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Will we ever see 'Blades of Avadon' or 'Blades of Avernum 2'


Thynar

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Did you even try looking for one?

 

Hey now, no need to be rude.

 

Blades of Avernum almost ruined SW, and Jeff has repeatedly said he wants nothing more to do with it; according to one email he sent a few years ago, even looking at the code was "painful". It's almost certainly not going to happen, sorry.)

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Blades of Exile had to have been enough of a success for Jeff to think that Blades of Avernum was worthwhile. However, due to the engine differences between Avernum and Exile, the BoE editor is fairly simple to use while the BoA editor is just... not.

 

Dikiyoba is speculating here, but the market BoE and BoA entered into are probably very different as well. BoE probably didn't have to face the competition or expectations that BoA did (or that any hypothetical future Blades game would). Actually, it's certain that BoA had to face more competition and higher expectations, because it had to go up against the BoE community, and BoA just wasn't good enough to win enough BoE people over or to attract enough of a new audience.

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BoE came out and was very user-friendly. Yes, doing complicated things is hard, but whipping up a playable scenario with some fun elements is quick and easy. In 1997 that was no mean accomplishment, either!

 

Fast forward seven years. Neverwinter Nights had come out before BoA, and BoA required scripting to really get anywhere. Suddenly you need to be able to handle code to do any work, and if you're willing to put in that kind of effort you can turn to a prettier, fancier game with a larger playerbase to make your scenarios. And one with more creator support as well.

 

—Alorael, who thinks BoE succeeded to the unknown extent that it did because of simplicity. BoA failed because for all its increased power it passed an inflection point in difficulty while facing a market that had years to offer other, better tools. And, most basically, modding is a selling point for a game but is not seen as a game itself. If Jeff wanted to make Blades of X he'd be well advised to bundle it as part of another game, and then he'd have to double his time making a game and risk that half the effort would only marginally increase sales. It's probably not a blind step he's willing to take, risk-averse as he is.

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If I remember correctly, part of the problem is that Jeff is not a huge fan of making code that is works under unanticipated stresses and is well documented. He can limit what you can do in a game much better and with fewer problems than he can limit what you can do in a scenario-creation application. He also doesn't have to explain the code to anybody in a game; it just has to work. The exact opposite is true of a "Blades of," where we need to know exactly what everything does.

 

I think it's telling that Jeff (literally, I think) misunderstood the complaints of the BoE community for a long time. BoE designers complained that BoE had bugs: there were features that didn't work as described. To Jeff, these were just natural limitations, just as there are many things that you can't do in a game. The fact that he had put in broken pieces that suggested one ought to be able to do certain things didn't entitle anyone to do those things, any more than you can do anything you can think of in a game. (Think of the linearity in Avadon.)

 

I guess what I'm saying is that a really high-quality BoG or BoAD would be fun, but that's not what Jeff would make. He just doesn't have the right mindset for it. He'd do better making a really high-quality AD2 and then AD3, which is probably what we will see, and that's for the best.

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