The iconic Dungeons & Dragons RPG Planescape: Torment was a “B-Team” project that began life as three different games, including a 3D dungeon crawler⁠

Now, I don’t have a fancy book to know what can change human nature, but there are certainly many factors that can change the nature of a game. In a retrospective feature in the upcoming PC Gamer print issue #390 (issue #402 for our friends across the pond), contributor Robert Zak explores the strange history of Planescape: Torment and the unlikely Interplay that made it happen. We dug into this by talking to members of the team. “As we were trying to make sense of it all, we realized there were three Planescape projects, each with about four people working on it,” Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart recalls. These were the heady days of 1996 and 1997, when Interplay was internally developing Fallout and eventually Planescape: Torment while publishing Baldur’s Gate at the same time. Urquhart was head of Interplay’s RPG division, which was later merged with the publisher’s popular subsidiary, Black Isle Studios. Urquhart said one of those projects has “very little work going on,” the second remains a mystery, and the third remains a mystery. “It’s a first-person, full 3D dungeon crawler that takes advantage of brands spanking new 3D accelerator cards like 3dfx Voodoo. You don’t have to invent new technology, you just actually create it,” Urquhart said. spoke. “We’re going to use the Baldur’s Gate engine and differentiate ourselves by having characters that aren’t just generic characters, and we’re going to enhance that by having the camera zoom in.” Interplay’s resources were put into an unreleased sequel to 1995’s Stonekeep. This has allowed many new developers to take the lead and prove themselves on projects with a lot of creative freedom. Some of them didn’t even know how to set up Planescape before they started working on the game. “[Urquhart]came in one day and said, ‘Let’s do a Planescape game,’ and in my head I was like, ‘What is that?'” PST lead artist Tim Donley recalls. . Donley also said: Torment lead designer Chris Avellone on something that was initially a bit of a mystery to the Black Isle crew. PST would later become one of the standard D&D video games, but Avellone’s first project at Interplay didn’t go so smoothly. “There was a guy across the hall who would always just go into his office and close the door,” Donley said. “I had no idea who he was. All I knew was that he was working on ‘Descent to Undermountain.'” (Image credit: Beamdog) Another member of this team, which we called “The Dozen,” was Eric Campanella, who created the sculptures and animations for many of the pieces. Despite only having experience with 2D art, rather than 3D modeling, which formed the basis of PST’s sprites, I was able to draw the main characters in Torment. Dennis Presnell, the artist currently working on Avowed at Obsidian, describes himself as a “college dropout” and describes the digital art tools for Torment as “learning by just pressing a button and seeing what it does.” “It is.” Stay up to date with the stories and updates that matter most. The best deals chosen by the PC Gamer team. However, this team would end up performing some real magic. An early sign of that came when Black Isle staff flew out to BioWare headquarters in Edmonton to show off the game. After demoing Torment’s opening in-engine scene, BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka went to a programmer and said, “There’s not that many frames of animation. How can the game look so good?” “?” Donley remembers saying. A complete retrospective feature on Planescape: Torment by Robert Zak was published in issue 390/UK 402 of PC Gamer magazine. You can also subscribe to magazines via MagazinesDirect in both the US and UK.