Project Eternity Interview

With all his time spent doing interviews, it’s a wonder Obsidian’s Chris Avellone has any left over for making games at this point. Nevertheless, IndieRPGs has offered up a Q&A session with the Project Eternity designer, covering the usual gamut of topics.

Could you elaborate on the things you loved and hated about RPGs that formed the game’s framework?

I’d played a lot of fantasy games (computer and pen-and-paper) over the years before Torment came along and gave me the opportunity to vomit out all my hate for RPG clichés in one game. There were a lot of common RPG elements that I’d been exposed to again and again, and once you can start predicting a game world and seeing where it was leading, the idea of continuing to feed those all-too-familiar concepts was unappealing. Common clichés like elves and dwarves and how they interacted, quests for magic swords to kill evil wizards, the conceit of many games of trying to force you to care about a situation, a nation, a family member, or a princess or king when it flew in the face of the experience of every role-player I knew, which was to keep the focus on their player character and make them the thing that mattered. Torment was a very selfish game, a very personal quest (with larger repercussions), and that was intentional. I didn’t care about anything external to the player’s experience, and I didn’t think other games should try to bother, either, because at the time, they weren’t doing such a great job to the point of insulting my intelligence and taking me out of the experience.

I also was disappointed in several computer interface mechanics the idea of saving and reloading, for example, struck me as pointless and nothing more than an excuse to stop playing the game rather than continuing to have fun. Why not short-circuit that choice and make it part of gameplay in a new way? Make it a challenge and part of the exploration process instead.

You mentioned recently that you had to massage both the D&D rules and the Planescape license in order to get the mechanical and narrative results you wanted when you were making Planescape: Torment. What did you change, and why?

The class leveling structure and memory gains, the removal of the priest class (we purposely decided to ignore the theology of Planescape because we were worried we were throwing too much at the player already), and new spells and abilities (plus githyanki-specific spells and philosophy) among others. Obviously, the player had a number of intrinsic powers that were unique, but some of those were built on existing D+D foundations (raise dead).