Kyronea

Even decapitation is harder to successfully do than you think. Often in executions that involved decapitations, there would be multiple cuts needed to entirely sever the head from the body. Hence the invention of the guillotine, to prevent such messy mistakes.

I always thought that the intro music to Avernum II was the best meself.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Next you'll want a GIFT to tag along and tell you that you're cute. I could actually see Jeff doing that as some sort of unlockable/hidden joke option.

How about playable Goblins? Just a thought.

Originally Posted By: goblindolf Avadon was sold for the ipad, was available at the mac app store and steam too. Jeff's previous games were not, so I don't think you can just attribute increased sales to his new simplified style, when steam alone has opened him up to a much bigger market. That's not what she said though. She wasn't attributing the increased sales to a simplified style--she was saying the simplified style didn't affect or harm sales. Significant difference between the two statements.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus My desktop computer has 10.14TB of hard drive space split up over 8 drives. Good grief. I thought I was ridiculous with only 1.5 TB spread across three hard drives...

The protests originally started in Tunisia, over a fruit cart that was all the owner had, that was his life for many years--the figure I usually hear is twenty--being burned and destroyed by police for no real reason. It was then filmed on a cellphone and uploaded to the internet. The internet is really the cause of why these spread so far and so quickly. It's so hard these days to keep the sort of state censorship and crackdown on the spread of information and ideas that dictatorships across the world--particularly in the Middle East--are so used to, and they're struggling to catch up. Without easy internet access, that little event would have gone down like so many others: important to the man involved, to what little he had for family, and that's about it. With the internet, it became the spark that lit the fire of Middle Eastern revolution.

In Avernum you also generally fight fewer enemies in a group than you do in Exile.

Is that why solid state discs have much lower storage space capacity?

The problem with having more party members is that there's just plain more to deal with. More to buy, more to sell, more time spent in each battle controlling each character...it can get quite hectic. It's resulted in me neglecting several characters in numerous RPGs, both JRPG and Western, where I'd just pick a few and stick with them over anyone else because it was simpler and easier that way. (Final Fantasy XII is one of the most recent that comes to mind, though in my playthrough of the International Zodiac Job System version I found it a lot easier to use all six people since each one was so specific, and thus more useful than six complete blanks.) At the same time...there is something nice about having more people around, even if you don't use them, because it feels...good somehow. Not quite sure how to describe it. Almost like you're more powerful. Final Fantasy VI...I've played that a couple of times, and I don't think I could ever do the World of Ruin without going around and getting everybody, even if I didn't use some of them. (Mog, Umaro, I'm lookin' at you guys. Or rather, not, because I never use you.) So I can see both sides to this issue. Still, if it's easier for Jeff to balance four people, I'd say stick with four. It's enough people, really.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Just out of curiosity, are there any completely normal socially awkward people these days, or did they all get infected with the asperger virus? I don't want to offend anybody I don't know personally, but I just have a hard time understanding how someone could have a mild form of a debilitating mental disorder. How could you tell the difference? Psychological analysis by several therapists. I also have Borderline Personality Disorder.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus I was bullied and beaten up many times in middle school and high school. As someone with Asperger Syndrome, I did not fit in socially at all. Couple that with the fact that I was very intelligent and arrogant, and you have a recipe for someone whom everyone likes to pick on and for whom no one cares to intervene. I don't really have a good choice to pick on that poll though. I'm 25 now and have developed many social skills since then. Also, adults do bully each other, but it is less common. As someone else with Asperger Syndrome--albeit not as strongly as others--I had a very similar experience, though my arrogance stopped--mostly, because I'm still arrogant to a much smaller extent, though I am aware of it and work to moderate it--once I turned fourteen or so and I suddenly began understanding how I was hurting others with my senseless words and complete lack of understanding of the word "discretion." Once in high school I was still bullied, albeit never beat up, since I went to such a small school in the mountains instead of an urban school, but I actually made friends by not being a dick to everyone I met. Since I finished public school many years ago, I haven't really been bullied all that much. I mean, the occasional bit of cyberbullying, but since I don't use Facebook or other social networks and don't participate on that many forums, I'm mostly just alone instead.

Although I love the idea of playing tabletop RPGs, I almost never have a chance to do so, being as I live in a very isolated area, with no friends around and very little opportunity to get out and socialize, which is the biggest draw for me of tabletop stuff. Which is one reason why I dislike the idea behind 4th Edition. If I want to play a CRPG, I'll just play one, like any of the fine games of Spiderweb Software. I do tabletop for roleplaying and for socializing, not so I can munchkin and min/max.

Or Titan Quest. That game has been out for years and still gets tons of mods made for it even though it's technically a big Diablo clone set in mythical history land. Plenty of suboptimal yet super fun builds there too--the system is set up to encourage it, practically, and even more so when you start looking at Mastery mods.

I agree entirely. The nature of combat in the Avernum series is turn based and it will stay turn based regardless of how mobile people are. The lack of mobility attributed to being so close to an enemy would make it impossible to, for example, run away in the event you're up against something tougher than you can handle at the moment. I don't like being unable to run away. It frustrates a gamer.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S What *can* make a game better is internal consistency -- internal realism, if you will. Indeed. Internal consistency is very much desirable, because it helps you enjoy a world far more more so than having one where nothing stays consistent would be.

Is it really that hard to explore the map and then look at the map to see where the secrets would logically be? All it requires of you is something you're doing anyway--exploring the dungeon--and to exercise a slight amount of thought. If you're headbanging into every single wall everywhere in an Avernum game, you're doing it wrong.

I love how this thread went from talking about used bookstores to ecological genocide. Anyway, I do agree that overuse of rats in RPGs as a whole is frustrating, but even more so if you're trying to set up a rat as a super hard enemy late in the game. Unless your party has been reduced to the size of gnats, it doesn't make much sense.

Another area where Exile was better with its spells: Magic Map. Sure it required a sapphire, but it was good stuff.

The fundamental problem with this suggestion is that it has an underlying assumption that is simply not true: the more realistic, the more fun. Obviously this isn't true, or else most videogames would cease being enjoyable. You're able to perform feats impossible in the normal world in all sorts of ways all the time in videogames, and removing that would remove a crucial element key to the enjoyability of it. That's not to say that one can't do a system where there's penalties for things like limb injuries and not have it fun. Deus Ex, for example, had a particularly interesting health system that could simulate the sort of things suggested here, and it was a great addition to a superb game. But for the combat system of the Avernum series, it doesn't fit. Given how often you face hordes of enemies far more numerous than your party, it's just not going to work, not for the typical person playing these games, those who do things like singleton Torment challenge runs not withstanding.

Hrm...on the one hand, I'm not exactly fond of change...but on the other, more and more as I would play games, particularly, as stated, as I got older...having to make all the decisions at the start paralyzed me. It had me constantly on edge to try to figure out if I made the right decision, if I'm doing the right thing with my characters... So I think that in the long run, I will really appreciate this design change. It will bother me at first, but I think I can get past that.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Yeah, but X wasn't a great character either. His saving grace is that you aren't expected to interact with him much. With Nicodemus, you are expected to interact with him all the time. (Also, none of X's items attempt to outright murder the moment you step into the game, which is another plus for him.) Dikiyoba. True but it wasn't really my point that X was all that great of a character. Rather, it was the exact opposite: X was a rather silly character, and so is Nicodemus, only even more so, because an Expy, by nature, is generally not as good as the character they're based on. Although that is not always true...

True enough. I mean, poor Mac users don't get that many games to begin with. Robbing them of Jeff's would just be downright cruel.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Bleh, Dikiyoba thought Nicodemus was awful. He's a clueless, one-dimensional dunce. I always thought he was an obvious eXpy.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba ...between Cordelia's character portrait in the default Avernum party and Miranda's fate as revealed in G5, that is going to lead to some awkward conversations. Dikiyoba. I did not even think of that. That is a rather hilarious--if darkly so--thought.