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Torn tried to break away from the Dungeons & Dragons license. |
For the past five years, the games produced by Interplay's Black Isle Studios have completely dominated the role-playing game genre. By successively releasing the Fallout and Baldur's Gate games, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale, Black Isle Studios refocused attention on a genre that had almost been completely abandoned by the mid-1990s. Black Isle Studios consistently enjoyed commercial and critical success by both developing its own original titles and by teaming up with BioWare to produce games adapting the popular Dungeons & Dragons rules. Black Isle always seemed to satisfy the typically voracious expectations of the genre's fans.
Although the Fallout games sold well, games that strayed from swords-and-sorcery settings never sold as well as more traditional RPGs, which were stocked with elves, dwarves and wizards. All of Interplay's recently released swords-and-sorcery games had been D&D-licensed games. Interplay was reluctantly forced to consider whether it had been too reliant on the D&D license when Hasbro granted Infogrames the exclusive right to create D&D games for at least the next 15 years. Although it could barter to prolong the duration of its existing license, Interplay was faced with the prospect of being unable to produce D&D games in the near future. Not wanting to abandon the potentially lucrative market of swords-and-sorcery RPGs, Black Isle Studios began designing its own fantasy setting to replace, or at least supplement, games using D&D settings. Black Isle Studios: Torn was spawned from those efforts, but it was destined to become yet another occupant of PC Gaming's Graveyard.
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Torn was powered by a version of the LithTech engine. |
What went wrong? Why did Black Isle Studios abandon its first original swords-and-sorcery RPG since 1995's Stonekeep? Following the public announcement of the decision, fueled by the concurrent dismissal of 56 Interplay employees, rumors that the decision was made as a result of Interplay's ongoing financial difficulties circulated. However, only five of those employees were actually employed by Black Isle Studios, and Torn's development hadn't gone smoothly for an extended period of time prior to the game's cancellation. The game had received only a lukewarm reception from the gaming press at the 2001 E3 conference. Black Isle Studios had licensed Monolith's LithTech engine to use in Torn, but the development team had little previous experience with 3D graphics and found it difficult to appropriately customize the LithTech engine. In July 2001, after it became evident that it would take at least another eight months and require a greater amount of time and other resources than previously expected to complete the game, Torn was canceled.
