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Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

Darth Roxor

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Ubermass
 

Jedi Exile

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Was he fat when he worked on Torment? I think he was. So losing weight in his case means losing creative power.
 
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Better fat and creative and productive Avellone though, than buff, but doing nothing. Remember how he looked when he made Planescape, men. Maybe that's his ideal creative form.

Was he fat when he worked on Torment? I think he was. So losing weight in his case means losing creative power.
Way ahead of you, m8. :smug: У дураков мысли сходятся! :shittydog:
 

Rev

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Better fat and creative and productive Avellone though, than buff, but doing nothing. Remember how he looked when he made Planescape, men. Maybe that's his ideal creative form.
Maybe it is, but he's wasting his time doing nothing just minor things on other people's games right now.

:negative:
 

naossano

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MCA needs to start a kickstarter with stretch goals about how much weight he must lose. People would pledge for this. Then, he would have to make other stretch goals for his Black Isle friends as the pledge would explode.
 

Fairfax

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http://www.geekgamer.it/2017/04/int...e-rpg-un-passato-glorioso-un-futuro-scoprire/

In the late 1990s Bioware’s Infinity Engine became the standard tool for the creation of some of the most successful and influential cRPG of that era. Both the Baldur’s Gate series and the Icewind Dale series were heavily focused on combat, while Planescape: Torment chose a totally different approach, basing its gameplay on dialogues and on a complex network of multiple choices. Was it difficult to “convert” an engine like the Infinity – which had been designed for Baldur’s Gate – to Planescape’s unorthodox approach? How the opportunities (and the limitations) of Infinity conditioned your work in creating Planescape?

[C.Avellone] No, because it wasn’t that far removed (although the spell programmers at Beamdog may disagree, and they’d be right to). Visually, sure, it looked markedly different but the means of visualizing that world was still the same pipeline as BG (import images as backgrounds). As for mechanics, the engine structure was there to support it, and it was more our lack of resources that dictated some design decisions (ex: we can’t have a ton of monsters, we can’t customize the player’s appearance or change armor sets, not as many companions, etc.) – we had about half the manpower BG did, if I recall correctly, so we had to focus our efforts. I think that focus was good, btw – I still look back on Planescape as an example of doing less (ex: companion number) is actually better than “more” as long as you put as much quality as you can into them. In short, the Infinity Engine is there – but you raise a good point in your “unorthodox” comment. The reason for the dialogue approach was spurred by the campaign setting – it just felt like it was doing the setting a disservice by not being more thoughtful and being able to interact with it instead of killing everything. I’m a big proponent of allowing for pacifist approaches and quests that can be solved with speech or cleverness vs. simply killing someone or where combat must always be an option and speech is more of a cosmetic tweak to the situation – and Planescape supported that approach. It was one of the few settings that encouraged it. Before freelancing, I was increasingly involved in games where those options were no longer allowed and considered wastes of time, when in fact, it can make a role-playing game much richer. Working on Fallout 2 also had an impact, because of the speech trees the first and second game allowed for the player (and the stat reactivity) played a big part in influencing the design approach to Planescape.

Since its first appearance in 1999, Planescape: Torment has always been considered a cult classic. You have already mentioned your major sources of inspiration for it, so our question will be a bit different: can you discern any recognizable influence from Planescape in games you did not contributed to?

[C.Avellone] With the exception of direct spiritual successors that I’ve worked on which clearly had an influence, not many games come to mind, but (and I recognize this weakness) I consider myself ill-informed on this response because I don’t have time to play many games except the ones I’m working on and bug-fixing/doing narrative iterations. It’s unfortunate, but I think it was drilled into me (in a bad way) that as a gamemaster, you must be constantly creating game content (rather than being a player or an observer), and that became a bad habit for me. Being a player makes me feel passive, even though being a player is an important part of being a better game developer for many reasons. So, yes, I suck. But back to the original question (and before this next bit gets misinterpreted, this isn’t about any spiritual successors to Torment): I have seen RPGs try to emulate Planescape or claim to uphold the concepts without fully realizing what the Planescape approach really is – and without realizing what the narrative is there to do and where the narrative should be focused (and yes, I’ve even had people on those same projects emulating Planescape brag about not playing the game or finishing the game – which is fine, but then maybe you’d want to do a different approach, then?). It’s not about vomiting words onto the player. It’s also not about the word count.

For the record, I’m embarrassed about the word count in PST. It’s not even accurate – it resulted from duplicate strings in the development process from copying dialogue trees (zombies, for example, that shared similar structure). And the number of words was a sign of inefficiency in the process – it’s like a game artist trying to make a game-ready character model and bragging about using 10x the number of polygons they should have used (this happened to me early on in high school during architecture class, and the teacher rightfully lectured me it was nothing to smile about – I learned my lesson). I mean – the word count in PST was so large we didn’t have time to edit it properly, although I never realized how bad it was until I started repairing the Enhanced Edition. Editors are important. Any other influences (No Truce with the Furies, which fascinates me very much) have said they were inspired by Planescape, but I hope they realize that inspiration carried them in a new direction, which I’m excited by – and they should realize they’re making something special, just from the dialogue skill set alone. Lastly, I do want to reiterate Fallout 1 and 2 had a big impact on Planescape (esp. talking down the Master at the end of F1 and the speech/smart solutions to quests), and I also think it’s important to mention that a lot of what you see in the game was groundwork laid by designers and artists at TSR and Wizards of the Coast – from the slang, to the architecture, to the factions – the studio just decided to set a game in that universe, and we were part of a much larger effort.

In the last few years there has been a successful revival of isometric games inspired by old cRPGs. Titles such as Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland, and Tyranny can rely on a large, nostalgic fan base who already played Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment back in the 1990s, but one may wonder whether these games, with their old-fashioned mechanics, would ever appeal to a younger audience. There is no doubt that the Enhanced Edition of Planescape: Torment could definitively help a new generation of gamers to get in touch with such a classic adventure, but have you ever thought of alternative ways to help isometric cRPGs challenge their own boundaries and attract a different kind of public?

[C.Avellone] Well, this may sound odd, but the mere fact isometric games are allowed to be made again and there’s now a market and distribution system for them that can be independent of traditional publishers means they get introduced to a new generation. There was a long period of time where the publishing model wouldn’t allow for isometric RPGs anymore – despite people’s interest because it just wasn’t enough interest to make the investment and time worthwhile vs. other types of games. I don’t blame them for that, btw, it’s true. But now there’s other routes to explore, and we don’t need to rely solely on that model anymore, so that’s awesome. I also think the Enhanced Edition’s UI additions make the barrier to access the game much easier and while a number of gamers excel at mods and getting older games working (and kudos to them), a number of other gamers don’t. They are idiots like me, or they’re tired like me after a long day – they just want to play the game quickly and have as little in the way of enjoying the experience as possible. It was a barrier to me for Wasteland 1 and getting that working again, and same with Bloodlines and it was an extra hurdle that I didn’t need – I just wanted to play the damn games. Sure, I got both working, but did I wish I could click a single button and get it going? Of course.

Looking at Planescape: Torment with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would do differently today?

Yeah (and I’ve said this before, put down your pitchforks and torches), the combat could have been much better and more frequent, more “dungeons” to explore (although the context would be different than most RPGs – or a mockery of them for the sake of fun, like the Modron Maze), the game was overbalanced by being in Sigil (though we felt it was important to introduce the city for the heart of the setting), and I would have loved to allow for more plane-travelling. I’d also allow for more character customization, as I think that’s the heart of an RPG, but we didn’t have the resources for it.

You are involved in several different projects. Can you tell us something about your ideas on the future of cRPGs? There is currently a wide variety of different solutions in terms of gameplay and mechanics. What paths do you think this genre will take in the next future? Can you envision a “next step”?

[C.Avellone] Most of my focus is on dialogue systems – and I think one of the next steps is to provide a new interface for dialogue systems, and I suspect VR will be that space. In the VR projects I’ve been involved in, the nature of the platform allowed a much wider degree of expression (and more powerful expression) than a dialogue menu did, often without words and relying more on gestures, contact, one’s gaze (and direction of gaze) and body language in addition to what’s said or selected.
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Anyway MCA's ignus twitter pic few months ago just referring to the planescape torment remaster right? It stirred up quite a bit of speculation that time
 

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