Easy ways to improve Planescape: Torment

[buffalo bill]

Planescape: Torment (this thread is not about Numanera) is a pretty good game, but has some serious flaws. I was recently thinking that these flaws could be pretty easily fixed. Here are my ideas (the first two ideas have probably occurred to everyone who has played P:T).

(i) make the combat turn-based (this requires no explanation)

(ii) improve encounters: there is lots of trash combat, and not enough difficult encounters. Cut a good amount of the trash combat (but not all of it, since it's good to have some filler combat to indicate how the player has become stronger since beginning the game), and make the remaining encounters more difficult (ideally not with hp bloat, though)

(iii) give dying more consequence. This is related to some ideas in the thread on ludonarrative dissonance. In the game, we are told that dying causes the nameless one to lose memories, but in game there is no such consequence, and the NO can die as many times as the player wants (though apparently there are more shadows in the engame if you die more before reaching that, but that consequence is pretty whatever).

My specific idea here is that the NO loses an increasing amount of xp for every death. E.g. first death is -100 xp, second is -200, third is -400, etc. In scenarios in which the NO gains xp by dying (I think this can happen several times), the xp lost is subtracted from the xp gained. This would give some cost to dying which the player would have to assess as worthwhile or not, and fits with the narrative about dying that the player is presented with.


I imagine an ambitions modder could implement one or more of these changes, and significantly improve P:T. (maybe such a mod even exists for the combat, but I don't know about it)


Any other suggestions for simple changes that would significantly improve the game?

 

[Sizzle]

Oh, if only there had been some sort of a remake, an Enhanced Edition if you will, that could have improved - enhanced! - the original game.

But alas, no such thing.

 

[Thal]

Planescape: Torment (this thread is not about Numanera) is a pretty good game, but has some serious flaws. I was recently thinking that these flaws could be pretty easily fixed. Here are my ideas (the first two ideas have probably occurred to everyone who has played P:T).

(i) make the combat turn-based (this requires no explanation)

Yes it does. PS:T has the worst IE combat by a long margin. What makes it worse is that the best of what IE combat has to offer is really good: Davaeorn, Durlag's Tower, BG2 mage duels, some IWD encounters and most of IWD2. The most obvious way to address this fault is study how these games were designed - each of them had different design principles - and how this design could have been applied to PS:T. Making PS:T turn-based would solve nothing.

(ii) improve encounters: there is lots of trash combat, and not enough difficult encounters. Cut a good amount of the trash combat (but not all of it, since it's good to have some filler combat to indicate how the player has become stronger since beginning the game), and make the remaining encounters more difficult (ideally not with hp bloat, though)

Which is what you acknowledge here. The big question is how to improve encounters. However, it must be more than simply manipulating individual encounters. You have to take into account itemization, area-design, character development, linearity/non-linearity. If you compare BG1 to IWD1 for example, you see that their combat is drawn from different principles. BG1 is largely, but not entirely based on resource management. It has lots of trash mobs, occasionally respawing enemies, random encounters that scale with level and deadly rest spawns. You are expected to face boss fights with depleted resources, which is supposed to make them harder for low-level parties. These features are undone in non-ironman playthroughs for obvious reasons. IWD too has rest spawns, but it is largely based on tough individual encounters, which is the design principle BG2 also adopted.

Some initial suggestions:
Given that in PS:T death has no consequence and the game is mostly linear, the obvious solution would be to adopt IWD approach over BG1. For starters, make the resolution larger and the characters slightly slower, so positioning and movement become tactical issues. Increase the amount of equipment and character development options to make more build varieties possible. Fine tune the difficulty to make sure that the player needs to study the system and make good choices in character development. Make sure that the economy is sufficiently harsh that the player has to pick and choose what good gear they are able to afford. Adopt mage duels from BG2 and make sure that encounters are composed of enemies with different class or creature type combinations who use different attack types (such as adventure parties in BGs). Work on the AI to make sure that backstabbing enemies use consumables such as invisibility potions appropriately and target mages, or that two enemy mages cast complementary spells.

(iii) give dying more consequence. This is related to some ideas in the thread on ludonarrative dissonance. In the game, we are told that dying causes the nameless one to lose memories, but in game there is no such consequence, and the NO can die as many times as the player wants (though apparently there are more shadows in the engame if you die more before reaching that, but that consequence is pretty whatever).

My specific idea here is that the NO loses an increasing amount of xp for every death. E.g. first death is -100 xp, second is -200, third is -400, etc. In scenarios in which the NO gains xp by dying (I think this can happen several times), the xp lost is subtracted from the xp gained. This would give some cost to dying which the player would have to assess as worthwhile or not, and fits with the narrative about dying that the player is presented with.

It is explained in the game that this time TNO doesn't lose memories and the big mystery is why. Second, the entire point of dying without consequence was to subvert traditional gameplay loop of loading on death by weaving it into the story itself. Your solution would ruin it, because players are loath to accept even small exp penalties and would load an earlier save on those occasions.

 

[Maxie]

Big laugh at you OP. PST is flawed by design - it's a walkie-talkie type of game elbow pressed into the Baulders formula of walking around and killing monsters, resulting in an overblown fest of clicking dialogue and slogging through shitty encounters. The storyfag WIS/CHAR build results in absurd EXP gains from dialogue, turning the game into a trite exercise in spellcasting, provided you actually bothered to spec as mage - otherwise you suffer this awkward 'experience,' trying to salvage any quality bits whatsoever. And this exactly is the true image of PST - a cherry-picked gallery of quirky dialogue with all the nonsensical filler conveniently left out. Why it plagues Codexian TOP RPG lists is beyond me, since it's clearly no good as an RPG.

I've nothing to say about the quality of its writing, simply because I did not find it either interesting or enjoyable.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Have a better pacing between combat and non-combat (aka reading walls of text) sequences to make it play more like an actual RPG and less like a visual novel.

 

[Jack_Deth]

Give the license to Cleve.

 

[Nano]

Yes it does. PS:T has the worst IE combat by a long margin. What makes it worse is that the best of what IE combat has to offer is really good: Davaeorn, Durlag's Tower, BG2 mage duels, some IWD encounters and most of IWD2. The most obvious way to address this fault is study how these games were designed - each of them had different design principles - and how this design could have been applied to PS:T. Making PS:T turn-based would solve nothing.

Yeah, no. D&D is fundamentally turn-based, any other combat system isn't going to fly.

 

[GhostCow]

Planescape: Torment (this thread is not about Numanera) is a pretty good game, but has some serious flaws. I was recently thinking that these flaws could be pretty easily fixed. Here are my ideas (the first two ideas have probably occurred to everyone who has played P:T).

(i) make the combat turn-based (this requires no explanation)

No. Why do turn based fags always want to take games away from rtwpfags? I'm not going to ask for turn based games to be turned into rtwp.

(ii) improve encounters: there is lots of trash combat, and not enough difficult encounters. Cut a good amount of the trash combat (but not all of it, since it's good to have some filler combat to indicate how the player has become stronger since beginning the game), and make the remaining encounters more difficult (ideally not with hp bloat, though)

Encounters definitely need an improvement but I don't want less of them. The game is already close to visual novel territory. I think more interesting class options for the Nameless One would have helped a lot. I was kind of hoping the EE would be ported to the BG2 engine so modders could get the class kits in. More variety of mobs in encounters with better AI would help too.

[/QUOTE](iii) give dying more consequence. This is related to some ideas in the thread on ludonarrative dissonance. In the game, we are told that dying causes the nameless one to lose memories, but in game there is no such consequence, and the NO can die as many times as the player wants (though apparently there are more shadows in the engame if you die more before reaching that, but that consequence is pretty whatever).[/QUOTE]

Some of the puzzles were based around having to die and they were some of the best parts of the game so no.

My specific idea here is that the NO loses an increasing amount of xp for every death. E.g. first death is -100 xp, second is -200, third is -400, etc. In scenarios in which the NO gains xp by dying (I think this can happen several times), the xp lost is subtracted from the xp gained. This would give some cost to dying which the player would have to assess as worthwhile or not, and fits with the narrative about dying that the player is presented with.

No thanks. Got enough of this in Everquest. I fucking hate any kind of xp penalties in general and think they are terrible game design. It's the reason I didn't play certain races in 3.5

 

[Glop_dweller]

(i) make the combat turn-based (this requires no explanation)

Yes it does.

If your internal explanation is, "Because I like turn based, and not RTwP", well a lot of us feel that way, but that's no justification to change the game, and it's not necessarily an improvement. It's akin to 'improving' Vegemite by making it taste like Nutela; that's making into something else entirely, and by destroying qualities that many prefer.

Consider that a turn based conflict in any of the wards would play out like a city-wide fight in New Reno, or Adytum, as seen in Fallout 1 & 2. The wards are densely populated by faction members, and a fight with any one of them is a fight with all of them.

__________

Suggestions to improve the game:

• Adjust the UI to better accommodate long conversations, and long lists of responses.
• Change (and add more) encounters (and creepy interactions), but do them in the style of Pillar's of Eternity's special text based encounters; complete with additional artwork for representing the situations.
• Adjust the rule set to allow for proper multi-class, instead of the awkward single class Nameless One, who can only be a fighter, or a thief, or a mage at any one time.
  

 

[Thunar]

- Remake the game inside the bg2 engine, this takes care of the awkward ui

- Remove every class that isn't a mage, there's no customization to TNO anyways.

- Add the various mage schools and a couple of home-brewed mechanics to highlight their differences

• Focus on making character development satisfying, so that in the end, by clever use of spells, items and attribute gain, one could become a battle mage, summoning ranger, illusionist thief, etc.

• This wouldn't be multi-classing, you have enough attribute gains during the game to pump your dex/str, while still having high int and wis. Perhaps it could be supported through the use of feats.

• In order to help with itemization and the variety of builds, allow the player to craft his own scrolls and wands, similar to knights of the chalice. Perhaps with the possibility of making some spells "permanent" through tattoos (x amount of uses/day style).

- Remove Curst, the city itself has nothing to offer but half finished quests. The prison/fight with the deva can be an isolated plane, hell, you could reuse the planar prison assets from bg2.

- The demon who's forced to do good could be found by a portal in the Under Sigil, making it actually interesting to go there. Obviously redesigning the under sigil encounters would be necessary, though some of them were already quite fun, but they got repetitive. Perhaps add a puzzle(s) to be solved to open the portal while being swarmed by enemies

You're basically tightening what already exists within it and focusing on what works, completely scrapping what doesn't. That's what Numenera should have been... they probably had enough money to negotiate the real licenses, assets and script.

 

[Shadenuat]

Planescape doesn't need any focus on combat, it's not a game about it. And it doesn't need improvements, just like any old game, it is what it was created at a time by people with its high points and flaws and it should stay that way. If anything the flaws in things are as important as good parts when it comes to perspective on things.

 

[Thunar]

Planescape doesn't need any focus on combat, it's not a game about it. And it doesn't need improvements, just like any old game, it is what it was created at a time by people with its high points and flaws and it should stay that way. If anything the flaws in things are as important as good parts when it comes to perspective on things.

I don't think anybody is saying it should have had a focus on combat during its development. That would have resulted in an entirely different game and would have undercut a lot of what made the game good. This is more about what would you like fans/devs to do with the game, similarly to TOEE's Co8 or an EE.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Falksi]

Run Uninstall.exe

Removes all shit features from the game

 

[Ysaye]

just turn it into cyoa

Even better, Visual Novel.

Seriously though, on the question of turn based - I love turn based games but in a game which is not really about combat, isn't real-time better? It goes faster for one thing......

 

[a Goat]

Uninstalling it. It's a shit game liked by nerds who used it for about 2 decades as a proof that their manbaby hobby is totally sirius stuff, in before going to my little pony convention.

 

[Funposter]

what if the nameless one was a cute anime girl? maybe even with kitty ears?

 

[octavius]

Either turn it into a pure CYOA/interactive novel, or dramatically improve the encounter design.
Personally I really can't stand the extreme story faggotry combined with poor and too frequent combat.

 

[Lilura]

I don't think anybody is saying it should have had a focus on combat during its development.

Only I've said that. That subject dominated my retrospective. And maybe one of the devs wished PS:T combat was a bit better, but that's about it. You can see in the spell ranges, itemization and enemies/companions, that combat could have been good.

Most people are happy with the way PS:T turned out, and it's first-ranked on the 'Dex, but there is no accounting for collective "taste", and the rabble is always wrong.

That would have resulted in an entirely different game and would have undercut a lot of what made the game good.

More like it would have resulted in more of a game: games are about, well, game-play, and D&D is a hack n slash ruleset.

I don't doubt that, if combat was done properly, it would have resulted in a better game. Maybe one that could have toppled Baldur's Gate.

This is more about what would you like fans/devs to do with the game, similarly to TOEE's Co8 or an EE.

Co8 and the EEs are shit, though.

 

[a Goat]

Typical PS:T fan

 

[Darth Canoli]

Typical PS:T fan

Nobody here would judge you if it's secretly how you want to dress, wanna talk about it ?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Either turn it into a pure CYOA/interactive novel, or dramatically improve the encounter design.
Personally I really can't stand the extreme story faggotry combined with poor and too frequent combat.

PsT - Disco Edition.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Let's assume I have managed to huff my medicinal anger management shit and won't call you a nonce immediately - PST is in the end a D&D adventure with near every single member of the cast being an active combatant in a world without Mr Colt's equalizer

But does it work in its favor? You yourself stated that the combat is shit. Though I understand that, given your view of the writing as being 'neither interesting nor enjoyable', that you'd rather scrap that and turn PsT into a wackier IWD.

 

[Citizen]

PS:T is weird. It's basically an interactive fiction adventure game that was by some terrible mistake made in Infinity Engine instead of whatever the engine infocom games used, which resulted in what we have: a boring slog of a game where the developers want me to read a pretentious pseudo-phylosophical CYOA book, but constanly interrupt my attempts at understanding their graphomaniacal scribbling by shoving unbearably terrible combat sequences down my throat

I always though that it being the #1 rated codex classic is some kind a post-ironic elitist inside joke

 

[Lilura]

I like how PS:T breaks down and throws these at storyfags: