Mea Tulpa

They just appear in the order they happen to be numbered in the game data. Sometimes this means quests from the same area are grouped together, or "important" quests are grouped together, but not always. The order is meaningless.

On Normal it's much easier. On Torment it's much harder and in fact practically impossible.

I dunno, SoT. I intensely dislike the possibility of playing at a disadvantage for a while in order to gain an advantage later. I dislike it precisely because it exists in most games in some form or other, and usually the time you wait is long and the advantage is small. The problem is that in Avernum-style RPGs, the further you are in the game, the less difference any individual skill, spell, or item is going to make. Torment or not, economizing on a couple of skill points isn't going to make a huge difference in any game. But for those of us who are compulsive optimizers, it's still hard to pass up. Yeah: I could pretend the opportunity isn't there and not optimize on that. But it's a slippery slope. As soon as I'm willing to depart from the reality of the game mechanics in that small way, I may as well depart in other ways, and pretty soon I'm flat out cheating. The idea of needing to combine archery with Pwnagemastery or some other obscure combination of skills in actions to defeat a big bad on Torment is great. Space for creativity is always good. The idea of needing to play suboptimally for half the game in order to be creative? Really crappy. Which leads directly to my brilliant reinvention of the CRPG that I will never make. Sigh...

Also Inferno Wyrms, Glaahks, and Ur-Drakons. Ur-Drakons are the only real issue there. But drayks aren't really any better off; and there aren't tons of ur-drakons running around anyway. I'm skeptical that any lifecrafter will have >450 essence available at the beginning of chapter 3 when drayks and wingbolts first become available. (That's what 3 wingbolts cost, if you want them to be controllable, and that's without saving a little essence for spellcasting.) Although having 900 by endgame is quite doable. You may be right...

Interesting. I'm still inclined to go with drayks due to their significantly cheaper essence cost, which allows you twice as many for most of the game.

Ahh... fair enough.

Yes, fire resistance is everywhere and fire attacks suck. Magic resistance is also an issue since where it does exist, it tends to be high (i.e. wingbolts). This is actually one of the things that makes kyshakks so spectacular -- their high HP and electrifying effect gives them an advantage over otherwise comparable wingbolts in a 1-on-1 fight. A team of cryoas, drayks, and kyshakks can sweep wingbolts and other magic creations. I remember somebody saying once that in the PC version of G4, drayks do fire damage and not physical damage (which makes more sense anyway). Unfortunately, that devalues them entirely.

A1-3 are all remakes of E1-3 with all the same text and slightly different versions of the same maps, towns, characters and enemies.

Cold resistance is actually annoyingly common. Most regular enemies are vulnerable to cold, but a large proportion of the less common but more annoying enemies resist it heavily: specters of all sorts are immune, and golems and pylons both take only 10% damage. And of course there are cryodrayks. The cryoa melee attack isn't horrendous, but creation melee attacks are really never good after G2. Cryoas are still good -- they are one of the better values for their essence cost, and they are available early -- but the majority of your team should probably use magical or physical damage, to avoid being shut out against ice resistant enemies. Although note that cryoas are great against wingbolts and their ilk.

Your comparison was wrong; creations and Alwan and Greta all leech XP the same way. It's very minor, but they all do.

It's not an issue of complicated plot, it's an issue of atmosphere, of creating an internally consistent, believable, interesting world in which a story can be set. E/A 2 and Nethergate were both steeped in atmosphere. A4 received a lot of criticism for breaking this atmosphere. Between the invention of Exile and the release of A4, 40 years passed in game time and 10 years passed in real time. Things changed in the game world but more importantly they changed in the mind of its creator. But in between we had a decade of remakes where the story and atmosphere didn't change, so A4's focus on petty, colonial-era immigrants (as opposed to brave, collaborative Exiles) came as a bit of a shock. The change in presentation of scale really was drastic, mainly in the Eastern Gallery and the Great Cave; towns that previously were multiple map screens apart and just felt extremely distant became ten character widths apart. The use of sound effects and graphics that longtime Spiderweb users immediately associated with other worlds (Geneforge) did not help. (The original A4 chitrach graphic was actually the Geneforge clawbug graphic, which looked very little like the chitrachs from E/A 2.) Having a simple and predictable plot, drawn out like the most unbearable Dickens novel, was just the nail in the coffin. All this is not to bash on A4, but to present the reasons older fans prefer the older games. Keyboard control, while potentially frustrating for some, is not the main issue.

I think this is the answer you are looking for: All armor automatically protects against fire, cold, and energy attacks at half the percent of its armor rating. It does not offer that kind of protection against acid, poison, or anything else. If you're looking for something else, maybe you can be more specific?

I give you points for using the Faerie Bazaar as a stage. But really, Erika vs Litalia without any creations present is a complete joke.

Really, the drayks shaped drayks. This progression was inevitable.

The other significant variable here is play order. All of Jeff's games are good games, so most people who like this kind of RPG will like whichever game they play first. However, it can be hard to take a "step down"... and what constitutes a step down is different for different people. Avernum-style movement or scale-switching could be a step down for some. Conversely, I think the lack of scale-switching was one of the most maligned things about A4, by older players; they had spent 10 years imagining Exile/Avernum as this huge expansive place, and suddenly it seemed really tiny. Similarly, A4's plot seems shallow and boring to players coming from A2; but for the genre, it's pretty standard, so it isn't going to turn off new players. However, I do think it's possible to identify incontrovertible successes that please some people without displeasing anybody else. The movement in A4/5, for example, pleases the mouse people, while the keyboard people have (mostly) all the options they did in older games.

Also, while I'm sure Solberg did do stuff to help out in the first war against Grah-Hoth, there are three wizards consistently credited with sealing him away -- Erika, Patrick, and Rone. Not Solberg. And in E3, when he could have helped most, by keeping Linda away, he failed to do so.

Actually, it seems pretty easy to implement. You can already give yourself a permanent speed boost just by changing one number in the data files. Presence of hostiles and whether a zone is cleared or not can't be hard to check for, since the game already keeps track of those things. It is admittedly a little more complicated to boost your creations' speeds, but if this was being handled in a hardcoded way, I don't see how it could be too hard.

When I said "no RPG should have that," I was talking about sandwich time, not walking animations. Walking animations are fine and are, in fact, a staple of the vast majority of CRPGs. Console RPGs have had them from the beginning, as have action-RPGs, and they've spread. These days it's only the little niche of Gold Box style games (well, plus roguelikes) that don't have them. Walking animations do not normally create sandwich time. "Sandwich time" refers to time where you may as well get up and make a sandwich, because you know nothing will happen in your game, but you have to spend that time having nothing happen anyway. It's a waste. Walking animations only create sandwich time if the animation is slow compared to the amount of terrain you have to cross. Geneforge has lots of detailed terrain, which mostly becomes uninteresting after the first time you cross it. What Geneforge could really use, IMHO, would be a "run" mode that could only be activated (a) when the zone has been cleared, and ( when no enemies are visible. This prevents it from poisoning any game mechanics, while at the same time getting rid of sandwich time.

Tor wasn't even the official greeter. Somebody else had that job. He wasn't the official information-provider either; that was somebody else. All he did was hand out knives and food to anyone who stepped into his office. His later exploits: separating from his wife, remarrying and buying a farm, then selling it to the farmhands and abandoning his second wife. He was also a supply officer and a mechanic. Where's the heroism? I suppose Tor does have the name recognition factor, but does anyone excluding his various wives and co-workers mention him? No.

If we add as a requirement some level of fame -- that is, that at least one person in Avernum with no personal relationship to them talks about them -- you can't really have a national hero nobody's heard of -- the list gets shorter. Micah, Erika, Patrick, Rone, and Solberg can all stay, as can the Empire War Heroes. Besides them we have lists of famous non-humans and non-Avernites, who don't fit the bill (Bon-Ihrno and Prazac come to mind); talked-about Avernites who haven't done anything terribly heroic (Starrus, Houghton, Linda); and non-famous Avernites who mostly haven't done anything heroic either, like Tor or Kelner.

It really has nothing to do with engine calculation time for NPCs, it has to do with animation time. In Avernum 4-5 there is no walking animation, so steps happen with the smallest possible delay. In Geneforge, the delay is however long it takes to display the animation. This is actually character-dependent and can be modified in the game data files. Most people seem to agree that the walking speed in Geneforge is fine for when you are exploring, the problem is needing to cross territory you've already been through. That becomes horribly tedious. G3 was the worst offender with its mandatory boats and special entrance levels like Dhonal's Keep, but it can be annoying just walking to the middle of a town to get to a shop you visit often. Click... wait. It's sandwich time, something no RPG should have.

You got it. Missile weapons work just like melee weapons except you use Dex instead of Str, and the appropriate weapon skill of course. There is no cap. So you are very right that the die size is more important than weapon "strength." In Avernum 4 this even led to the odd situation where the stick was sometimes the strongest melee weapon.

Search a little harder. There is a hidden entrance.

The earlier Avernum games were mainly designed for easy keyboard movement. Geneforge and the later Avernum games are obviously designed just for mouse movement. Not-crappy mouse movement is a relatively new concept in top-down CRPGs, so older gamers are often very accustomed to keyboard movement, while newer gamers might not be exposed to it.

Erika is the most obvious candidate. The others would be Micah and the rest of the Five. As far as PCs go, the E/A 2 PCs might count .