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I'm not a huge fan of the remarkable staticness of game elements either. However, those are that way because that's how Jeff wants them, and no amount of feedback is going to change that. I think you're overestimating the guaranteed impact of testing feedback: not its potential impact, but its guaranteed impact. Locmaar put it well: Originally Posted By: Locmaar What you fail to take into account, though, is this: when you submit your work to a review environment it's usually to get help to get it ready to market (whatever market this may be) - if Jeff manages to do that without our preferred review environment who are we to argue with that? Thus I think the one Spiderweb game that really would have benefitted from more feedback, early on in the process, was Blades of Avernum: "this scripting language you are developing, while cool for me, will be lost on the vast majority of players, something that was not true of BoE's parallel parts" and "oh man, this editor interface is abominable, and I usually like your interfaces" could have made a difference. Or maybe not: maybe that was just not meant to be. Here's another comparison. Basilisk games, while much younger than Spiderweb, produces a similar product. Basilisk is WAY more present in their forums and, at least after their first game, made changes based on a LARGE amount of user feedback on the forums. From what I can tell, these changes seem to have amount to about 3 to 6 months of work, and resulting in a second game that has improved play controls and some other added goodies, but nonetheless looks and feels almost exactly like the first game. Jeff's output average is about 1 game per year. If he's going to delay a game by 3 to 6 months, he'd need to increase sales by 25 to 50%. The changes that I suggest, even though I know they would make the game better, would not result in such an increase.

I don't think I have heard ANY negative comments about A6's food implementation, which is interesting. It reminds me a bit of Dungeon Master's, but even more scaled down: you get to pick up and move around pretty icons, some of which may even be valuable, but the food timer is slow enough that it's never an actual concern.

Originally Posted By: FnordCola Methinks 'A Small Rebellion' gave Jeff a lot of ideas for the Geneforge series... A Small Rebellion was an obvious precursor, in this respect, to both Nethergate and Geneforge. Valley of Dying Things was another giant precursor, right down to the elite trio who double-cross each other while abandoning the school.

I think it's pretty obvious at the beginning, if you played the first two games. The game quickly makes it clear that there are three possibilities, two of which make little sense given those characters' personalities in the previous games, and one of which makes perfect sense given (1) the ominous threats Rentar-Ihrno makes in X2, and (2) the blatantly suspicious dialogue in Ghikra, particularly with Rentar-Ihrno and Glantris-Bok (Ouroboros!).

A3 is a whodunit in the same way that The Scarlet Letter is. If you don't know whodunit, you haven't been paying attention.

Originally Posted By: Refudiate Exorbance Or, I think, a medium less open to criticism than games. Write a novel and most of the time people will accept it as a novel. It might have flaws, and maybe people won't like what you did with this or that character, but very rarely will people explode with rage the way they will over gameplay and game design. (And Twilight.) You make a good distinction in your parenthetical sentence. Most novels are rarely read by 13-year-old boys with unleavened social skills who enjoy simulating blowing things up. Most novels are also rarely read by 13-year-old girls. Therefore, most fiction-writer forums fail to draw from these two deep pools of viciousness which are available to video game forums and Twilight forums, respectively. In other words, I think the fact that most readers will accept a novel as a novel has more to do with the self-selection of the readers and less to do with the novel.

If you really enjoy storyline and lore, Avernum 1 and 2 are probably the games you will enjoy most. Since all of the games go in chronological order, they are also the natural place for you to start.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Just ask what happen to TM over his Avernum 4 comments. This is incredibly misleading, so I think in this regard at least the record needs to be set straight. Nobody was ever disciplined in any way for making comments about Avernum 4 -- in fact, many of the current mods had some colorful things to say about aspects of it. Ash Lael was banned for a week, around that time, as a result of putting a provocative, out-of-context quote from Jeff in his signature. His intentions (which involved humor and irony) were misinterpreted as malice, Ash was banned, and a storm of drama ensued. I believe that was one of the things that prompted Jeff to distance himself from the forums. But it was not over "Avernum 4 comments" and it had nothing to do with TM. TM was banned a number of times that season, but I'm pretty sure they were all for harassment, belittlement, and profanity -- never anything related to Avernum 4.

In theory, a video game could have a story just as intricate and engrossing and genuine and beautiful as a book or a movie. However, it's not an accident that this hasn't happened. Novels and movies are media that exist expressly for the purpose of telling a story. Neither has another primary purpose: you can argue that conceits of language, or of acting or visual effects or music or whatever, can compete, and perhaps they can, but telling a story is still, almost without exception, the broad strokes main point of a novel or a movie. With video games, telling a story is often one of the main points. But it isn't required to be one of the main points, and it is almost never the only point: with the exception maybe of the most linear of text adventures.

Stealth does seem to have an affect, in my experience, but it's a weird and inconsistent effect.

Originally Posted By: crpgnut …outside of the story, which is the least important element of a crpg; in my opinion. Whether or not you are correct, this is the exact opposite of the philosophy that Jeff has and that he employs with his games. (The success of said employment is a different question too.) I do agree with you that it would be easy and cool to add to item variety.

Apparently, in his early days at GE, he once planned to leave the company. He was persuaded not to, but told them not to cancel his party, because he might as well accept the presents people had bought him.

There is definitely a scale available somewhere in that area, even if you kill Reptrakos.

Exile: Escape from the Pit came in one of those First Class style silver-folder-with-icon folders, including in old versions of Realmz. And compared to Realmz, it didn't look very good originally. Then there was Exile II, with the KPT Bryce splash screen that I think was a requirement circa 1995.

The name literally means wand-elf, but Gandalf in the Eddas was nonetheless a dvergar and not an alfar.

Actually, the traditional observed parallel is with the valkyries, who rode terrible winged beasts as well as horses and who were not originally seen in the positive light that they are today.

I don't have A6 on this computer, but you should be able to get it by using an SDF code. Someone who knows what I'm talking about and his the scripts folder handy can look at the Duvno scripts and figure that out.

Tolkien, philologist that he was, was surely aware of that Sauron meant lizard in Greek. But he used names for their sense and feeling and not their literal pedigree: witness Gandalf, whose name appears along with many others from _The Hobbit_ in the Prose Edda: but as a sort of dwarf.

Given Thurilith it was probably intentional. He _was_ trained as a biological writer.

Yup. The in-game help lies to you, on that one.

You won't find anything to "paint" dialog boxes because dialog boxes are not made from images, they are made from parts: the window itself, static text boxes, text entry boxes, icons, etc., all with locations and sizes and their own data. On pre-OS X macs this was all handled via resources, so ResEdit back in the day or ResHack today are the tools you'd want. I'm not actually sure what the standard tools are for dialog boxes in OS X and on Windows, but paint programs won't do it.

Geez, what is this, Oldbie Week? And man that picture brings back memories... I haven't had a buzz cut or worn glasses in years (literally, since just about the time that picture was drawn). It's funny when you see an old picture of yourself and say, wow, did I really look like that?

That was a bit of a delayed reaction.

It's a children's movie with characters named Thumper and Bambi. I mean, geez.

In that case, the Timeline of Ermarian may be of use to you: http://encyclopedia.ermarian.net/w/index.php?title=Timeline_of_Ermarian&oldid=5947 I'm linking to an old version because there have been a few edits since I put it together adding questionable items. Anyway, the stuff here in House Hawthorne, Interregnum and Prazac I provides accurate dates for all of Avernum 1-5; I spent way too much time researching that, a few years ago.