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Slarti

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Everything posted by Slarti

  1. Folks, from all available evidence, the games are selling great. Demo downloads -- especially for a game that hasn't actually been released yet -- are very, very, very different from actual game sales. As Jawaj points out, most people don't bother with demos anymore because (1) they're already having 3000 different games thrust at them by platforms like Steam, and (2) price points are pretty low. Spiderweb has shared a little bit about their sales numbers in the distant past. We know they get a lot more sales now than they did then. And Jeff described Mutagen as one of their best-performing games in a long time. You can also extrapolate some ballpark sales numbers by looking at numbers of reviews on big platforms like Steam. This won't be even remotely precise, but it should relieve any concerns that nobody is buying the games. Clearly, lots of people are. (And remember that they are on a whole pile of different platforms, not just Steam.)
  2. The Eastern Gallery already has enough space for 800 screens of chitrachs. The settlements are not adjacent. It's in much better shape than the Great Cave. There were a lot of things in A4 that threw off the balance -- Divinely Touched and other traits/races, and Parry, in particular -- but "getting free casts of buffs which only cost a few spell points anyway" was not really one of them.
  3. The concept of the continuous world map isn't a bad one. I know Jeff was inspired by Ultima V (and thereafter) where there is a very deliberate shifting of scale as you move between different continguous overworld areas -- one minute a building takes up the whole screen, one screen later it's a pile of trees, then multiple mountaintops. And that had a certain style to it. A4 kind of shifted scales too, but the art unfortunately didn't shift with it so it felt weird rather than artistic. It also isn't that different in many ways from the "separate zones, world map is abstract and not walkable" method of Geneforge (and Avadon) -- you could take Geneforge's zones, stitch them together, and (except for having some gaps) you'd more or less have what A4 did. But Geneforge's world map does lend a sense of distance and scale that is missing when you stitch them together. I don't know how to solve this for A4 without redoing the map entirely -- or at least parts of it. Blosk and Dharmon are IMO by far the worst offender, but there are other spots that might be worth the TLC.
  4. A4 was really the one where the continuous-map was the biggest problem, because it just destroyed the sense of scale of the earlier games completely in a way that was kind of absurd. A5 was fine because it was new areas designed for the new map style, and A6 somehow didn't seem as bad either. He's probably gonna have to redo the A4 map anyway, unless he plans to keep elevation out of the game. So maybe there can be a compromise? Like, take one of the 18 A4 underground zones filled to the brim with unnecessary chitrachs and relocate it to be in between Blosk and Dharmon so they aren't 3 feet away from each other anymore? :P
  5. A4 before G3 would seem a little weird given that original G3 came first anyway. But maybe he's been hearing from Avernum-specific fans and realizing it's already been a while since the A3 remake? Man. I'm just remembering now what a shock it was to hear that he was actually making A4 in the first place.
  6. I mean, it would be weird to remake the first five games and not the sixth.
  7. It's real, but it's not a huge secret. If you google "rough diamond" avernum you'll find a bunch of mentions of it.
  8. Yes. And to their credit, they both have, um... names.
  9. Good people in general would be a welcome addition. The rebels maybe get it worse in this regard (Lankan, Hoge, Agatha... ugh), although OTOH Greta is notably less dopey than Alwan in G3. Also, the rebel quests forcing you to do dumb things like kill Khyryk, there's gotta be a way to mitigate that. It doesn't help that both of the faction big-deal figureheads, Akhari Blaze and Lord Rahul, have absolutely zero characterization and are basically just cardboard boxes that say "i'm in charge" on them.
  10. Jeff has acknowledged a lot in the last ~8 years that G3 wasn't well received, "suffered from complacency" on his part, and that the repetitive story was part of that. I don't expect radical changes, but he has brought it up basically every time the G3 remake comes up. I dunno. Maybe it will just focus more on Greta and Alwan, and less on all the NPCs, who besides Khyryk pretty much universally seemed like terrible jerks.
  11. Yu-La doesn't make any effort to hide the fact that she met other Shapers, nor their location. That fact that neither the other Sholai, nor the nearby serviles (the nearby very inquisitive and highly cautious serviles) would ever get a clue about this, even if she didn't go out of her way to say so, seems weird. Thrackerzod is also so close geographically to Masha's group, and in uncontested territory the Takers can easily surveil. It's not impossible for them to be completely undiscovered there... it just seems unlikely and isn't really explained. Whereas every other group is organically placed and feels integrated into the whole scenario.
  12. Shanti remains the best character in all of Geneforge.
  13. I was really irritated by that retcon -- it's a big shift even if on a minor point, and Thrackerzod in general seems very incongruent with the game world. (It's also just weird that the serviles freak out so much about both the PC and Goettsch, but have zero interest in Thrackerzod's crew of multiple shapers at all.) Either it was a kickstarter backer insertion that was poorly vetted, or it was a moment of Avernum 4 syndrome.
  14. Yeah, I don't think that's what the OP thought. They posted a bunch about Geneforge: Mutagen back in 2021, so clearly they played it, and from those posts they clearly never played the original Geneforge games. I think they simply heard "original GF2" in this thread, without context, and thought "original" meant it was another name for Mutagen. The confusion is representative.
  15. You can open or close the text combat log - in the settings menu - or by pressing 't'
  16. I mean, it's two games from the same series, so gameplay and mechanics are very similar. Items, similar. Races and creatures, similar. (The tutorial is also similar, because the mechanics are similar.) This is all... pretty standard for games within a series, isn't it? But I don't really understand how "only a small difference" can even apply to the storyline, the locations and maps, or the NPCs and dialogue... those are completely different. (Also, just an observation, but you've made an awful lot of posts here complaining about Geneforge. This is a lot of effort to put in to talk about a series you don't seem to like very much...)
  17. Sliths have... I guess analogues in standard fantasy, but they are kind of the polar opposites of traditional dumb, mundane lizardmen. So I'd give some credit there too. The others less so. Slimes are pretty much a direct lift from ad&d. Most of the monster list in Exile is straight from ad&d, which isn't surprising given that (a) this was true of the vast majority of 20th century RPGs, and (b) the whole premise of Exile originated in Jeff's tabletop campaigns.
  18. It's definitely a step further away from mainstream expectations for RPGs. A step backwards, absolutely not. It's also hard to argue whether or not it's a step backwards without any specifics to talk about. What about the gameplay, combat, and inventory is worse to you? I'm with Mechalibur on the combat balance points mentioned above. It certainly has more depth than the very fun but wildly imbalanced mechanics of the original Geneforge games. (And Mutagen came out after QW1.) The graphics are... well, I don't think anyone completely loves them, but I do appreciate going back to a top-down perspective. So that complaint I understand at least. As for the stories... it's worth pointing out that the central Avernum stories (1-3) were written from 1994-1996, and Geneforge was written all in the early to mid oughts. 15-30 years of real life (!!) passed between those stories and Queen's Wish. The world has changed, and so has the person writing them.
  19. I suggest emailing the email address you quoted and asking.
  20. Hi! What part are you asking about? This is basically just an announcement that the old policy is kaput (as of 2015) because it isn't viable to give previous-owner discounts in the modern app-store-centric world. If you're wondering about the free hint books, I'd suggest emailing the support address listed in the announcement to ask.
  21. They don't have the same odds. They use the same lookup table in their functions (charm_odds), but there are steps taken both before (in this case, dividing the monster's level by 2) and after looking up that value (in this case, using a 0-to-70 RNG), and those steps are different for charming and for capturing, which results in different resulting odds.
  22. also, worth noting, although this is the same odds table that Charm and a few other effects use, they don't necessarily use the same formula with it. I know Charm takes the caster's level into consideration, for example. So it's not actually that charming is twice as hard or anything, it just scales very differently.
  23. Except it's not actually a percent due to the 7/10 multiplication. r1 needs to be <= 4 to succeed vs a level 24-25 monster, which will happen 7% of the time -- as even 49/10 rounds down to 4. And then level 26-27 should be 2%, since a roll of 2 also rounds down to 1. After that, as you note later, it's 1%.
  24. pascal int Random() Random returns an integer between -32768 and 32767. The integer is from a uniform pseudo-random distribution. The seed for this function is the global variable randSeed. RandSeed is initialized to 1 by InitGraf.
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