Well there is really

New > Old

Well, the game came on four discs. And I don't mean they should have voiced it all - it's just that there are pretty much only two spoken lines for each character when you interact with them (there's a handful more in scripted sequences, and a fair amount if you use the accelerated banter mods). It feels as if the voice acting could basically have been cut completely for all the impact it had on most of the game, which is a shame. If the PCs had had maybe five or six lines each during the "interrogation" dialogues I would've been happy.

Planescape: Torment was released 11 years ago. You have to keep in mind that hardware wasn't as powerful in those days as it is now. This means that they had to use weaker encryption algorithms to compress data as computers couldn't handle decoding the stronger ones in real-time.
Shipping on multiple discs was common in those days but people didn't like disc swapping and hard drives were a lot smaller in those days. Finding room for a 2GB full install wasn't easy for many gamers.

What he said.

I remember reading a review of a game and the author criticized it for having soundtrack as mp3. Reason was it ate lots of cpu power and game wouldn't work properly on weaker machines.

The voice acting was added to make characters a bit real. with the amount of text it simply would not be possible to release the game with fully voiced characters.

Compression and crypto are different, btw.

The norm for compression was LZW, tar, or zip in those days and compression was seen as a piracy tool, since it let them cram more warez on fewer floppies.

PS:T, like most of the infinity games is uncompressed, a form of free ghetto copy protection but also to make the games seem "bigger".

all about Nordom:

http://www.gamebanshee.com/planescapetorment/companions/nordom.php