A lamentable fact of our hobby is this: time marches on. Because our games have to be rendered in real-time by whatever tech we load them onto, they inevitably end up harder to run as the years wear on, and the gap grows between the tech we have and the tech the games were designed to run on. On PC, the task of keeping those games running tends to end up in the hands of dedicated fans—and god bless them.
You can’t expect devs to maintain games in perpetuity. Unless, I guess, they happen to be the stewards of the Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment Enhanced Editions, which are still getting patches almost three decades after the original games released. Most recently (September 15), Planescape got a beta update to its, uh, beta update: a release candidate for an upcoming patch that will bring the game in line with the 2.7 patches some of Beamdog’s other Enhanced Edition games already have.
As with those other games, the new Planescape beta (itself an addition to a previous beta from August) makes Steam Cloud saves work how they ought to: toggleable through the Steam client itself rather than via in-game options. GOG cloud saves now actually work, too and—this is probably the biggest thing—Planescape now has a UI scaling option in its settings. Leave it off and the game will keep its UI at god’s own resolution, 1024×768, but if you flick it on it will adapt to better fit modern monitors. Like yours!
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Aside from that? Mobile fixes and “significantly easier” dialog.tlk modding. That’s the file that contains Planescape’s voluminous text and dialogue. Good news for modders, but less meaningful to me and, quite likely, you.
There’s no hint as to when Beamdog will convert the patch from beta to full-release, but I get the feeling it’s not far off. Frankly? I’m just happy classic games like this are still getting TLC in any capacity. Fans will undoubtedly keep these games alive long after we’re all dead and buried, but that they’re still getting a measure of official support this far along? I just wish everything worked like this.
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