Data Briefing:

Phil Bordelon/Sunfall to-Ennien had the pleasure of interviewing Chris Avellone, Lead Designer for the highly anticipated Interplay title, Planescape: Torment. Find out everything you always wanted to know about PS:T and more. Stay tuned for Part 2, coming soon!

Planescape is considered the most adult setting of the AD&D universe. Its dark setting and philosophical bent don't lend themselves to the hack and slash glory of the Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Greyhawk campaign settings. Do you think this translated well into Torment? How so?

I think the setting does lend itself to hack and slash glory (try fighting your way through the Cubes of Acheron or clashing up against a Blood War patrol on the Gray Waste), but it's hardly the focus or the point of the setting. The point of the setting is that you are part of a greater multiverse, and what you believe, your faith, actually molds the world around your character – it promotes role-playing in its purest sense.

I think the setting translated well into Torment; there's plenty of hack and slash glory in the game, but there's a lot more mind-bending and character-defining moments present. What you do, what you say, and your actions define your character and the Planes around him – which is what Planescape's all about.

There are 17 Outer Planes, 18 Inner Planes, the Prime Material Plane, and the Astral, Ethereal, and perhaps Ordial connecting the three sets of planes. About how many found their way into Torment? Were there any logistical problems in implementing them, if you chose some of the odder ones?

You travel across five different planes in Torment, among them the Ethereal, Limbo, and a few other planes you'll quickly recognize. All of them had their challenges, mostly in terms of getting spells to work properly within the environments of the Planes.

Torment uses the Baldur's Gate engine as a core, yet alters it for the needs at hand. What sort of alterations needed to be done to make an engine designed for classic fantasy become an engine for a much more plot-based game?

The Baldur's Gate engine was already well-designed for a plot-based game, so we didn't have to make many changes. The dialogue engine is robust, the ability of allies to interact with each other is there, and any changes we made to the engine from a plot standpoint were pretty minor: we made sure you could talk to your allies, we tried to coax more out of cut-scenes and transitions than we probably should have, and we gave the allies and other characters abilities that were based more on their personality and their background than standard AD&D rules and the engine would allow. Still, all the Bioware editors made that stuff pretty painless as well – their editors kick-ass.

The creatures in Planescape are often fantastic, with demons and angels and everything in between, often strong enough to beat the snot out of any player character. Which of the major planar races (baatezu, tanar'ri, guardinal, rilmani, githyanki, githzerai, etc.) found their way into the game?

All of the ones mentioned above except the guardinals and the rilmai made it into the game, along with gensai, modrons, and aasimar, to name a few.

The plot of Torment centers around the Nameless One and him trying to recover his past. From originally seeing the game and the plot and the intro setting, I immediately thought of the Super Nintendo Shadowrun, which started off much the same. What were some of the major (non-Planescape) influences on Torment, both game- and prose-wise? Where did the idea as a whole come from?

The biggest influences on the game are probably Zelazny (who is the king of amnesiac characters coming into their own in a strange new world) and this space craft campaign I was planning to run in college and never got around to, though I did a lot of preparation work for it: all the characters started out in a derelict space ship, waking up from their bunks with no idea who they were or what they were doing there – and over the course of the campaign (it was only going to be three to five nights), they would have to research themselves on the ship's computers, their medical records, and basically try to puzzle out who they are, what they're doing there, and why they are the only survivors in the vessel. I thought it'd be cool to run a campaign where the main goal of the characters is to find out who they are, but in the process of finding out who they were, they actually end up finding out what kind of people they've become as a result of losing their memories.

Planescape is a complex world, moreso than any other AD&D setting. Do you think the average player will be able to successfully grasp the setting and immerse themselves in it?

There's enough common role-playing elements for a player to pick up the basics, and the game itself helps guide you along – there won't be any problems with starting to play it – just trying to stop once you start. When the development team started hammering through the game in earnest, we kept getting distracted with all the side quests in the game that we kept playing and playing and forgot we were testing.

Torment promises to have some oddball character designs, from puritan succubi to the Nameless One himself. What sort of process did coming up with the entourage entail?

Designing characters, especially their personalities, motivations and quirks has always been one of my favorite design tasks. Once Torment began, I immediately sat down and started carving out the allies and important villains of the piece. In most cases, the character's personalities came before their stories; their motivations dictated their roles in the game. Some of the character concepts were ones I always wanted to play around with in a computer game (a puritan succubus), others were traditional classes from Planescape that I felt should be represented in the game (such as Annah, who in some ways is intended to present the tiefling's point of view of Planescape).

Once the main characters were designed, our concept artist, modeler, and animator, Eric Campanella, drew up the character concepts and constructed the models, tailoring their clothes, expressions, and animations to emphasize the character's personalities. Fall-From-Grace's movements, from her attack to her spell-casting, tend to be conservative and reserved, while Morte (the sarcastic, floating skull) tends to be more flamboyant in everything from his fidgets to his “running” animation. Watching him head-butt an opponent is something else.

After reading through the Planescape material, it became apparent that while the setting used the AD&D rules, the setting itself was more relaxed in terms of what was permissible and what wasn't – given that the Planescape was an infinity of infinities, anything was possible, so that affected the types of characters I created. Non-traditional characters were not only “okay” to do in Planescape, they were encouraged… thus, we set about making puritan succubi priestesses, insane geometric shapes, hollow suits of armor, and sarcastic skulls that taunt people to death. It seemed a waste of the setting to have a gruff dwarf fighter, an aloof elven archer, a pug-nosed halfling thief, a wise elderly mage, and so on.

...Check back soon for Part 2