PS:T goes out of print

[interrupt]

I think the Gamespot Graveyard feature on TORN with Ferg and Dave pretty much covered it all. We had a lot of technology limitations and organizational problems, and all of them combined derailed the project long before it was cancelled. It certainly wasn’t for lack of talent on the team; the vast majority of us had developed at least one top notch CRPG before and Dave’s design work for the game was fantastic. Most of us were relived when TORN was shelved, because there’s no way it would have congealed into anything remotely resembling a class Black Isle game in the time that we had left.

In retrospect, had Feargus been around more during the first year of development I think a fair amount of our problems would have been squashed early on (he was overwhelmed with overseeing the production of both Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate II), but I still don’t think we would have ever overcome our issues with Lithtech. It’s not that it was a bad engine or anything, but we fell for the same mistake that many developers have in thinking that licensing an engine will always save you time and money. Our industry has more than enough examples of the opposites happening.

Hope that answers your question.

[fable]

Yes, it does, thanks.

Scott, as you can probably tell from the top threads on this board, many of us feel that PS:T went considerably beyond the average jejune "kill this now kill that" CRPG, delving into darker areas of personal manipulation and ethical ambiguity. Did any of this interest you? What were the aspects of PS:T within the game intself that made it something you enjoyed working on?

[Platter]

Eh... I wasn't serious about ignoring me.

[interrupt]

Most definitely. The first time I read one of Avellone’s dialog documents for the game I knew that Torment was in as class by itself and that I had to be involved with project. To give you some perspective on the why the content was how it was, the three principle writers for the project had degrees in Writing, Philosophy, and Psychology, and all three of them had a lifetime immersion in PnP role playing (and of course one actually worked for TSR). The game didn’t turn out like it did by accident.

I was also attracted to the wild imagination of Planescape. I grew up with computer role playing games and science fiction, so while I had a definite interest in all things D&D, if I had the choice between working in established properties and 100% original ones, I’d chose the latter. Working within Planescape felt entirely fresh as the setting itself allowed for such a high degree of reckless creativity. A large portion of the team was influenced by Japanese storytelling and game design, so the rigid-ness of your typical fantasy archetypes wasn’t exactly everyone’s bag. After the success of Torment, the initial design ideas for TORN were, in some ways, far more daring than what we’d done before, but we were quickly brought back down to Earth by management that knew more about Interplay’s bottom line than we did.

The experience of working with those three (Avellone, McComb, and Maldonado) was very inspiring, and I’ll take their knowledge with me in all the design I end up working on.

Platter:

That disappearing act you see in that scene may very well have been one our equivalents of “Ninja Smoke”. I don’t remember the specific reason Chris requested that. Good catch on the Grey Waste as well. The end movie was done at the very last minute.

[Azmodan]

omg!.. Scott!... (sorry sounds like a frenzyed fan)... i just wanted to say, that it's such a loss that PS:T is taken of the shelves, and that we never ever get to see a secuel... it's the game of the century! (if you ask me)