Ty Arthur
BloodyaugustBlack Isle and Planescape: Vengeance
July 4th 2008 01:58
My last post about Lionheart got me thinking about the tragedy of Black Isle's disbanding and the various modded games that were birthed by fans who figured out how to tinker with the Infinity Engine. In December of 2003 every single member of the Black Isle staff was laid off by Interplay with no forewarning of any kind. While there was never an official statement from Interplay about it, many speculated it was because Interplay was having money problems and was trying to reduce their costs. Although this could not be independently verified, one of the staff members who was laid off claimed that all the V.P.s and the CEO gave themselves huge bonus checks later that month that probably came from the money that would have gone to paying Black Isle's salary. Many of the folks who got canned went on to work for either Troika games, which is also now defunct, or Obsidian Entertainment, which developed Neverwinter Nights 2, Knights of the Old Republic 2, and is now working on an Aliens RPG.
Regardless of the reasons, the destruction of Black Isle was a huge blow to the RPG industry. They were making the absolute best RPGs of the time, and had finally hit on the best way to adequately translate pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons into a video game format (and there are plenty of horrendous instances where this didn't work from other development studios!). Even more tragic were the games that were being developed when Black Isle was shut down. The code named projects "Jefferson" and "Van Buren" were going to be Baldur's Gate III and Fallout III, respectively. Even more annoying to me personally was that Baldur's Gate III was going to be a role play intensive, combat light game with a maximum level cap of 8, with an expected final ending level of 4 if you played the game through without level grinding. That sounded to me suspiciously like the story and dialog would have been at least on par with Planescape: Torment, which has to this day never been done.
This may not seem like it matters all that much now, with other companies having finally gotten the licenses to these franchises and the Bethesda developed Fallout III coming out later this year. It was huge when it happened though, sending shock waves through the whole gaming community, and unfortunately for us we will never get to see what Black Isle would have done with these games. One of the staff members who was reportedly working on Baldur's Gate III is apparently trying to re-make the game as a module for Neverwinter Nights 2, and while I'll probably play it, I'll still wonder what it could have been like if it was its own game.
The modding community has been the greatest asset of the various Infinity Engine games and the two Neverwinter Nights titles. Although they were never well known outside of hardcore RPG and Dungeons and Dragons fans, there were many home brew development teams who did amazing things modding the Infinity Engine, from converting the Forgotten Realms all the way over to the Dragonlance campaign setting to completely meshing all of the Baldur's Gate games and their expansions into one seamless epic that used the increased capabilities and graphics of only the most recent game.
One of these groups was working on a "mod" to Planescape: Torment which would actually be a full blown sequel called Planescape: Vengeance. Unfortunately the site for Vengeance has been offline for over a year now and it towards the end there it wasn't being updated at all. It seems the people involved probably either lost interest or realized it was simply too big of a project to be done in their spare time from different ends of the country. I know how hard that sort of thing can be, as it took me over three months of insane frustration just to get a semi-working asteroids clone finished (developed in C using only the Windows API). Without a team of professionals to assist you in the same room and lacking a college education in programming, making games is insanely hard and trying to get a full game done with just the spare time after work or on the weekends is even worse. Hopefully those guys will see this post and decide to take up the standard again and get Vengeance off the ground.
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