Achire

I don't mind paying a little bit extra since I feel the games are worth it. However, like the previous poster suggested, please let us register the games on Steam. Several other indie titles such as Fate of the World and SpaceChem (in addition to the Humble Indie Bundles) have allowed this. I'm sure it's not free for the developer but please, throw us a bone here.

No, I simply meant that I noticed both rooms with the total of four things that give power to Redbeard (soul jars?) that you have to kill. This was mentioned earlier in the thread. The wording was a bit unclear, sorry.

Here are some thoughts on this fight from a more casual player's perspective. I'm a long-time fan of the Geneforge series but I have not played the Avernum series other than Nethergate that used the same engine. I like turn-based combat but I don't play SW games for the combat, I play them for the writing, story and the ability to make interesting decisions. I always play through the games on normal. Overall I enjoyed Avadon, though I would have preferred more exploration and less linearity. I played as a blademaster and completed all the optional party-member sidequests. I killed both the dragon and the trapped demon lord. I decided to also kill Redbeard. It was completely unclear to me that you could use all loyal party members in this fight whereas in the whole rest of the game you can only have two people with you. I had no idea this was possible until reading this thread. Why would anyone ever not want to take all loyal followers to this fight if it's possible? As for the actual encounter, I did notice both secret rooms and all four MacGuffins. Even though I had completed every single (other) optional encounter in the game with relatively few difficulties, I was completely unable to win this fight on normal. So I changed the difficulty to casual just to see the ending. Except I wasn't able to kill Redbeard on casual either. So I used cheats to heal my characters and even then this fight took forever. I feel that this is unquestionably terrible design. Some are saying that Redbeard is the optional hard boss in Avadon, he's supposed to be really difficult. My answer to that is simply why? Why is Redbeard the difficult boss and not the demon lord? How can anyone play as a rebel and have a satisfactory ending to the game without killing Redbeard? There are difficult optional encounters in the Geneforge series as well but none of those are required for any of the endings. The other issue is why is this encounter so much harder than every other encounter in the game and much, much harder than any optional encounter on normal or casual difficulty in the entire Geneforge series? To me, playing on the casual difficulty means that one is not at all interested in the combat and just wants to follow the story. Suppose I had played the whole game on casual instead of normal and wanted to see the proper ending. How would I reasonably accomplish that when the jump in difficulty is so great? In short, why is Redbeard the difficult boss and not the demon or the dragon. Furthermore, why is this fight so difficult on normal and casual? Overall, I feel that not retuning this encounter for the Windows release of Avadon would be a big mistake.