Planescape: Torment Remastered - What do we think?

[kraftcheese]

So, what do we think about the remaster Beamdog is doing of Torment? I still haven't done a complete playthrough (I got it a few years back and got stuck in Carceri with all those damn guards!) yet so I'm considering stopping my second attempt and waiting for the remaster.

Does anyone think Wizards will use this as a chance to release some Planescape content for D&D?

[Driderman]

So, what do we think about the remaster Beamdog is doing of Torment? I still haven't done a complete playthrough (I got it a few years back and got stuck in Carceri with all those damn guards!) yet so I'm considering stopping my second attempt and waiting for the remaster.

Does anyone think Wizards will use this as a chance to release some Planescape content for D&D?

Why would it need a remaster?

[Morty]

It badly needs a remaster; the engine wasn't exactly smooth when it came out, and it hasn't aged well. The question is whether or not Beamdog will be able to make the changes Torment actually needs.

[Brookshw]

Does anyone think Wizards will use this as a chance to release some Planescape content for D&D?

Doubt it, the setting itself was folded into canon but the shelved it. Best you can hope for is probably a one off book.

Re: remastering, good for them. I can't see a shiny interface making me want to replay, but a nice graphics and engine update wouldn't hurt.

[LibraryOgre]

I sat down yesterday and tried to get started on the original, and just couldn't... too many interface things that just weren't there. No ability to max HP per level, no quickload key, no "highlight dropped objects" key. Things that came up later in the engine that it feels positively bare without. Plus, the resolution was not fun.

I wouldn't mind seeing a remaster, is all I'm saying, though I wonder how much they would play with it... I don't think I particularly WANT the Nameless One to be able to take the Kensai kit or anything like that, just better graphics and more convenient UI.

[Istarial]

As long as they do NOTHING except graphics, MAYBE sound, and interface, it's great. But I sure hope they don't try to mess with or add to any of the actual game/interactive novel.

[LibraryOgre]

It would require an insane amount more work, but a remastered version of Shattered Lands, and a functioning version of Wake of Ravager, would kick serious butt.

[Winthur]

Garbage, like every Beamdog product, and not worth the initial full price for what amounts to a widescreen mod with some random goodies.

Then, many months and patches later, it will work better and still be a 18 year old game worth 30$.

The tacked on poor writing that somewhat inevitably will be there shall cause a few grognard centres to go bananas.

But now I will be able to Update My Journal on the train, hurdled around my tablet!

You know, like always.

[danzibr]

I'll probably get it. Yeah, looking forward to another playthrough. I've gone thief and fighter (or whatever the actual classes are called), time to try mage.

[kraftcheese]

Why would it need a remaster?
I don't particularly think it needs a remaster, but it is getting one regardless of whether I think it needs it or not.

[Toddlesby]

I'm not real excited, honestly. It was ok with Baldur's Gate because the writing on those was so subpar already, but unless they bring in Avellone again, or someone like JE Sawyer or another high quality writer, it will be awful.

Unless they stick to just making it look and run nicely on new PCs, but we all know they won't be satisfied with just that.

[Inarius]

I'm not real excited, honestly. It was ok with Baldur's Gate because the writing on those was so subpar already, but unless they bring in Avellone again, or someone like JE Sawyer or another high quality writer, it will be awful.

Unless they stick to just making it look and run nicely on new PCs, but we all know they won't be satisfied with just that.

They did bring on Avellone to work on this remaster actually. They're also cleaning up the ui and adding some more modern features as well but those can all be turned off in the options. I might get it, but I probably will wait for it to go on sale since I'm not a huge fan of the game to begin with.

[Toddlesby]

They did bring on Avellone to work on this remaster actually. They're also cleaning up the ui and adding some more modern features as well but those can all be turned off in the options. I might get it, but I probably will wait for it to go on sale since I'm not a huge fan of the game to begin with.

Huh. Well, I'm still not excited, per se, but I'm definitely more interested now.

[Winter_Wolf]

No, I'll never buy it. Apart from anything else, I have a GOG copy of the original I snagged in a great bundle deal a couple years ago. I'm not bothered by the UI nor the screen resolution--which between widescreen mod and Ghostdog's UI update are both taken care of without any additional cost to me anyway. Actually I'm fine with the standard resolution and UI, too.

[NeoVid]

Huh. Hearing about a remaster for this game made me assume they'd be using the original writing and updating everything else, since that seems like the logical thing to do with ancient games that are still remembered for their writing. The original script is right there, and that's what made it a classic, no need to mess with that part...

[GloatingSwine]

Why would it need a remaster?

To run in modern resolutions without a hacky widescreen mod that makes the menu only appear in one tiny corner of the screen?

[Cozzer]

The real problems with the game (sparse gameplay, boring combat, obscure rules) can't be fixed with just a remaster. They'll probably just fix what had already been fixed in the unofficial patches, and a couple other minor things. It will be a rehash of the same old game, and I will probably still buy it. Now I understand how it must feel like being a Nintendo fan.

[Aotrs Commander]

Cautiously interested, though it depends what they actually fix (I would expect at least the same amount of overhaul as the fan fixes), but even just that and graphical/UI/widescreen and quality of life improvements would have me interested; extent content (likely, one feels, if they have indeed brought people on) would be a bonus.

Basically, so long as they don't change ti such that you can't do anything you used to be able to do, I'm nominally game.

[Pronounceable]

It's worthless. PST is an incredibly terrible game with an awesomely fantastic story and no amount of polishing will make it a not terrible game. It needs to be transformed it into an interactive novel kinda thing without any of the crappy game parts or completely remade as an actual good game to go with its rad story and atmosphere.

Instead it'll be a PSTEE like the previous cashgrabs they made for other old IE games. I wouldn't pay a dime to this.

[Driderman]

I read the RPS preview on the remaster, and I stand by my initial statement :smallbiggrin:

[Kaptin Keen]

Does anyone think Wizards will use this as a chance to release some Planescape content for D&D?

The only real Planescape content is the original boxed set. Everything since is abominable, heresy to be burned by righteous fire. Cough.

That said I don't see why a relaunch of Torment couldn't be as much of a succes as Fallout has been. Of course, I despise the new Fallout titles with the same fervor I feel for Planescape content that isn't the original box, but it's still a succes in business terms.

[Morty]

The real problems with the game (sparse gameplay, boring combat, obscure rules) can't be fixed with just a remaster. They'll probably just fix what had already been fixed in the unofficial patches, and a couple other minor things. It will be a rehash of the same old game, and I will probably still buy it. Now I understand how it must feel like being a Nintendo fan.

That about sums it up, yes. The screenshots I've seen indicate an improved interface, which is nice, but minor. They're not allowed/able to change things that Torment really needs. They could add more content, but... well. The new content in BG:EE was good enough, but I'm not sure it'd match up to Torment.

[Eldan]

The only real Planescape content is the original boxed set. Everything since is abominable, heresy to be burned by righteous fire. Cough.


That's a fun way to spell "Uncaged: Faces of Sigil was one of the best RPG books ever", cough.

[Spore]

It's worthless. PST is an incredibly terrible game with an awesomely fantastic story and no amount of polishing will make it a not terrible game. It needs to be transformed it into an interactive novel kinda thing without any of the crappy game parts or completely remade as an actual good game to go with its rad story and atmosphere.

That's why you inform yourself beforehand and can only plausibly play Int/Cha build to optimize your dialogue options. It sounds weird when I say it like that: "There's an D&D product where you can, nay should, optimize for dialogue options." That is both pretty cool and aweseomely terrible.

I would have loved for the NO to have a few options for Fighters and Thieves, that require an active Thief kit with enough points in say Pickpocket or enough Combat Prowess to challenge anyone to a duel (but I guess that's what the combat is for).

[Aotrs Commander]

From the looks of the first couple of days (and reading the FAQ), it basically looks very positive. They haven't added content to it (except an editing pass and some extra item descriptons from Chirs Avellone) - they mad ea point of saying that, actually, but basically what appears to be a lot of quality of life improvements (some of which have been used (with permission/blassing/whatever) from the community mods) and the technical operational stuff.

And at £15, I really can't say no; a technically updated verson one of three best games of all time and best RPG ever; even with PS:T actually still installed on my machine...!

I always did say I'd snap their hands off if they did an enhanced version of PS:T, so...

(Might not play it right away though, as I'm hip-deep in about three differet PDX grand strats as 66% of Age of Empires III (nearly wrote "crusader kings 3" there, which might have caused some uproar...!)



Edit: Had a quick go. Yeah. It's Torment, only with soem nice quality of life buffs. Turned off the outline-shading (except for on selection) and greyscale pause pretty quick, but otherwise, neat. I especially like the max hit points thing, reloading for rerolls always was tedious. Not far enough in to make much other judgement than that (and I wanna go conquer Africa now), but pretty much looks like it'll be a case of "works for me!"

...

Now I will have to try and remember what my optimum starting stats were. ('Course, I could just dig out the saves from my last playthrough, see how early they go back ...!)

...

Oh.

Oh, that's why I couldn't remember. According to the date on those saves, my I only played it last "a few years ago" turns out to have been 2009!

Definitely time for a replay in the near future, then...!

[Winter_Wolf]

Less than ten, saying "a few" still seems reasonable rather than ironic. Still can't see myself getting another version of a game I didn't finish the first time around, but glad they didn't go and try to rewrite or add in "improved" story or dialogue. Messing with people's nostalgia is a dangerous business.

[Lord Raziere]

I think I'd to love hear whatever story its supposed to have, but between its gloomy, dreary atmosphere making me unable to see anything, its weird top-down view, and how slow it goes, I'm not really thrilled to try Planescape Torment in general. let me know when something comes along to tell the story without any of the gameplay.

[Calemyr]

I've just kind of played a little bit of it (Persona 5 stole my heart and my time), but I played the game a lot back in the day and I've played enough of the EE version to get an idea of how things have handled. (Note, I did not buy the game. I made the mistake of buying the Siege of Dragonspear Collector's Edition and, due to fiasco the CE turned out to be, they gave us a free copy of Torment to soften the blow.)

First thing you need to know about the game is that, much like the Dragon Age games, you're not going to be playing for the gameplay. Combat was never the strong suit of the game. You push through the combat to see more of the story, and it's quite probably one of the best stories out there.

Basic gist? You wake up on a mortuary slab. A floating skull who manages to be a wiseass without having a body greets you. You quickly find out that you come back from the dead if you are killed, and do so often enough to have a standing deal with the undertakers regarding preserving your body during your much-less-than-eternal rest. And you have no memories, beyond some vague instructions tattooed on your back. Why are you immortal? What is it you were trying to do before you lost your memory? Why did you die? That's for you to figure out. Weird enough, right? But this isn't your typical setting, some fantasy Earth with Scottish dwarves and Welsh elves. This is the Planescape, a network of realities linked together by portals and at it's center is the city of doors, and the denizens are nothing like what you'd call typical fare, especially your potential allies. A succubus nun, a libidinous floating skull, a Keith David-voiced suit of armor animated only by raw determination, and a mage who is eternally on fire and pleased with the fact... this is about half of the potential crew of misfits you can recruit.

Trying to piece together your past and what it means for your future is a bit of a slow burn, with a significant chunk of it being the main character (the Nameless One) walking around more-or-less aimlessly, bouncing from one vague lead to another, but the answers are there if you're willing to work for them, and I found them quite intriguing. All of your potential allies have solid backgrounds and motivations (or an intriguing lack thereof), of which you can have about half in your party at a given time. Since everyone's interesting and you usually can't go re-recruit allies you've kicked out, this makes picking your party a bit hard. Do you want the sweet Irish tiefling or the whimsical crossbow toting robot-thing? It can be a tough call because there's not a one of them that's boring. (Which makes it a marked difference from the Baldur's Gate series, which had a largely forgettable cast with a few exceptional standouts.)

If you haven't played Planescape: Torment before, it's a different animal from most Infinity Engine games (such as Baldur's Gate). You don't have much control over your character, for one. You don't pick his race, gender, or appearance - he's a gray-ish human-ish guy with a cave-man's fashion sense and enough scar tissue to give him an armor class, looking more like a zombie than a human. He doesn't have a name, or at least doesn't remember his name, and his class is somewhat malleable (you learn new classes, and then your teachers and/or party members can help you switch between the classes of fighter, thief, and mage, not as a multi-class but as three separate single classes). He doesn't wear armor, though he can wear disguises, and the game has a grand total of one sword in the game. Alignment here is based entirely on actions: tell the truth even when it hurts and you drift lawful, play with figurines of power like they're action figures and you drift chaotic, and this is one game where always picking the "good" option doesn't always lead to the best outcome.

As an Enhanced Edition goes, there's really not much added here. No new characters, quests, or even "improved" cutscenes. (Which, given Beamdog's track record on the matter, is probably to the game's benefit.) Yes, learning from the backlash over Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, they decided to keep mind-blowingly dated yet nostalgic as hell CG from the original game. The game has been optimized for modern tech (including tablets and phones), various interfaces have been revamped, and various bugs (including core bugs that mods and the GOG version couldn't touch) have been squashed. Rather than zooming in on the game's rather low res graphics (you can zoom in, as with other EE games, and you can see why they didn't do that as a rule), the game treats higher resolutions as simply an excuse to show more of the map at once, which is a pretty nice feature. Tab-highlighting is also a really nice addition to the game, as groping blindly for the next interactable set piece was a tedious challenge in the original game.

Is the game worth the asking price? It's hard to say. You could get most of this for less from Good Old Games for a fraction of the price, then mod it up, but the unique features it adds (phone/tablet versions, a more interesting resolution scaling solution, and continuing support) are pretty solid. If you've played the game and are satisfied with the memory, this probably isn't for you, as it doesn't add anything worth another dive into the Planes. But if you haven't played the game before and want to, or if you just want to reclaim a lost treasure from decades gone by, it's a solid version that is worth considering.

I got the game for free, but would I have spent money on it? Hmm... probably, but only the phone edition and then mainly because I have made it a mission to collect my favorite games on my phone whenever I can. As a game, it's pretty mediocre. As a story, however, it's freaking epic.

Hope that helps someone.

[Calemyr]

Posted as a second post so that the text isn't repeated should someone decide to reply to my last post.

Here's the basic story. Spoilers. Seriously, major spoilers. Do not look in this spoiler if you have any interest in playing the game, because the story is really too good to have it ruined like this, but I can understand not wanting to play the game just to learn the story.

The Nameless One (TNO for short) is a guy who did something bad. We never find out what exactly it is, but it's serious enough that, when he dies, he will be damned to the Blood War forever. The Blood War is a brutal and eternal battle between devils and demons, where the dead are just resurrected to keep fighting. Think the most evil "war is hell" scene from the most gruesome war movie, only lasting forever, having infinitely more imagination in terms of savagery, and death doesn't buy you any respite. Obviously, TNO wanted to escape this fate.

He tracked down Ravel Puzzlewell, a witch of ungodly power, and asked to be made immortal in order to have the time to atone for his misdeeds. Ravel demanded a worthy riddle for such a job, and TNO asked her this: "What can change the nature of a man?". The question intrigued her so much that not only did she grant his request, it became her go-to question when testing people. She made him immortal. To prove it, she then killed him.

This is where the consequences of Ravel's "immortality" cheat begin. First, every time TNO dies, he loses his memory and basically becomes a blank slate, developing a new personality in each incarnation. Some of them have been heroic, some have been villainous, but the worst of the bunch, the "pragmatic" incarnation, was brilliant, charismatic, and sociopathic. This incarnation pieced everything together, cruelly manipulated people with useful abilities to be bound to his service, and set up the entire chain you follow in order to complete his mission should he fail to. Most of your potential allies (Morte, Dak'kon, Ignis, Vhailor, Annah-of-the-Shadows) had their lives destroyed by the pragmatic incarnation. Apparently, dying enough (i.e. the last death before they game starts) will overcome this consequence, and TNO retains his identity when dying from that point forward. There are other consequences, however, and a major one is that, every time he cheats death via his immortality, another random soul in the multiverse dies for no other reason but to keep the balance. In his quest for atonement, TNO has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, without even knowing it. But the worst part of the deal was what he left behind: his mortality, which not only failed to fade away but developed it's own identity and a seething hatred of the man who had abandoned it.

The "Trancendent One" (TTO), as the mortal aspect of TNO calls itself, has made it's life mission the sabotage, torment, and repeated slaughter of his traitorous immortal self. It has made a game of this for ages, but when the pragmatic incarnation actually managed to engage it in its own fortress, it decided to take the game seriously. It trailed behind TNO, learning each step of the chain the pragmatic incarnation left for those that followed it, and destroyed each in turn. The first incarnation after the pragmatic one wasn't particularly useful. The pragmatic one had made so many enemies in his quest that he was hated on sight by people he never met, driving him into a self-destructive paranoia. But the final incarnation? That one managed to follow all the clues, root out all the collaborators and artifacts that were needed, and painted a lovely trail for TTO to follow and clean up. Its intention was to allow this incarnation into its fortress again, strip him of all of his assets, kill him, and then leave him as a clueless, bumbling husk without the tools or knowledge to ever return, laughing all the while as he unknowingly garners more and more unforgivable sins on his back for the rest of eternity.

TNO plays his part perfectly, doggedly hunting down every last clue and resource needed to figure out what's going on and do something about it. The details depend on the player, of course. Who did he take? Did he help his broken allies mend or break them further to ensure their continued servitude? That's up to the player. But ultimately, TNO's path leads back to mortuary, where the soul of the pragmatic incarnation's girlfriend remains trapped between the City of Doors and TTO's fortress, creating a bridge to get there. TTO divides the party and deals with them, one by one, coercing them to betray TNO and killing them if they refuse. In the end, TNO stands alone, surrounded by the broken corpses of his team, facing TTO in one final showdown.

Yes, you can fight TTO. TNO has enough power to resurrect an ally or two to join in the fight. And you can win, restoring TNO and ending the horror once and for all. But that's just one path. You can also use a weapon created specifically to kill TNO to utterly destroy both himself and TTO. No Blood War, no afterlife at all, just complete annihilation. Or you can do the same with simple belief, a powerful weapon in the Planes. Or, you can simply convince TTO to reunite with the TNO, becoming a mortal again at last. One argument that wins this fight without bloodshed? "What can change the nature of a man?" Answered well, it will convince even the Trancendent One, who resurrects the loyal members of your party before rejoining with TNO.

Unfortunately, getting away with his life is not in the cards for TNO. You can obliterate him from existence, but, if he recovers his mortality, he still dies from living too long. As his surviving friends swear to find some way to free him from the Blood War, the Nameless One passes away, only to wake up in a literally hellish battlefield. Picking up a bloodsoaked weapon from the ground, he strides towards the conflict with a grim smile on his face. The Blood War, it seems, was not the worst torment one could suffer.


That's the basic plot, anyway, not counting NPC character arcs (which are quite interesting on their own) and sidequests.