I often find that the greatest works of art come from the most unexpected places. That is certainly the case with Planescape: Torment. Twenty-five years after its release, it’s still hailed as one of the most intelligent and profound RPGs ever made. But its origin story is one of happy accidents, creative freedom, and a self-described ‘B-team’ of developers at Black Isle Studios who were given a ‘stay-busy’ project and turned it into a masterpiece.
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In 1997, Interplay was in the midst of a CRPG revolution, overseeing the development of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. Planescape was initially three separate, struggling projects. Producer Feargus Urquhart made a crucial decision: scrap them all and start over with one unified vision. The mandate was simple: use the Baldur’s Gate engine, don’t invent new tech, and differentiate the game through its character and story.
This is the story of how that small team, many with little experience, took a strange, esoteric D&D setting and created a game that would challenge the very definition of what an RPG could be. It’s a tale of identity, subversion, and the quest to answer one question: ‘What can change the nature of a man?’
💀 A Hero Unlike Any Other
The first and most important decision was to create a character who was anything but generic. This gave us The Nameless One, a grotesquely scarred immortal who loses his memory each time he’s resurrected. His quest isn’t to save the world, but simply to find out who he is. It’s a deeply personal journey of identity and redemption, piecing together the puzzle of his past incarnations.
This narrative focus was reflected in the gameplay. The team zoomed the camera in closer than in Baldur’s Gate, creating a more intimate feel. The traditional RPG classes were still there, but the optimal way to play, I always found, was to pour points into Wisdom and Intelligence. This unlocked more dialogue options and memories, revealing the game’s incredibly rich story. Combat was often secondary to conversation.
The companions you gather are just as unconventional, including a floating, wise-cracking skull named Morte, a succubus sworn to celibacy, and an iron golem obsessed with entropy. These characters were brought to life by some of the most mature and challenging writing I’ve ever seen in a game, a standard that other narrative-driven games like Cyberpunk 2077 would later aspire to.
🏙️ Building the City of Doors
The setting, Sigil, The City of Doors, is as unique as the protagonist. It’s not a typical fantasy city of castles and cobbled streets. It’s a bizarre, rusting, and jagged metropolis floating atop an impossibly tall mountain. The art team, led by Tim Donley, was given immense freedom to visualize a world that, at the time, existed mostly in text.
This freedom was a direct result of the project’s low-profile status. With management focused on bigger titles, the ‘Dirty Dozen’ developers on Torment were free to experiment. They embraced an open-minded philosophy, summed up by lead designer Chris Avellone’s vision: ‘If you want to create something, don’t use your first instinct. Stop for a moment, then put a spin on the idea.’
This led to a world where rats are part of a collective hive mind at war with a civilized nation of the undead, and a brothel exists to satiate intellectual lusts rather than physical ones. The architecture is unapologetically ugly, with buildings resembling insect hives or rusted barricades. It was a world that defied every fantasy cliché, and it was utterly captivating. This kind of deep world-building is something I also deeply appreciated in my retrospective on The Witcher 3.
🔧 Breaking the Engine
The team’s ambition wasn’t just limited to art and story; they pushed the Infinity Engine to its absolute limits. BioWare, who was building the engine concurrently, had set standards for things like animation frames. The Torment team, in their ‘wide-eyed optimism,’ simply ran roughshod over them. They added animated backgrounds, with rotating gears and oozing molten metal, something the engine wasn’t designed for.
I was amazed to learn that the animation for The Nameless One getting off the slab at the start of the game was almost 300 frames long—a ridiculous number at the time. When the Black Isle team showed this to BioWare’s CEO, he was stunned, asking his own programmers why they told him it wasn’t possible.
The answer was simple: the Torment team was a group of talented misfits who didn’t know what was ‘impossible,’ so they just did it. This spirit of fearless innovation, born from being a ‘stay-busy’ project that nobody was watching too closely, is what allowed Planescape: Torment to become a timeless masterpiece. It’s a legacy of creativity that lives on in the studios it inspired, like Larian, which I covered in my interview with Swen Vincke.
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