I Finally Beat Planescape: Torment
In *knowing* the teachings of Avellone I have become stronger.
Today I have finally beaten Planescape: Torment. Over the course of my life I have endeavored under this task approximately as many times as the Nameless One has been reborn from death. The furthest I ever got was in college, when it came out for iPad. I reached Ravel Puzzlewell’s maze and promptly lost interest.
This incarnation was far from my first. I made it partway through Sigil who-knows how many times in my childhood. Always my brothers would assure me that Torment was THE BEST cRPG, and I really had to play it. As I grew older, this sentiment seemed to be found everywhere online, so again and again I would try. But I never made it far. In my youngest years, my main objection to the game was that the Nameless One wouldn’t put on a shirt, and looked ridiculous. As I grew older, I began to more resent the awful systems design and (initially) thin plot.
Despite all this I knew that if I just sat down to finish the game, I would enjoy it. I knew so many RPGers weren’t wrong. I knew Chris Avellone was a great writer. I just had to get it over with.
So I finally have. And as I thought, I’m glad I did. The final act of Planescape: Torment is brilliant and moving and among the best from any RPG ever made. Quite possibly the best. You don’t need me to explain why; there are trillions of video essays on YouTube doing just that already. While their attempt was far from perfect, Avellone and his team led the way in narrative design, particularly for cRPGs, that gives an actual character for the player to inhabit, and in so doing paved the eventual road that brought us the KotOR games, Mass Effect, and finally The Witcher. No one had done it like this before Torment.
(And if you ask me, these sorts of games—where you are not a nameless blob, but a real person in the setting, with a past and a history—are far preferable to the Baldur’s Gates, the Outer Worldses, and the Pathfinders. Discovering your place in a grander scheme will always be more interesting in a roleplaying game than inhabiting a black void of personality, who amasses followers despite having no face, no voice, and no personality. Why does anyone fall in love with the Warden from DA:O? I don’t know. But I do understand why the Nameless One amasses followers—very explicitly.)
But I’m also glad it’s over with. Getting through this game felt a lot like eating my vegetables. I knew I had to do it because it was good for me; and while I wanted to know how it ended, I was never especially engaged with the plot itself until the end (it's mostly just asking questions to a long line of NPCs, one after another). I found the dialogue trees to be very poorly constructed and the text itself to be monstrously overwritten.
Originally I was going to compile examples of both of these sins, particularly in the way dialogue trees are organized, and complain endlessly about a game as old as I am, that no one cares about, as I usually do.
I won’t this time. I have no desire to nitpick this game, or explain why I found it hard to get through, because the reality is this: it’s old. It’s outdated. It has a lot of problem. Everyone can see that. You can see that for yourself. But unlike Fallout 2 or Diablo 2, the love Torment receives is no mystery, and I have no real motivation to deconstruct it.
Torment is far from my favorite cRPG. I like it a lot less than Fallout 1, and about as much as Fallout 2 (2 and Torment are bad for many of the same reasons). I don’t think it’s as good Torment: Tides of Numenara, and I think Avellone’s more recent visitation of the same themes in Prey is far defter and more mature.
But I am glad to have played it. And I hope someday, as I flounder with my writing career, I can come up with something anywhere near as compelling as what Avellone manages in the final few hours of Torment. Like KotOR 2, here is a game that could desperately use a remake.
What can change the nature of a blogger?
For years, throughout all of high school and college, every time I watched a movie, read a book, or played a game, there ignited within me an unquenchable desire to analyze and deconstruct what it was I had just consumed. This fire was at its brightest after the shitshow launch of The Last of Us: Part II; it became so intensely hot, so blinding and destructive, that I had no choice but to launch this blog. Everyone had to know why that game was so terrible.
For a while, I felt similarly about everything I was exposed to. The result is the long catalogue of posts on theplayeristhething.com. I took far more joy in the analysis of a thing than in the thing itself.
Yet since I’ve begun to take my writing career more seriously, with the launch of my Substack especially, that joy has seriously waned. I’ve felt like my postings on this blog are done more from a sense of obligation than an intrinsic desire. The energy that a review requires has seemed so much better spent on my fiction than on complaining about things for the Internet.
I’ve been contemplating this for a while now, but Torment has driven the point home. At first I had written out an entire essay bitching about the dialogue trees from this game released in 1999. But who fucking cares? Modern games have vastly improved that part of RPG design. It's not an issue that needs discussing. Obsidian innovated and figured out how to write games like this after Pillars. So who cares?
Not me. So it's not worth the time or effort. I don't really care, and neither do you (if you even exist).
I'm not sure what I'm getting at here, except to say that the era of the angry review may be over. My postings on this blog will likely wind down, and when my Wordpress expires (in the far future at this point), I'll likely migrate everything here to Substack--and leave it mostly entombed there.
Or maybe the desire to write reviews and essays will return to me. I do often have opinions that I cannot contain within myself, and thus must vomit onto unwilling strangers. I do feel like this space is important, for heterodox ideas in games journalism and for laying bare the syphilitics' plague that is Neil Druckmann's existence. But really, creation is far nobler than deconstruction. Maybe it's better to ignore the Druckmanns of the game industry and just make my own shit (that will, unlike his creations, not be shit). I guess we'll see.