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I hope you all had a good and relaxing Easter weekend and I thought it's time to bring you up to speed with what's happening
around here these days. As you remember, we have had the Game Developers' Conference some time ago and it was a blast.
Not only was it great to see all my friends from the industry again - GDC is so much nicer and relaxing than E3 or other trade
shows - I even got the chance to play a few real pen & paper Planescape games. Yep, that's right. One night I played
with Johnny Wilson of Computer Gaming World, Mike Wolf from PC Gamer, and my buddies Jim Namestka of Dreamforge
Entertainment (Sanitarium, Ravenloft, Menzoberranzan, etc.) and Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk from Bioware. It was a
great game that lasted well into the night. The next day our Marketing guru Greg Peterson and I even got to play with from
Darryl Barthe from Happy Puppy and Robert Mayer from Computer Games Strategy Plus and Computer Games Online. Again
it was a lot of fun and it reminded me just how enjoyable pen & paper games can be, especially since these games were
run by our own Colin McComb and Chris Avellone, two true Planescape bloods. Yes folks, sometimes it pays off to be in the
games industry - but only sometimes. =)
We're currently working on a new presentation video for the game. Many of you certainly remember the video trailer we had on the Baldur's Gate disc. Well, this one will be even better! We felt it is time to pull out some gameplay scenes and put them in the video as well. The final things are being prepared right now, and tomorrow our video department will put the sequences to tape. Then the video will be re-edited and readied for the upcoming E3 show. I will try to get an AVI version of this new trailer up here as soon as possible, but I am not sure if I'll be able to do it before E3 in May. It will finally give you the chance to see what the game really feels and plays like. It's nice to have screenshots, but they just don't show the animations, effects and the general ambience too well. As I told you in one of my posts on the message board last week, we received some first sketches of music themes for the game from our composer Brian Williams. After some deliberation I have decided to post some of his work here so that all of you can get an idea of the sonic direction we're taking with the game as well. Bear in mind however when listening to these pieces that all of them are very early sketches, and only represent basic ideas he's toying with. Rather than looking for the overall mix and "sound", try to listen to them for their feel and for what kind of emotions they evoke. Until the game will be finished there will be many reincarnations of these pieces, as they will get re-instrumented, re-orchestrated, re-mixed and who-knows-re-whatted several times. Although very temporary in nature, I thought you would nevertheless like to hear the basic ideas. We also have another Windows wallpaper for you. This time it is the "Lady of Pain" image we used for the teaser ads of the game. I still find this backlit image very powerful, ominous and intriguing, and having it as a wallpaper here on my Windows desktop truly inspires awe in me - and I have been working on this game for 2 years now!
Guido Henkel |
| Planescape: Torment & Design: © 1998 Interplay Productions. All Rights Reserved. © 1998 TSR, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Planescape, the Planescape logo, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Torment, the AD&D logo, and the TSR logo are trademarks of TSR, Inc. and are used by Interplay under license. TSR, Inc. is a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc. Interplay, the Interplay logo, Black Isle Studios and the Black Isle Studios logo are trademarks of Interplay Productions. Exclusively licensed and distributed by Interplay Productions. All other trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. |