Chris Avellone: Dark Knight, Part One
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(We had the licence and very few developers to work on it,) he recalls. (Feargus [Urquhart, Black Isle CEO] asked if I wanted to be the first to work on the PC version; I said: '˜Hell, yes.') Avellone's central conceit with Torment was that death, in storybased games, was a punitive waste of time, and served only to slow players down. From this, the story emerged: players were cast as The Nameless One, a hideously scarred immortal amnesiac who would remember (rather than learn) new skills by coming into contact with relics from his forgotten past.
Death or the lack thereof was so pivotal to Torment's gameplay that it could even be used to the player's advantage. Say you needed to break into a morgue: you might attempt to attack the guards outside, but a much simpler (albeit perhaps more cringeinducing) method of entry was to simply commit suicide and be carted in, cadaver-style.
