Planescape: Torment

Product Details

Planescape: Torment From Black Isle Studios List Price: $79.95 Price: $15.97 Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Ships from and sold by GoGamer 31 new or used available from $14.00 Average customer review:

Product Description

Advanced Dungeons & DragonsProduct InformationThe Planescape "multiverse" is the settingfor the game - but setting is actually a misnomer... the Planescape multiverseis actually composed of a series of "planes" (other dimensions) thatrotate around a central city Sigil like spokes on a wheel.The city of Sigil is the central fixture of the Planescape multiverse. Alsocalled the "Cage" or the "City of Doors" it's unique inthat scattered throughout its labyrinth of streets are portals (some hiddensome obvious) that lead to anywhere in existence provided you hold the properkey. It is neutral ground and watering hole for races and creatures from acrossthe multiverse all under the watchful eye of the Lady of Pain the enigmaticruler of the city.The world of Planescape is a more adult hard-core fantasy setting comparedto other AD&D worlds. The architecture the people the creatures --everything has an edge to it. Belief emotions faith and other abstractconcepts actually make their presence felt in reality. In the Planescapemultiverse belief has the power to reshape worlds kill and resurrect beingsand change the laws of physics.Product Highlights Charactercreation is just the beginning - throughout the game your character adapts tofit your own personal gaming style. ThePlanescape universe is a setting you've NEVER experienced before filled withsharp-edged visuals bizarre adversaries and strange magics. Encounterinventory items with personalities. Manage an unpredictable party of thestrangest allies to walk the faces of alternate planes. Youcan regenerate speak with the dead and have magical immunities. You're a powerto be RECKONED with. Unfortunately so is everyone else.The Planescape multiverse is a setting like you'veNEVER experienced before. It gouges you with sharp-edged visuals bizarreadversaries that can murder you with an idea and strange magics that unravelcommon conceptions about physics and

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1391 in Video Games
• Brand: Black Isle Studios
• Model: C95-862-0
• Released on: 1999-12-14
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 95
• Dimensions: .25 pounds

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review In Planescape: Torment, you play a nameless, scarred, immortal on a quest to discover his past, his identity, and his role in the conflict over the nature of reality. The brilliant role-playing and adventure game focuses on the "Planescape" campaign setting of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, and combines the best elements of Interplay's phenomenally successful Baldur's Gate with an enthralling story line, well-written dialogue, and beautiful artwork and graphics. In an inspired choice, Black Isle Studios, the developer of Planescape: Torment, has chosen to provide the player, at least initially, with as little details about the story as possible. After viewing a mysterious introductory movie, players guide The Nameless One on a journey through the bleak city of Sigil and its underground catacombs. The story leads from there to the bizarre realities of alternate planes of existence, where belief and thought determine the laws of physics. Through dialogue with hundreds of nonplayer characters, puzzle solving, and point-and-click combat, The Nameless One discovers clues about his identity and the circumstances surrounding his condition. Gamers overwhelmed by detailed role-playing games will find Planescape: Torment easier to grasp; players can freely switch between three different character classes (Fighter, Mage, Thief) for The Nameless One as the game progresses, and learning the combat and magic system--with a simple point-and-click interface--takes only a few minutes. Literally hundreds of weapons, items, spells, and "tattoos" can be collected and affixed to The Nameless One or any of the several party members acquired during the course of the game. If you're a fan of role-playing or adventure games, Planescape: Torment's engrossing world creates a must-have gaming experience. --Doug Radcliffe Pros:

• Fascinating, unique setting
• Engrossing story
• Rich graphics and spell effects
• Intriguing dialogue

Cons:

• Zoomed-in perspective tends to limit combat to close range
• Long load times

Amazon.com Product Description Explore Sigil, the City of Doors. The doors serve as the town's gateway to everything and everywhere that matters. Step through one door and enter the halls of Ysgard, or turn down a particular alley and discover the Abyss. There are more gateways in Sigil than can be imagined. But there's a lot more out there than just Sigil. Get outside the city and there's the planes themselves: the throne of the gods, the battleground of the eternal Blood War, and home to more horrors and wonders than ever existed on any prime world. There's enough crusades, exploits, treasures, and mysteries to keep a band of adventurers busy for centuries to come. All it takes is the right door, so step right through. GameSpot Review Torment is a traditional role-playing game with an uncommonly detailed story and first-rate graphics and sound. It's set in the complex and interesting Advanced Dungeons & Dragons universe of Planescape, which is a patchwork of wildly different dimensions surrounding a sprawling city that connects them together. In Torment, you play as a nameless character who cannot die and cannot remember his past, and in uncovering his origin, you'll experience one of the year's most fascinating games. Torment uses the same graphics engine as Baldur's Gate and will consequently seem immediately familiar to fans of the best-selling 1998 role-playing game. However, Torment's top-down isometric perspective is much closer to the ground than in Baldur's Gate, which means all the characters in Torment appear quite large onscreen. Each character is highly detailed, carefully animated, and cleverly designed above all else. Torment abandons the high-fantasy styling of most RPGs and instead uses the Planescape license's unique interpretation of familiar fantasy archetypes, which lends the game a wholly original appearance that defies expectations for fantasy and science fiction artwork. Even Torment's protagonist, who is heavily scarred, entirely tattooed, and dressed in bones and animal hides, seems nothing like the usual role-playing game hero. Torment's scenery is more intricately detailed than the scenery in Baldur's Gate because of the close perspective, and much like its characters, the scenery looks good and looks different from what you're used to. The game has no pointless spans of wilderness; each area is carefully designed, and most areas are densely populated. The jutting blade-like architecture of the game's urban settings and the rough-hewn, almost alien tangle of its catacombs give Torment a well-defined, highly distinctive appearance, while the game's atmospheric soundtrack, good sound effects, and sparse but high-quality voice acting all help maintain Torment's style. The game has a consistently cold look that can even be unsettling and uncomfortable at times, but Torment's bleak environments seem to work intentionally to motivate the protagonist's desire to escape from the oppressive, claustrophobic confines of the city of Sigil. In spite of its harsh scenery, at times Torment is colorful and impressive looking, mainly because of its often-spectacular special effects. Powerful magic spells cause the screen to go dim and erupt in ghostly energy, which shakes and rattles the screen. Even the game's most minor incantations feature impressive effects and animations, although some of the more elaborate effects tend to make the game slow down. The Baldur's Gate engine has other limitations, some of which are exclusively aesthetic, and some of which have a slightly adverse effect on Torment's gameplay. However, as in Baldur's Gate, Torment players will likely be quick to dismiss or disregard any such problems, like the limited screen resolution, bad character pathfinding, and the unattractive real-time-strategy-style fog of war shroud that covers each new area you visit. To allow for Torment's bigger characters, most of the game's interface is invisible until you right-click to bring up a circular pop-up window that lets you use items, cast spells, use special abilities, and so forth. Unfortunately, while the hidden interface does free up most of the screen, it is neither compact nor intuitive - you'll spend a lot of time fumbling for its little unmarked buttons or otherwise dragging it aside so you can see what's happening once you bring it up. At least the game automatically pauses whenever the interface is active, so you can figure it out at your leisure. Even though most of Torment's interface isn't onscreen most of the time, you'll find that the game's close-up perspective nevertheless has particular problems. There are virtually no ranged weapons in the game, if only because there's so little relative distance from one end of the screen to the other. Similarly, several of the game's powerful spells have a bad tendency to be just as dangerous to the caster, because by the time the enemy is targeted and the spell is uttered, that enemy has already closed the distance with the caster, who invariably suffers from his own magical attack. Torment also suffers from the game's unrefined menu screens and the unavoidably slow scrolling speed of its extensive dialogue, which, much like the interface, you will train yourself to ignore. You will ignore Torment's technical problems because it's such a good game. Specifically, it's a long and involving game with an original plot, well-written, descriptive dialogue, and likable characters. It's fortunate that Torment's dialogue reads well, because there's a lot of it to read; although the game's graphics are evocative and often beautiful, the game's most vivid events are actually written out rather than portrayed onscreen. You might wish the game had a more frequent tendency to show-not-tell; however, its combination of great graphics and writing is generally very effective. As such, even though you'll be reading text half the time, you'll rarely feel as if the dialogue interferes with the game's surprisingly quick pacing. That's mainly because the dialogue is actually one of the best parts of Torment, since it's one of the few role-playing games to ever make good on the promise of letting you play your character however you prefer. Torment's dialogue often lets you choose to make promises, bluff, or play dumb; the game lets you perceive small details if your character is intelligent, understand philosophical implications if he's wise, and intimidate or charm if he's strong or charismatic. Your character's moral alignment and his affiliation with Sigil's different factions are openly flexible and have a noticeable impact on the course of the game. Similarly, your character can readily switch between fighter, thief, and magic-user classes and can rapidly advance to a high level of proficiency in any and all of these, which is justified within the game as not so much an acquiring of new skills as a remembrance of latent centuries-old talents. In addition, your character's perverse incapacity to permanently die also helps maintain Torment's pacing by discouraging you from frequently reloading your saved games, although the game never seems easy or trivial in spite of the hero's immortality. Yet it's easy to apologize for Torment's many programming flaws, which cause the game to become excruciatingly slow at times and some of its dozens of quests to become unsolvable on occasion. It's true that bugs in computer role-playing games seem almost as conventional as spells and hit points. Fortunately, Torment's aren't so drastic that they actually ruin any single part of the game. Nevertheless, you'll probably experience several glitches either in performance or in quest scripting that make portions of the game unnecessarily frustrating, especially in light of Torment's generally excellent quality. In fact, it's evidence of Torment's impressive achievement that its problems, which would be detrimental to most any other game, seem so negligible. It's clearly the best traditional computer role-playing game of the year and is bound to be an all-time favorite for many of its inevitable fans. That's because it's a great-looking game that's lengthy but never boring, and it begs to be played through more than once, just as its unique hero and his story promise not to be forgotten. -- Greg Kasavin --Copyright ©1999 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

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Customer Reviews

Even better than whatever I write. First, you have to ask yourself: why is a game from a few years ago STILL getting 5-star reviews -- a bunch in just the past couple months?!? And second: how could a 2-D game (like the Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 series) possibly hold up against 3-D games like Neverwinter Nights? Well, it's because of gameplay. It's remarkable. You start out by waking up on a slab, in a cemetary. You have no memory, but you've got a lot of wordy tattoos all over your body, and a very talkative floating skull to fill you in. As you progress, you'll meet up with many other characters who can join your group (or not), including a strange living computer called a Modron, and a bizarre man engulfed in flames. But what really makes the game stand out is how open-ended it is. It's like Morrowind in that respect. You can do anything, go anywhere, fight or talk, do some quests and ignore others. Your character can find "masters" who will teach your character to fight, become a magician, or a thief. You can even switch back and forth. But even better than that is the dialogue, which is NOT forced or pre-programmed to lead you one way each time. The dialogues that each character speaks can take into account your experience, your intelligence, how attactive you are, where you are in the game, etc. One of the most amazing discoveries for me went like this. Playing the game the first time, I had a fairly average character who was very strong. Some of the dialogue with Ravel, about two-thirds into the game, was just stunning. The plot twists threw me for a loop. But then I played again with a wimpy but incredibly smart character. I was stunned to see my character pulling out plot details from the characters almost as soon as they joined the group. By the time I got to Ravel, I was a completely different character and had completely different conversations with her. And the end! It can change! It's pretty great ending(s) too, so I won't even mention what happens. If anything is a disappointment, it is that the opening cemetary is pretty dark -- work through it and get out as soon as you can. If you can find a save-game online that at least gets you down onto the first floor of the cemetary, maybe do that. Once you are in town, the game just blossoms into something incredible. My only sadness is that the game did well when it was launched, but not stellar. I'd like to thank their marketing department for the hideous box cover for probably killing quite a few sales. Because of this, I've lost hope for there ever being a sequel or even a game with a similar style. I'm very sad to see that, even after a few years, this game still has no rival. Addictive and Very Creative This has to be one of the most creative RPGs I've ever played. The graphics and animations are impressive, stylized, and original. The plot is relatively non-linear and effectively rests in the hands of the player with multiple endings. The alignment and attributes of the player character affect game play. I played a character with high intelligence and wisdom, and I enjoyed outwitting people in the game. Although the game is VERY dialog driven, I felt there were enough graphics and action to make it feel relatively balanced and seamless. The NPCs are highly original and interact with the party to a much greater extent than in Baldur's Gate. Talking to your party members can be integral to being successful at a Succubus, who has given up her past; a sarcastic, floating skull who can taunt enemies with profanities; a wild and unpredictable Tiefling (part human/part lower plane) thief who seems to have a thing for you . . . Guest voices include Dan Castellanetta (Homer!), Sheena Easton, and Michael T. Weiss (The Pretender). The game is very dark and somber with appropriate music that really added to the mood, yet has very effective comic relief via. Morte the sarcastic skull. I was genuinely surprised by the plot and character development. I was always kept guessing. Your immortality allows for many creative developments. Dying becomes a method to be taken to a place you want to go. Limbs are taken off and reattached. A woman pays you for the privilege of killing you. The magic and magic items are phenomenal. Many items have almost a voodooesque feel to them (roach charm, blood charm, cranium rat charm), while some magic items can actually talk to you and try to seduce you to the ways of evil. Many magic items are appropriately alignment and class restricted. Spell effect animations effectively add a distinctive style to the already rich substance of the game. The animations on the higher level spells can sometimes involve amazing cut scenes! This game could best be called a Fallout 2 on acid with a twist of Baldur's Gate. One moment you're in Hell talking to a pile of skulls, the next you're trying to save a city about to be destroyed by a deranged angel. It's almost as though at least five writers with years of pent up creative frustration exploded into this game. The result is creatively brilliant. I also appreciate the replay value of this game. I just played as a lawful good mage, now I'm going to I'm expecting a totally different kind of game. The latest issue of Newsweek (Jan 1, 2000) declares that "in the century to come, the medium producing the most dynamic, vital and exciting new art will be . . . videogames. . . . Eventually, we'll have artists who realize that videogames are technologically advanced enough for real story telling. . . the closest I've seen to this aspiration. It breathes like a novel, astonishes with great visual art, and allows for more realistic role-playing than in most other games that have ever been on the market. It is definitely a ground-breaker in this genre. Best, deepest, most meaningful game ever Torment is the best computer game I have ever played. It feels wrong to call this 'just a game'. Computer games will become an important new art form in the coming century, and Torment gives us a delicious foretaste of what is to come. Moral choices abound. The game takes note of what you say and do, and rates your morality and alignment accordingly. The game itself changes depending on how you play it: each action and choice closes some doors and opens others. Consider a point in the dialog where you are offered these choices. (1) Vow: "Tell me and I will not harm you" -- (2) Bluff: "Tell me or I'll break your neck" -- (3) Threat: "Tell me or I'll break your neck" -- (4) "Please tell me". This illustrates the sort of choice that gives expression to your moral character. You feel like an actor in a play -- but one who can choose his own script. This brings you very close to your game character. When it was revealed that a past incarnation of my character had committed some evil, I personally felt heartbroken about it. This sort of immersion-into-character is not possible in a conventional novel. The story is compelling and meaningful. It is supported by excellent writing. Some of the key dramatic scenes are still going through my head two months after completing the game. It is an ongoing source of delight to discuss and discover new interpretations of the story and characters. The characters are deep and complex, and funny. You get the feeling more than in other games that they have their own agendas. Eventually some of their secrets are revealed and -- best of all -- you yourself, in the game, are the one who discovers those secrets.