Fael

Originally Posted By: jlsgaladriel One of the reasons I love Spiderweb games is the excellent writing. What other writing stood out for you? He says, by way of introduction, "Shnrunk stomp! Shnrunk kill! Shnrunk eat!" Then Shnrunk takes proactive steps to carry out his three-part plan. Yup, that's my favorite bit, too.

New areas only get unlocked when you get a quest to go there.

Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves But to center the view on your party you don't have to click on the sprites; rather on the character portrait in the upper left. Right, but to me that's the most annoying method of all, since that means moving your mouse away from the place you're trying to move to, clicking on the character portrait, moving back to the map to move, moving back to the portrait, etc. Blech. Although, in reading this discussion, I have realized that a right-handed person can use the mouse to move the characters around with their right and and center the screen on their main character by hitting the 1 key with their left. So, that's not as annoying as I was originally thinking. I still don't see why we can't just have the camera follow the party like in all 20 previous Spiderweb games, though.

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit Just click on one of the party member's avatars. The camera jumps to them. I see no need to move with the mouse and simultaneously track the camera with the arrow keys. To move long distances: Swing the mouse to the edge of the screen to scroll That works for long distances (except that I found mouse screen scrolling to be much slower and less responsive than keyboard scrolling), but for moving around unexplored areas, it really helps to keep the camera always centered on the party. As you say, you can do that by clicking on the avatar, but I find clicking on moving targets in this game pretty difficult. (That's another ergonomic problem I forgot to complain about -- I kept trying to talk to NPCs and missing, because they moved rapidly away when I tried to click on them. The creature keeper in Zethron's lair was particularly annoying for this.)

Finished (version 1.0; your mileage may vary with 1.0.1) Tuesday night. I can't say this is Jeff's best game ever -- because I haven't played every game Spiderweb's ever come out with. It's certainly the best of the ones I've played. Pros Over the years, Jeff has been slowly stripping away all the annoying conventions that infected the retro-RPG genre back in in the '80s, when it was just the RPG genre, and stuck to it like antibiotic resistant TB. Long gone are the days of "camping" to recover HP, only to have your rest interrupted more often than not by a random encounter that ended up costing you more HP than you recovered. A5 removed encumbrance for non-wielded items in inventory. But I think Jeff has really perfected the mechanics in Avadon. The Junk Bag removes the last vestiges of irritating inventory management, finishing the job Jeff started with removing encumbrance for non-wielded items in A5 -- finally, you can carry as much stuff as you want, rather than having to finagle loot distribution to manage weight or inventory slots. Selling everything with a single click is nice, too. In retro RPGs, your characters always have all these cool abilities -- but in Avadon, for the first time, you can actually use them! Rapid HP post-combat HP recovery means that your shaman can spend vitality on something other than healing. Huge amounts of vitality, low VP costs for spells, and an over-abundance of vitality potions (I used one in the entire game prior to the Redbeard battle) means that you can cast spells in insignificant combats, without having to hoard them for the major fights. Go ahead and fireball those trash monsters. Blade whirlwind that swarm of bats or pack of wretches. No more tedious trips back to town to restore your abilities. Adventure all you want, use your powers all you want, and only go back to town when the plot requires it. You can actually just enjoy playing the game, without fighting with the mechanics all the time. I can not emphasize enough how great this is. (The only worrisome thing is that there's some indication that Jeff considers the abundance of VP a mistake and plans to "correct" it in Av2. This would be a giant step backwards.) This stuff isn't new -- roguelikes have had rapid HP and VP recovery since the '80s (and if Jeff is indeed worried about large numbers of VP unbalancing the game, he should play Angband or TOME for a while; they've had well-balanced spell point recovery systems for 20 years). But it somehow never managed to penetrate the professional RPG market. So, in some ways, Jeff has created the best game of 1985. But, in the genre he works in, it really is revolutionary. And, really, after playing Avadon, other games in the genre -- whether it's older Spiderweb games, or competitors like Eschalon -- are just unplayably tedious. I'm trying to think of some irritating mechanic that remains, but it's really not coming to mind. Congratulations, Jeff -- a quarter century after Ultima I, you've finally cured the genre of its flaws! Second, the story. I love the world and am looking forward to seeing more of it in the sequels. I love the party members' personalities, and the cross-talk on missions (not new to the genre, but new to Spiderweb; and I'm happy to see it). On his blog, Jeff has talked about liking games that make you feel something, and I think he really hit the mark here. I love the suffocating sense of doom that creeps over you as the game progresses, the sense that every thing you do just makes it worse, that every choice you have is flawed and pushing you closer to the abyss. Yeah, you could see several of the major plot points coming a mile away... but, somehow, that just added to the sense of doom. You knew you were about to get screwed, and you did everything you could to avoid it, and it all just ended up making things worse. Cons The skill tree. I know it's what all the cool kids are doing these days. I realize Jeff is trying to keep casual players from investing their skill points unwisely, creating unplayable characters, and swearing off Spiderweb games forever in a huff. But I don't think this is the right way to do that. First of all, by being in the retro RPG genre, Jeff has a self-selected customer base of people who love tinkering with their characters and customizing them just so. By limiting choices to one of three or so skills per level, Jeff is taking that away, and I think that's a huge part of what people get out of his games in the first place. Ironically, right now on Jeff's blog, you can read a recent post where he notes, "Everquest is particularly cunning in the way it rewards the player. It has the character’s skills constantly creep upward, a tiny bit at a time, providing a constant stream of tiny rewards." In Avadon, though, you're usually picking the same skill over and over for four consecutive levels (or, even worse, the same two skills over eight levels, or worst of all, the same three over twelve -- over a third of the game!) -- not much of a reward there. That Jeff Vogel guy, he's got some pretty insightful ideas on why people play RPGs. Someone at Spiderweb should go read them. Likewise, the level cap is too low. I hit that well before heading off to Castle Vebeaux for the final quest; meaning for the whole final section, my characters weren't advancing at all. See previous paragraph for why this is bad. Single-gender character avatars. Jeff has commented that he created one avatar per class rather than two to save resources for adding cool features to the game. Since I could really care less about the gender of my character, I think this is great -- whatever he added instead is sure to have contributed to my enjoyment of the game more than a second set of avatars would have. The problem is, I'm wrong; and so is he. See my earlier comment on customization and multiply it by a thousand times. I'm not one of them, but many players identify very strongly with their characters and are very insistent about being able to play the gender they want. Indeed, many games, of all genres, allow only a single customization on character creation -- male or female. Not all players care about this, but the ones that do care hugely. Some players will pick up the demo, realize they can't choose their character's gender, and drop it like a hot potato. It may have been a good game design decision (and, indeed, I applaud it for my personal enjoyment of the game), but it was an uncharacteristically poor business decision. Of all the things Jeff could have cheaped-out on, it's hard to imagine something worse he could have picked. As has been mentioned elsewhere, high Dexterity is too good. Fortunately, this should be a relatively easy fix in Av2, simply involving some adjustments to the to-hit formula. Maybe, after Dex 20, additional points add only 1/2 value to defense; after Dex 25, only 1/4 value; etc. Of course, getting the actual balance of what the numbers and ratios should be will be a trick. Then again, it's not like it's well balanced now, so it's unlikely he'll make things worse. (Jeff has also suggested, rather than tweaking the to-hit formula, maybe having all stat gains be automatic, rather than player-chosen. That, by contrast, would be a terrible idea -- see previous paragraphs on customization.) It's too easy to miss stuff. As has been noted in other threads, there's no warning when starting the final quest that you won't have a chance to go back and finish any other outstanding quests once you start the last one. Several people have complained on the forums about missing the chance to complete quests because of this. I avoided that, but missed out on three of the four biggest combats in the game -- Incarnus, Beloch, and Zhethryne -- because I was waiting for explicit quests to fight them that never came (Beloch, particularly, when you first meet him comes with a warning that he's probably too tough for you to fight right now -- and, after A6, when Jeff gives me a warning like that, I believe him). By the time I realized I'd missed them, I was through the last quest and would have had to lose 3 hours or so of game play to revert to a save where I still had the opportunity to fight them -- not worth the effort. I wanted to see more of the world. Jeff's created a cool world, and I'd like to see more of it. Then again, that just leaves us wanting the sequel all the more. :-) Three character parties. I understand why Jeff did this -- to force hard choices about party composition. The problem is, it doesn't work. The idea is that you'll have to choose a party to suit the mission. But, on the first play-through, that's impossible, because you never know enough about what you'll be encountering to know who to take. That still leaves later play-throughs -- and theoretically, this makes the game more replayable, since you'll be able to try out class combinations you missed the first time. In practice, though, what happens is that you find a single party composition that suits your play style and use that exclusively. For me, it's a Blademaster, a Shadowwalker, and a Shaman. For the first half of the game, I thought this was a great system and that I'd be able to enjoy an entirely new experience re-playing the game later with a different party combo that included the Sorceress. But, after finishing, I realized that the thought of fighting the more difficult encounters with only one fighter or with no healing no longer seemed like it would be much fun. When I play again, it'll be with a Blademaster, a Shadowwalker, and a Shaman. The Sorceress has very cool powers and I'd love to try them out... but not enough to forego one of the others. This gets back to what I was saying earlier about how, if you're going to give your players cool powers, let them use them. If you're going to put four character classes with completely different abilities into the game, give your players a chance to experience all four. As it is, I only used the Sorceress in her loyalty quest and fighting Redbeard. And, no matter how many times I replay Avadon, I only ever will. The biggest flaw, though, is that while the mechanics are simply brilliant, the ergonomics are simply dreadful. Avadon is a ton of fun to play, but it comes with side effects of headaches, back pain, and vomiting. That may be okay in an antibiotic, but it's not ideal in a game. As documented elsewhere on the forum, the lack of keyboard movement annoys many people. Jeff has explained why it's not really possible to do keyboard movement with the engine he's created. I don't like it, but I do understand it, and it's probably worth it for the improved rendering, so I'll give him a pass (C-, but still a pass) on that one. Maybe there's an equally good reason the camera doesn't automatically track the party like in previous Spiderweb games but, if so, I haven't heard that one yet. True, the huge areas do mean that maybe 5% of the time, it's useful to be able to easily scroll the camera away from the party. But the other 95% of the time, the fact that you have to manually re-position the camera is really annoying. Even worse, for the first few hours of play, until I got the hang of moving the camera in time to how my character was moving, the lack of synch between the two made me nauseous. No, I didn't actually vomit, but it really did make me feel quite ill. A demo that makes your players want to vomit strikes me as another one of those things that's not ideal from a marketing perspective. Furthermore, I'm left handed, so, once I finally got the hang of synchronizing the timing, it was very natural for me to be able to move the party with my left hand and use the arrow keys to scroll the camera with my right. I really can't imagine how right-handed people play this game. It seems that you would have to contort your body into very uncomfortable positions to keep up with party movement and camera scrolling. Since 90% of people are right-handed, designing a UI that only works for lefties -- while, I personally applaud it -- seems like not the best business decision. If possible, the best of both worlds would be to have camera tracking a customizable option, perhaps toggleable directly from the keyboard. By default, the camera tracks the party, like in previous Spiderweb games, but you could press a button to decouple the camera from the party and scroll it around manually like in Avadon. Like another set of avatars, this would undoubtedly take a few resources away from plot and encounter development. But "it made me want to vomit" is just not something you want to read in a review of your game. And then there are the switches. I've always hated switches. I'm about the same age as Jeff and any players who've been around since the early Exile days are going to be of similar age. I don't know about you guys, but my eyes aren't want they were when I was 20. Squinting at the screen, trying to see a brown switch against a brown wall, has never been something I enjoyed; now, it ranges from headache-inducing to impossible. But in previous games, you could at least work around this by pressing the 'u' key obsessively to get any switches highlighted. In Avadon that's no longer possible -- now, it's eye strain and headaches or nothing. I didn't find a single switch in Avadon unless there was some clue (either in the text or as an obvious hole in the map) that it was supposed to be there. I'm sure I missed areas because I couldn't see the switch. As mentioned in another thread, the final battle with Redbeard turned into a three-hour death march for me because I only found one of two tiny dark switches against a dark wall. My very last experience with the game was profoundly, profoundly negative solely because for some reason Jeff believes Squinting At Your Screen = Fun. So, in what was in every reasonable sense Jeff's best game, my very first experience was nausea and my very last experience was boredom and frustration, not because the game plot or mechanics are poorly designed, but because it has a crap UI. And, finally, that ending. Yes, my experience here was colored by that stupid UI issue. Perhaps I'd have liked it better if I'd found the second switch; there's no way to know for sure. And, of course, the previous game I played was A6, which was Jeff's best ending ever, so there's a high bar of comparison. But I'm trying to be fair, and I think (though I'm not certain) that, even taking that into account, this is the worst ending Jeff's ever written. Basically, you have two choices -- fight Redbeard or don't (or do what I did -- save your game right before you go in to talk to him and try it both ways). Well, maybe you have two choices. If you didn't get at least three (if you're a very skilled player) or all four (if you're not) of your companions to fight with you because of actions you took much earlier in the game, you really don't have the option of fighting Redbeard. If you don't fight Redbeard, then there is no climactic final battle. Your toughest encounter might have been Baloch or Zhethryne (unless you were like me and missed those fights entirely), but that was ages ago by the time you reach the ending. Your final fights will be solo against a bunch of trash monsters on Avadon's main level. Hugely anti-climactic. If you do it that way, your final sense of the game is, "that's it???" There's no sense of accomplishment, no sense of having accomplished some difficult task. Just a big let down. As for the battle against Redbeard, I hated it. It is, of course, impossible to know how much of that is just because the first time I tried it, I did it wrong and fought Redbeard to a stalemate over three grueling, boring, tedious hours where neither of us could significantly harm the other (and all because I only saw one of the two #*^&$ switches). I will suggest, however, that the fact that this was even possible is a sign that the encounter was deeply flawed. If you do it wrong, you should die. Thoroughly. Painfully. And quickly. No encounter should ever last three hours, no matter how badly the player screws it up. But, even if you do find both switches, this is the kind of encounter I really hate -- you spend all your time trying to damage the sentinels in the right sequence to allow you to get a brief attack on the main enemy, and then, when you do finally get it right, instead of fighting him, half the time you waste all your actions unfearing, undazing, and uncharming your party. I know that Jeff knows how to design an encounter that's brutally hard, but still fun. We've seen it plenty of times -- the Slith Horror, Kavarus the Lich, the final battle in A6 (that wasn't nearly as hard as the others, but it was a great climax and lots of fun to fight). But the fight against Redbeard manages to be both hard and boring. I'll play Avadon again. But, from now on, I'll take the loyalist ending every time. So, which ever way you do it, your very last impression of Avadon is negative one. I loved the game a lot while I was playing it, but I'll never love it quite as much in retrospect, because I can't quite get the bad taste left by the ending out of my mouth. (Or maybe that's just the vomit from back when I was playing the demo.)

The thing is, with Jeff constantly improving the mechanics, it's hard to compare earlier to later editions. Were A5 and A6 the best games in the Avernum series? In many senses, maybe not; but ever since A5 came out, I can't stand to play the earlier games where you have to balance inventory weight against encumbrance. Now that Avadon is out, it's again going to be hard to go back. There are several things I absolutely loath about the Avadon UI, but who wants to play a game without a junk bag? Or where your mages can never cast any of their cool spells except in the more dire of circumstances because they're always running out of power points?

Originally Posted By: Synergy I believe that is how Jeff intends it—the typical player's game will not end with Redbeard dying, and I also believe he's supposed to be back for Avadon 2. So yeah, you pretty much need 4-5 PCs to do it, patience, skills, and have 1-2 PCs stationed in each sentinel chamber to deal with them as they appear. I don't have a problem with that conceptually. I'd just prefer that Jeff make it slaughteringly hard. The whole "you can't hurt Redbeard and he can't hurt you either" dynamic I ended up was kinda like storming the front gate of Formello in Avernum 6... except not as fun. What I do have a problem with is that, if you choose the wrong character when you first start the game, this fight is unwinnable (because you need four non-shaman characters to fight the sentinel). Having to do all four loyalty quests isn't that big an issue, because anybody who's a good enough player to take on Redbeard should be experienced enough to figure out that they need to do that or they're setting themselves up for some big pain later. But there's no warning that choosing a shaman makes this fight unbeatable and no reason to expect it. As noted above, that wasn't my problem -- I played a blademaster. My problem was that I only noticed one of the two hidden switches (that's a different rant, not just related to the endgame). But if I had played a shaman, I think I would probably want to punch Jeff in the face about now.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer First thing you missed is there are two rooms which each have those bladewarded sentinels. So you need to station characters in each room. So, there's four sentinels total? Originally Posted By: Randomizer I found a sorceresses with battle frenzy, which is why you save speed potions and elixirs, can take a sentinel out in two or three rounds with misses. A shadowwalker or blademaster which has been dedicated to missile attacks is almost as good. I'm with you on the sorceress. But I found it was more like 3-4 with the shadowwalker and, for some reason, even with maxed archery stats, my blademaster's missile attacks just weren't doing significant damage. Originally Posted By: Randomizer Keeping Redbeard busy is also important so keep summoning pets even if they can't hit. Yup, did that. Those summoning wands are super nice for this since you can use them and still do something else. Originally Posted By: Randomizer Use missile attacks and give everyone recuperation crystals and scarabs to remove mental effects to deal with terror. Even with all this you will probably burn through all your resurrection scrolls. That wasn't too tough to do when I thought there was only one room of sentinels and I could keep everybody clustered in range of recuperation crystals. With splitting the party, though, seems like it would be pretty easy to get everybody in one room stunned or terrored. Originally Posted By: Randomizer This is why a singleton game is probably impossible. With four sentinels to deal with, it would seem that this fight is basically unwinnable (or rather, way too annoying to bother with) if you either A) don't have all four of your companions or have a shaman as your primary character.

Am I missing something? This seems like the most boring fight in computer game history. Three freakin' hours... on Normal. Presumably it takes a week on Hard, and if you try it on Torment you need to worry about whether or not you're going to be able to finish it before the heat death of the universe. You find the switch, open the room to south, go in, and take out the two sentinels. Who can basically only be damaged by Nathalie (and a little bit by Shima's razordisks) and are completely immune to wands, scrolls, anything Jenelle can do, etc. And who regen a round or two after they're killed. Redbeard can only be significantly damaged when both sentinels are dead (you can chip away at him for 5-15 points per hit when one sentinel is dead). So, basically, you spend four rounds killing sentinels (figuring Nathalie's misses and her speed rounds about cancel out), then you get one round where you can pound on Redbeard. Assuming you're not dazed or terrified, which you probably are. About half the time your best fighters are out for whatever reason and you waste much of your one round of opportunity. Of course, the above also assumes that you can get Nathalie and Shima on the two squares where you can actually see both sentinels. But, since Redbeard does both fear and knockback, you probably can't, so you'll end up wasting more rounds maneuvering Nathalie and Shima into position. So, it's really more like one round in twelve or fifteen that I was getting a decent attack in on Redbeard. Now I do know that I seriously screwed up by putting all of Nathalie's stat points into Int and End, which meant that she was the last party member to act every round. She actually needs the highest Dex so that she can go first and the rest of the party can act after she kills the last sentinel and before they regen. However, fixing that means going back to a save prior to the final Bereza Woods sequence... which would take as much (though not really more) time as fighting Redbeard with her acting last. Is there something else I'm doing wrong? Some aspect of strategy that's not occurring to me that would make this battle epically challenging rather than epically boring? Or is it actually supposed to take hours and hours and make you want to slit your wrists? (And, just to be clear -- my complaints isn't that it's too hard, my complaint is that it's too long.)

Look for a trapdoor.

You'll find that a lot in this game -- in every area I've been to so far, there are chunks that, for whatever reason (locked doors, gates, etc.) you can't get through when you first get there. What happens is that areas are being re-used. Your first quest is in southern Kva... but not everything that needs doing in Southern Kva needs doing right away. So, there are areas you just can't get to the first time through. Later on in the game, you'll be sent back and those barriers will be removed and you'll be able to access those higher-level areas. For now, the barriers are basically keeping *you* safe from encounters you can't handle yet. So, chances are you're not missing things -- you're just not supposed to get to those areas yet.

Originally Posted By: Dantius DON'T sell her the crystals one by one. Drop all of them on the floor by her and then sell them en masse, in which case she will give you some battle crystals, tinkers crystals, and wisdom crystals. It's well worth the twenty coin difference, but you've got to wholesale them to her. It doesn't actually matter. The rewards are based on total number turned in, not number turned in at one time. There's no difference between turning in ten crystals one-by-one and turning in ten crystals all at once.

And, yeah, respawned auto.

Note that you may have already been through this area before fighting the demon the first time.

No, I don't think there is such a list. The power gamers are pretty much unified in the opinion that you should never, ever, ever purchase spells. And, since the power gamers are also the ones who compile those sort of lists... Dispel Barrier is trainable at the Tower Colony, after completing a very difficult (for its level) quest. Gladwell's quarters are in the south wall of the Patrick's Tower.

You can't turn the wheels. Kill the monsters, and the portculises (portculi?) will open automatically.

Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves The only difficulty that may arise is if your food-bearer happens to get killed. That food will no longer be available to you, and you may see a few warnings about hunger affecting your ability to fight. But it's usually pretty easy to get back to a town and Return Life scrolls are not particularly scarce, so it's not that big a deal. Plus, there's only a few points in the game where inventory space is an issue, so most of the time you can divide your food up among the party members to avoid this situation. You don't have to; but most of the time, there's no reason not to.

Click to reveal.. Yes -- that's the last quest in the game. No.

I didn't notice it until my second play-through, when I already knew basically where I was going. Then, it was like, "oh, hey, I'm following the ... , aren't I?"

Actually, if you look carefully, the path is marked... Click to reveal.. ...by paintings of dragons on the walls.

It's not.

It gives you one extra AP. Attacking costs 9 AP, using an item costs 5 AP. When hasted, attacking has a chance of of only costing 5 AP. Quick Action has a chance of giving you one (or more) additional AP. So, +1 battle speed won't do anything on its own, since the magic number for two attacks is 10 AP. However, it can make Quick Action more useful. And two +1 battle speed items give you a guaranteed second attack.

Originally Posted By: Ovenall But there's always the other side of the coin, which is vendors charging top dollar for equipment to a team of heroes who are going to save the world. Why are the vendors insisting on a price I can't pay? Are they just waiting for the next set of heroes to stop by with more money? If you haven't seen it,, Jeff has a post on his blog (http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-people-on-your-side-are-always.html) arguing fairly convincingly that, of all the silly, unrealistic things people complain about in his games, this one actually is realistic.

I'm with waterplant. I steal things that directly translate to experience points -- Knowledge Brews, Wisdom Crystals, and Mandrake Root (used later on to craft Knowledge Brews). I never steal anything else.

Originally Posted By: dupe dupe dupe ...and blissfully headless with his equipment choices. Which is too bad, because there are some really good helmets.