Planescape: Torment

June 10, 2002

Price: $10 (full retail packaging)

According to all indications the Dungeons & Dragons franchise has hit an all time high. With a half dozen best selling PC titles, several action packed console derivatives, and a new 3rd edition of the pen and paper rules--not to mention an allegedly more business savvy corporate owner, Wizards of the Coast--things certainly do appear to be looking up. But, as we all know, appearances can be deceiving. Bookstores across the country are now stocked with rather mundane Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance titles, the best of them merely reprints from nearly a decade ago when the then smaller license had to be ever more creative to captivate the more esoteric group of fans instead of trying to score cash from those hot off of seeing Tolkien in theatres. But back during the early nineties worlds such as Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Planescape were born.

Ravenloft: When the worst of evil deeds are committed in other realms, the inhabitants are pulled through the mists into a place where the land itself is alive, sentient, and quite evil--becoming the ultimate setting for horror themed adventures.

Dark Sun: A dying world in which magic has ecological consequences; where defiler mages in their quest for power have left the world a barren wasteland of deserts and oceans made of ash, where preserver heroes fight to make the world green once again.

Planescape: Sigil--the Cage, the City of Doors--hangs above the plains of the Outlands (where all dimensions intersect and thoughts can become reality) at the top of an infinitely high spire where all things are possible and different worlds are only a step away.

Is an upcoming sequel to Icewind Dale (essentially Dungeons and Dragons in fur parkas with an "ice-" prefix on the same old cast of monsters) really the blessing we are told to believe it is?

Thankfully, Planescape: Torment has hit the bargain bin. Released in 1999, the game was hailed by some as perhaps the best role playing game ever--combining great writing, impeccable voice acting, and the same Infinity engine that powered such games as Baldur's Gate (unfortunately limited to the resolution of 640x480).

Speaking of the voice acting, work was done by such people as: Dan Castellaneta (voice of "Homer Simpson"), Mitch Pileggi ("Skinner" on the X-Files), Michael T. Weiss ("Jarod" on the Pretender), and John De Lancie ("Q" on Star Trek), making Torment a sci-fi geek's dream.

Torment is the story of a wanderer known as the Nameless One, being that he suffers from a terminal case of amnesia and a strange inability to die permanently. Unlike most games with superficially similar story lines, the amnesia is more than a plot device and is done perhaps more creatively than any time before: e.g. the Nameless One had instructions for himself tattooed onto his back, unfortunately the only one around to read him what it says might not be trusted to tell the truth considering the tattoo is a warning not to trust that particular individual!

Though players cannot create their own party of adventurers from scratch, the prefabricated ones have more than enough personality to make up for that. Those joining the Nameless One along the way, number: a disembodied floating skull (who knows enough curse words to shock a demon), an empty suit of armor that refuses to realize that his body has long since perished, a mage that resembles the Human Torch (but, to quote Xander, "it hurts"), a wind-up mechanical archer, and a reformed succubus working as a priest.

If there is any fault to Torment it is the sheer amount of text involved in the game. While it is often witty, amusing, or even inspired--it can become overwhelming; having to go through each dialogue choice, no matter how trivial, just to see if anything important turns up. The plot tends to buckle under its own weight because of this; it might have been more affecting if condensed a bit. When I came to the conclusion of the game, I forgot to use a semi-crucial item that was hard-won during the middle portion of the quest because it had been placed in my "backpack" and forgotten--and the game did not have a problem with me forgetting as it never reminded me and I completed the game without it. Why bother to have the player fight for that item or make it a central plot point then? The ending and final revelation concerning the Nameless One's history was indeed astoundingly clever, yet it was hard to muster the emotions to feel its significance because of how long it took me to complete the game in bits and pieces of playing.

The changes brought by the 3rd edition of the Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper game are allegedly to make things easier to understand for newcomers but many of the rule changes seem to be fixes for things that are only broken in the computer games. Upon reaching level 20 or so, characters in pen and paper games are often reluctantly retired by players at the bequest of their "dungeon" or game-master, but Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn changed everything. Players now expect to be able to hit levels 20-30 in a game, to be able to cast level nine spells such as "time-stop" or "wish," and even create dual-classed specialist-fighter/mage characters who are able to take advantage of normally unproblematic balancing issues in the game system.

Torment plays a bit fast and loose with the rules (allowing character statistics of your allies to change over the course of the game) but most human game-masters do as well--that is what makes it role-playing and not an exercise in game mechanics and dice rolling. For this reason, Torment feels warmer than other games based on the Infinity engine (excusing the pun with regard to Icewind Dale) though there are still areas in which savvy "hack and slashers" can exploit the game.

For example, in 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons, the human limit of strength was set at "18" (should the player be lucky enough to roll three consecutive sixes). However, players were then given the opportunity to roll a 100 sided dice to elaborate on that 18 even further (18/44, 18/76, 18/00) to portray levels of amazing strength without exceeding 18 and moving into superhuman or monstrous territory. While players in Torment can spend five "points" (in lieu of rolling dice) to boost the Nameless One's strength from 18 to 18/100 at the start of the game--they can skip directly from 18 to 19 with just one point at a later time.

While the ability to gain godlike abilities is clearly a draw it seems to diminish the utility of magic within the game. After all, if a character with a constitution of 25 can regenerate wounds faster than an enemy can inflict them--why not play a fighter (the Nameless One can change to or from a thief, magic user, or fighter at nearly any point in the game)? The Dungeons and Dragons rule of having to rest and memorize spells between battles becomes a liability when there are easier options at hand.

But despite some of the drawbacks, Torment is a must buy for anyone who is into the role-playing game (RPG) genre and especially so at bargain bin prices. While it might lack the gloss of the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons games it has the heart and creativity that they cannot match with their utterly standard conceptions of what fantasy is all about.

by Richard Leader

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