The 1999 role-playing game Planescape: Torment is a fan favorite, and now it’s finally getting a successor.
The original game’s lead designer, Chris Avellone, has given his blessing to the followup, according to a Eurogamer interview with Colin McComb, the writer-developer of InXile’s Wasteland 2. McComb will write the game not as a direct sequel, since he and Avellone believe working with the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Planescape setting rights holder, Wizards of the Coast, will invite too many headaches.
“I told Chris that I would not work on a Torment successor without his approval,” McComb told Eurogamer. “We talked about it for a bit, and he told me that he was entirely comfortable with me moving forward on a Torment game without him, and he gave me his explicit blessing to do it.”
Currently, both McComb and Avellone are developing games they successfully funded on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. Avellone is still deeply involved with his Project Eternity role-playing game, so his involvement with a Torment sequel is unlikely. But McComb wrapped up the majority of his writing for Wasteland 2, which prompted him to look for something to work on next.
“The point is that of all the games I’ve written, the one that I keep circling back to is Torment,” said McComb. “And now that the bulk of my work on Wasteland 2 is largely complete — with some iteration work that still needs to be done — I can start thinking about Torment seriously.
“I have a lot of ideas about what to put into a new Torment game. But my primary goal would be to help the player tell a story that was evocative of the original Torment without aping it. To be faithful to the odyssey of the Nameless One, and to recognize that it has ended, and that stories of Torment are ongoing.”
A company called Roxy Friday filed a trademark for “Torment” with the Unite States Patent and Trademark Office in late November. Gaming forum RPG Codex discovered that InXile founder Brian Fargo is a part of Roxy Friday.
We’ll have more on the Torment sequel as new details emerge.