“Avellone is credited as the lead designer on PST, and so I asked him about this maturity question. “I think it was that the setting encouraged a philosophical/thoughtful approach to questing and exploration,” he told me over email, “so that in itself may have given it an innate sense of maturity than simply hacking orcs with swords.” The game is thoughtful, pensive, and it doesn’t really require that much combat out of the player. Like the Fallout games of the late 1990s, immersive sims like Deus Ex, and the early Thief games, Planescape: Torment seemed to be reaching out for other ways of dealing with, and being in, a game world.
In this week leading up to E3, it almost seems impossible for a major game release to have such an ambivalent stance toward its own genre. The games of our contemporary moment that “swerve” into new territory do it in a calculated, thoroughly vetted way.”