*i

Personally as a kid I always found stage 6-2 of the first Ninja Gaiden the most frustrating of any video game level. I don't think I beat that one until years after first reaching it. Compared to that, NGII was cake.

Complaining that higher difficulty levels are too hard is a perfectly human thing to do. Look, nobody likes to admit they are not as skilled as others at things they enjoy doing whether it be sports, singing, or computer games. When someone joins the intramural league for experts and finds out they cannot keep up and are not having a good time, it's a whole lot easier to blame the other players for being too aggressive and unsportsmanlike than it is to say that they aren't quite as skilled. Same applies here. Most people don't want to admit they aren't superstars at playing the kinds of computer games they normally would enjoy. As such, we see plenty of rationalizing about the game being too tedious, the monsters having too much power, etc. Again, it's far easier to complain than it is to admit defeat and lower the difficulty level and resume.

Possibly these are scripted attacks, and not the standard one. Jeff probably forgot to put in logic to check for daze. Can't hurt to submit a bug report.

Quote: The point is still missed, if he was that much of a tough guy, he would have acted like screw you! to his lord And I think you miss mine. Yes, the wizard was powerful, but there are other needs than those that can be derived from power alone. An alternative to support his reaction is the threat of losing the social status, prestige, and support of his clan. I argue that it is quite normal to value those things highly. While it is pointless to try and dissect the motives of fictitious characters, I do see his reaction as within the realm of plausible human behavior, as is the alternate reaction you suggest.

On easy, you are completely correct. As you advance to higher difficulty levels, rarely is there a contest between the center columns and the side ones. Picking those generally leads to suboptimal builds that can really cripple you on the higher difficulties. While I am okay with suboptimal choices being available that have such an impact, what I do object to is when there is only one logical choice. I call that bad design. I do agree with you on Moritz'Kri making sense, but for different reasons. While he might not be afraid of you necessarily killing him, there are other motivators than fear of death to make him act the way he does. In this case, once you make the accusation, he has lost all the support and comfort of his previous life. Even if Avadon, for some reason, decided to leave him alone, he would never be welcomed back into the fold because of the risk it would bring upon his erstwhile employer.

Furthermore, you get to pick a major, and even then, the requirements to graduate are typically not extremely inflexible. Certainly there are general education requirements, but even those have at least a few options if you attend an institution that is large enough.

Good luck. This fight is rather drawn out and a source of much complaints. Redbeard is an incredibly defensive enemy.

Granted, some don't have the option to end the discussion. Nonetheless, these are generally few, and usually offer a quick "Attack" option. The ones that don't are usually important to the plot anyway and should probably be read.

Wrong forum, try Second Avernum Trilogy. I believe you can simply leave them anywhere.

Your level does seem rather low at 19; usually I'm almost maxed out by this point. Ranged attacks are quite helpful for handling ensnaring and immobility and it's good to train in them for that reason alone. Nevermind, that typically dexterity is a better investment anyway.

@Lilith, Yeah, it felt weird typing it. Nonetheless, if a a fictitious world has enough internal consistency, you can ascribe that there is are objective truths within that fictitious world, even if that world itself is not real. Within such fictitious world, well-developed characters generally have an imperfect view of it, because, well, they are analogous to you and I, who also have imperfect views of the real world we live in.

Just to clarify things, I took the title "Keeper of Avadon" to be in line with the general theme of the forums. As the color indicates, I am the one of the board admins, and the one that handles most of the higher level board management issues, so the actual employees of the company have more time to make the games we all love.

Some items just can't be stolen.

No. They are there completely for environment. It does not matter what you tell him; he will decide to fight you anyway.

Superba, first, I'm not Jeff, since I'm not sure who you're talking to. Next, I'm stating the philosophically, a purely egocentric view of knowledge is intellectually specious applied to this game or anything. You as the player/hand are told certain things about the world that you do not observe first hand. Inevitably, you are not told the whole story because that would be impossible, boring, and simply unrealistic (doesn't happen in the real world anyway). Like the real world, you have to use higher level intellectual skills of synthesis to draw your own conclusions about the parts of the world you don't see, just like in real life. Of course, because information is incomplete, you will rarely find two people who reach exactly the same conclusion, even if their conclusions are substantively the same. That's perfectly fine. However, to take the paradigm that you can only believe what you see first hand is unhelpful at best because it allows us to draw conclusions about very little, and those conclusions are likely wrong. Furthermore, our window to the world is revealed to be completely biased! Of course, we only observed places where the Pact and Avadon were incompetent and brutal because that is specifically what we were meant to see! Our egocentric and narcissistic companions were given to us for the exact same reasons. This alone should tell you that your egocentric view of the world was intentionally skewed by those trying to manipulate you to reach specific conclusions. So yeah, it's fine to say these are the conclusions the character is supposed to reach, but it is quite another to state that these conclusions are at the same level as the objective reality of the fictitious world. This is especially so when we are given a major reason to discount what we observed as skewed.

Quote: Sorry I don't think I am missing the biggest point, I'm ignoring it. Because you look at the game in a sort of God Mode (or total overview), while I deliberately adopt the player point of view. I already tried to explain the dicotomy. I know what happens in game while I am playing, my point of view is that of the Hands that form my party adding mine as the main character. Hope this is now clear. So, what you are saying is you are intentionally adopting an egocentric worldview? Okay. I guess. This seems like a way to purposely reach fallacious conclusions about just about anything, unless you honestly believe there is no reality outside what you subjectively experience. It is made quite clear that there is far more going on in this world outside the player. You, as the player, are a small and really not all that important piece of the overall action. If you hope to get an accurate view of the world, you cannot base it off what insignificant you actually see. You have no choice but to accept what you are told about the world as being true.

I disagree. We had this in Exile and the old Avernum series. It really just added a bunch of busywork. I'm content to suspend disbelief and assume that the party is smart enough to produce some nominal light source on their own volition, just as I'm able to suspend disbelief and assume that take care of other mundane life tasks.

Let's also not forget that there is a way to the surface as of A1. It's quite possible that a few escaped that way.

South of the fort's main entrance and east of the back entrance.

Yes. The trapdoor does not appear unless you confront Neray earlier outside the Wretch fortress.

Quote: And saying that the laws of physics may not work say, regarding singularities in black holes - would it not be more fitting to say that the laws of physics contain a set of laws specifically for those conditions. Laws that differ under specific circumstances. Yes. We assume that there are laws that describe that regime, even though we don't know what they are. I'm stating philosophically that it is possible that there are no set of laws that govern that regime, and use it as an example, not as any assertion. I think there are laws there that we do not yet understand, and my only basis is that everything else that we've found has them. Nonetheless, I have no evidence with regards to that claim. Further, there is no way to test the assertion there are no laws for the same reasons that you have trouble proving a negative. *** EDIT *** To clarify what I mean by no laws, it means that the outcome of a particular measurement of a system is entirely unpredictable, not even in the sense of probability. There is, in fact, a theoretical way to test this, but not possible in practice. If you and I both do an infinite number of identical measurements on a system, and we get different distribution of results, I assert that there is no law of any predictive power we can make on that system. Now, this is impossible in practice because we would have to do infinity measurements (not merely a lot) to be sure we have completely probed all possible events. Those measurements must also be identical, which is also impossible for one because of the simple reason that you and I are different and would inevitably have a different impact on the very system we are measuring.

From a theoretical point of view, I suppose it is not inconceivable that there would be certain exotic regimes (singularities of black holes) where things could be entirely unpredictable such that it would not totally violate our daily lives. It would still be within the laws of physics to demonstrate where the boundaries between the predictable and unpredictable are; however, once again, we are back to the impossibility of ever proving total unpredictability, so it's a silly point to make anyway.

Quote: Or it means that these laws break down under certain circumstances which cannot be duplicated on the macro-level. Aside from the attention grabbing headline, all your above link says is that the discovery implies new laws are needed. The fundamental notion of science is that are rules that allow us to predict the behavior of observable phenomena. These need not even be deterministic, and only need to assign measurable likelihoods (probabilities) of events occurring given a set of circumstances. It's an interesting question whether anything can be truly outside the laws of physics. I suppose if there were some phenomenon that were absolutely unpredictable, even in a probabilistic sense, then that would apply. However, proving that something is totally unpredictable is not possible because one can always argue that we are just ignorant of something far more fundamental that we have yet to conceptualize or measure.

Slarty, maybe my experience with Spy's Quest all those years back has made me a bit insensitive to all that, and just auto-filtered much of that out. Believe me, I took a lot of very harsh, very unhelpful criticism after that release. As I said, I'm sympathetic to this issue and will not defend all that. That said, I'm not willing to let the community be painted so negatively with such a broad brush. As you said, "thin but loud slice", and I'm trying to provide perspective here.

It would be very good to hear the story finish itself out, even if not in scenario format. I personally would very much like to know how it ends. Quote: I agree that the community has calmed way the heck down now. Back in 2006, when I was most active in designing, I grew to dread releasing scenarios because of the non-constructive and often unreasonable criticism I got every time I put something out. I would like to point out this was hardly the majority of criticisms in the community at the time, and I don't think it fair to paint them in such an unyielding light. If you don't believe me, go and read the CSR reviews of Exodus. I just reread them, and while there was definitely some amount of non-constructive critiquing that I'm not going to defend, there are also a lot of very valid concerns. Fundamentally, the problem most people had with Exodus was the combat was too tedious and frustrating to the point of not being fun. There is also some good points about the outdoors being too sparse and unrealistic, and the custom graphics used being unappealing in parts. There were also a few mentions that the plot, while well written in many places, failed to hold peoples excitement. All of these are perfectly valid criticisms and all creators of works should heed them! I've said this before. I'm sympathetic and appreciate the effort it takes to design a large scenario. My experience with Spy's Quest taught me a key lesson: that elegance in design is no substitute for player enjoyment. Every release I did, I took some harsh criticism on the chin. Some of it was unreasonable, but most of it was quite helpful.