Necris Omega

That said, Avernum 3: Ruined World is going to have all four Ermarian continents, lods of new details in Valorim, and the ability to go into both all of Avernum proper, the Vahnatai caves, and the northern caves from Avernum 5! That's the rumor that I heard, at least.

And released shortly after we colonize Mars.

... Is it really terrible, though, that I'd be perfectly happy if, instead of remaking Av4-6, Jeff reboots the second half of the series completely? :x

Can I choose to live forever? The idea of dying scares me because there may not be an afterlife at all, just oblivion and the maw of eternally not knowing anything at all (hope this isn't the case, but....)

Ultimately, this mortal existence isn't feasible for eternity. Even if you could keep up culturally and linguistically, biologically man kind will become radically different given enough generations. You'll be the lone talking monkey in a world full of colossal brained six fingered telepaths or something otherwise bizarre. Even if you're okay with that, nature itself isn't.

I'm talking disasters here. Supervolcanoes and Asteroid Impacts. You can't die, so now you're buried under a hundred feet of ash. Civilization just kerploded by and large, so digging you out may well never, ever happen.

But let's say you manage to avoid all that. At some point the sun will expand and devour the inner solar system. Does your immortality let you survive that? Yes? Wow.

Okay, let's go trillions of years forward. Those ironclad laws of thermodynamics mentioned above are going to destroy everything. And I mean everything.

Most popular is the heat death of the universe - yes, the concept of "warm" isn't even immortal. Atrophy will result in an energy level so low that there's no longer enough energy to do anything. Period. With essentially no energy, essentially nothing happens. Ever. With no discernible change anywhere with anything, no activity, no change anywhere the universe is dead.

But let's say that those laws are less ironclad... yeah, that doesn't necessarily help. Dark Energy, the stuff that fuels spacial expansion is the most mysterious of the forces, so if anything breaks down, that's probably going to be it. If it goes overdrive? It rips apart all matter until there's nothing left. If it dies? Gravity wins and the universe collapses back in on itself.

On top of that there are far flung fringe theories which, perhaps as unlikely as they are interesting, suggest other important "ironclads" might start to shift, destabilizing matter and all of existence in the process. Or the stability of the universe itself could be in question, with the universe being hung up in a higher than minimum energy state, and if that slips, everything explodes. Even if it isn't likely or even possible, the fact that we live in an existence where these notions could even be conceivable by our brightest minds pretty much moons the idea of "eternity".

When I throw out the term "mortal existence" I'm not being flowery. All physics pretty much agree that universe itself is dying, and will inevitably die. It might freeze, it might get dissolved, it might implode, or something otherwise utterly insane may happen, but it won't be here indefinitely. We who are dying are in good company. And bad company. And all the company.

What comes next? Everything will find out eventually.

I'm touring a firework's factory when the demonstration of the factory's safety systems goes wrong in the most ironic of ways...

"Ooh... ahh... -- I mean, oh, the humanity!!! ... but still, ooh, ahh..." ~ A distant witness to my demise...

Advadon: A Freudocracy.

Ah, ground effects... good.

I've been playing a lot of Divinity: Original Sin here lately and Larian... overdoes it something fierce.

That's thankfully never been a problem in any of Spiderweb's games, and I've always been a supporter of bringing back classical goodness that fell out of the boat.

Exile earns so many nostalgia points from me this really isn't fair.

"Throg want kill"

I don't think there's anything brought up so far that I'd find grounds to object to.

A clearer indication of what does what for skills, right mouse button support, clear pathing indicators, more autosave, more quick use slots...

Skill tree revamp? Prerequisites are fine in moderation, but leveling the skill you want vs. another skill to someday level the skill you want will always be more rewarding. Thumbs up there.

I'm fine with friendly fire in terms of AoE, just so long as it works both ways - if we can't lob spells into the midst of our enemies without vaporizing our own guys, that needs to be true for said enemies as well.

Letting some air out of the Tinkermage? Yeah, it's true when you're talking single player it's not as important as a multiplayer competitive thing, but... the Tinkermage was just so head and shoulders above everyone else, anything else felt like I was handicapping myself, which is bad.

Most of all, difficulty being a question of AI rather than health and damage bonuses is a great direction to be going in. Enemies which work together, combining their abilities, and maximizing their effectiveness is a lot more interesting than just grabbing a slab of digital meat and pumping in steroids

Great stuff all around.

What can I add? Hmm... The Junk Bag. Phenomenal storage powers!!! Itty-bitty Interface. I suggest giving it its own window, and maybe some sort capacities.

Good question.

I know a lot of Spiderweb's sounds have been fairly common - the "row your boat" sound from the original Exile was the same as the "place water sound" from Sim City 2000, for instance, but a lot of the later, ambient stuff? The towns and some of the original Avernum's Dungeon ambiance are quite unlike anything I think I've heard elsewhere.

Angel with an angle? ...

Anyways, I never mind the remakes, and in fact think they provide an interesting study into how the industry has evolved with time. This isn't someone remaking something, this is the exact same guy remaking something, minimizing the variables involved.

I guess my only complaint is that I really do have to side with the notion that, overall, the games have been dumbed down. Yes, yes, I know, one man's "dumbing down" is another man's "streamlining", but even in just the item system things have become progressively simpler. No more alchemy, a comparably paltry number of spells, graphics that have traded technology for art and diversity... I mean, don't think it's all sour grapes - I love how much more developed the "warrior" archetype has become since those days, but taken as a whole... if you find the phrase "dumbed down" to be too insulting, perhaps a better way to put it would be a loss of depth and detail.

But maybe it's just that it's always easier to see and complain about losses than all one has gained.

I'm still baffled by how Apple can function this way. Regardless of the platform, notions of backwards compatibility are kinda Comp. Sci 101. And really, from the sounds of things, this level of change should have prompted some extreme notice on their part.

It doesn't seem like anyone bothered to tell Jeff at the very least.

Again, sorry to hear that Jeff's been driven out of a market, but if the technology has mutated beyond usability and the market's twisted to the point where the effort involved in unraveling the chaos isn't justified... well, what can you do?

Huh... to have this kind of problem arise out of the strictly controlled world of Apple seems really strange to me. A stable, dependable software environment seems like it would be something you could count on in the absence of variable hardware, and backwards compatibility in such a state should be even less in question.

It's a world I've never really set foot on either as a gamer or programmer, but it's never a good thing to hear a developer you've followed since forever get shuttered out of an entire market. Sorry to hear things have soured so sharply on that front.

At least I guess this leaves more time and energy to invest in new games going forward on the other platforms?

Family was supposed to take one of those boat tours... yeah, it rained the whole time we were there.

Thing is, my grandparents went and their time was just as lousy.

I'm sure someone loves it, though.

Eh, nothin' special on my end. Though I suppose Minneapolis to Anchorage is kind of impressive in terms of sheer distance for someone who's never set foot outside his country of origin.

That said, Anchorage Alaska? Surprisingly boring.

Embarrassing how long it took me to find the "Change Theme" button to see this. Dunno why, but I figured it'd be under profile settings.

I think some basic UI improvements would be nice and non-invasive.

Yeah, complex systems of spellcrafting and talents and whatnot are more dramatic, but the damage they can do to a game's balance are without question. Jeff's never taken the ElderScrolls "laissez-faire" approach to game balance, so I really don't think the likelihood is all that high. That said, a bigger window for your junk bag (which remains one of my all time favorite Spiderweb Software concepts and no I don't care if anyone else did it first) with autosort capacities doesn't really hurt anything on the "how hard can I hit and be hit" front, so why not?

The zombie scenarios that make the most sense are the ones where it's some highly contagious, probably airborne plague/curse/whatever that infects almost everyone but that only hits, say, 95% of the population with the remaining 5% resistant. That's an instant apocalypse, but you'd get apocalyptic disaster even if the victims weren't zombies just by that 95% lethality.

 

—Alorael, who can come up with other ways to make more plausible zombies. The problem is that it never keeps all the elements that have somehow become the lowest common zombie denominator. Instant zombification from infection helps somewhat in getting the first horde going, for instance, but you lose the agonizing over infected survivors and the brain-eating.

See, and the problem here is that the "zombie" part of this apocalypse is pretty much a moot point. All the heavy lifting's already been done via disease/curse/whatever, and at what point does it cease being a zombie apocalypse and just turn into a generic plague apocalypse with added zombie DLC? At 95%, even if the zombies successfully kill everyone who's left, how much credit can they really be given? At this point the zombies are just a symptom of a greater disaster, which just further serves to downplay them.

Zombie scenarios all seem to posit a nearly symptom-free incubation period that is long enough for travel but that then turns into sudden, unexpected face-gnawing. And somehow the hordes happen even though zombies want to eat the brains, which are also a zombie's only weak point, meaning their victims probably wouldn't rise as more shambling undead. Everyone conceals their injuries, and their friends' and relatives', despite the inevitable horrible fate that in turn puts friends and relatives at risk. No one forms mobs to throughly dismember the potentially infected in crazed mobs.

 

Look, this isn't a highly transmissible illness. No one is going around in a contagious but non-obvious state. Sure, once most humans are dead it's really hard to fix things, but what's the likelihood of an uncontained outbreak, really?

 

—Alorael, who finds zombie fiction very poorly thought-out. He is not convinced by the scare-mongering. But get your flu shot.

Pretty much this.

They say this is why most zombie fiction takes place after the fall of civilization, because there's really little hope of getting from "no zombies" to "more zombies than mankind can handle" in most zombie incarnations. Even if you ignore all the drawbacks of being rotting meat, just the mere reproductive mechanism of zombies is pretty much a lost cause. What, to reproduce you have to take on the deadliest apex predator Earth has ever seen? Oh, noes, zombies... yeah humanity's mechanisms of defense are built around thinking, cunning enemies armed with supersonic rapid fire death that can come flying, armored, or both. How's Shambles McCerebrophage gonna stand a chance against that?

That's why the zombie scenario is really workable is if it works like cheesing a game of Plague Inc. where everyone gets infected before symptoms show up, and then everything goes to pot. If you end up with a few pockets of infection here and there, it's going to be shut down hard - hell, look at what we did with Ebola, and that was in one of the least developed regions of the world. Really, though, the air born pathogen angle kinda makes the whole zombies thing a meaningless after thought because something like that would be infinitely more dangerous than any actual zombie outbreaks.

Symbolism and fiction are fine and good, but deconstructing the zombie phenomena doesn't take a shotgun to pull off.

Say hello, Kevin.

Killing Garzhad was ... satisfying. After Avernum: EftP, I really hated this character. Oh no, it's not your heroics that topple the emperor, no, it is I who let you kill the emperor! ... It didn't ruin the game for me, but it came close.

That said, I liked this fight. I didn't mind expanded dialog one bit, and I found the purity of mechanics something to appreciate. While I did find his melee resistance way out of line (if you're fop in a dress, you have no business shrugging off swords like pool noodles), overall I liked how "clean" the fight was. It wasn't an endless parade of stun happy summons, it wasn't a hokey pokey exhibition between to death zones, very little in terms of gimmicks... Maybe I've just been playing too much WoW, but I find that very refreshing.

Please cease abusing language.

... You know, I was considering doing a conversion of the Chitrach .bmp files to the .png format used by the latest Avernums, but after this, no.

Well... are they even really new persay? Not really - that exact graphic's been used before. Really, the general lack of diversity in the later Spiderweb games is another problem - I briefly touched on it, sure, but...

Seeing formerly unique and interesting creatures like the Chitrach and Null Bugs reduced to what they were in A2:CS was kinda sad. Leaving the hydras out in favor of yet more recycling was a further letdown.

Really, how many legitimately new graphics can the latest Avernum boast? ... I mean, no one's asking for a brand new engine or high budget graphics, but... this? And really, what was done with the Chitrach doesn't even make sense! There's a perfectly fine Chitrach graphic in A6 that works beautifully! What happened?

I don't mind the style. Really, I don't. But... I just can't help but get a painful feeling of cut corners on these things. And I hate to say that, but it's the truth.

Jeff has stated that he doesn't plan to significantly improve sprites since he will never be able to get it to AAA game level and anything less is always going to be criticized as not good enough. He likes the retro look and will only make small changes. Doing new graphics takes time so don't expect much.

 

He is planning a new game engine, but isn't giving any details.

Sad as this may sound, I actually prefer the ultra retro graphics of the Exile series (second incarnation) to what followed. At least in terms of the monsters and characters. Geneforge and Avernum's graphics always felt like they lack detail, variety, and above all are overly stiff. And yes, I maintain that judgement even if they are literally more animated. To me it's a case of higher technology not resulting in better art.

Yes, the resolution is better, the items, UI, and terrain are better, and hot damn has Jeff found himself one heluva great artist to do the "cinematic" art since those days, but generally the art for the characters really feels inferior to what Exile offered.

... but I guess above all else this goes to show how Jeff absolutely cannot win in the graphics department, so why should he invest too hard there?

Eh, Humans and Demi-Humans can be really tiresome - as cliche' as "Catperson" and "Lizardman" may be, by comparison they're as fresh and interesting as the Vahnatai.

I think I was lucky, then, coming on board the RPG genre with Exile 2. I think "Person", "Scrawny Person", "Midget", and "Jake the Fat One" wouldn't have been nearly as compelling.

From where I'm standing, pole arms need a general buff overall, and swords (particularly dual wielding) needs to have a bit more linear progression.

Early on, I sit around scratching my head as to why I'd ever think to use two swords - the hit rating is abominable, and the result is negligible damage. My sword happy nephil is less "furry Legolas" and more "Stimpy with butter knives."

Later on, I sit around scratching my head as to why I'd ever bother with spears - Dual Wielding does magnitudes more damage such that my Halberd wielding Slith looks like he's constantly drifting into torpor. One Adrenaline Rush and my dual wielding warrior eats dervishes, wizards, and empire archers with the same efficiency as an industrial metal grinder, but the guy with the Halberd may as well be poking them with a broom.

I'd buff pole's damage and cleave capacities and lighten up on Dual Wielding's hit penalties and utterly insane damage capacities. Yes, I do think that the guy who has to carry around twice as much equipment should be doing a little better, but not so much better the role of "Spearman" is demoted to "Silver Age Comic Book sidekick".

"No RNG" absolutely does not equal dumbed-down... and I don't think anyone here has suggested that it does! "Action games" don't mean dumbed-down either. But have mainstream CRPG trends over the last 25 years involved shifting emphasis from certain mechanics onto others? Absolutely. Does that correlate in some way with changing (expanding) CRPG audiences? I think so; certainly developers, including large companies for all of that time period, are paying attention to what their audience responds well to. (Their ability to interpret that might not always be 100%, but overall, trends definitely follow the popular reactions.)

 

That SW games have gone through some but not all of these shifts is one of the reasons SW frequently describes their games as "retro" and "niche".

I'd argue that RNG means the exact opposite - deliberately placing something at a specific point requires thought and decision, consideration and rationality, even if it's only a token amount. RNG, meanwhile is a blind dice throw.

"Don't worry, head. The computer will do our thinking now." ~ Homer Simpson

Granted I definitely feel there's a time, place, and all but unquestionable use for RNG, but lately it feels too many developers are leaning harder and harder on it. Absence of chance and luck would make things incredibly boring, as would too much scripting, but the balance seems to be sliding too far in the opposite direction overall.