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Talk me into Avadon and Geneforge, please!


Vera

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Longtime lurker trying to get some reasons to play the rest of Spidweb's games while waiting for the Avernum 3 remake.

 

So, I beat the first 2 Geneforges, and tried some hours of Avadon 1 and 2.

 

I own everything Spiderweb has put out (including most of the older versions; one of the Exiles was my first game purchase in the 90's). So I generally love the old-style indie RPG genre and I play a good number of these games multiple times.

 

However, I just cannot get into the plots of Avadon and Geneforge. Mostly I endured those hours of trying because I enjoy some mindless grinding and questing and character-building sometimes. So, I'm hoping someone can talk me into them or tell me why they're good/fun/worth playing for the plot. (Or, someone can talk me into not trying, because I don't feel obligated to like all the games; I just want to.)

 

I loved Avernum/Exile because I had a real sense of helping people. Even Avernum 6 gave me that satisfaction at the end (I beat it 3 times to get variations until I found one I liked) despite its frequent downer moments. I think in that series, there is a strong sense of your character(s) being invested in the future of the world they're in. There's a fairly immediate and better sense of real crises facing large numbers of innocent people, which you can be a part of. This feeling kicks in within an hour or two of starting most of the Avernums.

 

However, I just feel this incredible sense of detachment in Geneforge and Avadon. It doesn't feel like there's much TO care about or protect or help in any of these games. The games spend so much time having you choose where your loyalty lies. Once it becomes all about taking sides or helping various individuals benefit, and there's marginally few missions where I can feel happy I did them, I just give up in either annoyance or boredom.

 

Part of the problem is probably also that I don't really enjoy having games which are all about the edgy grey morality and where you can never feel very satisfied with what you've chosen. But I feel I could have gotten over that if I could have felt like I had something to care about or be attached to in these games, something that helps justify the edginess. But nope. I don't really care about the outcome of the various factions or countries. (In Avadon 2, I kind of cared about the love interest, but once I realized that I had to join a specific side for that, I was extraordinarily annoyed.)

 

Maybe I'm too emotionally invested in immersive fantasy of saving the world and helping people?

 

Anyhow, if I had to characterize the difference between the games I could finish, and the ones I couldn't, it would be:

 

 

 

Power squabbles among proliferating factions that have far-reaching societal effects (Geneforge, Avadon, Avernum 5 to a much smaller extent)

 

vs.

 

Large crises facing groups of people and places, including innocents, with power squabbles affecting the outcome at times (Avernums 1-3, 6, even 4, I suppose).

 

 

 

I'm sure this doesn't really do the games justice, so if someone can give me something to look forward to in the games I haven't managed to get through, please, do so!

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Geneforge is all about that gray morality. If you help one good guy, another good guy dies. There's no real happy endings, heroes, or justice in the Geneforge series, so if that's what you care most about, look elsewhere.

 

I know little about Avadon. I am given to believe it is also fairly gray-morality-based, but not nearly as much as Geneforge. I think there are mostly two main stories in each game, pro-Redbeard&co and anti-Redbeard&co, as opposed to a dozen endings in Geneforge, and it comes down to choosing who you sympathize with the most. But again, I have very, very limited Avadon knowledge and may be wrong. Beyond that I can't help you with that.

 

I know little about Nethergate. I know the basic premise but have not actually played it or read many spoilers.

 

You say you've played all the Avernum and Exile games. Does this include Blades of Avernum and Blades of Exile? I know BoE and BoA both have "The Valley of Dying Things" and "The Za-Khazi Run", which are fun adventures with people to connect with and save, and there are a number of user-made scenarios which meet that paradigm as well.

 

Open BoE is free but doesn't really work properly at the moment. I know people are regaining interest in BoA with Chessrook's Let's Plays, and I believe due to its age it may be reasonably priced. If you want to try it, download the demo first, and make sure it actually runs on your computer. It's 13 years old. If it doesn't run properly there are probably tweaks others can advise you on performing, which will get it to run.

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I'd say you have a fair sense of how Geneforge and Avadon go. Both are built on settings with big structural problems, and you are probably part of the problems. You don't get to have the clean do-gooding of Avernum. Geneforge does eventually let you find an ending that isn't bleak and that's probably for the best for most people (with a lot of argument among players about which ending that is!) but it's not clearly and unarguably heroic.

 

I do think Nethergate might fit your tastes better. There's a faction choice, but you make it in the very beginning during character creation: play as Romans or as Celts. And either way, you're heroes. Maybe a little more so as Celts, since the locals generally get along with you better, but there isn't the same realpolitik current through the game as in Spiderweb's later offerings.

 

—Alorael, who also wouldn't mind a return to something a little more optimistic. He's all for choices and consequences, but that doesn't have to mean always choosing among shades of gray. And there can be factions that disagree about the best path forward without being enemies or advocating ends justifying horrible means.

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Sounds like my impressions are fairly accurate. Maybe at some distant point in the future I'll be in the mood for political intrigue and pessimistic worldviews, but I've never been very attracted to that. (Isn't there enough of that in real life? Can't I have my escapism?? Ha!) I was an optimistic, indiscrimate, adventure-loving kid when I first played Exile 3 (my first game). I kind of miss being that way.

 

 

You say you've played all the Avernum and Exile games. Does this include Blades of Avernum and Blades of Exile? I know BoE and BoA both have "The Valley of Dying Things" and "The Za-Khazi Run", which are fun adventures with people to connect with and save, and there are a number of user-made scenarios which meet that paradigm as well.

 

I may give BoA a try. I do recall enjoying a lot of the fan-made scenarios for BoE, and I notice a lot of them were remade for BoA when I browsed that forum just now.

 

 

I do think Nethergate might fit your tastes better. There's a faction choice, but you make it in the very beginning during character creation: play as Romans or as Celts. And either way, you're heroes. Maybe a little more so as Celts, since the locals generally get along with you better, but there isn't the same realpolitik current through the game as in Spiderweb's later offerings.

 

I tried Nethergate several times (both old version and remake, although my aging brain no longer remembers what the old version even looks like). Despite hours of play, I could never get far enough to feel like I had any grasp whatsoever on an overarching plot. All I know is that I was either helping the faerie-ruler-person with something, or not helping, for reasons I didn't know, with minimal understanding of how this would really affect the two groups in the game or the world as a whole. So I never got past the Fomorian skull quest. :/ This is kind of the other end of the spectrum from my personal difficulties with the two series above. In Nethergate, none of the things I was doing felt like they mattered to or made an impact on anyone at all except the Faerie-folk, despite some vague hints about Celts and Romans and conflict and whatnot. And the important Faerie-folk were, IMO, pretty bland. Alas.

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I would recommend skipping Geneforge 3 and playing 4-5. GF3 and Avernum 4 are kind of the nadir of the Spiderweb oeuvre (doing six games in five years, then pumping out two in one year, is not good news for the quality of those last two games). Starting with Geneforge 4, though, Jeff put a lot more effort into the writing of the games, and they're a lot more satisfying in terms of dramaturgy as a result: not that the prior Spiderweb games are poorly written by any means, but the games starting with GF4 have much more in the way of stuff like character development, foreshadowing, thematic patterning, etc. The characters in Geneforges 1-3 are generally prototypical representations of certain perspectives on Shaping, while in 4-5 they tend to be more complex and rounded. So, if emotional disconnect with the stories is a problem for you, you should definitely try em out. (Likewise, the characters in Avernums 1-4 are mostly entertaining but inconsequential eccentrics (X) or eager straight-faced questgivers (King Micah) or both (Erika), whereas in 5-6 there's a much greater attempt to develop them (mostly), and 6 in particular tries (with mixed success) to provide satisfying character arc conclusions for established characters (esp Solberg, X).)

 

Avadon is very different from either Avernum or Geneforge, and, though it's written by the same man and is mechanically quite similar, plays out more like a modern Bioware RPG (eg, KOTOR, Dragon Age). I think it's totally possible to love Avernum or Geneforge and dislike Avadon, or vice versa: it's a really different kind of game- more being told what to do, less exploration, more emphasis on plotting your course through the interpersonal politics of the game world. If you didn't really feel connected to Avadon, then that's kind of it.

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