By Alec Meer on May 29th, 2008 at 3:42 pm.
Click the pics to embiggen
“What can change the nature of a classic RPG?” Answer – a resolution-tweaking mod.
A couple of you have previously pointed out The Gibberlings Three‘s marvellous Infinity Engine res hack in our comments, but though I cooed with interest and immediately saved it to my bookmarks (three times, it appears), I’ve not had a chance to take a look until now. Yesterday, though, was Finally Replaying Planescape Torment day for me, and word of a resolution-raising tool that saved this incomparable tale of destiny, identity and tragedy from pixels-the-size-of-fists graphic-o-horror excited me enormously.
Turns out it’s a thing of beauty.
It’s a mod that’s superficially a wholly aesthetic tweak, but in fact it changes the entire game to a fairly profound degree. The standard compliment and criticism for Planescape is that it’s essentially a novel hiding in games’ clothing. Mostly that’s because of its wonderfully ridiculous slew of text, but partly it’s because, on a technological level, it’s an ugly game. Bear with me before you get angry about that. The blurry pixelisation is one thing, but the greater problem is how little of the world you see – just narrow, blocky slices of screen, each offering only the vaguest sense of where you were. That ever-overflowing text box thus became the player’s focus, and the lavish artwork underneath it so often overlooked.
Playing PST at 1680×1050 thanks to this mod – the pixels not stretched, but rather the game world expanded, a vast amount more of it now visible at any one time – I’m constantly struck by how beautiful it is. It seems less a thing of pixels now, and more like the vast painting it was created as. Particularly, the cursed, sinister city of Sigil is no longer a collection of short, dingy alleyways and squat, disconnected buildings, but this grand expanse of gothic metropolis – bustling with NPC life, sprawling and darkly gorgeous.
I get the sense this is Planescape as it was intended to look. It’s a different game for it, and now I stop to stare at the world as much as I do the elegiac prose. Unfortunately, the increased resolution does make said prose (and much of the UI) squinty-small, but I’m more than happy to make do. Oblivion, NWN2, The Witcher – losers in the 2D vs 3D RPG war. Give me this any day.
The Widescreen Mod (something of a misnomer, as it can do full-frame tweakery too) also works with both Baldur’s Gates and Icewind Dales. Changing the resolution seems like such a minor thing, but the degree to which it transforms these graphically-hamstrung games into sharp, presentable modernity is genuinely astonishing. Find it here.
29/05/2008 at 15:51 Grill says:
New desktop!!! Do Pharod’s Vault and that big underground maze in Curst! Please Alec… (flutters eyelashes).
29/05/2008 at 15:51 Lake says:
Useful files for Planescape Torment. Had this bookmarked for a long time.
29/05/2008 at 15:52 Sideath says:
That looks awesome – this may cause me to revisit Avernus…
29/05/2008 at 15:57 Hieremias says:
I bought Planescape a few years ago for under $5. And I’ve never played it.
I installed it and explored around the opening area with the floating skull, but then got distracted and never returned.
I’m so going back to it now that you brought this to my attention.
29/05/2008 at 16:15 Butler` says:
Here’s a question, and one I’m not sure you’ll be able to answer easily: is this game playable now to a complete new comer – all these years on?
29/05/2008 at 16:19 brog says:
Butler`: I first played it just a couple of years ago and loved it, so yes. May depend on the newcomer though.
29/05/2008 at 16:21 Phil says:
Much as l love Planescape above pretty much anything else made of bytes, surely this is becoming slightly indulgent?
What with this, speed runs, producers notes, retrospectives, replays and constant, yawning desire to play something this good again pervading pretty much every comment thread relating to story telling, shouldn’t we now be searching for the ‘next planescape’ rather than dwelling on this one?
The fact there doesn’t appear to be a ‘next planescape’ is the small flaw in my plan.
29/05/2008 at 16:22 Paul Moloney says:
I feel shallow for admitting it, but yes, that slightly jerky, spidery pixellated look kept me from getting immersed in these old isometric RPGs. I have that mega Baldur’s Gate Compilation which I picked up from play.com but barely played – maybe I’ll get into it now.
P.
29/05/2008 at 16:27 Cunningbeef says:
Would LOVE to see this for Fallout…
29/05/2008 at 16:28 Jim Rossignol says:
Indulgent, Phil? Being a site purely about how we spend our leisure time (done for free because we can) means we get to about as indulgent as we like? Indulging seems to be pretty much the point of the site…
29/05/2008 at 16:28 Ryan says:
I love going back to games like Myst, BG, Diablo. Maybe I’ll pick this up again.
Ryan
lessons in brevity: http://www.mofata.com
29/05/2008 at 16:30 Michael says:
I just may replay it now.
29/05/2008 at 16:34 Lukasz says:
“would LOVE to see this for Fallout”
…me too but ‘F’ is an ugly game so it won’t benefit from it much. PST does (especially since original version was suffered from weird close-up)
Since I cannot find the game anywhere here, in country of jumping Kangaroos…
TO THE TORRENTS! or 4chan.
29/05/2008 at 16:37 Colthor says:
Cunningbeef: There’s one for Fallout 2 which somebody posted recently:
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42386
Funnily enough I started replaying Planescape: Torment (I haven’t finished it before, got stuck at the Fortress of Regrets) with this mod yesterday too, and it does indeed make a massive difference. It’s a very good-looking game now.
29/05/2008 at 16:50 Butler` says:
I’ve been meaning to get back into one of these old skool RPGs for a while now, and this mod gives me the ideal excuse.
The only question that remains is “Baldur’s Gate or Planescape?” I suppose
29/05/2008 at 17:00 Pidesco says:
Awesome, but I’ve replayed Torment too many times as it is. I don’t want my number of Torment playthroughs to reach double digits.
29/05/2008 at 17:01 James G says:
Wow, pretty.
When I first played Baldur’s Gate just over a year ago now (I’ve only recently been introduced the the joys of RPGs. Am playing Fallout at the moment) I used the TuTu mod to increase the resolution, and was disapointed when I found that Torment didn’t (then) have a similar mod.
However, unlike Torment, BGI still ended up looking fairly bland, and especially in contrast to BGII. Its a shame that the infinity engine wasn’t updated to the BGII level when Torment was first released.
29/05/2008 at 17:04 Pod says:
Works with BG and Icewind? Hmm….
29/05/2008 at 17:05 Meat Circus says:
Tried the mod. Won’t install.
CURSE YOU, WINDOWS SO-CALLED VISTA.
That said, I’m now in full-scale Planescape replayage mode in old school Big-o-Vision, so I hardly mind.
29/05/2008 at 17:08 Jonas says:
Christ on a bike, first Deus Ex for free and now this.
I’m going to faint.
29/05/2008 at 17:15 Alec Meer says:
Meat: I’m playing in Vista 64, and it’s fine. There’s a whole buncha crap you have to do in terms of manually copying all four CDs over first, though. First install the official patch, then follow the steps here.
29/05/2008 at 17:18 Meat Circus says:
I have the two-CD version. Maybe that’s what’s causing the problems.
I shall have a more sustained fiddle with it this weekend, because I only just left the Mortuary for the first time, and would dearly love to see this game in the glory of 1900×1200.
29/05/2008 at 17:24 NegativeZero says:
The areas look like vast paintings because they essentially *are* vast paintings. That was always the beauty of the Infinity Engine – beautiful 2D in two layers with a collision map. Simple, elegant, and when you get it in high resolutions like this it is beautiful.
Sometimes I wonder whether we might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to 2D graphics.
29/05/2008 at 17:24 Hieremias says:
Fallout may be ugly but it ages better than the original Baldur’s Gate. A lot better.
Though with these new patches that Lake posted, which apparently work with all Infinity engine games, I’m so going back and re-playing BG.
29/05/2008 at 17:32 Kast says:
Was so excited about this. I whipped out my old copy of BGII… only to find it won’t install, likely because of a minute scratch in disc one. I cry :(
29/05/2008 at 17:43 eyemessiah says:
Anyone got some kind of clever way to resize the text for those of us with less than perfect vision?
29/05/2008 at 17:44 Janto says:
ye know, I played Planescape before I touched Baldur’s Gate, and I far preferred the scale of characters in Planescape.
Baldur’s Gate’s characters were just too damn small to emphasis with on any level, there was no sense of real identity to them beyond their portrait and text, nothing special about how they moved or fought. (Admittedly, this could just be hindsight being less than perfect, been a while since I touched them)
Obviously, given the option, in games such as Spellforce and Dungeon Seige, you zoom out as far as you can to have a tactical vantage point, but I prefer getting up close and invading my little pixel minion’s personal space, it feels more involving, less like a RTS with five units that want to talk to you about their relationships and more like an emotional experience.
Of course, the mod may not throw your point of view up into orbit, but that’s what I’m assuming it does, and I ain’t convinced, no siree.
29/05/2008 at 17:53 Zuffox says:
Great link. A thing that’s somewhat deterred me from Planescape was the graphics – that and my library loan nearing expiration.
There’s also the “BG2 graphics for BG1″ mod, also – sans high resolution of course.
29/05/2008 at 18:06 trioptimum says:
Looks great, but I wonder how it copes with those stunning full screen spells toward the end of the game… their impact might be diminished if they did anything but take over your entire screen.
29/05/2008 at 18:23 Benjamin Barker says:
I haven’t tried this one yet; thanks for the reminder. Since I’m more often than not stuck in the gaming past I live by these sprucings-up of older games. I’m playing Jagged Alliance 2 v1.13 right now and among many, many enhancements you can run it 1076×768 (not the loveliest game, but seeing that much more of the map is very nice; in vanilla I think you can only get 640×480!). Vampire: Bloodlines can be run now in widescreen and looks great. And I unexpectedly had a similar experience with X-COM by setting the renderer in DOSBOX to “mame3x” and running it fullscreen. It smoothes out the pixels in a basic way that looks great– and also seems to fit 16:9 perfectly, which was a shock; if it is stretching somehow it looks in proportion to me.
And for the record, to complete a fully up-to-date Planescape experience I think one would also want the unofficial fix pack: http://www.sorcerers.net/Games/Torment/Platter/index.php
& @ Janto: You remind me that I totally had the same disappointment in looking at those tiny, bland BG characters after playing Planescape. I never got off the ground with BG and that was a major reason why.
29/05/2008 at 18:24 James says:
Grabbed this the other day, but I have to say that the way it stuck the inventory and menus into the top quarter of my screen really bugged the hell out of me. I might give it another shot, but to be honest I was never all that worried about the way the thing was in the first place. It might not have helped that I installed it mid-playthrough and the effect was therefore quite jarring, though.
29/05/2008 at 18:25 eyemessiah says:
Can someone answer a torment question for me?
Is it feasible to play through just the main questline without doing all the side-quests? I ask because I am unrepentantly not a side-quest man but I fear that I might end up so XP starved that I will be unable to get very far. I don’t normally play this sort of RPG, but I was impressed by the quality of the storytelling.
On my second attempt at this game I got as far as heading down into a tomb to retrieve some stuff for Pharod but unfortunately started getting 2-shotted by pretty much everything bigger than a rat. Is this likely due to XP deficiency from skipping all the side quests?
I was enjoying the writing & the characterization but in truth I have no real appetite for D&D style housekeeping, and don’t fancy having to go back and completing quests that didn’t pique my interest the first time around.
Is there any hope for me?
29/05/2008 at 18:38 Nick says:
I always found the infinity engine beautiful and funcional too (although PS:T’s radial menues were not my favourite incarnation). Give me the hand painted vistas of Infinity games over the ugly 3D of NWN2 any day.
That and comparing the ease and functionality of full party control to the fiddly crap of NWN2 with less party members.. meh. RTS style controls worked a treat and not having to fiddle with a stupid camera (which added nothing but highlighted the ugliness of it all) just feels right to me.
29/05/2008 at 19:08 wcaypahwat says:
All Torment needs now is a mod that makes Annah sing Morning Train :]
29/05/2008 at 19:47 dhex says:
Is it feasible to play through just the main questline without doing all the side-quests?
you can, but it’s a huge part of the good stuff (presuming you play as a high int/charisma character i.e. how you should play the first time through) in terms of the story. there’s a larger point to a lot of what you do…eventually. not all of it, but a lot.
29/05/2008 at 20:03 eyemessiah says:
Is it feasible to play through just the main questline without doing all the side-quests?
you can, but it’s a huge part of the good stuff (presuming you play as a high int/charisma character i.e. how you should play the first time through) in terms of the story. there’s a larger point to a lot of what you do…eventually. not all of it, but a lot.
So I keep getting murdered by zombies because I suck then? I knew it! ;)
29/05/2008 at 21:16 Noc says:
Eyemessiah: if I remember correctly, the Torment (and BGII, as well) side-questery is actually interesting. Exploring around and poking your nose into things earns you XP, but it also exposes you to all the interesting little scenarios that make the game. I’d say that most of them are worth doing for their own sake, experience concerns aside.
On a different note, I think I developed more of a connection to the Baldur’s Gate NPCs, despite their relative lack of depth. I’ve been thinking about this, and I suspect that this is because I had to actually rely on them throughout most of the game. Combat’s not a huge part of Torment, and it’s honestly sort of a chore when it comes up. Not so in Baldur’s Gate, and I think the constant character management helped the NPCs grow beyond the sum of their dialog trees.
Interestingly, the same thing happened with Final Fantasy Tactics. I developed a tremendous attachment to most of my squad, despite none of them actually having speaking parts. It’s another interesting variation on Storytelling through Game Mechanics, I suppose.
29/05/2008 at 21:37 Alex says:
I’ve always read that a high WIS is most important, it opens up the most quests (including one for the addition of a party member).
That said, I’ve played PS:T twice and just made a character I’d like to play, which played fine.
29/05/2008 at 21:54 JackFlash says:
Ah, Planescape. Still tied with Deus Ex, X-Wing and X-Com as my favorite PC game of all time. Haven’t played it in years, but would love to check it out again in this full-res glory. Thanks for the article.
29/05/2008 at 21:56 dishwasherlove says:
Posts like this are why I love RPS.
29/05/2008 at 22:05 Chris A says:
Another one of those I really should get around to playing this games.
Anyone recommend a place to pick up Planescape: Torment, or a digital download version? Looks like it’s on Gametap, so that’s an option, but I’d rather just buy it straight out if possible.
29/05/2008 at 23:34 ScubaV says:
I wish I could like this game. I tried it out a few months ago, got maybe 10 hours in, was distracted by something else and have never felt the urge to go back. Partly I think this was due to all the graphical spell glitches caused by my hardware being too new. And partly because nothing felt new or exciting. I’d explored Sigil before in a real DnD game, and the underlying quests and such were rather standard RPG fare. Plus, the interface was terrible and the old school lack of tooltips explaining things was frustrating.
Oh, and I did use like 3-4 mods/fix packs recommended by various sites. I shudder to contemplate the vanilla game.
30/05/2008 at 00:14 sluzzuls says:
whoa! most interesting to me is if it gets rid of all the weird sprite problems of bg2. and at 1920 im all for it. i never had the chance to play that game. its.. its like a wonderful wonderful christmas! sniff* thanks for the headsup alec.
30/05/2008 at 00:45 Rustkill says:
I knew this would catch on. ;P
30/05/2008 at 02:00 Thrasher says:
Hah. I’m curious to know if anyone actually plays through the whole game with this hack.
The user interface and text isn’t scaled up, and if you hated pixel hunting in infinity engine games before, you’ll throw your computer out the window with this.
Unplayable.
But sure looks purty though. That’s all that seems to matter nowadays….
30/05/2008 at 02:18 Jahkaivah says:
Yeah as much as it would be nice to enjoy the benefits Alec pointed out… it just isn’t worth the awkward interface, the puny menu screens, and the fact that the characters move to the top left corner (meaning if they happen to be talking about soemthing north west of themselves, you cannot see it)
30/05/2008 at 02:51 papergoose says:
I feel stronger.
I HAVE BECOME STRONGER.
30/05/2008 at 03:52 Lukasz says:
hey guys.
I’ve never finished BG1. Simply because the game aged terribly (‘F’ did not. maybe cause it was ugly from the very beginning?) I am not big fan of awesome graphics (i still play transport tycoon) but the pixelization is just too annoying.
any idea how to make game prettier?
19/01/2011 at 06:31 tomz says:
The degree of transformation when you try to change the resolution, seems like such a minor thing, but it transforms these graphically-hamstrung games into sharp, presentable modernity is genuinely astonishing.
-
- – santa clarita auto glass
.
30/05/2008 at 04:01 Sucram says:
A few years ago I wanted to replay Torment and spent about 20minutes typing ‘high res torment’, ‘higher resolution hack planescape’ etc. in Google.
When I failed I decided I didn’t want to replay Torment THAT much. I like the character design but I don’t to see their pixels for 8cm away. The original res gives the Nameless One worse eyesight than I have in real life.
30/05/2008 at 04:01 Noc says:
I dunno. I played through both BGs pretty recently, and the graphics didn’t bother me. Maybe it’s because I played it on a laptop, and not one of your newfangled fancy-shmancy Widescreen Water Crystals with High Definitions.
Maybe run it at a lower resolution, in a window? That should shrink it down enough that you won’t get so much pixel-stretching.
30/05/2008 at 05:06 Zed says:
I’ll have to dig out my discs when I have some time. I never finished PS:T the first time–it crashed on me in the final(?) dungeon when I hadn’t saved in hours and hours and hours. I was so pissed I never went back to it. News that it can work on
shitstaVista is most welcome. Bookmarked for whenever I get back to the other side of Canada.Actually, I need to ask: did anyone else spend HOURS farming the Modron random dungeon for XP?
30/05/2008 at 09:48 Nick says:
“I’ve never finished BG1. Simply because the game aged terribly (’F’ did not. maybe cause it was ugly from the very beginning?) I am not big fan of awesome graphics (i still play transport tycoon) but the pixelization is just too annoying.
any idea how to make game prettier?”
If you have BG2 you can play BG1 using the BG2 engine with its slightly prettier resolution support.
Try http://www.pocketplane.net/mambo/index.php?option=content&task=blogcategory&id=143&Itemid=98
30/05/2008 at 09:57 Kismet says:
Even RPS reminds me that there’s no mail yet in my InBox saying that the 24″ that will replace one of my 2 CRTs is ready to be picked up at the shop :cry:.
Should it arrive before the week-end (a long week-end here, monday is holiday), Torment will definitely be part of my new gear testing, thanks for the links.
30/05/2008 at 10:14 Alec Meer says:
Thrasher/Jahkaivah – I’m still cheerfully playing through the game with this mod. The small UI and text is a mild annoyance, nothing more. There’s an enormous difference between ‘not perfect’ and ‘unplayable’, frankly.
30/05/2008 at 13:21 Jahkaivah says:
Yeah ignore what I said earlier, im actually finding it alot more tolerable now.
30/05/2008 at 15:10 Eschatos says:
I actually downloaded the game a little while ago, but I’m getting an error that doesn’t let me play the game. I played it for about an hour, but the next time I tried to open the game I just got a black screen. Waiting didn’t help, and neither did restarting. I tried again about six times, and once it actually got to the intro screen, but the game ran incredibly slowly. I’d love to be able to play the game, but I can’t. Has this happened to anyone else?
31/05/2008 at 07:02 Scandalon says:
Wow, I’ve been seeing you guys (and many others years ago) bang on about this over and over, but it wasn’t until now that I realized it’s “Planescape”…I always thought it was Planetscape.
Currently playing “Planescape: Torrent”
31/05/2008 at 07:34 malkav11 says:
The Infinity Engine games all look sooooo much better than subsequent D&D games (with the possible exception of TOEE). It was one of the many disappointing things about NWN – going from lovely handmade artistic backdrops to ugly, repetitive 3D tilesets. NWN2 is a vast improvement over NWN1, but still doesn’t quite capture the magic.
And there are people who claimed NWN looked better! Blind, I tells you, blind.
31/05/2008 at 11:45 Lone_Foxx says:
One of this games defining moments is when you get to decide Mort’s fate…I’ll say no more in fear of spoiling its greatness.
01/06/2008 at 23:11 Thiefsie says:
Can’t wait to replay this now in super high res!
02/06/2008 at 01:26 Fumarole says:
I started playing through Baldur’s Gate with this mod last week. Once I’m done with that and the sequel, I’ll give Torment a go to see if I can actually play all the way through this time.
02/06/2008 at 23:04 The Hammer says:
Much love for this, RPS! This was one of the things putting me off having a bash at BG1 and seeing what I missed out on almost a decade ago, so I’m leaping on this chance to see if I’m still utterly useless at it even when the interface isn’t working against me!
03/06/2008 at 02:06 Elo says:
Some clever types recently made a variant of this mod to make a widescreen mod for the Dark Engine games. Thief 1 2 and System Shock 2. No clue how they managed to get an Infinity engine mod working with Dark engine, but I’m happy they did.
http://www.ttlg.com/FORUMS/showthread.php?t=121240
If you’re running a multimonitor set up you’ll need to disable your secondary monitors, otherwise you don’t see the gui, but other than that it’s perfect.
03/06/2008 at 04:54 Lukasz says:
@Fumarole. You are playing BG1 with this mod? how?
04/06/2008 at 01:32 Perry says:
Installing as I type this!!!
04/06/2008 at 10:13 Lp says:
Nice. If it does the exactly same thing to the Baldur’s Gates and the Icewind Dales, it’s a must-have for begginers in this field, including me, that are virtualy smashed (there is no other word) by the pixelsize of those games.
Now, to see those beautiful 2D paintings (I had no ideia that Planescape was like that – beautyfull indeed) all I need is one copy of the Planescape: Torment, an authentic quest, I dare say.
07/06/2008 at 17:23 vbigiani aka The Bigg says:
Wow, I (er, my mod) got mentioned on a major blog and I didn’t even notice :)
07/06/2008 at 17:55 surprise says:
Which brings us to the question how you found out about this post ;-)
But still, good work. it works like a charm.
08/06/2008 at 01:15 vbigiani aka The Bigg says:
By accident – I’ve seen one of those screenshots linked in the forum for another PST mod, I noticed the URL for the pic, and investigated on what post would contain enlarged PST screenshots, and if it mentioned Widescreen at all :)
08/06/2008 at 02:01 vbigiani aka The Bigg says:
The history of Widescreen for the IE is that weak-ling (the same dude that made the System Shock 2 hack you link to) originally made an hack for Baldur’s Gate II at 1440×900 (by simply overwriting the relevant files). I spotted it and wrote a mod around it so that it asks the desired resolution (and, with help from both weak-ling and Avenger, also expanded it to the other IE games). Since my mod used a full, six years mature uninstall framework and had highly generic code for this type of patching (it declares a list of offset-oldvalue-newvalue triplets and tries to apply all of them, with support for different lists for different game versions), Weak-ling adapted it to the Dark Engine rather than write a patcher from scratch (usually, game cracks and similar have a similar VC framework in which you have to plug your offset-oldvalue-newvalue, but it doesn’t contain support for actually asking your resolution).
10/08/2008 at 19:36 Game-Fm says:
I have found and publish some game videos from Planescape Torment on my blog
19/08/2008 at 18:33 Schtee says:
Fallout 1 & 2 Res patches:
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1129
http://www.nma-fallout.com/forum/dload.php?action=file&file_id=1158
Yay? Yes.
25/08/2008 at 03:27 Zed says:
/finally gets back home to his discs and installs/
Oh wow. Thank you so much for this. Maybe I’ll be able to finish this brilliant thing now.
02/11/2008 at 04:47 Bex says:
I wish someone would make a similar mod for Dungeon Keeper
15/01/2009 at 02:46 blas says:
The fix pack posted aabove is very outdated.
Qwinn is now maintaining a new one.
http://www.shsforums.net/index.php?s=fc873fdba8b96b23ebafb26492326d58&showforum=551
the dl links are in the forum links there.
26/03/2010 at 07:44 starmonkey says:
I’ve tried WSM but unfortunately I get pseudo crashes when I enter the “open tomb” just below the mortuary, and that fellas house just below it.
Uninstalling the mod makes the problem go away.
*sigh* I guess I can live without returning to those places, but I was using them to rest!
17/11/2010 at 20:23 Randell Accala says:
Will be blogengine superior to wp for some reason? Must be as it would be ever more popluar recently.