• 60-80 hours of gameplay.
• The characters are about twice the size they were in Baldur's Gate, and can walk or run.
• Your alignment and skills are determined by your actions in the game.
• You'll be able to visit various planes including the Plane of Concordant Opposition, Limbo, Baator, the Ethereal Plane, and Carceri.
• Story-driven game with increased replayability as opposed to epic size.
• Complex dialog that is greatly affected by how your character develops.
• 80-100 spells featuring stunning animations. A few of the more unique are spells that taunt a target to death, cause an avalanche of hungry spells to descend upon a victim, or summon a blanket of insects to devour a target.
• Around 60 monster types, of which 12-13 are newly designed, while the rest are known AD&D creatures. You will have to deal with devils and demons. Many of the creatures and characters around you will be devious and up to the task of removing you, not necessarily by killing you.
• The interface features a popup menu system (brought up by right-clicking) and a character panel along the bottom of the screen. The character's portraits are animated to reflect their condition. Each portrait has a coloured health bar that can be toggled into a numerical display.
• World map similar to Baldur's Gate that now can be annotated. The Journal has sections for assigned quests, completed quests, what you have been told and experienced, and a bestiary. The bestiary lists every important person and creature you meet, and becomes more detailed as you learn more about the creatures. The journal updates itself prefusely as you explore the world.
• Animation of whole backgrounds such as the Pillar of Skulls, the Iron Golem, and a room with gears.
• The same fixed, isometric, 3/4 top-down view as Baldur's Gate. The game can only be played at 640x480 resolution.

• Don't need to know AD&D Planescape as you will learn everything you need in the game. Prior knowledge, will make you aware of the little touches. "The Nameless One is as clueless as you and I about the planes!" [Adam Heine, Scriptor]
• Although there are a few courier quests ("Please go get my potato!"), far more involve puzzles, riddles, and other sorts of quests.
• Reloading will not be common because reasons to do so have been removed: player death (you are immortal), companion death, or failing to copy a spell into a spellbook. Hit points are still rolled on going up a level.
• There are actually a couple places where reloading is highly discouraged (that is, it would be easier on you if you just walked back into battle and finished it). There are some places where you can die or where you have to die. As Colin McComb (Designer) put it: "And there are places where you can be wiped from the face of immortality. There are people to whom your immortality means nothing."
• Magic weapons are not affected by the Planes, but spells are.
• Twenty nine movies including a few "special" spell movies.
• Precautions have been taken to avoid no-win situations. If you ever do anything that permanently jeopardizes your ability to finish the game, Torment will flag it and automatically inform the player and play the Game Over movie. However, these instances are few and far between, and usually quite obvious.
• Although many treasures are placed, most monsters will have some kind of random treasure on them.
• Some items are class-specific, person-specific or alignment-specific. The items stocked by stores will slowly replish and change over time.
• Weapons include the axe, knife, and the popular, huge, two-headed hammer. Some weapons may be intelligent and have personalities. You won't be able to wield two weapons; instead, you can rip off an arm and use it as a club.
• Special animations have been created for critical hits. They are even better than those of Fallout.
• Many ambient sounds to make areas come alive.
• Each area and major character will have their own musical theme. The music is very atmospheric, not very joyful. It's very dark and ominous.
• Voice actors perform the important dialog. Sheena Easton marvelously provides the voice of Annah.
• Keyboard shortcuts can be entered through an interface in the game. You will have the choice of auto-scroll or manual screen scrolling.
• A 48-page manual, of which 35 are "how-to-play". Greg Peterson (Marketing Head) provided the following reason for the short manual: "Much of the nature of this game involves discovering aspects of your character as you play - so if we produced a huge manual with full spell tables it would remove much of the surprise."
• Coloured light sources are present so objects being carried through lit or shadowed areas will be coloured and illuminated accordingly.
• French, German and Spanish versions of the game are planned.
• Game is rated for Mature audiences although it does not have nudity, sex or excess foul language.
• Help button leads to an in-game HTML version of the manual.
• The game is easy to learn and will help you along the way. However, you can purchase a strategy guide written by Chris Avellone (Lead Designer), Colin McComb (Designer) and Matt Norton, which will provide unique, yet non-essential, insights into the game.
• A Planescape: Torment novel related to the game is being written by Ray and Val Vallese.
• You can actually have a Lim Lim as a pet that you can carry around. If you put him on the ground, he will follow you and attack someone that threatens you.
  
  
  

From the start of AD&D, there was always this strange collection of "other universes" called the Outer Planes. Mostly they existed to explain the AD&D alignment system. Each plane matched an exact alignment -- good, evil, lawful, chaotic, etc. The gods of a whole bunch of different mythologies were assigned places in these planes according to their beliefs which means you wound up with a wild jumble -- a few Greek Gods sharing a plane with Norse, Japanese, Aztec, and fantasy gods for example. There were really powerful monsters from mythology, angels, and demons. Some of the planes were mythological places -- Asgard, the Nine Pits of Hell, etc. The Outer Planes had a big reputation for being deadly -- not the place anyone really wanted to take their character to. My job was to take all of these strange, mixed up and fantastic places and try and present them in some way so they made sense as a place you'd really want to explore and campaign in. I figured the best way to make sense of it was to say that's what every character there is trying to do. Figuring out the planes is figuring out how the universe works. The planes are unique in another way. Unlike other worlds TSR created, the planes existed in every campaign. They were the big cosmology that "explained it all." Characters from any campaign could theoretically get themselves out to the planes. This all meant that the Outer Planes were filled with characters potentially from anywhere (Hell, Nirvana, the Forgotten Realms, etc.) trying to understand the illogical and unreal secrets of the planes.