ottakoi

Of all Spiderweb games, Geneforge 2 has the highest replay value in my opinion. There are too many things to do with plot branches and character builds it's impossible to deplete the possibilities without replaying and halfway-reloading at least 5 times. I find the second titles from each series are generally my favorite ones (Avernum 2 without a doubt, and Avadon 2 being the only highly-replayable Avadon game from the three).

Fn&Esc should switch the F keys back to normal, if I remember correctly.

Well, part of the reason they are tough is because they wear the best equipment.

When playing video games, I rarely care about "legendary/hardcore/suicidal/unimaginable/impossible(or whatever they are called)" difficulties, optional bosses, bonus levels, and all those annoyingly tedious collectibles/achievements/medals/easter eggs. There is absolutely no fun for me to beat a game on the highest difficulty, and extremely unfair and unavoidable boss fights often result in a rage quit followed by an instant uninstall. I'm glad Avadon 3 is not difficult on Hard, and those two difficult fights are totally optional.

That reminds me of Spellforce. I played it a lot with a friend many years ago. There are dozens of skils to put points into, and characters automatically fight enemies on sight. There are RTS maps, but it is possible to totally ignore the base-building and sneak into the enemy camp to destroy everything (there are skills that make the character tear down houses much faster).

Nathalie loathes necromancy.

When exiting the Monitor Base area, I accidentally let Khalida step onto the black zone outside the edge of the border, and now her sprite vanished forever. Selecting her portrait results in a black screen. Changing party members and going to different areas both won't help.The only way is to load an earlier save.

Since you've mentioned Arcanum and Fallout series, maybe you could also be interested in these indie games: The Age of Decadence Underrail Balrum Lords of Xulima

They run perfectly on older HD3000 with max graphics settings. With V-SYNC turned off, the fps could even reach ~500.

It's always depressing to see a whole town from previous games get destroyed, let alone twice.

I was always wondering why Blosk never got rebuilt.

Just ignore them. Those maniacs are a fishbone in your throat and totally not worth your time. I personally think they are the most annoying NPCs I had ever seen, made a mistake dealing with them and received a very horrifying ending because of that.

Zhethron and Zephyrine (dragons in Avadon 1) Vardgras (dragon in Avadon 2) Mekhen (appears in multiple zones as well as some of the endings in Geneforge 5) Correlea (she is the key to solve the black shades problem)

Warrick never reunited with her sister Anastasia.

Agree with you that the lack of a quest journal is hugely annoying. The Take Note button might be useful in keeping track of quests though.

Well, that is weird. My laptop has exactly the same 4gb ram and an i5 processor and it heats up very quickly playing sw games (not with other games that's what is weird).

There are a couple of workarounds to force the limit of CPU usage. If your cpu supports SpeedStep, and you are using Windows Vista or later, there is a built-in feature to set the maximum processor state. Create a new power plan, set the Maximum processor state value (see link) to 60% or so, and switch to that power plan before launching the game (don't forget to switch back after quitting). I have been using this and the effect is immediate. Note that if 60% makes the game slow or it still generates lots of heat and noise, change it to 50%, 55%, 65%, 70%, etc. until you find a balace between the heat of device and the smoothness of gameplay. And there are also some utilities that do the same job: Rmclock for windows and Macs Fan Control for OS X. Haven't tried them though. But both of them have detailed user guides on their respective websites, so read them before downloading.

In G4, a captain outside Southforge gives you a wand as a quest reward. He "takes this wand out of one of his boots, wipes it, and hands it to you". You "wipe it again while he isn't watching".

That's exactly why I hate Rentar most. She killed my fav character by dirty tricks.

English is not my native language, and it's not my 2nd language either. So it was quite a challenge (or torment?) to play through A5 back in 2009. It was my first spiderweb game, received as a gift from my sister who always thought I really should not ignore the English language totally. Upon starting the game, I took it to be more of an irresistible punishment than a gift, because my English was far worse at that time, and I could not even comprehend any walkthrough or strategy available on the forums, not to mention the lots of text in the game. There were so many words and terms and sentence structures beyond my knowledge and they were preventing me from understanding what to do next. And even a dictionary at hand didn't help much. It was a miracle for me to finish A5 bit by bit. Although there was a huge language barrier precluding my perception of the plot and game mechanisms, I DID enjoy the game immensely and was hooked by what few portions I grasped. After I finished it, I started it over immediately and the second playthrough was much easier than I expected. Since then I have played through G5, A6 and AEFTP entirely, and the demos of many other. With great difficulty of course. It sure will make lives of non-English speakers easier if the games get translated. But I must admit it is not that vital. People (at least those like me) will still take a look at English-only games as long as their quality merits people's attention, and as long as the enjoyment defeats the struggles when they play them.

As the UI since G3 are relatively similar, in my opinion there would be no significant distinctions between update and remakes of the later games. One difference in definition is that an update will replace the old one, while a remake won't.

There are many funny dialogues in A6. I can only recall two though. The first is your commander telling you don't to believe the rumor that Avernum's biggest problems were always solved by adventurers. The other is about a mage in the castle explains that the Orb of Thralni can only make a group of 4 fly, not 6.

I once had exactly the same problem with A6 on my PC(sw version). And yes it always happened when starting a new game or after loading a savegame. The characters just keep walking left automatically, until they hit something (or hit some npc and bring up a conversation that cannot be closed). At first I thought maybe it was because a key on my keyboard got stuck. So I ran a keyboard test software and it told me that all keys were intact. And this problem never happened on my Macbook. So I have no idea what has caused this problem. It do seems that in the PC version when I press F3 to quick-save the game while my characters are still moving toward their destination, the next time I load the savegame, this problem has a high chance to recur. Though that cannot explain why it also happens on staring a brand new game. But one solution seems work for me. Whenever I encounter this, I press the Win Key (the key between Left-Ctrl and Left-Alt with a windows icon on it) to switch to the desktop, then switch back to the game, and everything returns to normal.

The new screenshots look much agreeable to the eye. Especially the new Nephilim&Slithzerikai PC portraits. Just curious. What else inside the Steam version got updated besides the graphics? Will the original SW's Mac/PC versions get updated too? If so, the new graphics will definitely make me give A6 another playthrough. Really don't want to buy it again from Steam. Will buy A4 from Steam anyway. A6 SS1 A6 SS2 A6 SS3 A5 SS A4 SS

I'm pretty sure that Your Windows Installer "engine" (or component or whatever it is) has been corrupted. I believe most Windows users have once experienced such an inconvenience. It is, in other words, that Windows Installer sucks, and the cause of the problem is quite complicated. So it may take forever to fix it. Don't bother. With that said, the best workaround is simply to install the game in another computer running the same OS and copy the whole game folder to a USB stick, then transfer it to your PC. Run the exe application file to start the game. You can still play, register, save or load your game. You won't lose anything except a desktop icon. If you don't own an extra PC, have a friend with some experience install and send/mail the USB stick to you.