![]() ![]() You could go so far as to call Planescape a work of art it’s a truly interactive story that would only work in this medium, and with this setting. Ideas become real, and the conflicts in your head are reflected on gigantic battlefields like your character, the entirety of the world is in turmoil. The same conflicts that rack the Nameless One also torment the people you meet, the neighborhoods you walk through, and the world around you all the way up to the endless “Blood War” between law and chaos that rages at the edge of the game’s world. Everything, from your gnarled body to the changing city streets to all of the planes around you, shifts and disrupts based on nothing but principles one city physically drops from its original plane to a more nightmarish one after its people become chaotic. Instead of your usual fighters’ or thieves’ guilds, the factions include the Anarchists, the Godsmen, and a pack of people who roam like wild dogs. But in Planescape, alignment informs every part of the world you’re in. Most RPGs don’t respond to your behavior in any serious way, except maybe to give you either a “good” or “evil” ending after you beat the game while the Dungeons and Dragons rules use an alignment grid that extends from good to evil, and from lawful to chaotic, most dungeon crawls just tack it on as another attribute. (It’s true that LucasArts’ Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic pulled a similar trick, but the reveal was far more straightforward.) The Nameless One has also been wild and savage, cold and calculating, and an obnoxious do-gooder – and you have to deal with the fallout. Planescape neatly balances a rich protagonist with an emergent narrative: Although you wake up as a blank slate and you can roleplay any way you choose, you’re just the latest in a series of personalities that have controlled this beaten-up body. But the most complicated character is the one that you control. The NPCs that join your party – including a reformed succubus, a psychopath engulfed in flames and a girl with a Scottish accent and a rat’s tail (who was voiced by pop star Sheena Easton and was, well, wicked hot) – are not only exotic, but their motives and back stories make them feel three-dimensional. People remember Planescape most fondly for its characters. Strange and unruly dimensions intersect at the city of Sigil, where most of the game takes place, and your character, portentously called The Nameless One, wakes up in a mortuary with amnesia, a battered shell of a body that cannot die, and just one friend: a flying, talking skull. The strangest, and one of the least successful RPGs from Black Isle (the company that brought you the Icewind Dale series), Planescape: Torment, which was released in 1999, took a risk by using the alternate Dungeons and Dragons campaign of Planescape, a not-really-fantasy, not-really-futuristic world that’s mostly defined as unstable and bizarre. ![]() ![]() Planescape‘s ideas on character development and storytelling are still bold and exciting – and today’s mainstream hack-and-slash adventures could still take lessons from it. Combine the unique and often disturbing setting, the cabal of antiheroes that follow you through the game, the fan favorite voice talent – like Dan “Homer Simpson” Castellaneta – and a story that some gamers called “intellectual” and others dismissed as “brainy” and “dull,” and you’ve got a product that was sure to ward off casual players, yet convert others into lifelong devotees. Planescape: Torment was doomed to be a cult classic. ![]()
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