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“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.
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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?
“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
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.
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.
Yeah ignore what I said earlier, im actually finding it alot more tolerable now.
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?
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”
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.
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.
Can’t wait to replay this now in super high res!
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.
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!
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.
@Fumarole. You are playing BG1 with this mod? how?
Installing as I type this!!!
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.
Wow, I (er, my mod) got mentioned on a major blog and I didn’t even notice :)
Which brings us to the question how you found out about this post ;-)
But still, good work. it works like a charm.
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 :)
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).
I have found and publish some game videos from Planescape Torment on my blog
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.
/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.
I wish someone would make a similar mod for Dungeon Keeper
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.