The Planescape devs mutilated BioWare’s engine in a good way while making the legendary 1999 RPG: "We were lucky we didn't break the game"
Nov. 29, 2024Black Isle Studios couldn’t be stopped
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Black Isle Studios made sure its venerable Dungeons & Dragons RPGPlanescape: Tormentwas like no other video game on the market when it released in 1999. All the developer had to do was obliterateBioWare’s nascent Infinity Engine.
BioWare first implemented the young Infinity Engine in its own D&D RPG, the 1998 releaseBaldur’s Gate, which ignited players' imaginations and, eventually, anoutrageously lucrative franchise.
But, even though Baldur’s Gate was a trendsetter in its own right, seamlessly transporting the immersive fantasy of table-top RPGs to PCs everywhere, Black Isle Studios wanted more.
BioWare was still tinkering with Infinity while Planescape was in development, PC Gamer reports, so Black Isle started pushing the uncertain bounds of what the engine was capable of.
“We were lucky we didn’t break the game,” Spitzley muses.
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Or maybe this cinematic was just heartbreaking for BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka. Lead artist Tim Donley remembers that, when Black Isle showed Muzyka some of it, he was “silent for a while.”
“Then he turns to his programmer,” says Donley, “and goes, ‘You guys told me we couldn’t have that many frames of animation. How come the game looks so good?'”
I faced my modding fears by testing out Larian’s favorite Baldur’s Gate 3 mods and now it just feels like I’m cheating.
Ashley Bardhan is a critic from New York who covers gaming, culture, and other things people like. She previously wrote Inverse’s award-winning Inverse Daily newsletter. Then, as a Kotaku staff writer and Destructoid columnist, she covered horror and women in video games. Her arts writing has appeared in a myriad of other publications, including Pitchfork, Gawker, and Vulture.
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