Planescape Torment developer teases follow-up game

Game designer Colin McComb, best known for his work on Planescape: Torment, recently teased on his website that he is considering working on a follow-up game.

Writing on his personal blog, McComb said he'd finished up most of his work on Wasteland 2 and now he "can start thinking about Torment seriously." McComb muses about the strengths of Planescape: Torment, what people liked about it and identifies the elements at the heart of a Torment story.

McComb writes:

The first step in designing a new Torment story is to ask the primary question. I'm older than I was when I worked on Torment, and my questions now are different than they were. I have children now, and I look at the world through their eyes and through mine, and that's changed me - in fact, the intervening years have changed me so much that I have new answers for the central story in the original Torment. So now that I know what can change the nature of a man, I ask: What does one life matter? ... and does it matter at all?

Then I'd re-examine the fundamentals of the setting. I'd put it someplace other than Planescape (and I'll explain why in a followup). I'd use a system other than D&D, because I'd want to align the player's story axes along different lines than Good/Evil or Law/Chaos to something more subjective. The core of Torment is, after all, a personal story, and while we can be judged by others on the basis of our actions, arbitrarily aligning those actions on an external and eternally fixed line removes some of the agency from the player's game.

McComb presents all these ideas seemingly as hypotheticals, never confirming that such a game is in the works. He ends his post by asking: "What would you want to see?"

To read McComb's full blog entry and comment on it with feedback, visit his personal website.