Planescape: Torment

Planescape: Torment is a video game that consists of 3 releases

Edit Article

EDIT BLURB SUBSCRIBE

An isometric RPG based on Bioware's Infinity Engine, Planescape: Torment told a rich, dark story set in the Planescape world of Dungeons and Dragons.

Overview

Planescape: Torment is an RPG which was built on Bioware’s battle-tested Infinity Engine. Unlike other Infinity Engine games which are set in the Forgotten Realms universe, Torment takes place in the Planescape universe in the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons setting. The game lets you take the role of the Nameless One, who starts the game in a mortuary having lost all his memories. He doesn’t know who he is or why he can’t die. After leaving the mortuary, you find yourself in Sigil, the City of Doors. It’s in Sigil that you spend most of the game trying to find your identity. Sigil is divided into several wards, and you spend your time traveling among the lower ones.

Gameplay

Dialogue

The majority of the game is spent interacting with the large number of people you encounter in Sigil. The game’s extensive dialogue trees make the conversations interesting and allow diversity among your responses. Dialogue plays a major role in the game as it can often change the requirements for your quests and the experience given. Ultimately, dialogue can change the ending of the game.

Combat

Even though dialogue dominates the first half of the game, later on the game begins to focus greater on combat. Planescape: Torment uses the traditional Dungeons and Dragons rule set to determine combat. PCs can be one or a combination of several classes and participate in combat accordingly. The combat works similarly to other Infinity Engine games: it plays out in real-time but remains pausable at any time by pressing the spacebar.

Plot

In Planescape Torment, you take control of The Nameless One. Unlike other role-playing heroes, The Nameless One is not a hero destined to save the world against destruction; he is a horribly scarred immortal who cannot remember anything about his previous lives. As the game begins, you awaken in the mortuary to be met by a talking skull called Morte who helps figure out your first objective by reading the message tattooed on your back. As you leave the mortuary, you enter Sigil, the City of Doors, which is being ruled with an iron fist by the Lady of Pain. As pointed out by Morte, your first objective is to meet up with Pharod in the Buried village to find out more about yourself and why you are immortal.

As the player proceeds through the game, he learns interesting aspects about the Nameless One's past lives such as how he had been involved in political issues, killed countless people, manipulated countless people, and caused havoc around Sigil.

After playing through most of the game, you find out that the only person who can reveal the truth about the Nameless One's immortality is a vicious hag called Ravel Puzzlewell who has been imprisoned in a maze by the Lady of Pain for her attempt to destroy Sigil. After finding a way to enter the maze, you meet Ravel. After speaking with Ravel, you realize that the Nameless One's first incarnation had committed various heinous acts and the only way of atoning for his sins would have been to fight in the never-ending Blood War. In order to escape punishment, the Nameless One sought out Ravel and asked to be made immortal. Something went horribly wrong, however, and not only had the Nameless One been made immortal, but he had also been turned into an amnesiac who could not remember anything from previous deaths. You also find out that Ravel bears romantic feelings for the Nameless One, and she does not allow you to escape the maze which forces you to kill Ravel in order to exit. After you leave the maze, the Transcendent One appears and truly kills Ravel; she had feigned her death at your hands. You eventually discover that the Transcendent One is the physical embodiment of your mortality.

The player, after speaking with the Pillar of Skulls in Baator and a deva named Trias, finally finds that the only way of going to the Fortress of Regrets, the plane of the Transcendent One, and reuniting with his soul, is through an entry point in the mortuary in Sigil--the starting point of the game. By now, most of the plot is clear to the player--such as how it is in the nature of the Nameless One to gather all tormented souls like himself around him and how many of his previous incarnations had visited the plane of his soul only to fight a losing battle and how Morte had been with the Nameless One on most of his previous incarnations--and it is also clear that the only way of ending the torment is to reunite with your soul.

Once in the Fortress of Regrets, the player must complete a difficult maze and fight one party member depending on your alignment in order to move onto the Maze of Reflections. Here, the player meets up with three previous incarnations--practical, paranoid, and good--and must find a way of convincing the three to join as one with the current incarnation. The Nameless One also meets his old love, Deionarra, for the last time.

In the final confrontation with The Transcendent One, the player has the ability to either destroy the soul, killing himself along with it (preferable for Fighters) or convincing it to reunite with the Nameless One (preferable for good characters with a high intelligence), after moving through the various dialogue options. Various items, such as a Golden Sphere obtained from Pharod, or the Blade of the Immortal obtained in Undersigil can influence the ending of the game. Planescape: Torment was also one of the first games to incorporate multiple endings, the selection of which depends on the outcome of the final conversation with the Transcendent One.

Trivia

The game was initially released on 4 CDs, but the jewel case edition was released on two CDs. Developers cited better compression for the reduction in the number of CDs.

General Information Edit

Game Name	Planescape: Torment
Platform(s)	PC
Publisher(s)	Sega Interplay Entertainment Corp.
Developer(s)	Black Isle Studios
Genres	Add a new genre Role-Playing (RPG)
Themes	Add a new theme Fantasy Steampunk
Original US Release	Dec. 12, 1999 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	know the real date?
Aliases	Torment