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I think the worst unreachable teaser was the room behind Erika's throne in Exile 3. You could tell that there was some designed terrain in that room (i.e., it is not just floor tiles), but as far as I know there was no way to access it.

When my Nature Lore is high enough, I am able to calm down some of the wild creatures I encounter. If I kill these creatures anyway, will I face any risk of the zone becoming hostile to me?

Can we get this in a grid that won't hurt my eyes?

Um, no it's not? Are you playing on a laptop?

That's a shame. I always liked the riddles in your previous games. They added a more intellectual aspect to the hack&slash action. Some of them were extremely clever, in my opinion, and I reminisce fondly about those in Exile 3.

I personally think Spiderweb's graphics have come a long, long way from back in the Escape from the Pit days. With the inclusion of area of effect spells, the ability to cast buffs on NPCs, weather effects, scripts, missile weapons actually worth having, and everything else, tiny gripes about graphics seem picayune and trivial to me.

Monsters do respawn in a few areas in his latest games. Perhaps we would be appeased if they respawned in large groups.

I'm going to inform Jeff of this by E-mail tomorrow unless one of you does it first. I guarantee you this is illegal.

I like that explanation a lot.

If you want to talk to the Jeff, who basically constitutes the whole of Spiderweb Software as the programmer and writer, you should E-mail him because he rarely looks on these forums.

I doubt Jeff would add a lore section to the hintbook, though. I think it is just more fun to make it up as you go along.

Well, even if we cannot have cliffs as a part of the engine, I hope there will still be some special encounters in which we can satisfy our cliff-jumping cravings.

I do want to make it known, though, that the incorporation of height into the Geneforge style graphics is hard to get used to at first.

My suggestion is not to worry about it. First aid is practically useless until A4, wherein the skill recovers health for you after every battle.

I'm pretty confident we can start jumping off cliffs again in A5. It was one of the things I missed dearly in the GF series. But we're just going to have to wait for confirmation.

I wouldn't mind having a more multiracial assortment of creations to choose from. I'd make a purples fyoras, neon yellow fyoras, black vlish, striped battle alphas, etc. My Rainbow Coalition and I will surely prevail. If we fail the first time, we'll have another shot in about four years.

But we are not talking about the character editor or cheating. We are talking about the aspects of the game that could be exploited by players in the course of normal, intelligent play.

EDIT: From Jeff's quick description of the fatigue system, it appears as if each battle discipline or ability immediately fatigues you; that is, there is no endurance counter that must be gradually depleted before the fatigue effect sets in. For example, in this screenshot , I take it that Aldous cannot use any abilities for 4 turns because he used Well-Aimed Blow this turn.

Maybe this feature was removed from the games to discourage swing-and-miss tactics...

I think spell fatigue would be a worthwhile addition to the game, and there are a few different implementations I can think of.

1) A magic fatigue could be added. More powerful spells would drain more fatigue. The capacity for fatigue would increase with stats and levels. It would function almost like spell energy in GF.

2) Only powerful spells would drain fatigue like the combat abilities.

3) Add a maximum number of spell points that a caster can use during a turn. If he has been out of combat for a while, he starts with an additional bonus reservoir, and if he doesn't use his entire quota for a turn, some of it would rollover to the next one.

I always imagined that my creations would die if I die. Through my essence they are closely intertwined with me that it just doesn't seem right for my cute little fyoras to devour my corpse as soon as I fall down.

The coolest thing about shades is that even though they can be so powerful, they don't spend their time dwelling on how awesome they are. They are not like the conceited and egomaniacal drakons who can't stop bragging about their power and trying to take over the world. The shades are content with their little crystal caverns or whatever.

This update sounds great, and the screenshots reveal enough intriguing, new features to keep me drooling for more.

And while I am sometimes disappointed that Avernum and Geneforge share very similar graphics, I still love that the two series can co-evolve, allowing each new game to be a spectacular mixture of everything that came before it -- like the quick spell and item slots.

What typo?

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(It was a joke.)

Thanks.

I have been embarrassed to ask this for a while, but what does FYT stand for? I do not think that I have ever regularly seen it used outside of this forum, and of course chatspeak dictionaries indicate that it means **** Your ****, **** You **** and other such pleasant phrases.

I thought it had lost market share to Linux and Apple since 2002. Anyway, if Jeff is really trying to test it on a Vista, we're going to have to wait a while, unless he got the corporate version of it that was released about two months ago.

I'm not sure if Jeff, in his blissfully Mac-filled world, even cares about Vista. His games are not known to be tailored in the most general of Windows API methods that allow for easy cross Windows version compatibility.

I've been anxiously waiting for the Geneforge 4 release as well, especially because of the praise that the community has given it. But I am willing to wait so that he can make sure that there are no game crippling bugs left.

Yes, E3 mind-dueling was rarely helpful. I didn't really miss its disappearance from the Avernum series.

Mindduel in Exile 3 was very hard to pull off if I remember correctly.

It is pretty amazing that a colony of misfits could have banded together to make anything useful.