Firing the Canon is a recurring feature where an MD contributor examines a classic game and interrogates its status. This week, guest contributor
Edcrab
looks at
Planescape: Torment
and the heights of, and limits of, its success.
By Edcrab
End of Story
Torment is a very particular type of game, telling a very particular story. The game’s associated dialogues and glossaries combine for a word count that’s well beyond the half-million mark. Yet Chris Avellone, the game’s lead designer himself (as if you didn’t know that), came to regret Torment ‘s reliance on dialogue at the expense of other game mechanics.
So why is it that Planescape: Torment is so often offered up as the be all and end all of game writing?
There’s never been anything quite like it. It’s a huge, sprawling title with incredible depth. It’s bizarre and surreal and it kicked current fantasy trends and tropes right in the teeth. You are the amnesiac Nameless One and you cannot die.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, you become the protagonist of a novel that’s trapped behind a slightly clunky interface. A really, really big book that we must now read.
It’s hard to imagine a game like Torment appearing on shelves today. The current market calls for voiced dialogue, speaking protagonists, and incidental animation more complex than standing stationary or performing an extant combat move.
Is that the market as it actually stands, or merely the market as publishers think of it? I don’t have a clue; it may be a bit of both. If X sells and Y doesn’t it’s an exercise in self-delusion to wonder why X is appearing in other titles and Y is in decline.
Avellone is quoted as saying that many of the themes presented in the game “could only have been communicated through text.” Text is cheap. Text doesn’t eat into a special effects budget, doesn’t demand more animations or more voicework. But text can portray ideas just as fully, unless you feel like arguing that literature is a dying art form.
Text-only storytelling opportunities must be seen as golden by game writers nowadays, a chance to write independent of cinematic concerns or total poly-counts rendered or the fees for the voice actors. For an example, there are the emails in Deus Ex or Mass Effect and to a lesser extent, the recycled invented languages played over different subtitles in Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire . And, of course, virtually all of Torment.
When I describe Torment as an interactive novel, I mean it not as a disparagement but almost as a genre. You aren’t being told a story, despite the gigantic reams of dialogue on display— you are telling it yourself. Yes, it can be argued that the narrative will inevitably guide The Nameless One to the same framework for the finale regardless of the player’s approach, but you the player make TNO your own. It’s a philosophical story of self-discovery, and can we really argue that a journey to find yourself is any more linear than beating the usual world-threatening bad guy? Every game has the player pursue a goal. And that goal, however abstract it might be, is all about winning.
We all think fondly of Torment , but perhaps we should let a classic stand on its own merits and stop trying to compare it to an era of titles that are completely alien by comparison. I can’t, in all honesty, claim that I’d recommend any developer working today try to recreate what made Torment what it is.
In fact, I’m clearly lying when I state that everyone thinks fondly of Torment . I know plenty of people who have tried to visit lauded classics for the first time and failed to enjoy them, pulling out early in their playthrough. Sometimes it’s because the graphics are dated, or the mechanics are too complex or unintuitive for modern tastes. And sometimes, dare I say it, it’s because kids these days just aren’t grabbed by a swollen dialogue window. They’re pampered by their anti-aliasing and their recorded lines and, I don’t know, an absence of game-stopping bugs. Damn kids.
Okay then, a particular set of people who have played classic RPGs think fondly of Torment . Stop the presses, I’m obviously onto something revelatory.
So.
What games have really good writing?
Planescape: Torment. End of story.
No. No, generic forumite replying to a generic thread title, it’s not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning. To glibly parrot that is to forget what made the game great. Not just good, but great. Beloved.
Torment is epic in scope in the truest sense of the word. It’s extended (and how!) and poetic in its execution. It is not epic just because of the 800k word script, it is not special merely because of the amount of its content and the time it would take to experience it all. When we say that its story is what a game story should be, we’re not trying to posit that an involving narrative necessitates masses and masses of text—we just mean that Torment , in and of itself, is a narrative experience worth being part of.
What Torment did was something which had never been attempted before, using the capabilities (of the admittedly limited) technology available. It’s not impossible that a The Witcher or Dragon Age could try and pull off what Black Isle did, with unique animations for all the little bits of description and action that Torment merely described during conversations, but it’s impractical to the point that no developer would have the time or budget to allow for it.
Modern RPGs have less “space” to work with, cramming as much character development as possible into a few brief conversations. If Torment was the world’s fattest novel, The Witcher is a TV series, Mass Effect is a film trilogy. When we talk of game writing, we’re actually subconsciously remembering that the genre is huge and varied. We don’t expect the same approach (or same quality) in story from a platformer as we do in an RTS; we recognise the different needs and requirements of the writing.
So “the next” Torment , so to speak, will be as much a product of its time as the original. It’ll defy current expectations and toy with cliches. It’ll be quirky, it’ll be unpredictable, and above all it’ll be clever. But this new title won’t— I bet you now— it won’t be a novel. And some of us will just have to learn to deal with that. But hey! The original book is still on the shelf.
Or your harddrive. You can only stretch these analogies so far.
A copy-editor who occasionally does work of his own instead of messing with other people’s, Edcrab makes a living from being a pedant. In his spare time he likes to write things, but only when he’s not doing something essential like reading a book or watching a film or trying to beat a level on a game he’s terrible at. He lives in Cumbria with his tarantula and his Steam account.
