Planescape Torment: Great RPG or Greatest?

[A Black Falcon]

Planescape: Torment also has some of the best writing and story in any RPG ever. Every location in Planescape: Torment is filled with NPCs that you can talk to and every single one of the them has numerous lines of dialog. Not only that, but that game also gives you textual information about that character, such as what they look like and what they're doing. Not only that, but each character that you can talk to has their own story, their own backgrounds, their own life. They're not just one-dimensional mouthpieces who spout the same line over and over, like NPCs in a lot of other RPGs. And this is just random people you can talk to on the street! Many of them will also offer you various side quests to tackle.

The game's script, meaning just dialog, character descriptions, and so on, was 800,000 words or about 3,200 pages. Black Isle went all-out to give Planescape: Torment a depth to the story, characters, and settings that very few RPGs have ever been able to match, and it shows.

It is one of the longest scripts ever in a videogame. KotOR, Baldur's Gate, what have you, they have tiny fractions of the amount of script of Torment. Most games measure the size of their script in words... Torment measured it in lines, and it had over a hundred thousand of them.

Of course lots of script doesn't matter if it's not well written, but on that note, Black Isle had great writers. Chris Avellone and the others made a deep, insightful story which asked questions, gave you many opportunities to decide what you wanted to do and gave you true moral choices in the oddest of circumstances (think of the rat section in the underground... how many people just walked in and killed everything, never realizing that they did have a choice? They're just giant rats after all, the fodder of all D&D, right? Nope.), and so much more.

At the time the only game it was compared to in depth of story was Xenogears... and I don't know if anything else since then is in that same class. Mark of the Betrayer is one of the closer ones, but even it doesn't quite match Torment. (I haven't played enough of Xenogears myself to say how I would compare those two, though)

So because it has moar pages of text, that grants it a 'good story'?

No, it has a good story because some of the best writers in the industry wrote it. But it's utterly pointless to argue about a game with someone who has never played it and knows nothing about it, so there's no reason for me to continue. I know you're just trying to troll for fun, not saying anything much of actually backed up by fact, so it's easy to ignore.

And if an RPG is a tactical RPG, it doesn't count as an RPG?

I've been saying for years that in my opinion "tactical RPGs" are strategy games. Western games with very similar gameplay to "tactical RPGs" are pretty much all considered strategy games, so why should it be considered any different just because of what platform they're on?

Some sites do agree with me, Gamefaqs for instance lists tactical games as a subset of strategy. They are right.

Here GR, this is what a real soundtrack sounds like.

On that note, Planescape: Torment has one of the best game soundtracks ever. It's a very different sountrack done by Mark Morgan, the composer of Netstorm, Fallout, and Fallout 2, among others, and like all of his soundtracks, it's ... um, what's the best description? Techno or electronica of some kind, I imagine, but beyond that I don't know enough about music to be able to categorize it besides "awesome". :) It's an unconventional soundtrack for an unconventional RPG.

Black Isle dumped Planescape: Torment's soundtrack with three weeks left before the game was to ship. That's what Mark Morgan was working against and the soundtrack is STILL amazing, and not just because the tracks are great but in how the music is integrated into the ambient sounds as well.

I know, isn't it absolutely stunning how he managed to make such a brilliant and amazing soundtrack in such a short period of time?

Now, I know, it did result in him reusing some themes -- I know I've said it before, but he did reuse some bits of Netstorm's soundtrack in Torment. Still, Netstorm has an outstanding soundtrack too, so I don't mind... and Torment's music is mostly new, and all brilliant. The way the themes return through the game, changing with the circumstances, is very well done; just listening to these songs it may seem like a bunch of variations of a few things, but when you play the game and realize what each one means and why the songs change over time, or depending on your actions, it all makes sense.

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etc, etc, etc. I won't continue or I'd have to just link every song in the soundtrack. :)