Iconic Dungeons & Dragons RPG Planescape: Torment was a 'B-Team' project that started life as 3 different games⁠—including a 3D dungeon crawler

Now I haven’t got the flowery guide learnin’ to know what can change the character of a person, however there positive are quite a lot of components that may change the character of a sport. In a retrospective characteristic for upcoming PC Gamer print concern 390 (402 for our buddies throughout the pond), contributor Robert Zak dug into the unusual historical past of Planescape: Torment by speaking to members of the unlikely Interaction workforce that made it occur.

“I used to be simply making an attempt to determine all the things out, and I seen that there have been three Planescape initiatives that every one had like 4 individuals on them,” recalled Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. These had been the heady years of 1996-’97, when Interaction was concurrently publishing Baldur’s Gate whereas internally creating Fallout and, ultimately, Planescape: Torment. Urquhart was head of Interaction’s RPG division, which was then coalescing into the writer’s well-loved subsidiary, Black Isle Studios.

“Virtually no work” was getting performed on a kind of initiatives in accordance with Urquhart, the second stays a thriller, whereas the third presents a tantalizing however probably ill-fated what if state of affairs: A primary individual, full 3D dungeon crawler that will have taken benefit of name spanking new 3D accelerator playing cards just like the 3dfx Voodoo.

“I mentioned, ‘Okay, we’d like a sport that we will go and truly simply make with out inventing new know-how,'” Urquhart mentioned. “We’ll use the Baldur’s Gate engine, and differentiate ourselves by having a personality who’s not simply going to be a generic character, and we’ll reinforce that by zooming within the digital camera.”

As improvement progressed, lots of Interaction’s assets had been dedicated to a by no means to be launched sequel to 1995’s Stonekeep. This allowed numerous newer builders to take up the reigns and show themselves on a challenge with a big diploma of inventive freedom. A few of them weren’t even conversant in the Planescape setting earlier than beginning work on the sport. “[Urquhart] simply got here at some point and mentioned, ‘We’ll do a Planescape sport,’ and in my head I am going ‘What the fuck is that?'” recalled PST lead artist Tim Donley.

Donley additionally described how Torment’s lead designer, Chris Avellone, was a little bit of an enigma to the Black Isle crew at first. Whereas PST would go on to be one of many canonical D&D videogames, Avellone’s first challenge at Interaction went much less easily. “Down the corridor from me was this man that will at all times simply go to his workplace and shut the door,” Donley mentioned. “You by no means actually knew who he was. All I knew is he was engaged on Descent to Undermountain.”

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(Picture credit score: Beamdog)

One other member of this workforce Donley described as Interaction’s “Soiled Dozen” was Eric Campanella, who sculpted and animated lots of Torment’s predominant characters regardless of solely having had expertise in 2D artwork, not the 3D modeling that shaped the premise of PST’s sprites. Artist Dennis Presnell, now engaged on Avowed at Obsidian, described himself as a “school dropout” who discovered his digital artwork instruments for Torment “simply by urgent buttons and seeing what it did.”

This workforce would ultimately do some actual magic although. An early indication of that got here when Black Isle employees flew out to BioWare HQ in Edmonton to indicate off the sport. After demoing Torment’s opening in-engine scene, Donley recalled BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka turning to a programmer and saying, “You guys advised me we could not have that many frames of animation. How come the sport appears to be like so good?”

You possibly can learn Robert Zak’s full retrospective characteristic on Planescape: Torment in concern 390/UK 402 of PC Gamer journal. You can even subscribe to the magazine by way of MagazinesDirect in each the US and the UK.

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