But it's still worth playing, it is still better than the median cRPG almost 25 years later, and it remains a milestone in cRPGs history: i.e. just like Sgt Peppers or Dark Side of the Moon are still worth listening today.
Edit: Not a fanboy defensiveness or anything. Just rare to see the contrarian opinion on this, and genuinely curious. Other than the trash combat, I really enjoyed my time with PST.
That said, I would nudge Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder: Kingmaker above PST as they have an equally good amount of story, NPC interaction, they balance combat better. Pillars II, Wrath of the Righteous and Tides of Numenera, otoh, are below the PST bar in my opinion but ymmv depending on tastes. On the Divinity side, DOS:2 is also a good competitor in the list, although I find it the story tends to be too diluted by combat.
Notably many of the titles I listed above have had Avellone involved at some point (I think he had been involved with Numenera, DOS:2, Pillars I and Kingmaker, maybe more).
I was very skeptical about BG3, especially because even if I listed DOS:2 above, I didn't really like it too much, I'm no Larian fan. But I played the early access and it seems to be golden good so far.
Otoh I replayed (for the billionth time?) all IE games recently and while I still consider PST to be the best IE game ever (only BG2 comes close) it's definitely not uniform. The plot weakens after leaving Sigil, and so do side quests and non-linearity (it's actually pretty linear overall, but after Sigil it doesn't even maintain the illusion). Even the interactions with NPCs are sometimes lackluster (e.g. I would have "pushed" Morte more on the "don't trust the skull" bit) I felt (but it's personal opinion I'd say) that many interactions in PoE went deeper than that.
Anyway, these are opinions and I know of at least one PST fan who would trash the PoEs, Numenera and the Pathfinders (but loved DOS:2), so YMMV.
I haven't tried Pathfinder: Kingmaker, because it has an enormous number of very negative reviews, so I'm surprised you'd put it in the same league as PS:T.
Interesting.. I consider this one of the best albums of all time, unrelated to the "standards of the time" or whatever.
I also don't think I've played a CRPG I enjoyed as much as Planescape. Some of the fallout games may have been pretty close, though I never finished any of them
What are you talking about? I've never heard this take before. I found it fantastic all the way through. Maybe introducing the lord vessel was a poor design choice, but it's a minor fault.
The catacombs are just a smudgy mess with a couple of uninteresting ennemies and a mid-boss without any worthwhile patterns. The depth is just reskinned old ennemies you have to plod through one after the other before what’s probably the worst boss in the soul games. Even the better areas like Duke’s Archive, Crystal Cave or New Londo are inferiorly designed retread of previous ideas. The true genius of the game - the looping-on-itself level design - is over and you spend your time in this very bland linear areas wishing it was over already.
Honestly if the game stopped after fighting Orstein and Smough, it would be a better game overall.
The DLC is good again however. You can tell FromSoft got additional budget for it.
Which games would you say have bested it in terms of writing/plot? I see a few but not very many really. Disco Elysium would be the first but that also stands alone in terms of quality. (That said, don't get to game much anymore so could very well have missed a lot...).
The gameplay is absolutely an important part of "should I play this now".
Plenty of games that were good when they came out aren't worth investing hours in today. Bioshock Infinite comes to mind.
If a game is relatively linear (think Last of Us, To the Moon, Alan Wake), I'm actually inclined to just watch a lets play because I can skip the "gameplay" parts.
Maybe that makes me the minority, but I don't think it invalidates the opinions of people saying PS:T was a phenomenal game even if the gameplay was nothing special
PS:T is a cRPGs not a visual novel. There is an actual game you have to play around the dialogues and this game is not particularly complex, engaging or even that fun as demonstrated by the rest of my comment lamenting the part of the game after Raven’s maze which is notorious for having lots of boring combats and less dialogue than the rest of the game.
People excuse the mechanics both because the plot was original and because they have forgotten as this part of the game is unremarkable. It still make for a less than stellar experience when you play it today.
There are also very few cRPGs of the same type; maybe about 20 in total? Note I don't consider all these first-person action-RPGs the same "type"; it's cool if you're in to that, but I'm not really.
At any rate, I don't think it's a perfect game, but IMHO it holds up very well.
Adequate writing? The writing of 99.9% of games is simply atrocious, and PS:T was and still is miles above them.
"PS:T has now been bested by plenty of modern cRPGs"
It's been bested on the gameplay and graphics level, but I've yet to find a game with better writing.
I think the only comparable games recently have been mostly outside what I would consider the cRPG genre, taken strictly: Elden ring, horizon zero dawn / forbidden west, recent Zelda franchise entries, RDR/RDR2, I was a Teenage Exocolonist
Witcher 3 is probably the strongest challenger, I think.
I haven't played Disco Elysium but I hear good things. I don't think the Mass Effect series fully measures up, though it's definitely in the ballpark. Same for the Elder Scrolls series - suffers the opposite problem from PS:T, that the gameplay is solid but the plot fails.
PS:T was a cut above the other cRPGs of its time mainly because it had adequate writing and an engaging story when most others cRPGs were trite. Still eveything after Raven’s maze is frankly average until the ending which is good again and the gameplay outside of dialogue is frankly uninteresting. It’s in a lot of way like the original Dark Soul whose last half is so aweful I’m not sure the awesome first one is enough to redeem the game.
PS:T has now been bested by plenty of modern cRPGs. I’m not sure it’s worth revisiting considering how long it is.