Despite launching so soon after other monumental RPG releases like the first two Fallout games and the original Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment carved its name into history as one of the best titles of all time – amid fellow Dungeons & Dragons entries and otherwise.
Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent interview, Black Isle Studios founder Feargus Urquhart has the answer to Planescape: Torment’s startling success – or at least a big part of it. “In Fallout and Baldur’s Gate,” explains the lead, “you’d have NPCs just kind of milling around, but in Torment, we really tried to make it feel more like this is a bustling city.” This prompted the developers to put in some extra work, but it certainly paid off.
“So we wrote in a whole thing to allow these crowd characters to walk around the maps,” he continues. “We had to create a whole different class of character so that the AI didn’t bring the game to a halt.” That’s what Black Isle Studios did in the end, and it revolutionized the RPG scene forever. “Torment really showed what you could do with companions,” Urquhart explains, comparing the characters to other games’ own.
“You had companions in Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Baldur’s Gate for that matter,” says the studio founder, “but they had no real dialogue. Torment was the first game that made them feel like fully functional parts of the story.” As someone with far too many hours in the 1999 classic, I’m inclined to agree. Even after more modern genre icons like Baldur’s Gate 3, I seem to find myself going back to Planescape annually without fail.
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