shallow excuse of a combat system (28 spells lawlz -- try 300) you'd have something considerably deeper and more involved -- though still a far cry from real D&D, which already by its third edition was 100 times more complex than what's featured in even its most faithful digital adaptation (Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil). And this is one more reason why digital D&D games HAVE to give you control of a party of characters, whereas pen-and-paper D&D doesn't need to: if their systems are 100 times simpler, this loss of complexity can be somewhat mitigated by giving you a bunch of characters to control instead of just one.

Unfortunately for the genre, however, as I have again explained in my RPG essay, this solution is a double-edged sword since it kills any chance the game has of acquiring an appreciable role-playing dimension, and condemns all these games to forever remain more or less pure tactical games. Which are great and awesome and I love them as much as the next guy! -- but they are neither role-playing, nor D&D, because D&D, as we've seen, is 50% role-playing, 50% combat -- and that's where Torment comes in.

[Joshua]

Thank you for all the work you put into these reviews, icy. I just have a quick correction: "Project Infinity" should say "Project Eternity".

[Some guy]

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition Launch Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2wXLCI ... el=Beamdog

Get ready for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android!

Discover an incredibly rich story and a unique setting unlike anything else in fantasy. Defeat strange and alien creatures, engage in rich dialogue, and explore the dark and dangerous Planescape setting in this 50+ hour RPG classic.

Coming to Beamdog, Steam, GOG, iTunes, and Google Play on April 11, 2017!

http://www.planescape.com

[icycalm]

I really ought to finish that review someday. I think it would only take one or two pages more.

Looking forward to also replaying the game at 4K on 43 inches. I wouldn't have bothered replaying it otherwise, but that's gonna be an unmissable experience. I just hope they would patch in official 4K support for the other Infinity Engine games as well.