Josan12 said:
+ Extraordinary depth (rivalling FO for sure)
What is your definition of depth? A plethora of dialog trees with some excessively existential philosophical writing that at times forced me to meander a break just so I would not groan in anguish for an extended period of time?
There is not much depth in PS:T, for all its other commendable qualities it's a static storyline with varying alignments slightly affecting the course of the action as far as emotional tinting can be concerned. You kill all you come across, make the lives of others miserable, the story is still the same, the Nameless One still must atone for his unspeakable past crime and that crime, whatever it may be, is still the same, similarly, so are your incarnations still unchanging as well as their past deeds.
What depth is there in the character, beyond his excessive ethical and philosophical musings? None, you're restricted to a few basic and uninteresting classes, only one of which is interesting or useful to play as at all (the Mage obviously) and character development is restricted to your tedious interactions with the denizens of the Hive or Curst or where else the game eventually leads you.
There are no options available to you, and the system behind the game is arguably even shallower and more basic than Fallout 3's, the game can hardly be considered a roleplaying game as it never truly concerns itself with the niceties of the genre. A horde of stat checks in dialog is hardly a true display of a roleplaying game's fervor in meeting the qualifications of its genre as a veritable and definable RPG "experience".
Oh, and you can apply some points to stats, well, there you go.
There are no alternations respective to character action, or even your dialog choices which seems to be the root of Torment's praise. Rather, your fellow party members experience some worthless "growth" such as Dak'kon's interaction with the Nameless One and the Ring, or Nordom's improvements as you fiddle with his programming. But what does this all mean if the combat is utterly reprehensible?
Suffer no such illusions that Torment's combat is passable, or in some strange madness of unclarity consider it to be the same as those in other Infinity Engine titles. For one thing, there is almost no ranged combat, a massive part of nearly any AD&D game. Spells are incredibly unbalanced, sludging either in the realm of useless or entirely overpowered, and to force this assertion into extremity, most buffs and status effect spells are completely irrelevant and hardly ever need to be used, something that cannot, with utter certainty, be said of any other Infinity Engine game.
Weapon choice is limited, as is armor, character development is minimal, the view is zoomed in far too close making combat a chaotic poorly paced affair that fills up the entirety of the screen. Not only that, but spells are supremely annoying, your best options constantly display incredibly bothersome animations that once again, serve to break up the pacing of combat.
Somehow, and I really don't understand how anyone who isn't a complete and utter moron at game development could manage this, the die rolls are utterly erratic and aimless. Damage amounts are all over the place, to the point that the Nameless One swinging around a toothpick dagger all of a sudden performs a heinous amount of damage without a critical.
This, I assume, can be blamed on the fact that Black Isle stripped down many of the complexities of the system in order to compensate for the lack of ranged weaponry and focused on the superfluous glossing of atmosphere and dialog.
I see how it's possible to fantasize about the superb quality of the writing (which is arguable as well, as it sometimes led me into excessive eye-rolling), but I do not understand how anyone could consider Planescape: Torment a good game as far as its mechanics go. Remember that the first thing a good RPG does is make sure that it has a tight and flexible system, the Gold Box games did, and more familiarly, Fallout did with the SPECIAL system.
Planescape is in its entirety a broken game with some good atmosphere and what many would call great writing. But if it is to be considered an example of a "true" RPG, then I am truly baffled by people's standards, somehow it's entirely okay for the game to be irreparably flawed to the point that everything under the hood twists and twines about itself into a ragged mess,
if it provides a vision of "intelligent gaming".
I didn't seem to notice. Anyone care to explain?
