Should I Summon up the Will to Try Torment Again?
I recently started playing Baldur’s Gate 1/2 on iPhone again and thought about giving Torment another shot as an adult. BG1/2 were my favorite games in my youth, I enjoyed IWD 1/2, but I never liked Torment, and never managed to play it very far (I only ever managed to recruit Zakkon and Morte, if that places it).
I know Torment is a revered game and that I am posting in your forum, so I hope what follows will not be taken as insulting or fighting words. But I wondered whether fans of this game could speak to the main issues I recall having with it. They are:
I dislike being forced to play as a particular character (in this case, “the Nameless One”). When I first played this game years ago, I thought this was a bad import from JRPGs, and it changes the experience from participating in a story to something closer to passively consuming a pre-written storyline. Similarly, I think the small cast of potential party members in Torment feels like a structure lifted from Final Fantasy.
I have always found the Planescape setting ugly, and dislike its “punk” aesthetic and the one-note “philosophies” that drive its factions. Planescape makes a big effort to come off as deep and intellectual. But I’ve found that the philosophies of Planescape factions are less interesting and less sophisticated than the ideas that animate characters in purportedly more stock settings like Forgotten Realms, which are typically derived from real-world religion or esoteric/occult thought even if the coloring and names have been changed around and the setting doesn’t try to beat you over the head with how smart it is.
I know this is blasphemous to fans of this game, but I found that I disliked the writing of Torment on every prior attempt. I thought it was not interesting or entertaining enough to justify how wordy and frankly kind of self-indulgent it seemed. I disliked the use of labels like “(lie)” or “(bluff)” on dialogue options, and found that the writing interjected the voice and thought process of a narrator in a way that a game like Baldur’s Gate never does.
Some of these issues are probably ultimately an unbridgeable difference of taste. But I wondered if anyone who likes Torment and yet kind of understands my objections could speak to why, in their view, the game is worth pushing further into.
I am of course fully aware that I may just never have given this game enough of a shot to let it grow on me.