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Information Colin McComb on Black Isle's cancelled Playstation Planescape game at Eurogamer

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Tags: Black Isle Studios; Colin McComb; Interplay; PSX Planescape game

Eurogamer are on an inXile roll today. Another one of their staff members, Robert Purchese, has an article about a talk he had with Colin McComb at EGX Rezzed about Black Isle's cancelled King's Field-inspired Planescape game for the original Playstation. We've heard about the PSX Planescape game before, but I believe this is the first time we've seen direct quotations from its vision document.

Brief in hand, McComb got going. It was just him and a programmer in a small office for weeks, months even. He hadn't made a computer game before, only tabletop games, but gradually ideas began to form, and the project known as Planescape PSX was born.

He can only remember so much, nearly 20 years later, but he does manage to dig out an old vision document for me. McComb isn't sure who wrote it but seems fairly sure it wasn't him.

"The goals of Planescape PSX are to immerse the player in an interesting and stunningly distinct fully-3D gaming world; constantly provide the player with interesting and rewarding activity; and to make players feel like their characters are in a real fantasy world."
Remember, it is 1996.

"Players will find themselves in amazing places, face-to-face with creatures both bizarre and frightening, unlike anything seen before in a console [role-playing game]. Combat in Planescape will not simply be a matter of holding down the fire button and being quick to dodge. Players will be buffeted by a Githyanki's long sword as it crashes against their shield or be knocked to the ground by the mad rush of a dying Wererat."
It was going to be a first-person "running through a crypt type thing", McComb summarises - with branching dialogue! It would have real-time combat and, of course, be based in the weird and wonderful Planescape setting of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

"Planescape PSX is, at its heart, an RPG. Players will create their characters - warriors, thieves, magicians and clerics - and take them out adventuring. Players will be able to tailor their characters to suit their own play styles ... and adventure in several districts of Sigil, the City of Doors and beyond, to Baator and the gate town of Ribcage."
You were going to be able to climb, swim, float or fly to achieve mission goals - even pass through walls. "Warriors," on the other hand, "may simply choose the direct approach and try to kick the s*** out of whatever stands in their way".

Spells and items and powers taken directly from Advanced Dungeon & Dragons would open up to you as you play.

The story would cast you as a lowly enforcer for the Harmonium, the law-people of Sigil, "the guys who believed in order and goodness and tried to keep everybody on the straight and narrow", adds McComb. Sigil is the city connecting all the multiple planes, from which the weird and wonderful come. It's a dirty and dangerous hotpot constantly close to boiling point.

You, as the Harmonium recruit, would go to break up a routine riot in the slums. It's there you'd uncover the deeper threads of a bigger conspiracy. "It turns out this conspiracy led all the way to the upper-planes and the lower-planes," adds McComb, "because there were people in the upper-planes selling weapons to keep the Blood War going.

He adds: "We realised it was total fantasy and there was no way that could ever happen in real life!"

Above all else, Planescape PSX was going to be tough.

"Unlike Doom where you get armoured up like a crab and go toe-to-toe with everything until they are all dead, things in Planescape can make you dead very easily, especially if you're unprepared. Until he knows the lay of the land the player will do more running than fighting. Exploring does not mean finding strange new places and depopulating them. It means the player will learn what he can and can not tackle, where he should and should not go and be compelled to sharpen his skills, wits, and weapons to explore the game further."
"Players will learn things the hard way in Planescape," it concludes, like a marketing slogan. "Planescape PSX will hit back."
The article also reveals that Interplay was already considering a sequel if the game did well, which would you allow you to import your character from the original. But then of course, it was cancelled, and the third Planescape game by Zeb Cook was transformed into Stonekeep 2, which was also cancelled, and Colin ended up working on the last survivor, Planescape: Torment. Oh, 90s Interplay.
 

Amasius

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Imagine they would have cancelled Planescape Torment and developed this console-abnomination... *shudder*
 

ghostdog

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While I may like some of what I'm reading here, thank god this was cancelled. Aside from the fact that it could hamper PST, such a game in PSX was going to be absolute crap, in PC... maybe it could be good.
 

ghostdog

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such a game in PSX was going to be absolute crap, in PC... maybe it could be good.

It was going to be directly inspired by a PSX-exclusive game widely regarded as good.
King's Field was gud, but it was a game filled with desolate areas, scarce enemies and basically a dungeon crawler. PSX could never support successfully the kind game that's described here, especially one that takes place in a huge city like Sigil. What I'm reading here would work much better on PC, just look at the immersive First person games that emerged on PC a few years later, Thief, SS2, DX.
 

Athelas

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What Urquhart wanted Colin McComb to make was something a lot like 1994 PS1 game King's Field. You know, King's Field made by From Software. You know, the King's Field series that would inspire Demon's Souls.

"Have you played King's Field?" Urquhart asks McComb in his first briefing. "And I said, 'I have not,'" McComb tells me. "And he said, 'Your first task is to play King's Field.' So they dropped me into an office with a PlayStation and King's Field and then said, 'Get going.'"
Feargus was into Dark Souls (well, its predecessor) before it became the hip thing to do. :troll:
 

Crescent Hawk

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What Urquhart wanted Colin McComb to make was something a lot like 1994 PS1 game King's Field. You know, King's Field made by From Software. You know, the King's Field series that would inspire Demon's Souls.

"Have you played King's Field?" Urquhart asks McComb in his first briefing. "And I said, 'I have not,'" McComb tells me. "And he said, 'Your first task is to play King's Field.' So they dropped me into an office with a PlayStation and King's Field and then said, 'Get going.'"
Feargus was into Dark Souls (well, its predecessor) before it became the hip thing to do. :troll:
From Soft best game for me is no doubt Shadow Tower Abyss. Demons Souls however took their whole immersive dark depressive setting to a new level.

Would love to play another game in Planescape, maybe a fps rpg hybrid.
 

LESS T_T

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I actually would like to play a Myst-like in Planescape or Numenera setting. Or even a more exploration-focused first-person game in those setting would be cool.
 

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I should read the article or spend 10 minutes doing the math, but I'm feeling lazy -- am I right that this game predated PS:T in design? In other words, that Planescape PSX was folded into PS:T? (For example, the weapons-dealing angle made it into PS:T via Trias.)
 

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In other words, that Planescape PSX was folded into PS:T? (For example, the weapons-dealing angle made it into PS:T via Trias.)

I've never heard of any plot elements from Planescape PSX being folded into PS:T - Avellone was never involved with it - but I suppose it's not inconceivable.
 

Awakened_Yeti

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I still mourn the fact we never got a proper Spelljammer game... I was thinking a sequel for Planescape would do it.. but then... nothing....
 
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I've never heard of any plot elements from Planescape PSX being folded into PS:T - Avellone was never involved with it - but I suppose it's not inconceivable.

I bet the two scripts will turn out to be virtually identical, only the PS:T one has the author's printed name blotted out and "Master Chris Avellone" scrawled on top of it.
 

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Being a console game I'm pretty sure it would have played like BoS just in the Planescape setting.
 

mondblut

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I still mourn the fact we never got a proper Spelljammer game...

How Pirates of Realmspace was not "proper"? Straight D&D combat? Check. Ship to ship combat? Check.

I was thinking a sequel for Planescape would do it.. but then... nothing....

Funny you say that, considering that Planescape the setting was brought in as a replacement for Spelljammer. It basically killed SJ.
 

CMcC

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I should read the article or spend 10 minutes doing the math, but I'm feeling lazy -- am I right that this game predated PS:T in design? In other words, that Planescape PSX was folded into PS:T? (For example, the weapons-dealing angle made it into PS:T via Trias.)

This is actually something we'd explored in the Planescape boxed sets a bit, particularly Hellbound. But no, Chris was already working with the initial PST team when I started my work. Some ideas may have migrated over because of recycling, but the two designs were fairly independent.
 

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