The Vagrant Werewolf

Ah, damn. My memory was too fuzzy on this. I remembered playing Avernum II, III, and Blades. They really weren't in the first? Well damn. My bad, then. Okay, I won't be going for a refund (for obvious reasons, since this is my fault and they weren't taken out retroactively), but I doubt I'll be playing this version. Looking forward to Nu Avernum II, I guess.

I have to admit, I'm really sad about this. Am I missing something, here? I remember Avernum having the nephilim and slithzerikai. I thought they were just locked out in the demo (as the Character Editor was), but I can't see any way to get at them. The original Avernum had them, so where are they in the reboot? I always used to create a team of nephilim and slithzerikai just to piss off the xenophobic empire patriots, it was a laugh. And fun from a roleplaying perspective! I can't do that any more? It's just not the same without the races... I'm going to put in for a refund on the iPad version I got if they're really not in there. Seven quid isn't exactly a trivial amount of money to throw away on something I don't want to revisit. But this was going to be a massive nostalgia trip. It can't be a nostalgia trip without my original team. It'd be like playing Mass Effect again, but now Wrex and Garrus are humans.

@Chris & @Ociporus I can use Windows Magnifier. Windows and Mac are fairly even matched in nearly every category, elitism aside. It's just that I don't find that an ideal solution. I wouldn't find it ideal whether I was using Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux. Constantly zooming in to read and out to play is a pain in the arse. That's why I try to get developers to see the need for accessibility. As someone who's worked with open source projects in the past, I can say that it isn't at all hard to have a raw text file that a setting could be included in to handle the font size of important (mission/story) dialogues. It's just that not many developers actually realise the necessity of this for a lot of people. The attitude 'too bad for you' (and I'll come back to this) will do nothing other than absolutely convince people beyond the shadow of a doubt that their money is better spent elsewhere. And considering that Jeff's games tend to be expensive for indie games, I don't think it's out of the question for him to consider accessibility concerns. There's a silent minority of gamers out there who just play games which are accessible and would support games like this more frequently if the attitude wasn't 'too bad for you'. The thing is is that the easier solution is simply to save one's money and buy games which are accessible. To give some examples: Neverwinter Nights 2, Magicka, and Torchlight all had their font settings in configuration files which could be edited by the player. This made those games something that I could play and recommend to disabled friends. Torchlight even more in its favour had a large font at any resolution to begin with, thus making it an exceedingly easy game for me to play. This has put Runic Games (the developer of Torchlight) in my good books, and I'll be buying whatever games they release in the future. I have a choice as to whether I buy a game, and if the attitude of the developer is going to be 'eh, screw the disabled', then the attitude of disabled people to that game is going to be 'eh, screw that game.' Look at the recent furor over Dead Space 2 and what came of that. People with accessibility needs do exist, and they want to enjoy games just as much as healthy people. Now, what I will say is that I don't think Jeff would be the sort to think 'eh, screw the disabled.' I think it's more that he's unaware that this is even a concern. So my thread is an attempt to reach Jeff and say that yes, this is a concern. If he considers accessibility concerns in Avadon, then he's got a sale from me. It's really that simple. It's about appealing to demographics. And you either want the disabled demographic or you don't. But there are more of us out there than you might realise. @CapnKaroo Exactly my point. I'm an old school RPG fan (and I'll get back to this later, too). And New Vegas was a joy for me recently because not only was it an old school RPG in almost every sense of the word (even to the point where I could talk my way out of most fights), it was also easily playable by someone with accessibility concerns. I'm sure it sold more because of that. The thing is is that there are people like you and I who likely just aren't buying current Spiderweb Software games for this very reason. In fact, were accessibility concerns to be taken into account, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a 20% overall increase in sales. I miss oldschool RPGs, but I don't want to go blind in order to play one. Also, the larger font mod for Planescape Torment is another great example. Yeah. Anyway, I've said my piece. Hopefully Jeff is listening and will consider this for Avadon, but if not... what can you do, eh? It's a lost sale in that case, though. A lost sale with me, and I wonder how many others who've tried the recent demos and simply found them unplayable?

Hullo youse all, I found myself recently pondering doing an article for my site about some of the older entries in the Avernum series. (Or mainly of my personal favourite, Blades, which is likely an unpopular opinion.) Whilst wondering this, I thought I'd stop by Spiderweb to see if anything new was cooking, I hadn't been here in a while. And lo, something was. Now I'd like to bring up why I haven't played the recent Avernum games. I loved the early games. I will admit that the original draw for me was that I have some furry interests, and seeing the Nephilim and the Slithzerikai piqued my interest. I was pleased with what I found and enjoyed those games. Though in more recent Spiderweb games, I've found that I'm not able to play 'em. Why? The font size is too small for me to read and there's nothing I can do about that. I have a visual condition that glasses don't really help, so I tend to rely on authors providing the option to scale up text within the game. Now tiny interface text doesn't bother me as I can usually guess what things are fairly well even without reading that and have done for years. But for story dialogues and the like, I end up needing to use Windows Magnifier, and that gets a bit tiresome. This is why I tend to skip over some recent RPGs which don't include any form of option to scale up text sizes. Now let me digress a little as I segue off into a very related topic. I find that the recent spat of console ported RPGs has actually been a blessing in disguise for me because the interface sizes have actually been readable. One great example of this was New Vegas, which was a fine example of an old school RPG done with modern ideas. Most gamers jumped on the DarN mod for that and seethed at Obsidian for not 'fixing the interface'. I was always happy that the interface was as it was. A number of games I've been able to play due to the option of either scaling the interface (thank you, Guild Wars), or being able to get into the guts of the interface code due to it being openly handled by XML or similar format files. Neverwinter Nights 2 was a fantastic example of this, because it allowed me to rewrite the interface to my liking. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty with code. It's just a shame that too few games actually provide accessibility. And if the cat and lizard folks are present in Avadon then that would be another game that I would likely end up lamenting not being able to play. However! Since this is still in development, I figure that I might not be too late... So, let's move on to the point of this thread, then. (I'm sorry, I really can't do succinct, I have a personal lack of capability in that regard.) My question: Would it be possible to include an option to scale up the dialogue font size for reading the story stuffs in game? This doesn't have to be an option in game, I can understand not wanting to spend development time on something that only a smaller number of people would be interested in, but perhaps just a raw text configuration file or somesuch? I would very much like to enjoy Avadon as I did with the early Avernum games, and I figure... this is a question worth asking right now. You know? The chances are that I've caught development too late on. But just maybe...