Marak

The only way to "zoom in" at the moment is to lower your resolution. Think old school. The game plays very well in something like what was standard many moons ago - try lowering your resolution to something more like 1280x1024.

It's a double-edged sword, isn't it? *Jeff takes out needing Food to rest and makes an engine that means Light Sources are optional* Old timers: WTF? Game is so damn watered down and simplified and casual-friendly now. *Jeff leaves in needing Food to rest and tweaks the engine so unlit dungeons are really damn dark again.* Newcomers: WTF? Game is so damn nitpicky, this is 2011, you shouldn't need crap like Light Sources and a food/hunger mechanic? Puh-lease. *Jeff facedesks for a while because he can't win*

Unlike in the original trilogy (and Avernum 6), food in this game is really just stacks of weak healing items. If that's useful to you, great. If not, you can skip picking it up entirely.

Read: enough to seem useful, not enough to really warrant putting points into. The game makes it sound like having Luck will help you during encounters (like Cave Lore can), but this is, sadly, not the case. It really does just give you a tiny little smattering of survivability (which other skills do better).

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega Ah, nothing like scathing, totally nonconstructive criticism laced with baseless accusations and ignorance, eh? Speaking of... There's a reason you don't see Jeff post on here much.

Originally Posted By: Spires and Tunnels —Alorael, who at least think videos are better. If what the reviewer says and what you see don't match, you can draw your own conclusions. This is an excellent point, and is probably a big factor in why the "WTF is...?" format has gotten so hugely popular. You're basically getting 2 reviews in 1 - hard to argue with that.

Originally Posted By: Poomermon Hello. New user here. I bought the game after seeing Northernlions youtube video. I had never heard of it before but the tactical combat looked interesting and I got the feeling it would be similar to original fallout. I have not yet really played the game but I can say these kind of first impression videos are good way to give more publicity to indie games. I have made many purchasing decisions based on Northernlions and TotalBiscuits videos. As have I; that's why I'm hoping that some people that don't normally play games like Avernum - or are ignorant of Spiderweb Software - will see the video. Anything that gets Jeff more potential sales is a darn good thing in my book.

What Alorael said. He could have said "this game is utter crap," and while I would have strongly disagreed with him, the end result - exposure of Avernum and Spiderweb to a wider potential audience - remains the same. It really doesn't matter what he put in that video; as long as it's landing in 30,000+ YouTub subscription boxes and people are watching it, it's a good thing.

Wow, here it is already!

I wonder if Jeff has ever tried actually mailing TB about a WTF is. If he hasn't, I'd say it'd be worth a try - nothing to lose (except for the couple of minutes it takes to fire off an e-mail with links to Spiderweb Software, maybe 10-15 mins if he wants to set up and provide links for a free "review copy") and 150,000+ views to gain.

Dunno if anyone follows Northernlion on YouTube, but if you are, he's planning on doing a "Let's Look at" for our favorite newest Avernum re-make next week. With over 30,000 subs and almost 12 million video views, I'm hoping this will shed some semi-mainstream light on Jeff (for once). I dunno about you guys, but I'm tired of only hearing about Spiderweb on after doing a long Google search and finding 2 reviews not written by 11-year-olds/hosted on some site you've never, ever heard of ever. Jeff deserves more positive press - ideally from known/respected sources - and hopefully this will send some his way.

If in doubt: a Wizard did it.

That's why do almost all of my combat with Keyboard shortcuts. Assuming you're not iphoning it up, of course. It's hard to miss when you attack with a, a or a, b instead of clicking. D A B A B P C B M A B A round of combat dedicated to nuking monster "B".

The only thing that concerns me is how, in each game, there seems to be less and less of those long, elaborate text boxes that pop up, describing a new area and how your characters react to it. Those bits of descriptive text are some of my favorite moments in the various Avernum games, and it seems like Jeff is actively working to pare them down to a bare minimum. Maybe it's for the best, I know a lot of people feel they break the flow of the game or that such things should be shown and not described - but to me they always evoked that "sitting my basement as a kid and listening to my dad be Dungeon Master" feeling. It's a good feeling.

Since this is the second revision of the Exile story, and the second engine upgrade, the game is going to have a different look and feel (obviously). Not that this is a bad thing. The isometric perspective, while "dated", is perfectly serviceable for what the game does, and the lessons Jeff has learned over last 15 years emphasize doing more of what is fun in an RPG like this (exploring, fighting, getting phat lewt, choosing how your characters level up) while trying to streamline - or eliminate - the stuff that's tedious (inventory management, finding quest objectives when given vague directions, reload-inducing death penalties).

It's not so much that they slack off on gameplay and storyline so much that the overly-pretty graphics eat up 99.999999999% of the devolopment time and money, leaving far too little left for the actual game part of the game. Yet another reason why I'll buy Avernums over and over and laugh at fluff like Skyrim. I want an RPG, not an FPS with persistent elements, melee weapons, and magic bolts in place of bullets. I mean really, how is Skyrim different from CoD, aside from having NPCs standing around in towns telling you where to go instead of standing around on the current map telling you where to go? You level up in both games, you shoot things in both games, you're in a constant first-person view in both games - there's more similarities than differences at this point, and it's just getting silly. RPGs are becoming more like FPS and FPS are adding RPG elements, to the point that the two genres - at least in their current "AAA" form - are nearly the same damn games, just with different arsenals to kill things with. On topic: I've been enjoying A:EftP immensely thus far (only Level 4 but I'm trying to pace myself) and once you get used to the Avadon-esque Skill Tree, it plays as well as any other Spiderweb title. Hard is actually Hard, slow and steady wins the race, quests are still varied and fun to complete, sidequests galore, and the standard snarky writing - it's more of what I want, really.

I'll still say that Avernum 2 is my favorite Spiderweb game - although that's mostly because it was the first Spiderweb game I ever played, and it scratched that "old school RPG that they just don't make anymore" itch so hard I played it every waking-and-not-working hour for about 3 weeks. So I'm sure nostalgia plays a role. But in any case, realism doesn't make these games any more fun. Having to make (literally) 15 trips into the Goblin Lair in order to pick up and sell everything that's of value may be realistic - but it's tedious and the actual coinage you net is minimal. Being able to "character build yourself into a corner" because the game asks you to put points into skills and spells (and traits) before you have any idea which skill, spells, and traits are "best" and which are "best for you," resulting in characters that end up too weak because the stats didn't do what you expected them to. Is that fun? I'm pretty sure that falls into the category of "the game just flipped you off, now start over", which is about as far from fun as you can get. Also, low-strength character were penalized even more heavily in A1-3 than they are now. There was the old Dungeons and Dragons "can't cast in anything that actually provided more than +1% armor" system in place, and on top of that you couldn't have them carry anything at all, because you had a maximum weight you could carry. So if you had a party with a couple of spellcasters, YOU'D MAKE LESS MONEY BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T PHYSICALLY PICK UP HALF THE LOOT AFTER ANY RANDOM BATTLE WITH ARMORED FOES. Again, realistic, but not particularly fun - or fair, for that matter. In a game where you buy power - by upgrading Skills and Spells for coins - penalizing certain party types to have less coins to spend was a pretty big slap in the face. Humping walls was sort of fun for about the first third of the first game; after 3 entire games' worth of it - even with the Magic Eye spell or whatever it was called - it got real, real, real old real, real fast. Again, it turned into a mini-game of "tedium for bits of extra loot". Related: the PLEASE PUSH ME I TAKE UP HALF THE WALL TILE buttons in this version make me roll my eyes, although I'm sure that was done to appease the people on portable devices. While I do agree that the pseudo-skill-tree system of Avernum: EftP feels "dumbed down" AT FIRST (especially after having replayed A6 recently), the Traits really open things up and restore a lot of the "lost" customization to the game - at least to me. I prefer to make my characters better at certain things as the game goes on, rather than make them overpowered right from the get go, with the "drawback" (reduced XP) actually making your characters MORE powerful because they'd get more Skill Points of free Perk Skills than they lost from the levels they lost by the end of the game - see Divinely Touched, Elite Warrior, Natural Mage, Pure Spirit. When there's literally no reason NOT to take the Perk because the downside the game gives you is no hinderance at all, it's time to change the system. "Traits as you go" is great because it allows you to slowly attain what you would have gotten from an uber-perk in the older Avernum games (the list above) - only you get it in nice, bite-sized chunks, and you know which chunks you want and when you want them - because you're going to find out what stats and spells you prefer to use while you're playing, and then you can boost them every few levels when you're picking Traits. Also, going back to "Spells are level 1, 2, or 3 and those Levels MATTER" was a huge plus in my eyes; after playing A6 and having my Level 8 Firebolt doing an extra +5-15 damage vs. a Level 3 Firebolt, this is a welcome reversion. TL;DR version: I'm as old-school as the next guy, but what Jeff has done is take most of the "realistic but incredibly tedious" mechanics of his old games and streamlined them into a system where you can get back to what's actually fun - exploring, chatting, questing, and looting.

Personally, I just chased him into the room with the wheel, trapped him in the corner, and chipped away at him while keeping all the Worms he was summoning chain-Dazed with my Mage. Having a Pet out to take some hits isn't a terrible idea, either. This was on Hard, but should apply to most difficulties, I would think.

Plus he's steamlined things a lot, and for the better in nearly all cases. I can't speak for Exile, having never played it, but going back and trying to play Avernum 1 - especially after playing any of the Second Trilogy (read: Avernums 4-6), is painful. The interface is cumbersome, the quest log is lacking, and so on, and so on. While I've always wanted to see how Avernum "starts", I could never stomach the game engine enough to break down and pay $20 for it, not when I could play the much more refined games that I'd already bought, if that makes sense. Even Avernum 2, using the same engine, has been tweaked enough to be playable. But going from Avernum 1 (or even 2 or 3) to what we have now, it lets you experience the same story, but with all the annoying crap chopped out of it. Imagine all your characters being encumbered not by what they have equipped, but by how much they are carrying. Say good-bye to thousands and thousands of coins worth of armor you couldn't pick up sell because you'd spend the entire dungeon with 2 AP/round. Hope you don't want your low-strength Mages to carry ANYTHING but the Robes on their backs and a couple of scrolls and wands. Imagine that random battles that took place outside, on the world map, being self-contained "maps" that disappeared once you clicked the "end combat" button - so any loot you couldn't carry (see obsolete encumbrance gripe above) would vanish into the Aether, never to be seen again. And for god's sake, don't drop anything important in a random battle - you could lose it forever if you forgot to pick it back up before clicking "end combat". Imagine that, instead of hitting hard-to-see wall switches to find hidden paths, you literally had to hump every single wall in the entire game with the Number Pad. I'm serius - EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. So we're talking thousands and THOUSANDS of key presses to find the odd extra body to search or that one invisible shortcut that you need to find in order to beat a dungeon. Imagine being able to customize your characters fully. Sounds great right? Well, it is great - until you realize that your "no Strength, high Dex, high Sharpshooter, pump First Aid (the Avernum 1-3 version!) and Cave Lore" build means that your Level 25 character that you spent 40 hours playing with is now so terrible that you cannot beat the game with her (and her equally terribly built comrades). Hope you like a forced replay of the whole game. Jeff has learned a lot of lessons over the past 15-ish years, and you're seeing the results here: all the Epic Story Goodness of Avernum (and let's be honest, that's one of the biggest draws for the series is its unique, non-cookie-cutter setting) without all the Obsolete Gold Box CRPG [censored] to deal with. Sounds like a win-win to me. Can't wait to play the Windows version Soon™.

Yeah, it's one of the very last tunnels you find the entrance to, if memory serves. I recall having that quest in my log for-freaking-ever before finally stumbling onto the foundry's rear entrance when I least expected to.

I'll second Randomizer on this one. I'd say 30-ish hours if you just burn through the game, and closer to 50 if you're like me and simply cannot leave a sidequest un-completed. So if you've got 30 (real) hours played, you're probably something like 75% done.

To piggyback on this, I always envision "you" as being the plural form, every time. When the NPCs say "you", they're addressing the whole group, as in "you all" (only shorter). In any case, who's to say that, on occasion, the Empire doesn't decide to lump people into small groups and pop them through the Portal either A) all at once or in a very rapid-fire manner? And if you were shoved through said Portal with 3 other people at roughly the same time, wouldn't there be some incentive to stick with them afterwards?

Re: Strumpet Yeah, but you can avoid pretty much all the fights if you're careful about watching for patrols and take the correct path. As for the first, unavoidable fight, follow the guards and don't engage until you're right next to them when they hole up in that one room. Of course, being a Shaman meant I could send my pet Drake in to take most of the hits. > If you're a Sorceress, that'd be the perfect time to use up your Call Beast wands. Why fight alone when you can summon up a pet with an AoE special attack to tank for you? However, the fight with Click to reveal.. Heart Miranda was quite daunting until I realized that I she didn't really have all that much health and with a full Fatigue bar I could outlast her and let my Drake breathe fire all over her until the cows came home.

Yeah, it's a rather unique item. It's like a Charm from the Diablo II expansion: whoever's inventory it sits in, they get a stat bonus. You may be able to go back to the Beast's Lair and grab it; items don't typically disappear off the ground in Spiderweb games unless you're intentionally dropping hundreds of items on the ground, all over the place, and overloading the system (so to speak). Just run around the Beast's Lair hitting 'g' and looking for a skull that doesn't have the John Donne quote about 'for whom the bell tolls'.

I personally found that pumping the middle tree with my Shaman gave her so much Max Health that it (partially) overcame her meh armor and resists. I still don't think I'll be using Jenell much on my new, Shadowwalker-main Torment playthrough.