I’ve read a lot about this game Planescape Torment. It sounds like no other D&D game, adventure, novel, etc. I’ve ever heard of. It sounds a lot more like [spoiler]Memento* or something.
What is it that led its developers to think, “I know what would be great. Let’s set this in a D&D world and use D&D mechanics!”
How much D&D mechanics is there in this thing anyway?
I’m not criticizing–I think it would be awesome if there were more D&D stuff with pretensions to literature. Or at least pretensions to not be mostly mindless.
That and the fact that it used the same engine as the Baldur’s Gate Games so it made it easier to just keep the D&D mechanics.
As for how much D&D? Well, the setting is entirely part of the D&D “universe”. But the msot direct way D&D is implemented is in the combat. Which is not that prevalent actually. In fact, someone correct me if I’m wrong, but can’t you beat the game without ever engaging in combat?
One thing related to the game mechanics is that some conversational choices require a high INT in order to become available. So there’s a significant part of the writing that simply isn’t there if your stats aren’t high enough. (You can still progress through the game, though in some cases you need to find an alternate method). This may be a good thing from an RPG aspect, since it’s not especially noticeable unless you replay the game.
There’s even
an ending variant that’s only possible if you get a super-high boosted INT - something like 23 or more, maybe. You get the chance to basically say “Hey, look over there!” and you can resurrect your buddies for the last fight.
It’s been a while since I’ve played it, but per the TVTropes article, I think it said that depending on how you play it, there are only two times when you absolutely have to kill to advance the plot.
There are D&D mechanics in terms of things like your level of armor, your stats, etc., but you can do things like change your character class (fighter, mage, thief) pretty much at a whim, your best protection is tattooing rather than armor, you may be removing/replacing body parts or otherwise mutilating yourself to help your quest, your party’s priest is a non-believer, and there’s a deity wandering around the city but she takes great offense at being worshipped.
I believe there are three ‘required’ combats. All the others can be avoided through dialog or run from. That will involve failing or skipping a fair number of sub-quests, though.
There actually were very few ‘random’ encounters in the main game path, though there was a big, entirely optional (arguably pointless) ‘sewer dungeon’ with tougher enemies. Seemed to be there only for people who wanted to level grind or play with the combat system.
As was mentioned, it’s not a case of ‘lets shoehorn this cool setting into a D&D game,’ it was ‘lets make a game of this cool D&D setting.’ You don’t need to know how to play D&D. Even more so than the other Infiinty Engine games, Torment was very good about teaching you as you went, and making sure you could tell what was going on.
The combats also weren’t really very difficult, so you don’t need a high level of D&D tactics expertise.
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Pity they never updated Planescape. There was no 3rd edition version, and the cosmologies changed enough for 4e that some big changes would need to be made. Can’t believe they keep updating [del]Talaslantia[/Del] Dark Sun and [Del]Final Fantasy, if Final Fantasy sucked[/Del] Ebberon but not the good ones.
Of the D&D games i’ve played for PC, PS:T is probably the most “rules-soft” of all of them. There’s relatively little combat, since most of the plot is resolved through solving puzzles, dialogues, etc., and that’s where most of your XP comes from as well. Your party members are all classified in the Fighter/Thief/Cleric/Mage framework, but they’re almost all completely unique characters that don’t fall under the standard framework - the first “fighter” you pick up, for instance, is a flying skull that attacks enemies by biting them or by cursing at them, and you can subsequently earn the allegiance of a crossbow-wielding robot, the eternally burning animated corpse of a pyromaniac wizard, or a warrior-monk who uses his sword to cast mage spells. It uses the same game engine as Baldur’s Gate, but it’s really not a comparable game experience in any way.
Ah, yeah, I miss that about old school RPGs. Now everything has to be voice acted so you have about 1/20th the dialog content of some of the great games. You have fewer options, less background info, and you get the same set of options regardless of your character makeup.
In old school RPGs, you could replay the game as a dumb, average, or super smart character and get entirely different dialog trees and options and get a different experience with different challenges. I remember in fallout 2, if you had a character with 1 intelligence, your dialogue options would actually be something like “uh… me… og… give… food”
And I don’t think this issue will go away. I’m all for giving voice actor more work, but you can’t have something as deep as say BG2 now a days simply because there’s no way to have a voice actor record all of the script in time, nevermind the other parts + the main character’s gender and race variants.
I wonder if computer voice synthesizer will one day be good enough to render natural speech in various voices/tones/dialects.
I end up skipping the voice work 75%+ of the time anyway since I just read the captions and move on, after a while you grow tired of sitting there waiting for a guy to say his whole line. I wish we’d go back to non-voice acted RPGs, it would allow much more content and freedom and gameplay.
I’m not sure it’s voice acting that keeps the options down, I think it’s development time in general. Dialog trees, from what I’ve been told, require a lot more effort to make work than it seems like they would, and it involves doing a lot of work for things that won’t pop up in most games That’s why the later Infinity Engine games were more structured/railroaded than the early ones.
I don’t remember too much of this kind of thing except in the Infinity Engine (and not all of those) and Fallout games. And Arcanum, of course. Maybe Lionheart, but I didn’t play that enough to determine if there were stat-based quests. Were there other ‘old school’ RPGs I missed?
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As far as I remember, only 3 RPGs had the ‘dumb option,’ Fallout, Fallout2, and Arcanum. Funny as they were, doubled the work for the talking parts, and only a tiny percentage of players ever saw them.
Sadly, I’m apparently shallow and too hooked on graphics, or else I probably would enjoy Spiderweb Software’s games more. From what I’ve heard from the people who do play through them, they have crazy-deep multiple-option plots, dialogue options, etc. I got four or five hours into Avernum 4 (or maybe 5), put the game down for a while, and never picked it back up.
While it is indeed more work, it’s relatively cheap work - you get a writer to come up with a big tree. It doesn’t require multithousand dollar per day recording studios and such and professional voice actors.
Video game budgets are bigger with longer development times than ever before, so it’s not as if they wouldn’t have the money/manpower/time to do it the old way. The real issue is that it’s a pain in the ass to read text on your tv screen across the room, and everyone develops for the lowest common denominator - so shallow dialog trees and voice acting are universal.
Which ones? I count the tutorial zombie at the beginning, and
Ravel, either Ignus/Vhaillor, and maybe Trias? Maybe you can talk your way out of that one? It’s been awhile too…
panamajack, IMHO I’d say Wisdom is the most important stat. It allows recovery of memories, which then leads to further dialog.
With regard to the uniqueness of party members, one annoyance was in the lack of diversity of alignment. Out of EIGHT characters, SIX are either Chaotic neutral or Lawful neutral (three each). One is Chaotic good (although he doesn’t seem very moral), and the main character starts off True Neutral but changes based on dialog and actions you choose. And one of the CN is really more like Chaotic Evil.
TVTropes agrees that Wisdom is the most important. Also, on their page about the game (spoilers there, but whited out), under “Pacifist Run” they list the tutorial zombie and a Curst prison guard.
I never did a Pacifist Run, but I did like talking my way through/out of many situations.
You’re right, it was Wisdom. High Charisma occasionally helped you out as well.
The spoiler I put up there isn’t quite right, either.
It’s dependent on you doing something in another area before you face your mortality, not on high INT or WIS. High enough WIS lets you skip the battle entirely.
The very best roleplaying sessions I’ve been in were ones we played by throwing the rulebook away. We still kept to the rules, more or less, but didn’t bother wasting time poring over tables. One thing that can make an RPG great is when the mechanics integrate smoothly. PS:T managed to do that really well. You could easily have played it with almost no attention to the D&D details (though I’ll admit it could enhance the game if you did).
They’re hard to program and debug as well, not just write. There’s a reason why the Fallout/BG type games tended to be buggier than most.
The point I was trying to make, though not well, was that loads o’ dialog and deep conversation trees were already gone from mas market RPGs before full voice acting was standard. The need to make everything console-friendly came after those were gone, they didn’t cause it. And bigger budgets and development cycles means it’s harder to make a game for a niche market, because you need to sell more to make up the costs.
I’ll be ecstatic if I’m wrong, because that will mean I’ve missed some games I’ll probably like.
As for ‘how many fights can’t you avoid,’ TVTropes is proably only counting ‘kills,’ but I’m pretty sure you have to FIGHT Ravel (You technically don’t kill her, but you tried) Trias (who stops the fight once you’ve beaten him. Vahlior can kill him for you, letting you get both the best tatoo and the best weapon) and either Ignus or Vahlior.
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I knew about Sheena Easton and that X-Files guy, but not that Homer Simpson was Nordom!
***Torment ***in general, and Dak’kon in specific, are wholly responsible for why the Githzerai are so overpowered in 4e.