Torment Beamdog's Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition

[Popiel]

GO AND BURN IN BAATOR, BLASPHEMER.

 

[Infinitron]

Oh wait, maybe not a leak? https://venturebeat.com/2017/03/28/...edition-from-the-remaster-masters-at-beamdog/

Planescape: Torment gets an Enhanced Edition from the remaster masters at Beamdog

They’re doing it again.

Beamdog has made a business out of taking beloved role-playing games from the 1990s and making “enhanced” versions — remasters, essentially — for modern PCs. We saw them do it with excellent versions of Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, and Icewind Dale. Heck, the designers there have even taken their remixing skills to making new stories for these games with last year’s Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a new chapter wedged between the first Baldur’s Gate and Shadows of Amn.

Now, they’re turning their attention to what might be the best role-playing game of all time with Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition, which Beamdog announced today. It’ll bring the treasured classic to modern PCs (and Mac and Linux systems, too), and its lead designer, Chris Avellone, is coming along to help the studio curate this gem.

Planescape: Torment hit in 1999, and as time has passed, its reputation has grown. Its original studio, Black Isle Studios, crafted an RPG where the player’s decisions matter more than their battles; you could play without killing anything, though this was a rare feat. Its setting of Sigil is like no other — it comes from Dungeons & Dragons‘ Planescape campaign setting (this was the publisher TSR at the height of its creative power with D&D). Sigil is “The City of Doors,” sort of the intersection of all the planes. It enables for epic storytelling, a place where angel and devil, fey and elemental, and the poor berks of the Prime all mix … and all know to avoid the gaze of The Lady of Pain, its lord. Avellone and Black Isle took this and made a game that changed what “choice” meant when it came to RPGs, and its pedigree could be found in later games like InExile’s recent (and excellent) Torment: Tides of Numenera, which is a Planescape game in all but name.

In addition to smoothing out Torment’s code and making look nice and run well on modern PCs, Beamdog is also remastering the soundtrack, adding 4K support, and launching in English, French, German, and Polish, with support for Korean text (but with English voice acting).

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Beamdog updates "curated" by MCA. Yeah.

Sadly his "brand" is becoming the Pierre Cardin of gaming.

 

[MediantSamuel]

What is it with BeamDog and the fucking black outlines? Is nothing sacred!?

 

[Thor Kaufman]

^
btw didnt a dexer make that vid

 

[J_C]

Beamdog updates "curated" by MCA. Yeah.

Sadly his "brand" is becoming the Pierre Cardin of gaming.

He is selling out faster than WallMart on Black Friday.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

Codex's top 2 rpgs will be

1. PS:T:EE
2. PS:T

 

[Zed]

lol @ colin mccomb being completely disregarded
also lol @ upscaled character sprites with black outlines (they look like shit)

 

[Zed]

and a huge lol @ the fact that this will sell better and be way more profitable than the entire numenera franchise put together

 

[Black]

I forgot that Arroyo's elder also asked the question.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Quillon]

Remastered my ass, I can barely see anything in the UI. Why is it so hard only updating the UI and making it intuitive..? Also why haven't anybody mod the fallouts to remove the mouse cycling, yet? FUUUUU..

 

[A user named cat]

The sprites look like claymation characters from The Neverhood with a Photoshop stroke added. I also like how their trailer presented the game as an action RPG and showed none of the dialogue, basically the entire reason to even (re)play PS:T. Beamdog are officially the worst RPG company in existence, step aside Bethesda and Bioware.

 

[Junmarko]

At least they aren't fucking with the story/characters. Thank fuck.

EDIT:- Confirmed, they aren't:

Alright Codex people, PST:EE is now live. There's a FAQ section on the Beamdog website which may answer some of your questions. In addition, here are some design decisions that I made as the PST:EE Project Lead:

• No new party members, quests, NPCs, areas or cinematic movies
• No new writing by anyone except Chris Avellone. In case you're wondering, Chris wrote a couple of new journal entries, adjusted a few special ability (i.e. Morte's Skull Mob) textual descriptions and composed the text that is displayed on the new "Welcome Screen". He also designed the Steam Achievements (wrote the text and specified the icon appearance) and named the new main menu buttons (i.e. Options = Alter Senses)
• No changes to existing writing except for a proofreading pass of the original game text by Chris Avellone (he asked to do this)
• No kits/classes/races/spells/items from BG2 or IWD
• No changes to the combat and general gameplay
• No "Story Mode" or "Heart of Fury" difficulty settings
• No multiplayer

Note that when I say "writing" I'm referring to the text that the player can access within the gameworld i.e. by talking to NPCs, inspecting objects, spells, items and the journal. That doesn't include text that is accessed outside of the gameworld such as the technical descriptions which explain how new UI options like "Zoom Lock" or "Hardware Mouse Cursor" function. The descriptions of those options were written by the developers who worked on implementing them, not by Chris.

 

[Morgoth]

9 hours to go, then I want to slam down my dough.

Motherfuckers.

What is Tides of Numenera anyway? Some faggy try-hard ripoff or what?

 

[A user named cat]

"Get ready for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition on iOS and Android!"

 

[Jazz_]

What is it with BeamDog and the fucking black outlines? Is nothing sacred!?

Yep the black outlines look like ass (sort of cartoony), although you can disable them in BG2 I think? (haven't played the EE of BG2 myself). And in Icewind Dale EE the npcs didn't have black outlines, Beamdog seems very inconsistent:

 

[Goral]

At least they aren't fucking with the story/characters. Thank fuck.

We don't know it yet, all we know is that updates are curated by MCA (supposedly).

Even Herve and his team making remastered version would be less disastrous than Beamdog hacks.

Chris Avellone
What do you have to say for yourself?

 

[Rev]

The best Kotaku has to say about Torment is that it's "sort of like a cross between Cirque du Soleil and the Necronomicon"? WTF does that even mean? Fucking hacks.

By the way, that awful interface from the leak is confirmed, the combat log on the top right somehow manages to make it even worse with its dumb positioning which covers too much of the screen and the only graphical enhancement over the original seems to be the support for higher resolutions. This time Beamdog seems to have outdone itself with this cash grab.

 

[FeelTheRads]

The fuck is with that Mechanus Cannon video? It seems they kept the original one just added sort of duplicated and blurred it on the edges to fit a wide-screen.

 

[Projas]

Yep the black outlines look like ass (sort of cartoony), although you can disable them in BG2 I think? (haven't played the EE of BG2 myself). And in Icewind Dale EE the npcs didn't have black outlines, Beamdog seems very inconsistent:

It was in Siege of Dragonspear, but I don't think it was in BG2.

 

[Infinitron]

And in Icewind Dale EE the npcs didn't have black outlines, Beamdog seems very inconsistent:

That's because they never got around to updating IWD:EE with the new "IE++ 2.0" engine they developed for Dragonspear.

 

[Transfiguring Roar]

Infinitron is spot on. Hopefully they leave IWD:EE as is, because if they do update it, IWD:EE will possibly be getting the awful UI update from SoD. No fucking thanks!

 

[Junmarko]

At least they aren't fucking with the story/characters. Thank fuck.

We don't know it yet, all we know is that updates are curated by MCA (supposedly).

I'm ok with that, if it's true and applies only to graphical/bug fixes.

The last few days I have been freaking out that it would be "With new amendments and original content added by ex-Bioware veteran David Gaider!"

So, again, thank fuck it isn't.

 

[J_C]

What is it with BeamDog and the fucking black outlines? Is nothing sacred!?

Yep the black outlines look like ass (sort of cartoony), although you can disable them in BG2 I think? (haven't played the EE of BG2 myself). And in Icewind Dale EE the npcs didn't have black outlines, Beamdog seems very inconsistent:

Why the fuck do the characters have double rings around their feet? Sorry, I know the answer: just for the sake of it. Beamdog didn't know what should they "enhance" so they had to find stupid shit like this.