Mea Tulpa

That is also the only time it has worked, and it was a pretty atrocious problem -- the chitrach graphic WAS the clawbug graphic, and chitrachs and clawbugs were described to be fairly different-looking.

There was also Rock Solid, by far the best of his games and not released through Spiderweb.

What are you talking about Danitus? The rule is that you are not allowed to promote non-Spiderweb games unless they are SNES RPGs. Duh!

Yeah, the cheat codes award XP the same way quests do, meaning it is adjusted for level, and in some of the games that adjustment is very sharp. In such games they stop working BEFORE you reach the cap, and sometimes even before you reach the max XP you'd have in a normal game.

Originally Posted By: Of Probity Shanti could have been kidnapped and the plot would have been driven just as well, although of course the payoff would have to be tweaked a bit. I have to disagree here. Shanti's death provides potentially significant motivation for the player. Of course, being Geneforge, it's up to the player how to react to it, but I found it to be one of the few moments in Geneforge that actually managed to evoke some kind of emotion at all. Quote: the filler of the sprites stealing the contract (who actually serve a purpose in that they show you that the sidhe aren't all on the same page about the contract) Actually, you've just seen that, rather laboriously, in the form of the Crones. The sprites really don't serve any purpose at all besides a flimsy excuse for a (not very interesting) dungeon crawl that is one of the handful of required excursions in Nethergate.

Wow. Monroe makes a good point -- if that was a publicity stunt, it was a very smart one. Did Jeff really defend DRM? I remember him in the past defending only very limited forms of DRM and being somewhat ambivalent on the topic as a whole. Has that changed?

Yeah, but none of those were in Exile 1. (I think that except for one shield from Exile 3, those all originated in Exile 2.) The point is that at the time Micah's Gloves were named, name-bearing items were exceedingly rare; the only other example we have was an immensely powerful and totally unique artifact strongly associated with the person whose name it bears (to the point that you find it on his dead body). So what does Micah have to do with them?

I was quoting the (dead) Walter Kaufmann who was a professor of philosophy, from his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy -- far from groundbreaking, but rigorous and robust in its commentary.

If they exist in later Avernums, I don't know what they do there. They have existed, however, since Exile 1, and in Exile they improve spellcasting ability just as if you had raised your Intelligence to the next threshhold (9, 12, 16, etc). They will actually raise this above the normal maximum you can reach from stats, making them quite good. Also, besides the Orb of Thralni, I can't think of any other possessively named equipment from Exile 1. So it's a real oddity.

Wow. What a spectacularly awful idea. There are a limited number of fields in which a potential employer googling your name and turning up a whole bunch of WoW forum posts would be less than catastrophic.

As a side note, I always wondered why the magical gloves that enhanced spellcasting ability were called Micah's Gloves.

The Exile 1 automap neither pauses the game, nor shades explored areas in any meaningful way. And don't be silly.

The dozens and dozens of filler towns add to the atmosphere, but not in a positive way. I think there is another useful distinction to be made between "meaningful" and "filler". Those dozens and dozens of towns are filler atmosphere; the description of the Great Cave in Exile 1 on the other hand was meaningful atmosphere. Similarly, the murder of Shanti in Geneforge 2 was meaningful plot, while the sprite temporarily stealing the Contract in the Ruined Hall in Nethergate was total filler.

To take things up a notch, Walter Kaufmann said: "Great poetry often deals with hackneyed themes. Sophocles and Shakespeare chose well-known stories, Goethe wrote on love, Dostoevsky on murder. Yet what is new each time is not merely the language. The poet's passion cracks convention: the chains of custom drop; the world of our everyday experience is exposed as superficial appearance; the person we had seemed to be and our daily contacts and routines appear as shadows on a screen, without depth; while the poet's myth reveals reality." Ursula LeGuin: "Fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom." Does Jeff do that? At times, I think so. But definitely not all the time.

Hmm. That's true, Ghikra was distinctive. However, all the towns in the Olgai tribe homeland in Exile 2 looked just like regular towns. They didn't use Vahnatai walls or anything, and the layouts of Olgai and Egli were not that different from the layouts of Almaria and the Tower of Magi, really.

The Rebel/Shaper dialog exists for the entire game. Litalia's first visit comes when you leave the remains of the school, and if you played G2, it was even more obvious that the destruction of the school wasn't a random act of violence. You have Alwan and Greta and oodles of those annoying forced-choice questions from the very start. And you CAN'T get past Dhonal's isle without participating in the Rebel/Shaper dialog. Heck, one of the two ways you can complete the isle locks you in to siding with the Rebels! Oh yeah, and the second isle. Diwaniya and Lankan. Lots of forced dialog about the Rebels there.

I'm sure there were some dialog boxes talking about distinctive, curvy paths and roofs and stuff, but the town layouts were not any different from Exile towns.

I don't think they were terribly distinctive, were they?

Perhaps it would help to draw a distinction between plot, meaning exactly what happens in/surrounding a game, and atmosphere, which would include the way that plot is told as a story. G4's story is presented differently from G3's; it's gritty, although it still relies on a chain of successive Bobs. The plot really is the same though. Let's look at just the stripped down, bare plots from each SW game: X1: Explore and defend the land from critical threats (lizardmen and demons) by killing them, take revenge by assassinating the Big Bad, and find an escape route. X2: Respond to a critical threat (the Vahnatai) through exploration, diplomacy, and good works, and defend the land from a critical threat (the Empire) by securing foreign aid from magical creatures, highly involved sabotage, and assassinating the Big Bad (Garzahd). X3: Explore and defend the land from critical threats (monster plagues) by killing them and defeating the Big Bad (Rentar-Ihrno). A4: Defend the land from critical threats (monster plagues) by defeating the Big Bad (Rentar-Ihrno). A5: Chase a Big Bad, and help one of two groups end up on top of the other (the Darkside Loyalists OR the Prazacian Softies) by assassinating a Big Bad (Dorikas or Redmark). A6: Defend the land from a critical threat (lizardmen) by killing them, and help one of several groups end up on top of the others through killing and fetching. Nethergate: Help one of two groups end up on top of the other (Nethergate or Shadow Valley Fort) by securing foreign aid from magical creatures. G1: Explore the land, help some groups end up on top of the others (Obeyers, Awakened, Takers; Trajkov, Goettsch), find and decide the fate of an ancient artifact, and find an escape route. G2: Explore the land, find a missing VIP, and help some groups end up on top of the others (Loyalists, Awakened, Barzites, Takers) through sabotage and killing. G3: Help one of two groups end up on top of the other (Shapers, Rebels) through sabotage and killing, and take revenge by assassinating a bit part. G4: Help one of three groups end up on top of the others (Shapers, Rebels, Trakovites) through espionage, sabotage, and killing. G5: Help one of five groups end up on top of the others (Taygen, Alwan, Astoria, Litalia, Ghaldring) through sabotage and killing.

Hmm, interesting. Given the simplicity of the current automap (monocolor squares) I am guessing that just adding more squares that need to be shaded would cause an FPS hit as well. Assuming movement is Geneforge-style and not Avernum-style, I can at least sort of understand why this might happen. The "hit a button to pause and bring up a larger automap with explored areas shaded" idea still seems like it could work, though.

Well, Basilisk has only produced two games from the same series. There are any number of examples of SW game pairings you could say the same thing about, although admittedly the sheer quantity of dialogue makes it harder to be so crude about it. But plot honestly did not vary much after Exile 3 and Geneforge 1.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer If you want more animations go play Eschalon: Book 1 or 2 over at Basilisk Games. In discussing the end of Book 2 there was the following: Quote: Obviously what we need is a game for which Spiderweb does the story and Basilisk does the game engine. Ugh, NO! What we need is a game for which Spiderweb does the story and game engine, and Basilisk does the graphics. The big "win" factor of Basilisk is that their graphics are much like Exile 3's: they are colorful and crisp, and they really draw you in. They're great. However, Basilisk's game mechanics are a serious problem. While they have a number of good ideas, the mechanics are significantly less balanced than Exile's were (and with the infinite bless effect that's saying something). In Eschalon, there are a handful of ways you can totally break, or overpower, an aspect of the game, and the skills and abilities are so poorly balanced that most of them are useless while a few of them make you effectively invulnerable when used correctly. SW does not have the most interesting mechanics ever, but Jeff has gotten fairly good at balancing the mechanics, and seems to be stepping away from the A4 low point of lack of diversity in tactical options. The superiority of SW's storytelling is obvious, though I think the actual plot and atmosphere are fairly hit or miss, and are not consistent.

No_More was making a comparison between Spiderweb games, with few animations and little "forced watching" time, and FF games as an examplar of a game with heavy animation and lots of "forced watching" time. I think the idea is that a huge overhead sword swing, even in Jeff's graphics style, might take an extra second or two to watch. Add that up for everyone in a big battle and suddenly, the game is taking longer even though nothing more is happening.

The zoom out function sounds easy to program, actually. It's just a question of making sure the graphics work on a smaller scale, which they might not easily.

I suspect not. I don't KNOW anything.