Mike Echo

Speaking of Steam - WTH at their pricing

Although it's fun to play along, I really don't get the "Everything in Australia is trying to kill you" thing. Yes we have some venomous creatures but most people don't encounter them very often. Deaths from snakes & spiders are mercifully rare. On the other hand, America has BIG mammals with claws & teeth that can rip people to bits. You have bears and coyotes and killer bees and rattlesnakes and wolverines & mountain lions & rabid animals (no rabies in Australia!). Things some people carry guns to protect against. We have kangaroos which are only a problem when they jump in front of your car. I'd be much more scared of a bear than a piddly redback spider.

One day there will be a remake of Geneforge 1, and it will be a good day.

I have to admire someone who posts a question then remembers to add another question as an afterthought a year later!

I always thought they were recordings of his kids.

Since when is dusting yourself off and having another crack at something being a flake? It shows the exact opposite. e: Coding something that you have total control over is fun. Spending hundreds of hours fixing someone else s buggy in-house business application (stuff that the vast majority of paid programmers work on) is agony.

Thank you - just, thank you. Having a character unexpectedly wander away from enemies in combat because another character is in the way, effectively wasting 2 turns, was very annoying. Even just (optionally?) preventing paths where the character can't reach the destination in 1 turn would save a lot of frustration.

Friendly Fire, a tinkermage nerf & more flexibility in skill trees sound great. The additional enemy mental effects sound aggravating, but I rarely play on anything past 'Normal' so take that with a grain of salt If we have to keep the re-training thing, can there be a real, permanent cost associated with it? Maybe you only get 90% of your skill points back? Having the ability to infinitely rebuild your character has always felt cheap.

Did the spirit prism really get called that because too many people confused "Soul Crystal" with "Crystal Soul" ? I miss Exile II's Test of Mind

It's a fantastically hilarious (not to Jeff or the Player!) bug - out of all the random terrain that could spawn (water, walls, statues etc) - it's the one that can self-reproduce and destroy everything. Since quickfire is only useful in a few places it's weird there is no location white-list as a backup. e: I miss having a quickfire spell (and wall of swords etc), but the game is a bloody good sucessor imo.

In retrospect I should probably at least try taking the Shaman or Shadowalker on a mission so I know their abilities before venting angrily on on a forum!

True. It just seemed a huge jump in difficulty. If I was getting my backside handed to me from the get-go I would have given up, but the relative ease of the rest of the map made me think there was a trick or something I was missing.

Tried to, but they kept running away. Ranged attacks seem very weak in this game, and I couldn't get close enough to do the job with melee.

Alcander's question was going well - with my main (tinkermage), the other tinkermage, and the sorcerer, all at level 13 - until I hit the last part with the 4x corrupted constructs and pylons. This room was literally more frustrating then the Redbeard fight at the end of A1. Even after changing the difficulty to casual and using 'healmenow'/'shieldsup' literally every round I barely made it. How on earth are you supposed to get past those $#%$ constructs to kill those godforsaken controllers? Is there a trick to this battle that I've missed? I thought I might be able to damage the constructs from the other side of the debris wall or something, but no joy.

I thought Grah-Hoth was much easier then Drath

Well, I posted a rant here when I first downloaded Avernum EFTP, complaining about how I felt the game had been overly dumbed-down. 53 playing hours later, I'm happy to say I was wrong. This game is the most fun I've played in recent memory (and ME3, as amazing as it is, is not as good). And as a bonus, so far there have not been any "stuck on a slowly-rising platform with attacking archers" parts. Well done Spiderweb - I hope you earn a ton of money.

Originally Posted By: Marak 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. It's funny, but to me most of the changes in your list aren't improvements. >Imagine all your characters being encumbered not by what they have equipped, but by how much they are carrying. Breaks realism. If I wear steel armor it's heavy, but I can carry a dozen sets in my backpack with no downside? >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. You've made the decision to have a weak character to put more points into their magical ability - that's the trade-off. >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. "Magic Map" was your friend. The hidden path trick stopped working because we're now in pseudo-3D, which gets us the "You're trapped on a rising platform being attacked by archers" mechanic that has been truly played out by now. >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. This is my biggest disappointment. I hate how the levelling system has been dumbed down. It feels less like I get to customize a character to my playstyle, and more like I'm stuck on a rail where choices are removed. Avadon's "hey, I'll let you undo all your bad choices for free with no downside" mechanic was cheap imo. If you're playing on "Normal", randomly dump points without thinking carefully where they should go, and end up with an unplayable build, change the difficulty to "casual". Because let's be honest, that's who casual mode is for. I say that as a wimp who used to abuse the character editor in exile and currently plays with Casual difficulty.

The White Dots were amazing. I'd see one through a window and spend 20 minutes trying to get to it.

z2rbeard2.txt - find that, beginstate INIT_STATE; set_level(ME,30); and change the 30 to a lower number. I used 3, but that was way too easy. Maybe 10?

True, but in other Spiderweb games I've slaughtered geneforge-enhanced evil wizards, dragons, the head of an Empire, and various other horrible things dooming humanity. I play for the "adolescent power fantasy" as Jeff calls it. I _should_ be able to kill the unkillable. My personal preference would be to have Redbeard simply deal massive amounts of damage each round. At least that way it'd be obvious he'd too much for me. The existing fight is more like a grind imo.

I'm just curious if most people enjoyed the fight or not (it's possibly we're hearing from the 'noisy minority'). Please vote in the poll!

Well, I don't have Shima, but I do have everyone else (level 26ish). After getting frustrated I changed difficulty to 'casual'. After getting frustrated again I began cheating. Now I'm entering cheat codes every 2nd round because I just want this boring fight to end - but it won't! I've played (and loved) every Exile, every Geneforge, and the latter Avernums, and with the possible exception of the E3 golem tower this is worst fight I've ever seen. Sorry Jeff :-( Edit: C:\Program Files\Spiderweb Software\Avadon - The Black Fortress\Avadon Files\Scripts\z2rbeard2.txt Ended up changing that to make Redbeard level 3. 95% of this game was great, I just wish I had the last few hours of my life back.

Exile > Geneforge > Avernum with 'Outside' > Avernum with cities squashed together.

I got a kick out of normal people groveling at a level 1 lifecrafter in the early Avernum games. I've played the 'you're a new recruit who has trouble killing mice' angle too many times. I'm not trying to offer Jeff any suggestions (as I'm sure he has an interesting plot already in mind) but another possibility is you're the up-and-coming natural fighter / born mage people keep hearing about, however someone in power considers you a threat. Their response is sending you on tougher and tougher missions hoping you'll get killed.

I'm having it too - however I'm running Windows 7 ultimate, 64-bit. It's bizarre.