I played Planescape again a couple weeks ago and I'm sort of amazed at how I was able to sit through it when I was 12. I mean, this is Words: The Game. It actually sort of amazes me even more that I liked it so much back then, because I thought it was pretty fucking awful replaying it recently. The setting was cool, or I guess the idea of it, the story (until the very end when you find out that your mortality is actually a living thing, which is dumb) is interesting, and it's neat how they actively avoided the most obvious fantasy tropes like dwarfs and elves or whatever, but they really fucked up with everything else.
The game's main problem is that it repeats everything to you 100 times. If you want to Play The Game Right, you have to talk to every single person in the game and ask them every single thing you can possibly ask them. I was literally told the specific way that the Lady of Pain imprisons people by 50 different people and it was worded only slightly differently each time. This applies to everything in the game. You have to talk to everyone, but very few of the people you talk to have anything unique to say. It's sort of like if instead of having one article for one subject on Wikipedia, there were 50 articles for each subject that all said roughly the same thing. The other problem is that most of the shit people tell you is lore, which is complete garbage. Lore is any information about the game world that doesn't actually relate to the game and there is a ridiculous amount of it. It's terrible man. Even items have pages of lore on them. A lot of it is information that could have potentially led to something interesting in the game, like the conflict between the githyanki and githzerai. You read probably 10 straight pages worth of text about it and it ultimately amounts to a brief confrontation with a githyanki calling Dak'kon a dog or something. Even the information that is relevant doesn't really mean anything. You can learn about the Godmen and what they are trying to do and what they stand for and their ideals, but you never find out what it means to be a Godman, even after you become one. In fact, nothing even changes when you become one. This is what all of the information in the game is like; you can read about it but you can never learn what it means or how it relates to anything.
So I guess when a game's positives are that it's not about dwarfs and elves, it's not such a good game. If you want to make a game that is literally an encyclopedia, you have to make the shit you're reading actually meaningful to what is occurring in front of you. To me, Planescape: Torment is a primer on how not to make a game.
I guess you didn't find all the lore interesting on its own which I think was the point of there being so much of it, I thought it was pretty good precisely because it wasn't there to try and plug ridiculous plot holes or to explain game mechanics that don't make sense like it often is, it was actually just being lore, sometimes it gets 'confirmed' by what goes on in the game but not always and i can't think why everything should.
I always thought it was a bit clever how they used the text resources as well as they could to add an ominous spin or whatever to the items you could use even if nothing actually happens in the game, like the last paragraph in this description --
http://www.gamebanshee.com/planescapetorment/equipment/images/boltsofkessekthedevourer.jpgIs it really necessary that something bad happens if you use the bolts? The implication already provides most of the impact for minimal effort and that's hella artful, and there's better examples i think but i'm retarded.
Also there's a items that are important in puzzles and their description helps a lot, like the ice shard and a few more items from that same spot in the game.
Oh yeah and being a godsman lets you use 'godsmen only' weapons that have stat boosts for charisma and shit, which isn't mindblowing but this is still mostly a rpg where you make your stats go up and equip items so-
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