Planescape: Torment

According to hardcore PC elitists and Codex idiots, this is one of the best games ever made.

I agree with them in some regards… but, still, it isn’t the best game I’ve played; if I was to judge gaming just by fun.

Planescape was released around the time when Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Fallout were popular amongst the role playing crowd, and a while before MMO’s and the current generation of consoles began to swamp the PC gaming market. In a lot of ways, it plays in a way typical to a mid 1990’s RPG. Planescape is dense, deep, far from intuitive, text-heavy, non-linear to a degree, and viewed from a typical top down, isometric perspective. A bit of nostalgia has grown over it, especially after the recent popularity of more simplified and popular games like Oblivion or World of Warcraft. Some people have even gone so far as to write essays about how wonderful and deep the story was, or have gone out of their way to convince others to try playing it.

I decided to go back in time, while I had no Internet, and gave it a go. I made it through about two-thirds of the game before losing interest. Afterwards, I never really regained the desire to play it again.

The player is in control of the Nameless One, an immortal man who has been losing his memories each time he ‘dies’. The game starts with the Nameless One waking on a mortuary slab. When the player takes control, the Nameless One has no recollection of how he got there, and has no company or clues besides a talking skull called Morte and a slightly cryptic tatoo on his back. From here, the game sets out on a long journey through the world of the planes, or, actually, the city of Sigil in an effort to solves the numerous questions surrounding his past lives and to bring a conclusion to the Nameless One’s immortal life. The settings are morbid and grimy, and definitely give the atmosphere a downtrodden and gritty feel, which I suppose was the point.

Obviously, the graphics are dated. It’s in an unchangeable 640 by 480 resolution, which gives it that classic grainy, zoomed in texture. I don’t recommend using fullscreen view on an LCD monitor. The graphics are good enough to convey the image the developers were trying to make, and some of the art is pretty creative, so I personally didn’t feel that the dated graphics were a big problem. Still, the old graphics may be jarring for anyone who is used to bump-mapped, well textured environments or who started gaming around the time the PS2 reached the shops.

Planescape is not an easy game to get into, especially for people who haven’t learnt the rules of Dungeons and Dragons. I’d go so far as to say that anyone new to Dungeons and Dragons couldn’t really enjoy the game without some sort of explanation of the rules. Not that I didn’t have a couple of stupid problems. It took me about fifteen minutes to learn how to converse with a party member, as I shuffled through a whole series of obscure and unexplained icons. This seems to be a typical problem with older RPG’s.

The text is detailed and well-written, for the most part. There’s a great database of NPC’s that is both descriptive and interesting. Many important characters have quite detailed conversation trees. There are a variety of different playable characters, that all feel like they have quite distinct personalities. The themes that Planescape presents, revolving around death, existence and immortality are done in a much more mature way than most other games that I can think of.

Unfortunately, it also feels like verbal diarrhea at times. Apparently there are 800,000 words of text throughout the game. To put that in context, most novels are only about a quarter that size. A lot of those words seemed completely redundant. There were several points where I simply couldn’t be bothered reading the endless, long winded diatribes that every single NPC needed to give. I didn’t care about the paragraph long description of some guy standing on a street corner. I didn’t want to know all that much about a random wandering zombie. I didn’t need to have a long, uninteresting conversation with a merchant who doesn’t, in fact, sell or otherwise do anything useful within the game. I honestly think Planescape would have benefited greatly from cutting out a lot of useless text and focusing instead on the best, most powerful pieces of writing that were hidden beneath the swathes of white text. The sheer amount reading actually detracted heavily from the insights and story the game was trying to tell me. A good novelist tries to write efficiently. Planescape would have benefited from the same treatment.

Planescape is about as non-linear as a game can get without simply turning it into a sandbox environment. There are multiple endings, different factions to join and events that do, to a point, change the gameworld. On the flipside, that non-linearity, combined with the stodgy, uninformative gameplay creates a lot of confusion. I could choose to be good or evil, a spellcaster or a fighter, and I could choose how the game would end – though only if I knew how to go about doing so. You’re given no clue about how much of an advantage it is storywise just to shovel points into wisdom and intelligence, and are quite strongly penalised for making a combat focused character. Without a guide, I’d say that you have to play through it at least a couple of times to get the most important parts of the plot.

Planescape is an example of a great RPG, and at the same time shows deep flaws. It’s only fun if you know how to play it. For a D&D newbie that means at least a few hours of learning the game mechanics, and a few more just to work out what this game is all about. Planescape shows traces of the elitist mindset of hardcore PC role playing, consistently refusing to give out information, penalising you for what seem like valid character choices, before assaulting you with endless lines of pointless text. I’m sure some people think this is a good thing… but I personally wonder if a game being so dense is a sign of mature, interesting gameplay or simply bad design. It definitely only appeals to the patient, hardcore gamer who doesn’t mind dated graphics and is willing to suffer through the learning process.

Despite what some RPG enthusiasts would like, I honestly think that developers have moved beyond this type of game, at least a little. It’s a great experience, but in the same way that Dickens or Tolstoy are a great experiences – they both feel a little bit like work. Sure, a game like Oblivion is too shallow, and WoW is little more than an endless social grind quest, but those games are still, to me, more fun than Planescape was.