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Can I die of old age?


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Spiderweb games owe very little of their DNA to roguelikes. There are some common elements, but those are mostly from other shared inspiration, like D&D.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't think you could possibly take enough game time to win that aging would become an issue. A year would be exceptionally long. Two years is only possibly if you're actively trying to waste time. And that much means you're dedicating a substantial amount of real-life time to repeatedly resting, acquiring more food, and doing it again.

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Not Avernum, but I'm told early versions of Exile: Escape from the Pit (Spiderweb Software's very first game) would give you a message when the day counter maxed out, saying something to the effect of "Wow, you took a really long time to play this game. You're too bad of a player to continue. Sorry!" and kill your party. This was removed in an update shortly after people complained about it.

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I've never heard that, and it would surprise me. E1 doesn't have a visible day counter or anything that suggests that time is tracked. Nothing like that shows up until E3. Steps taken could easily be tracked, but why?

 

—Alorael, who will put this in the urban legend bin until someone credibly chimes in otherwise.

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I've never heard that, and it would surprise me. E1 doesn't have a visible day counter or anything that suggests that time is tracked. Nothing like that shows up until E3. Steps taken could easily be tracked, but why?

 

—Alorael, who will put this in the urban legend bin until someone credibly chimes in otherwise.

 

Err, see my disclaimer below. :p

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I thought so, but my memory's kinda funny, hence the disclaimer. tongue

 

I recall hearing it from Drakefyre, although that's also subject to the disclaimer. Best to ask someone like him who was around for the early days of Spidweb, I suppose. *i or Lilith might also know whether or not I'm an idiot.

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  • 3 weeks later...
Heh, nice move...

But, there were actually stuff about where the day counter ran out?

Early Spiderweb Trolling...

Again, no. There was no day counter. There may have been a move counter there's nothing but this second-hand rumor to suggest that it ever ended the game.

 

—Alorael, who doubts Jeff would have put that in, either. That's never really been his style, and even then he was trying to sell games, not alienate players. Yes, even before it became a profession.

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I'm not being DELIBERATELY unhelpful. I honestly do remember someone saying that. Whether or not my memory is failing me again is the issue.

 

I'm plagued by a tendency to forget things I should remember, "remember" things that didn't actually happen, and conflate unrelated memories, and then further draw false conclusions based on those misleading memories. Part of it certainly has to do with my bipolar disorder medications, but to some extent it's always happened.

 

This is why I decided to put a cautionary statement in all my message board signatures.

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I have a distinct memory of someone asking whether it was worked into the story or whether it was just "whoops u r dead" (the exact words), and the response was that it was more or less the latter.

 

Again, this might not have happened, but that's what I remember.

 

It might have been Exile 3, but I feel like it was Exile 1.

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It's definitely not Exile 3. I've rested my day to days in the eight hundreds, long after anyone could conceivably reach before losing all interest unless they're just mashing R outside. There's no end.

 

—Alorael, who has an alternate hypothesis for you. Remember the Xian Skull? It's quite possible that someone made a joke about instant death and it snowballed without a kernel of truth.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Speaking of age (and/or time), I do think this is a relevant question:

 

What is the size of Avernum? Often you will read a sign indicating that a city is 25 to 80 miles away, and making such a trip would range from a day or more (the former) to several days. Despite this, the venture between Fort Draco and Formello takes less than a day in Avernum. This leads me to several conclusions:

 

(a.) The scale of Avernum is not properly represented (which I think is unlikely - I'd like to believe Avernum as a seemingly tractless cavern of massive dimensions).

 

(b.) The Empire-Avernum War was quite possibly longer than two year's time, if we consider the player's party as the driving force behind the success of the battle - this argument is to say that due to the size of Avernum, it would take quite a long time to traverse all of it to complete the given missions.

 

(c.) Because your party is mighty and magical, you run at about 55 miles per hour, or even faster. Duke Nukem has nothing on you, because he cannot shoot fireballs with his bare hands. (clearly I'm not being serious here)

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The scale is i think not too wrong in general, Fort Draco is pretty close to Formello actually maybe about 10-12 mile at max,as for the whole size the map will probably make us believe that it is a few(200 is probably a decent approximation) hundred miles into about the same plus the northern frontier of A5.

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Your party goes around wearing bulky steel armor swinging giant swords, all the while moving as fast as they can.

 

I mean hell, were people doing this in real life? The armor, the sword, the shield, not to mention all the crap you have in your pack. And the walking! 12 miles from fort draco to formello with ALL OF THIS?

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I think checking your numbers may be necessary, at least with what is given on the world map. According to the signs, Draco and Formello are indeed at least 80 miles apart by road, unless "mi." has a different meaning in the world of Ermarian.

 

Even if the actual distance really is between 10-15 miles, that's still a day's worth of travel easy, especially if you're on the march with a lot of heavy gear.

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I'm hesitant about getting into the new Avernum trilogy, as silly as that may sound. I really do love the aesthetic and feel of the old games, and I'm certain that's why you still have great fans of the original Exile games here (Blades was the only one I ever got into). And certainly the only thing I can actively pin on Exile as having a real "up" over Avernum on is the great variety of spells and weapons in the older games. Variety is great. (As an aside, I also love reading comparisons between Avernum and Exile, especially when I've never really bothered to delve into playing into the originals)

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I think my argument would be this: when you see a sign listing a location as being 10-25 miles away (anywhere there is a location so listed), the distances on the map tend to be... fairly consistant. And so that's actually a better question - how do the distances in old Avernum compare to Exile, and how do those distances compare to the new Avernum?

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The distances on signs are identical in Exile and A1-3, leading to one infamous mistake where there is a sign from the distant future in Avernum. I haven't checked methodically and it's been a very, very long time since I played the Exile trilogy, but I remember distances in spaces being quite similar.

 

I think the thing that's really off is time. Look at E3/A3: you can cross an entire continent on foot in a day or two. That's completely unreasonable even if Valorim is a tiny continent (which it seems to be). Basically, Jeff threw days in the games on an arbitrary scale and it doesn't match with how fast you travel or how much you do.

 

—Alorael, who ironically finds the very slow passage of time much more accurate for the second trilogy, which doesn't track time at all. The loss of outdoors vs. town mode makes everything seem much smaller and closer together. Silvar and Cotra are more a half-hour's walk from each other than several days'. It's one of the biggest flaws in the second trilogy: Avernum just doesn't feel as big as it used to be.

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A5 also benefits from covering new territory. It doesn't feel weirdly cramped in part because we don't come to the game with expectations of how large the Drake Pillars should be, for example. It's reasonable for the frontier to be closer together. And I think it's telling that A5 is probably about the same size as A4 or A6 but covers far, far fewer cities. The area was built with the no-outdoor scale in mind.

 

—Alorael, who actually likes A5 quite a lot, and he thinks this is part of it. It brings back the wonder of exploration missing in A4 (and even a bit in A2), it's got new situations to encounter and people to meet, and it doesn't feel like shrunken Avernum. Also he thinks the Drake Pillars are one of his favorite game sections. Very different from Dark Waters, but spy-hunting is still fun.

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