A_Leftist_Pig?
Scholar
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2007
- Messages
- 206
Finally made myself play this game!
I can't remember ever having this mixed feelings over a game like I have about Torment.
The fact that I feared death for so long and kept reloading despite the fact that I had neverending lives is testimony to this.
The fact that I was truly perplexed as to if my Succubus partner was honest or not, if she would murder Anna or not.
Or the rumors about Morty, whether or not he really should be allowed to hang along...
The slow exploration of how things work, where you can do what with whom, all of this was amazingly well done.
But the game has some serious flaws and to me it read more like a truly perfected adventure game than a RPG.
Let me first say that I am not someone who really cares about balance.
I don't even like fairness.
But some things in this game were done very poorly, were very rushed or completely nonsensical.
Let's begin with one stat that you will never, ever care about! Weight!
Due to the lack of implemented armor, due to the lack of weapon variety (a good thing) and the endless amounts of tiny, weightless trinkets you will never actually become over-encumbered.
You will, however, run out of SPACE. Because a fly takes up as much space as a battle axe.
Your companions are used to fling about these tiny trinkets back and forth as a cumbersome form of inventory management, the worst I have ever seen. Just like many others I didn't figure out you could use the portraits to transfer items until a long time had passed and kept dropping them and picking them up.
Once I figured it out the transfer of items back and forth became a huge chore and trivialized inventory management and party management completely.
There are several points like this along the game, either useless or hard to figure out things that shouldn't be that hard or that useless.
Other examples include curses and their general lack and the inability of figuring out with what you are cursed, the bugged or somehow messed up overlapping spells that grant you strength (but in actuality take away strength), the lack of any description of the hidden stat known only as "Luck" that for a newbie must have been very confusing.
But these aren't the games major flaws. The absolute largest failure is the resolution which now, a decade later, can be fixed with a mod. The choice to use extremely detailed and blown up landscapes in a worthless resolution made the game unplayable for me for 10 years.
Now that I played it though I felt a sense of drawn out failure as I progressed in the realm of Sigil and entered into the other realms.
The game starts to suck, more and more, the further you go.
The illusion of choice, that never really existed due to the narative of the game (which is fine, even commendable) becomes so watered down by the time that you reach Chrust or what ever that shithole of a town is called that the only thing driving you forward is your will to see the conclusion of the basic storyline.
Chrust is an unfinished mess, admittedly so. Out of nowhere the only notable character you can speak of is a barkeep that apparently knows beforehand that you need some weird key to enter a hidden place. The only way to get it is to go IN TURNS from person to person. No way, no sir can you talk to them in your old pace and for some reason all of them know only a portion of some forgotten password to this same barkeeps mind. Why, how or even when this bloody stupid conflagration to the human mind came about is something nobody talks about.
The fact that it pits you into the dungeon but in a worse position than what a little exploring does is also quite frankly ridicilous.
From there on everything is a mess. Triaste a.k.a. The Fallen One is WAY overpowered unless you complete all good tasks making any evil character unable to progress despite the fact that the "practical one" (aka Sociopath) did it before.
The amount of combat required out of this badly configured engine that oftentimes does not recognise commands is too much although I grew to not hate it as much as I did when I just started the game.
In the end the story itself becomes a mess. You are continuously advised to search out your mortality (for it is apparently something akin to your soul) yet dying by any of the gods that exist is a bad thing. The fact that you are in a world of spirits already judged in a prior life is constantly in conflict with the concept of true death and the fact that you, even with your mortality will be punished for eons to come in a field of endless battle (ending cutscene) also doesn't make sense.
Final Judgment.
Planescape torment starts out promising but ends up being a story for the slightly insecure but intelligent adolescent who never cares to scratch behind its surface complexities. In the end a fable and in practice a novel with many possible choices, some of which lead to oblivion and others to some form of success it is non the less burdened by its weak gameplay, UI and inconsistencies.
In a way an allegory to God in modern religion, it provides you with the concept of Free Will but nudges you, harder and harder towards a Lawful Good playthrough due to the limitations of its mechanics and the practicability of your choices.
I can't remember ever having this mixed feelings over a game like I have about Torment.
The fact that I feared death for so long and kept reloading despite the fact that I had neverending lives is testimony to this.
The fact that I was truly perplexed as to if my Succubus partner was honest or not, if she would murder Anna or not.
Or the rumors about Morty, whether or not he really should be allowed to hang along...
The slow exploration of how things work, where you can do what with whom, all of this was amazingly well done.
But the game has some serious flaws and to me it read more like a truly perfected adventure game than a RPG.
Let me first say that I am not someone who really cares about balance.
I don't even like fairness.
But some things in this game were done very poorly, were very rushed or completely nonsensical.
Let's begin with one stat that you will never, ever care about! Weight!
Due to the lack of implemented armor, due to the lack of weapon variety (a good thing) and the endless amounts of tiny, weightless trinkets you will never actually become over-encumbered.
You will, however, run out of SPACE. Because a fly takes up as much space as a battle axe.
Your companions are used to fling about these tiny trinkets back and forth as a cumbersome form of inventory management, the worst I have ever seen. Just like many others I didn't figure out you could use the portraits to transfer items until a long time had passed and kept dropping them and picking them up.
Once I figured it out the transfer of items back and forth became a huge chore and trivialized inventory management and party management completely.
There are several points like this along the game, either useless or hard to figure out things that shouldn't be that hard or that useless.
Other examples include curses and their general lack and the inability of figuring out with what you are cursed, the bugged or somehow messed up overlapping spells that grant you strength (but in actuality take away strength), the lack of any description of the hidden stat known only as "Luck" that for a newbie must have been very confusing.
But these aren't the games major flaws. The absolute largest failure is the resolution which now, a decade later, can be fixed with a mod. The choice to use extremely detailed and blown up landscapes in a worthless resolution made the game unplayable for me for 10 years.
Now that I played it though I felt a sense of drawn out failure as I progressed in the realm of Sigil and entered into the other realms.
The game starts to suck, more and more, the further you go.
The illusion of choice, that never really existed due to the narative of the game (which is fine, even commendable) becomes so watered down by the time that you reach Chrust or what ever that shithole of a town is called that the only thing driving you forward is your will to see the conclusion of the basic storyline.
Chrust is an unfinished mess, admittedly so. Out of nowhere the only notable character you can speak of is a barkeep that apparently knows beforehand that you need some weird key to enter a hidden place. The only way to get it is to go IN TURNS from person to person. No way, no sir can you talk to them in your old pace and for some reason all of them know only a portion of some forgotten password to this same barkeeps mind. Why, how or even when this bloody stupid conflagration to the human mind came about is something nobody talks about.
The fact that it pits you into the dungeon but in a worse position than what a little exploring does is also quite frankly ridicilous.
From there on everything is a mess. Triaste a.k.a. The Fallen One is WAY overpowered unless you complete all good tasks making any evil character unable to progress despite the fact that the "practical one" (aka Sociopath) did it before.
The amount of combat required out of this badly configured engine that oftentimes does not recognise commands is too much although I grew to not hate it as much as I did when I just started the game.
In the end the story itself becomes a mess. You are continuously advised to search out your mortality (for it is apparently something akin to your soul) yet dying by any of the gods that exist is a bad thing. The fact that you are in a world of spirits already judged in a prior life is constantly in conflict with the concept of true death and the fact that you, even with your mortality will be punished for eons to come in a field of endless battle (ending cutscene) also doesn't make sense.
Final Judgment.
Planescape torment starts out promising but ends up being a story for the slightly insecure but intelligent adolescent who never cares to scratch behind its surface complexities. In the end a fable and in practice a novel with many possible choices, some of which lead to oblivion and others to some form of success it is non the less burdened by its weak gameplay, UI and inconsistencies.
In a way an allegory to God in modern religion, it provides you with the concept of Free Will but nudges you, harder and harder towards a Lawful Good playthrough due to the limitations of its mechanics and the practicability of your choices.
yourself instead.
