Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition Artifacts and Oddities

A new post on the official Beamdog blog talks about all the little hidden messages and Easter eggs they’ve found during their work with Planescape: Torment’s source code. These include map markers, NPC dialogues, and cheeky lines of code. To see the plentiful accompanying images, you’ll have to visit the link above. Here’s a text excerpt to give you an idea of what you’ll find there:

Meet the infamous test character, Testocles. Like many cRPGs of its time Planescape: Torment was filled with text, however the conversation mechanics of PST take speech option outcomes to the next level. In Planescape: Torment, the Nameless One can not only gain XP during conversation, but also be granted extra stat points, new abilities, or have his class change between fighter, thief, and mage.

Testocles’ dialog text tree is full of choices ranging from the aforementioned ability to make the Nameless One change class to a simple demand that the test character fidget. Here, Testocles fields a demand to view merchant stores for Robert Holloway, a programmer on the original game.

As you can see in the above image, Technical Designer and Voice-over Coordinator on the original Planescape: Torment, David Hendee, left his mark on Curst’s Automap Screen. In the original Planescape: Torment this message was hidden and we found it only by adding the zoomed out map and uncovering the walkable path for the area.

A sign of the times. The C language programmers on Planescape: Torment encrypted the data type void as a reference to the brand new hit show, South Park.

Japanese popular culture not only influenced Planescape: Torment, but also some of the test dialog.

Here, we’re introduced to Dak’kon in a test dialogue with some Hive thugs. According to the original team (watch our livestream with Chris Avellone!), the Planescape: Torment developers played a lot of Final Fantasy VII which may have influenced many of the higher level spells and the preference of each of the Nameless One’s companions to favor a single type of weapon based on their personality.