Good morning, boys and girls. I've always shied away from mods, seeing them as beneficial to a repeat playthrough, but as ruining the developer's original vision while playing a game for the first time. I read the mod article from gog, and I actually installed all of the mods and had a nice look around. I eventually uninstalled and reinstalled to get the vanilla game again, and that is what I'm playing now. (I just walked out into Sigil).

My question to you fine people is this: Do the mods make the original game that much better, and am I hurting my experience by not using them?

I have more experience with modding Baldur's Gate. I will play PS:T in the future though. I like installing mods that improve the technical side of the game (resolution, UI, bugfixes, spelling & grammar, ...) or add comfort (bigger stacks). I stay away from mods that change the story or add too much content. I prefer to play the original story.

If you want a "closer to the original" experience, here's my advice (I played the game on CD release, vanilla, and the GOG modded version recently)

-Widescreen + UI mod : Well... I play on a laptop with weird resolution, so this mod is neat. It's really a pure technical thing. You can launch the game without it, if the result suits you (and works on your PC), keep it that way. Actually using higher resolution kind of breaks the inventory/charactersheet/journal layout. But I don't care much, I really think it looks better on my screen native resolution anyway.

- The WeiDU Fixpack is mostly bug fix. It's not like Torment is full of gamebreaking bugs anyway, but you might come across small annoying things (mostly invisible to you) : this will fix quite a lot of things. I really recommand it, just to be on the safe side (don't read the "read me" which is full of spoilers, but an example : some attrbute check that were supposed to give you a dialogue line if your attribute is >= 14 only worked if your attribute was = 14. Which is stupid. And fixed by the fixpack. This kind of things).

- the Tweak Pack is mostly useless. You can enjoy the game without it : the ONE great thing it brings is more party banter (the original banter, that were almost impossible to get in a normal playthrough because of the settings). And it is not much (I mean, it's cool to have more dialogue between the great characters that follow you but that's about it). Feel free to skip it, or install only the Banter part.

- the Unfinished Business mod can be ignored too. It's very cosmetic for the most part, won't add huge content, and a veteran might not even notice most of them unless looking for it. I mean, you have a few more characters and quests in a few places, but that's never a big deal.

The entire goal of a mod is to take something in a given game and make it better--or, especially if it was below par in the beginning, to bring it up to par. There are a few mods, a very few, which try to change everything about the game they mod in order to turn it into a completely different game--they're often called "total conversion" mods or something similar--you'll have plenty of warning about those kinds of mods from the titles of the mods themselves, if from nowhere else. As I say, "change-everything" mods are very rare, and yet people inexperienced with mods somehow think that this is what a "mod" is intended to do. Glad to say that's not even close to true...')

The term "mod" simply is short for "modification." When a game developer releases an official patch for a game, a patch that may increase the resolution options or introduce higher-resolution textures, or new voice-packs--or even just plain bug fixes--he's "modded" the game from its original form. So, generally, "mods" are attempts either officially or unofficially to take a given game and try to *improve* something about it. It really is that simple.

Every one of the mods listed for this decade-plus-old game on the Gog site are mods designed to improve the game situation on more up to date systems. If Gog itself had not modded one of the direct-draw components of this game prior to shipping (what Gog did was to use another modder's work) it you would be unable to play it on current systems *at all*! (Because of improvements to D3d which came along long after the game initially shipped but with which the original game was incompatible.)

If you are afraid of "modding" you are pretty much of afraid of improving your games *for any reason*--and that is just nuts...;) Don't let anyone talk you into being silly about this--if you don't mod you miss out on a lot.

Basically, the mods Gog has linked to on its site that it recommends for Torment are all game-improvers, every single one. They improve graphics display (800x600 is one yucky res today! I play at 1920x1200 because of a mod and it is gorgeous), and who could object to bug fixes the original publishers never saw fit to make? Who could object to original material *still on the the original CDs* that never made it into the final game because the publisher rushed things for Christmas shipping that year--who could object to that material being *put back into the game?* Certainly not me!

Anyway--Gog is your friend, here. The company wants to *keep* your business so it links to all of these fabulous mods to enhance your experience far, far and away more than the original game in its original shipping state was capable of. I played the 1.1 version of the game when the game was new--this modded 1.1 version of the game makes it so much more fun and interesting that it is like a new experience and plays far better than the originally shipped version--a lot more fun! It's 100% Torment--just 100% better, that's all.

The purpose of a game mod is to improve some aspect of a given game. Lots of times, especially with these old classics, the original developers join in the modding fun and help to improve their own software! That's not uncommon at all. Bottom line: don't let anyone tell you mods are generally unsafe because they aren't. But just like games, there are some good ones and some bad ones...;) I'm happy to report that none of the mods Gog has recommended for this game are "bad"--they are in fact *great.* Don't get caught dead playing this game without them.

I installed the widescreen mod (1920x1080), and it did look a lot better. I felt like I had to strain my eyes to see things, though, even with the word-size turned up. I realize that mods are designed to make a game better, but I want to experience it how gog wants me to.

I played Gothic 3 a few months ago, which was one of the buggiest games to ship, apparently. If you examine the game card, you can see they included the Community patch into the game. That says that gog wanted that mod to benefit release, to me. The mods for Torment were not included (excluding the information waltc shared. Thanks for the information), and I won't be installing anything to benefit my first playthrough.

After I have beaten Torment, my next playthrough will certainly include mods. I would like to see and feel how the game originally was before I go changing things around.


Thanks for the input.

In my opinion, that's the biggest praise for the UB mod you could offer. You don't want restored content to stick out, with the textual or item equivalent of a flashing neon sign proclaiming *NEW CONTENT*. You want it to blend seamlessly with the game and enhance, not disrupt, the experience.

To the OP: I think you would love a modded PST. Take a look at this link: http://thunderpeel2001.blogspot.com/2009/01/planescape-torment-fully-modded.html

It will walk you through the process (and help you curate content) of the mods available. You'll want to pay close attention to the Unfinished Business quest selection (probably don't install the Pendant quest), and the PST tweaks options (I appreciated disabling battle music, others might not).

Lastly, a word about resolution. It sounds like you're playing on a 16:9 monitor since you tired 1920 x 1080. That's waaaaay too high res to be able to appreciate the art and characters. Don't go by the resolution recommendations in that link I posted above (they're for 4:3 or 16:10 monitors), try something just slightly higher resolution and widescreen like 1280 by 720 and 20% larger font. I think you'll like it. Any resolution you can switch your desktop to, you can use as a widescreen resolution, fyi. If you get into adding custom resolutions to your video card driver, you can get a perfect pixel map (4:1 for your 1920 x 1080 screen) using 960 x 540. That will look the most 'vanilla' also, due to the lower resolution. I'm using 960 x 600 in PST (16:10 monitor here) and it looks gorgeous.

Just a quick word to the OP:

I know the feeling. Usually I want to play games "the way they were meant to be played" the first time around. Which does not involve mods at all, except for patches to sort out bugs. Have fun with your vanilla playthrough, and come back for another later!

It's all relative--in a perfect world, for the higher resolutions you'd have a larger monitor. I play at 1920x1200 (my monitor's native res) but my monitor is ~28" and so PT's characters look smaller than they appear at 800x600, but they are from being too small for me to see. The great thing about the higher resolutions is how much more of the map you get to see in a single frame! Take a look at the playing field at your resolution, and then take a look at it at 800x600 (if you want to--too much trouble, really, to change the WS mod just to do that) and you'll see what I mean. At 800x600 you can hardly see any of the playing map in a single frame--and the only way to make sense out of it at all is to bring up the game's map in order to gain perspective. I well remember playing the original game at 800x600, and that was something I did not care for at all. Yes--Gothic three should be played from the start with nothing short of the 1.75 community patch. The last official patch for the game, the 1.6 patch, is a bugfest just waiting to pounce...as you discovered...;) 1.75 isn't perfect, but it is leaps and bounds better than 1.6. And I suppose, since 1.75 was a community patch, that it would be classed as a "mod" itself. Some people are for some reason scared of mods and seek to pass that fear along to anyone within earshot. Like all software, mods are both good and bad--but I think the good outweighs the bad substantially, and a lot of it is because mod authors don't like to release crummy mods with their names attached..!

Have fun...!

Then install the fixpack duh...

Why would you play the bugged vanilla version, rather than install the fixpack which contains a GREAT deal of work and makes this game more like it intended to be in the first place is beyond me.

Another thing:

Erephine over at Spellhold Studios has released high quality PST music for use in the game. It is the original soundtrack, but in 44.1 kHz rather than the game's default 22.05 kHz. It makes the music sound _much_ better in my experience, eliminates the crackling you'd hear in the high range occasionally. You can find the mod over at SHS's website by googling "1pp pst music" (sorry, can't post links since I'm low rep).

This wasn't included in the mod thread stickied at the top of the forum, so I'm not sure many players know about it.

I was wondering if I download and install only the Fixpatch, will my old saves be useless?

Most probably yes. They might not be but count that they will to stave off disappointment.

If the save still works then any areas you have already visited won't have any changes applied to them. Depending on where you are in the game this could be very little or almost all of the game world.