Standing the test of time as one of the best RPGs ever created, Planescape: Torment was a hit for various reasons – but surprisingly, much of Black Isle Studios was entirely unfamiliar with the Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that started it all.
Speaking to PC Gamer in a recent edition of the magazine, lead artist Tim Donley reveals the reaction he had to Black Isle Studios founder Feargus Urquhart’s announcement that the next game the developers would be working on was a Planescape title. The head apparently “just came one day and said ‘we’re going to do a Planescape game'” to the rest of the team, and it took many of the devs by surprise – because they didn’t know what Planescape was.
“In my head,” explains Donley, “I’m going ‘what the fuck is that?’ At the time it seemed so different, I was like ‘Is this like steampunk or space, or science fiction?'” Donley wasn’t alone in his thoughts on the ever-mysterious Planescape campaign – lead programmer Dan Spitzley confirms as much. “Planescape was not a very well-known property,” he admits. It’s not as though there was a plethora of Planescape video games then to look to, either.
“Certainly,” continues the lead, “it didn’t have a bunch of games already, so there were a lot of things we could try to do that other teams might not have been inclined to” – and it seems like that’s precisely what Black Isle Studios ended up doing. The devs’ game stood out among genre giants at the time like the original Baldur’s Gate and the first two Fallout games thanks to Torment successfully making companions “feel like fully functional parts of the story.”
As studio founder Urquhart himself put it, “You had companions in Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and Baldur’s Gate for that matter, but they had no real dialogue.” That was most definitely not the case with Planescape: Torment, and even today, it lives on as one of the greatest RPGs developed. As someone with far too many hours in the 1999 classic, I can attest to this. Even after more modern icons like Baldur’s Gate 3, I find myself returning to Planescape.