Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition Interview

RPGWatch has a new interview online with a handful of the team members behind the remastering of the iconic Planescape: Torment. There are a number of technical details regarding the changes introduced by the Enhanced Edition, and as such, the interview gives a good idea of what to expect. Here’s an excerpt:

JDR13: I read that the EE version will include some content that was dropped/cut from the original release of PS:T. How much did you guys have to improvise to finish the restored content? Was there significant debate over the things you chose to restore?

Alex: Chris Avellone requested to personally proofread all of the text from the original game in order to make some grammar and style corrections. Other than the adjustments that Chris made, there are no other content changes or additions in PST:EE. Instead, we focused on making the game run properly on modern devices, recreating the user interface in native 4K, adding Steam Achievements and introducing a number of quality of life improvements such as zooming, object highlighting, journal searching, quickloot, combat log etc.

Maylander: Will the high end spell animations finally get fixed?

Alex: The cinematic spells from the original Planescape Torment were designed to run at the 640×480 resolution. To make them display properly at higher resolutions, PST:EE automatically zooms in to the original viewport when the cinematic spells start and returns the zoom level to what it previously was after they finish. This way, no visual effects are lost.

Maylander: From what I recall, Planescape: Torment uses a heavily modified version of the Infinity Engine, so your previous EE fixes probably can’t be applied. How did you get around this limitation? Start from scratch?

Alex: PST:EE was initially based on the engine that we used for Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Over the course of development, any code aspects that were unique to Planescape Torment have been ported over to that version of the engine. This means that PST:EE received all code enhancements that are inherent to our new engine (such as improved pathfinding) while also benefiting from the code which allows features that are unique to Planescape Torment (such as cinematic spells) to work properly.

Scott: Our approach (as much as possible) is to keep improving the engine and bring the existing games back into the fold. PST:EE was a unique challenge because of how different it was, and most of the changes for PST:EE will not make it back to the other Infinity Engine games. We started with the code used for Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear and then using the original Planescape Torment source code added and expanded the engine. Planescape Torment did not have multiplayer, so the code that we brought over also does not support multiplayer.

RPGWatch: Do you have plans to also bring the new engine features to existing EE versions?

Alex: The existing Enhanced Edition games already allow players to turn off most of the new features such as the black outlines around character sprites and the grayscale tint which appears while the game is paused. Selected PST:EE features and settings may eventually make their way to the other EE games, but the codebase is simply too different for them to be merged in en masse.