Lilura
RPG Codex Dragon Lady
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The +pathing routine and new combat feedback window are enhancements. The other things are irrelevant to me.
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Torment Beamdog's Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition
- Thread starter TT1
- Start date
The +pathing routine and new combat feedback window are enhancements. The other things are irrelevant to me.
Deleted Member 16721
Guest
The gray scale when paused is cool, too.
Sent from my N10 Plus using Tapatalk
Sent from my N10 Plus using Tapatalk
hexer
Guest
That's Dan Spitzley, the lead programmer.
Sykar
Arcane
Who is this Chris Avellone guy leading the re-release of Planescape Enhanced? "ex-Black Isle employee and Lead Designer on Plansc..."
Everyone keeps saying this is disrespectful to Black Isle, then when you point out a key figure from Black Isle is actually involved, it's suddenly disrespectful because the entire art division isn't there too.Yeah I am sure he did all the hard work by himself. Like creating the tile sets, doing the sprites, animations, etc.
You just going to keep going?
Ok let us speak plainly:
Was Beamdog responsible for Planescape:Torment?
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- 13,093
It was very noble for a financially-struggling, post-Daggerfall Bethesda Softworks to assist developers Interplay and Black Isle in publishing two classic RPGs, Fallout and Fallout 2, in 1997 and 1998.
If a company as big (and shady) as Bethesda would still list these companies despite of their status, I don't see why Beamdog wouldn't.
Who has ever said that they are?
The people working for Black Isle at the time were - while certain figures at Black Isle had more impact on it's core gameplay (C&C, Characters, Plot)...
Obsidian is a good example. Look at Tyranny compared to Pillars. What difference does the Obsidian banner make, when it's pretty clear Sawyer, Cain and Avellone not working on it, led to it being lackluster as a result? It's clear to those who have become accustomed to their signature design approach.
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Sykar
Arcane
So we have now established that Beamdog is NOT responsible for Planescape:Torment.
Onto the next question, how much do they add which is NOT coming from mods which are readily available?
As to Tyranny comparison, does Beamdog create their very own game?
What does one achievement matter? Achievements cannot change the nature of a man.
Yes. And there was no need to highlight this.
Only ones I care about:
Supposed content added that was never finished due to time constraints. PCgamesN.
A lot of ammendments to the wrtitng, by the lead writer himself. (If this alone isn't appealing to you, not sure why I'm even bothering to argue, you mustn't like the writing here as much of some)
UI adjustments that actually scale to a reasonable size above 720p - uses up more of the space you have.
They have. It was shit, because, art teams and brand names like Bioware/Baldur's Gate - do not make a good game, unless you have people with talent.
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Sykar
Arcane
There is a mod which restores cut content already.
Where exactly does PST need "amendments"?
I could not care less about UI. Also there is a mod which scales the UI if you use the Widescreen mod.
So all in all, Beamdog cannot make games on their own and just cash in on already existing all time great games with very minor additions which you can already get for free from mods besides some very minor additions.
Glad we cleared that up. So I have to ask, why even go to the length to cut out Black Isle logo from the intro sequences and why are they only get "credited" at the end which almost no one watches anyway?
You'll have to ask the writer, but spending a year on it, would make it appear significant.
To a readable size? Ouside dialogue, I have not seen one that fixes the UI across the board. If you play at a high resolution, you need a magnifying glass to read certain things.
Well done.
I have never bought a single thing they have released as a result. This is all that interests me because it's not expensive (to me) and if the creative lead is involved, I'd support it purely based on that. Call it amateur, I don't care. I would've paid a modder if they did this today.
As for why they cut out the Black Isle Logo, as I've said countless times - why bother focusing on this, seeing as the company is defunct? You are just over-complicating praise for specific people, who today, should be credited by name - Mark Morgan, Avellone etc. And if you still havent noticed, Avellone's mere presence surrounding this, shows Beamdog as a name means nothing on it's own. After this, they'll be forgotten.
Sykar
Arcane
I bother about it because they bothered to cut it out in the first place. Now why is that I wonder...
Also the question about the amendmends was rethorical. PST is a master piece of it's own, there is very little you can add by writing at this point. The spelling and grammar fixes by Quinn's fixpack are more than sufficient.
ArchAngel
Arcane
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- Mar 16, 2015
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- 21,259
It is incredible that there is a person like you that is even so proud of being a retard. Just mindblowing.
Fluent, I previously defended you when others called you a retard and Watch-infiltrator. I said you were learning to fit in. Don't prove me a liar.
Yeah but dude, forget Black Isle for a sec. You're questioning the logic of someone who was a co-founder of Bioware, left, founded Beamdog while aquiring the Baldur's Gate IP, then removed the name of his old company from it - in place of his new one. Who does that? Sounds like a bitter exit. Bioware is still active, so you could argue he's actually doing more harm to them, than he ever could to Black Isle. But reflecting on that, does it matter about Bioware? Look up a photo of Manveer Heir and tell me it does lol.
As I said before, it's just a nice gesture to Black Isle, but if they don't do it, at least they have given Avellone and Morgan a shout-out.
I don't disagree, it is a masterwork. Perhaps there is little you can add. But I'm not going to ignore MCA's involvement, I want to see purely as a fan, what he's done.
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FeelTheRads
Arcane
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- Apr 18, 2008
- Messages
- 13,716
Well, you didn't expect them to say "Yes, there's no mention of the original companies because we are IP trolls and want everybody to believe these game are made by us", right?
You actually think he was there 8 hours a day for a year revising writing? Really? When he wrote most of the game in one year?
If MCA was actually there for 8 hours a day I'd have expected that he'd redo and finish the second part of the game. Not name buttons and add journal entries.
One year probably because he had to wait for the shitheads at Beamdog to implement what he was doing. Because copy/pasting mods and implementing changes they already had for the other IE games takes one year. When other games are made in one year.
Don't be a fucking idiot. It's not about Bioware of today or the defunct Black Isle. It's about principles. About not claiming you did what others did. And that's what you do when you strip their logos down and put up your own.
Nice gesture.. what the fuck? What kind of gesture is stripping their logos down then?
oldmanpaco
Master of Siestas
Who is they?
Black Isle & Interplay live on through key industry figures at other companies (Troika R.I.P, Obsidian and inXile) while “Bioware” makes single player MMOs now – led by great minds like "Manveer Heir"
Let’s not pretend it’s some great shame "Bioware" isn't proudly listed next to the title of two games made under the name, 19 years ago. It's not like the people at Bioware since then, have given a fuck about staying true to any kind of legacy anyway.
Dragon Age: Inquisition is just Siege of Dragonspear with 40mil in funding. Ironic that a Black Isle veteren, has had to intervene to make sure this doesn't go down any more weird roads.
You assume that no one understands that the bioware of 2000 is not the bioware of 2017. The people who are irritated that the original developers are not credited know the difference. Jesus their is even a chance that some millennial who has only known gay fan fic bioware could play an EE game (still far better than any modern bioware game) and realize that bioware used to mean something and demand more from the current incarnation.
Now that I think about it I can understand why modern bioware would not want its name on the EE remakes. That's to much pressure to put on the current sjw's running the place.
Why wouldn't I at this point? Everyone seems to believe Black Isle, a company that isn't alive to screw over, somehow is being screwed. And just outright ignoring everything that's been stated on the proper credit being given, yeah sure no company logos, but for the last time - individual names are more important given these products are nearly 20 years old. Company recognition is either pointless (Black Isle is no more) or completely misplaced, Bioware is not the same unit.
hexer
Guest
Yeah, it's wrong to strip down Black Isle's logo.
Maybe they can still add it back until April 11th?
How hard can it be to add something like this:
Developed by.. Black Isle Logo/Anim
Enhanced by.. Beamdog Logo/Anim
Maybe they can still add it back until April 11th?
How hard can it be to add something like this:
Developed by.. Black Isle Logo/Anim
Enhanced by.. Beamdog Logo/Anim
Sykar
Arcane
Are you genuinely retarded? No dipshit, we are irritated because they are taking credit for something they did not do. Planescape:Torment was developed by the people who worked for Black Isle. That Beamdog went out of their way and removed the Black Isle logo from the openening sequence is telling us just how much of disingenuous fucks they are, taking credit for a timeless piece of art and they had no part in it. It matters not if Black Isle is still alive or not, what matters is that they are claiming to be the producers when they are nothing more than a glorified modder group.
It is like me buying a Vermeer, giving it a new frame and then claim that this is my work.
I would have no problem with that. It would still be a cashgrab for me and I would never touch it with a 10 foot pole but that is beside the point.
- Joined
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RPS not-review: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/29/planescape-torment-enhanced-edition-review/
Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition – an elegant remastering, with a few exceptions
Alec Meer on March 29th, 2017 at 7:00 pm.
Surprise classic RPG remastering attack! Mere weeks after revered 1999 philoso-roleplayer Planescape: Torment [official site] enjoyed a belated spiritual sequel in the over-lored but otherwise strong Torment Tides Of Numenera, it gets itself a modernised re-release too. It’s due out April 11, but I’ve got the thing updating my hard drive’s journal and changing the nature of my VDU right now.
We’re not going to run a full review because we all played PST a thousand years ago and know full well it’s a solid-gold classic of narrative’n’choice-led games, but I do want to look at what’s changed in Beamdog’s ‘Enhanced Edition‘ and whether it’s a meaningful improvement. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, though the net result is the most playable and best-looking version of PST to date.
In terms of what it’s trying to do to the old man Torment, the Enhanced Edition has three primary goals. One! Compatibility and bug-splatting. GOG’s already sorted out some of the former, but PST always had a few nasties built in. Having not played the remaster from start to finish I can’t entirely attest to all being smooth sailing, but I’ve certainly not hit any howlers while jumping between savegames set in various key areas.
Click to enlarge. Zoomed in, sprite outlines turned off, filtering still on. Looks a bit messy, though you can’t tell that from just this thumbnail.
Point the second is quality of life improvements, and this means something of a do-over for the user interface. First and foremost of those is resolution scaling for the action bar, fonts and whatnot. We’ve been able to bump PST up to HD and beyond with fan-made utilities for years, but the UI and text ended up tiny and mangled as a result. There were fixes upon fixes, but you needed to be patient and committed and risk it all going horribly wrong part way through. So the main draw of the EE, as far as I’m concerned, is that all of this stuff is part and parcel and just works out of the box.
Newly added elements, including a limited zoom, tab-to-highlight interactive objects, an auto-loot button and how-to-play pop-ups, I can take or leave. Nice to have and perhaps shave a few extra years off a near-20-year-old game, but they’re timesavers rather than true reworkings.
Click to enlarge. Sprite outlines off.
Tab-to-highlight is the biggest win there in my experience so far, while on the other side of the coin, the how-to-play stuff and other added menu/loading screen stuff looks as it if were transplanted from another game entirely. I’m sure it will help people who’ve only heard the legends and so lack the years of putting-up-with-bonkers-UIs training that those of us old enough to play PST back in the day have, though.
And the third, most obvious rejigger is, of course, graphics. Specifically, the resolution. Unmodded, original PST is locked to 640×480. Not quite as unbearable in practice as it sounds, but a greater tragedy than the softness inherent in stretching this across a high-res LCD monitor is that it only allows you to see PST’s wonderful, elaborate, weirdo 2D environments in small chunks. PSTEE simply adopts your desktop resolution (there are no in-game resolution options), and apparently supports 4K, although I’m afraid I don’t know what happens beyond that. It all works fine on my 3440×1400 screen, at any rate.
Click to enlarge. Sprite outlines and filtering turned on, which has mixed results as you can see.
The beauty of higher res is that you see huge swathes of the environment all at once, what would have been single screens in the vanilla version now stitched together into whole places, and their hand-made sensibility gives them a visual fidelity that is rare even by today’s standards. PST is most famed for its maudlin, introspective, questioning writing, but it was always the places that locked in my memory. It’s these that most benefit from the EE.
The downside of higher res is that, if you go beyond 1080p, the spell starts to break. Not in terms of compatibility or anything like that – simply that 1440p and above seem to be exceeding how much the game can display without having to enlarge its tiles and textures beyond their original dimensions. At 3440×1440, PSTEE’s pixels really show, like I zoomed in too far in Photoshop.
Click to enlarge. This is the game running at 1440p (then downscaled to 1080p to be more browser-friendly) – you can see the pixelisation and aliasing I was on about.
One cannot expect miracles – this is a remaster, not a remake, and as such it’s using original assets rather than rebuilding them from scratch – but though I accept the necessary reality, I can’t help but feel a little saddened that I did not get the ultrawide sprawl of gorgeousness I’d hoped for. (Never, ever buy high-end hardware, kids, it’s only ever making yourself a victim of your own expectations). Perhaps some sort of filtering could have helped, but that option for backdrops is not there. However, on a 1080p monitor PSTEE is just the ticket. There’s still some grain and aliasing, but by and large it looks like Planescape was always built to be this way.
On the other hand, the optional zoom-in feature only makes everything look low-res and nasty. Once in a while, scrolling in a couple of clicks might help your cursor to find a smaller interactable, but by and large it both serves no purpose in addition to the game very obviously not being made for this.
Click to enlarge. Here you can see how PSTEE doesn’t look too rosy if you zoom in all the way.
Character sprites are more broadly problematic. They were pretty low-detail and pixelly even at the time, and blown up to high res then with a few new post-processing effects applied they only look more like soup pressed into bipedal form. The good news is that turning off said post-processing makes a big improvement. Better to look like crisp pixel-people than the blurred, excessively outlined splodges the EE makes them by default. They might not look modern, but they do look natural.
The effects – a smoothing option and a dark outline intended to make sprites stand out more – remind me of the filters you might try once then turn off forever in, say, a retro console emulator. They’re not awful, but it simply looks better – sharper and less artificial – with them off. Their effects are also worsened above 1080p.
1080p, cropped, character outlines on. Me no likey.
Other than those and the zoom, I left all the new EE features turned on, but the option to have it running in, essentially, vanilla mode is there if you’re a crazy purist and/or still own a CRT monitor. All told, my short-term impressions are that, yes, this is the most easy-to-play and best-looking official version of Planescape: Torment to date, able to smooth off enough rough edges that you won’t truly feel as though you’re wrestling with an 18-year-old videogame.
You probably won’t feel as though you’re playing a 2017 videogame either, but the important thing is that we get an RPG masterpiece made more or less modern without sacrificing anything important in the process. I’d love to see a more thorough reworking, of course I would – more specifically, new sprites and more VO, not that the latter is realistic – but I rather suspect that the core game is, in the main, so well-realised that that there’s little extra to be won anyway.
Click to enlarge. 1080p, zoomed out all the way, sprite outlines and filtering off – the best way to play, IMHO.
Which leads me onto my final point – yes, a few hours with PSTEE reminded me of what a good videogame it largely is (combat’s a weak point, and some of the character designs are a bit too wanky, in both senses of the word). I enjoyed last month’s Torment: Tides of Numenera, but at times it almost chokes on the volume of its own words, losing clarity and punch because it comes across as having been unwilling to edit down its lore and its pomp. This is particularly true of its opening sequence, which is a barrage of fantastical neologisms and exposition, and an excess of second-person commentary.
By contrast, PST’s cold open has you waking up in a mortuary, immediately addressed by a wisecracking skull who informs you you were dead a moment ago, and tasked with finding a way up. You’re introduced to some of the weirder aspects of how its world works as you play, a tertiary focus to a clear goal and the overriding mystery of how and why you came back from the dead.
Click to enlarge. 3440×1440 (downscaled after the fact), which gives a good sense of the sprawl of the environments.
Though PST is famed for its word count, the mandatory opening dialogue is tight and sparing, rather than verbose for the sake of verbosity. I know how the story plays out already, and sure, what seemed like high literature to me 18 years ago has a more obvious pulpish quality to it now, but even so, the sense of mystery and strangeness and character grabbed me all over again.
Not played PST before? PSTEE is all the invitation you need. Native high-res support, scaleable UI, a few helping hands and most of all it just works. Played PST before? Well, like me, the last time round you probably did it modded, and as such PSTEE, though a smoother ride, won’t feel particularly revelatory. If it’s your first time back since 1999, however, rest assured that it treats your memories well.
Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition is due for release on April 11, for Windows, Mac and Linux via Steam, GOG and Beamdog. It’s getting mobile versions too.
Sykar
Arcane
Are you stupid? You expect people to go their page and read some vague empty meaningless statement and this somehow is informative who did the game originally? And they go out of their way to remove the original developers logo from the opnening sequence and this is somehow not suspect to you?
I really start to think you are actually a Beamderp shill at this point.
Black Angel
Arcane
I'm know this is sarcasm, but if a retard like fluent happen to read this and just swallow it whole, the release date referred to the first time it was released, not the Steam release.It was very noble for a financially-struggling, post-Daggerfall Bethesda Softworks to assist developers Interplay and Black Isle in publishing two classic RPGs, Fallout and Fallout 2, in 1997 and 1998.
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