Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition PST: EE

The screenshots are not working for me, but I wonder what an EE of PS:T is supposed to bring. To my mind, PS:T doesn't need a game mechanic overhaul, its main attraction is the story.

 

That's probably what they'll do - add a zoom feature, give the game modern resolution support, consolidate all bug fixes, and incorporate the original highres artwork if they have access to it.
I know you coulds do most or all of this by modding the original game, but having an enhanced edition of PS:T would be really nice all the same, and might attract some new players to it as well.
Pretty smart of them to ride the coattails of Torment : Tides of Numenera like that if you ask me.

Here's the mirrored images Tal posted :

 

I just hope they'll do a good job with videos. Ps:T probably has more video files than any other IE game.

 

They can't really afford not to. Those videos are tiny and dated as hell. Unless, of course, they have the original pre-renders and they can resize them.

 

It's next to impossible to resize a video to such a degree within any acceptable margins. Not without the original source files that could be used to rerender them.

 

"Just fine" is up for debate. The new videos are horrible, but the old ones are equally unacceptable for the current market as far as I'm concerned.

 

It's not a new game for us, but it's an overhauled game sold at a considerable markup. Shipping it with 640x480 videos stretched to 1920x1080 is not acceptable for any potential customers, old or new, even some of us would be okay with that.

 

Except other things haven't remained the same. Everything else was adapted for higher resolutions where necessary rather than just stretched out. The graphical assets only stayed the same if they could be acceptably presented on a large screen without loss of quality or information. Video is simply not one of those things. Play the original BG1 in full screen and tell me EE isn't an improvement visually. Yeah, you can mod it for a similar effect, but mods are irrelevant within the context of marketing a remastered game. If everyone was satisfied with the modded originals, the EEs wouldn't be selling.

 

You say "GUI", like it's not something you look at 100% of the time as you play the game. It's composed of a massive amount of graphical assets and code. They also extended the in-game graphics formats and brushed up the assets to allow for a full range of colors, better animations, proper transparency, etc. Unfortunately, they didn't have the original source files, so most of the base textures are the same as they were, but those didn't really need to be changed much for a larger resolution anyway since they don't get stretched unless you zoom.

Poor content design choices aside, Overhaul Games did a fairly good job at updating the engine and the relevant assets for modern machines. Keeping the old videos was simply not an option, from any perspective. They needed to use a new video format (WebM, VP8+Vorbis audio) and it needed to be appropriately sized for newer devices like the rest of the assets. Of course, we all wish they'd done a better job at remaking those, but that's a different issue altogether.

 

Re-encoding the video would have only further degraded the quality. Without the source material, that's just not a viable trade-off.

 

If I'd bought the EEs, it would not be for the videos, and I don't consider the new videos a selling point. Possibly the reverse, but either way it's not a big deal. Better to spend that time and effort elsewhere.

Though I don't think that style of animation that they used in BG EE fits with PS:T ver well.

 

Of course, you wouldn't, they're horrible.

I'm a little surprised no modder has tried their hand at their own version of the videos. It shouldn't take that much effort (relatively speaking).