Update: The countdown site is still ticking away—five hours left at the moment--but the Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition announcement trailer has gone live anyway. The new version will support 4K resolution, a modernized interface and remastered soundtrack, and updates "curated" by Chris Avellone, the lead designer on the original.
We'll no doubt have more details soon, but for now you can just kick back and enjoy the trailer below.
Original story:
What is Plan Escape? A stealth-based prison breakout game? A hidden object/assassination sim? A new MOBA from Gearbox? The title looks oddly familiar somehow, but I just can't quite put my finger on it. We're all going to find out soon enough, though. A countdown underway at planescape.com is set to hit zero at 5 pm ET on March 28, at which point the super-secret mystery will finally be revealed.
Of course, the reality is that—unless it's a complete head-fake—this may be the least-subtle countdown ever created. Plan Escape (which, in my defense, is the title of the page) is obviously Planescape, as in Torment, one of the greatest RPGs ever created, and a link to it was tweeted just ahead of the weekend by Trent Oster, the boss of Baldur's Gate Enhanced studio Beamdog.
I've heard a lot about planning your vacation around a hub or nexus is a good idea: https://t.co/XKTTw6vn5ZMarch 24, 2017
And in case that's not sufficiently convincing, a look at the countdown source code reveals five hex characters under the heading "secret," which when converted to ASCII spell out "PSTEE." As in, Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition.
Beamdog will have its work cut out for it when it comes to "enhancing" Planescape: Torment. I enjoyed Baldur's Gate Enhanced, but the new characters felt slightly out of place, not to mention entirely unnecessary, and Planescape is so much more dependent on the strength of its writing and characters than Baldur's Gate ever was. And it's not just the undeniable quality of the game that it's up against, but the legend that's built up around it over the better part of 20 years. How do you improve on that without inviting disaster?
Beamdog made a big score in the narrative department when it picked up former BioWare writer David Gaider in early 2016, but even so I'm really inclined to think that the smart move here is to take the StarCraft: Remastered approach: Make it pretty and leave it alone. We'll know more, and let you know what we know, tomorrow.
