While it may not have been as popular as Fallout or Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment is often regarded as the zenith of the CRPG’s golden age. Its bizarre setting, kooky characters, and emphasis on solving quests through dialogue rather than combat set it apart from its RPG brethren, and you can trace its influence all the way through to modern roleplaying games like Disco Elysium.
Yet despite its legacy, new adventures in the world of Planescape are thin on the ground. The closest you’ll get is its spiritual successor Torment: Tides of Numenera, and even that has a completely different setting to Planescape. But a group of Polish modders has set out to change that, and are on the cusp of releasing a massive expansion to Black Isle’s beloved RPG.
Described by its creators as the “first ever” unofficial Planescape DLC, Blizzard in Baator will see The Nameless One and his motley crew travel to a new region of Sigil, descending through Planescape’s Nine Hells down to the Frozen Wastes of Cania. Here, they’ll become embroiled in an endless cold war between the Lords of the Nine, the titular Blizzard in Baator.
The mod adds far more than a chunk of new places to explore, too. In an interview with Polish roleplaying website girmuar.pl, the modders reveal that the expansion will add two new recruitable characters, new planar creatures to encounter, original music, and even new cinematics.
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At the same time, the mod also restores a bunch of stuff cut from the original Planescape. This includes voice lines, lost items, and even some graphical elements hidden away in the game’s files. The modders say these resorted elements are “minor details”, and that “the vast majority” of stuff in the mod has been created by the team.
Of course, the primary draw for Planescape was always its writing and storytelling. In terms of the expansion’s plot, the modders are keeping specifics close to their chests. They do say that the story will revolve around the main characters, and that the mod relies primarily on the 2nd edition of DND, though it weaves in elements from all later editions too. It’s also designed to be a higher-level experience, kicking in when The Nameless One returns from the outer plane of Carceri.
As for when you can expect to play Blizzard in Baator, there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that the modders don’t expect the project to be completed until 2031, though they “really hope it’ll be much sooner” than that. The good news is the first act of the expansion will release later this year, and will take around a dozen hours to complete by the modders’ estimates.
When it does release, Blizzard in Baator will be available in both English and Polish languages, though since the expansion is based on the Polish version of Planescape, this may result in some differences in naming convention compared to the natively English version.
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