Unwieldy

I'm just getting into Crystal Souls and just leveled up all four of of my party members to level 6. Two of them of them were able to choose two traits, while the other two were only offered one. Is this to be expected? I've looked at each character's stats and can't work out why this would happen. The two-traiters now have a total of six traits, while the others have only four.

Fair enough. I'm actually not much of a gamer save for the occasional RPG, so apparently these types of things are way more common in video games than I realized. I am a software developer of line-of-business applications though, so I guess I have a different perspective on usability bugs. Also, count me firmly in the non-exploitation camp :-)

Lilith - Nearly every piece of software, games included, has bugs. Most of them are trivial and not worth pursuing. Some definitely are. The two that I've pointed out on this forum are more than trivial because they allow exploitation of the game in such a way that gameplay is artifically, fundamentally altered. Good software developers care about this. Neither you nor I know the percentage of players that do.

It's so frustrating that Spiderweb can make such an engrossing game yet mar it with such poor quality control.

When I attempt to equip a character with a second heavy sword, I'm prevented from doing so with a reasonable warning similar to "this weapon is too heavy to be carried in your off hand." Yet, if I have a lighter sword in my off hand and a heavier one in the other, I can click the lighter followed by the heavier one to make them swap hands. Now, I have a heavy sword in my off hand, at which point I can replace the lighter sword in my dominant hand with a second heavy sword. This makes no sense! How am I suddenly capable of carrying a heavy sword in my off hand just by trading swords with my dominant one? Is this yet another bug that fundamentally altars the realism and consistency of the gameplay mechanics?

There are several items in the game that say "+XX% to blessings/curses you cause." I'm not exactly clear on what this applies to. The only spell I recall that specifically mentions being a "blessing" is the priest spell War Blessing. What other blessings can one cause that would benefit from these items? I was wondering if things like Haste and Protection fall in this category, but they don't seem to in my testing. Please correct me if I'm wrong. As for curses, "curses you cause" also seems kind of vague to me. For instance, say I have a mage equipped with a few items to buff blessings/curses that casts Cloak of Curses. My melee fighter (with NO blessing/curse buff items) then strikes an opponent and inflicts a curse on him via the cloak spell. My mage only indirectly caused the curse since my fighter actually inflicted it, so does the curse get buffed or not?

Agreed. I'm willing to overlook trivial glitches. No programmer is perfect. I am a professional programmer myself, and I've never coded a perfect app - at least not one that has a significant degree of complexity. Some bugs, however, have an urgent and significant implact on the way in which a user interacts with your software. This is one of those. No way should a player be able to kill opponents, particularly ones that are supposed to be powerful and important, with zero resistance. This seriously disrupts both the story and the gameplay mechanics of apparently multiple Avernum games, from what people are saying. It's not acceptable to excuse a serious flaw in a game or other piece of software as "that's just the way (so-and-so developer) does things." A good developer is in a sense never finished with their product as they are constantly driven to increase the quality of it when the need is revealed. I hope that Spiderweb cand find the time and budget to address this particular quibble, because as I've said before, they sure have created something great.

Thanks for the insight guys. Escape from the Pit is my first foray into Spiderweb games, and I'm enjoying it immensely. That is precisely why I get frustrated when a programming bug reminds me that I'm interacting with code and takes me out of my immersion in the Avernum world. I haven't been this excited about a game since I discovered Shining Force 2 on the Sega Genesis in the early 90's.

Thanks for your quick response, Randomizer. Sorry my first post is a nitpicky one.

Athron did get a couple of attacks on one of my party members, but they were so inconsequential and it was still so easy to escape that I thought I might have done something the game didn't intend for me to do. You would think she would at least block the exit. I still don't understand why when reapproached post-looting, she acted as if I never wronged her. Things like this really damage my sense of being immersed in in the story that drives the game. Maybe that's over-thinking things, but depth and continuity of story are just as important to me as gameplay mechanics. As for the flaws with scripted fights - that's unfortunate. I would say the same as above. It seems like it would be a very simple fix to have a monster launch a particular response dialog if not go directly into combat mode itself if struck prior to the regularly scheduled script. As it is now, it seems some monsters will just sit idly as they're bludgeoned to death, thereby making all realism completely fall apart. No sane adventurers would pick an unnecessary fight with a powerful monster if they know they can kill it without one!

I've run into a couple of spots in the game where I can easily kill/loot without consequence, but I'm not sure whether to feel good about being strategic or bad that I'm maybe taking advantage of an oversight in the game. The first concerns Athron's treasure. As far as I can tell, people acquire it by either killing Athron or leaving through the west door. I was able to steal all of it with my party at very low levels (and not nearly enough tool use to open the door) by simply moving my party right past Athron (even though she had turned hostile) and then out of the dungeon! I then reentered her lair and approached her only to find that she was speaking with me as if nothing had ever happened at all! The second situation that definitely seems like a bug concerns killing the spider queen in her upstairs lair - the one across the river NW from Fort Dranlon. I was getting slaughtered in this battle on Torment with my party at around level 20, and then I realized I could simply kill her with absolutely no resistance by just entering combat mode and never entering into the scripted dialogs. The game clearly allowed me to do this, but it doesn't make any sense, so I'm wondering if I'm ruining the realism of what should clearly be a fight. What do you think about these situations? Am I exploiting the game, or do they somehow make sense in the game universe?