Black Isle Studios is the premier publisher of role-playing games, developing or publishing such games as Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Baldur's Gate. The first game that really launched the Black Isle brand, though, was Fallout, a postapocalyptic role-playing game that won universal acclaim and legions of fans. Now, Black Isle is poised to bring the Fallout style of gameplay to the more common fantasy RPG genre and create an RPG called Torn that will rival even Baldur's Gate in the arena of huge, epic role-playing experiences. It helps that Black Isle can draw on its experiences with a variety of hit RPGs. The team that created Planescape: Torment is designing Torn, and the artists from Torment and Icewind Dale are creating the look of this new gameworld. Add to that the same role-playing system that made Fallout such a hit, and you have as sure a formula for success as you can get in this industry.

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GameSpot recently visited the offices of Interplay and Black Isle Studios to get a closer look at Torn. Surprisingly, Black Isle has been working on Torn since production wrapped on Torment, which was over a year and a half ago. The game is scheduled to ship by the end of the year. However, several circumstances are forcing the game to take longer to build than Icewind Dale, which was finished in a year. For one, Torn features an entirely new gameworld, not drawn from D&D, which heretofore has been Black Isle's bread-and-butter setting. Thus, Black Isle's artists are having to create all-new creatures, worlds, and characters that are different enough from Dungeons & Dragons but still familiar enough to returning RPG gamers. Secondly, Black Isle is turning to Monolith's LithTech engine to power Torn. Original work began on Torn using the LithTech 1.5 engine, but since then, Monolith has delivered more-advanced builds over time to Interplay. That's forced Black Isle to tweak and redo levels and assets, resulting in scheduled but nonetheless frustrating delays to production. At this moment, Torn is on LithTech version 3.1. Yet, the visual improvements on previous Black Isle games is noticeable. While the levels aren't entirely populated yet, we did see a variety of spectacular special effects associated with spells. Dynamic shining pentagrams, brilliant explosions, fiery missiles, and more accompany many of the spells in the game, and they look better than the psionic special effects in Monolith's own Sanity action game of last year.

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However, although the technology is continually evolving in Torn, and the levels are just now being really developed, much of the game design, story, and world is already months old, thanks to the active imagination and diligent creativity of the Torn design team. Let's take a closer look at the design of this upcoming RPG.