MTrask

Er, huh? I finished the Avernum games without relying on guides and simply put points where I felt like - I was actually role playing too, and not simply min-maxing. Sure, there were difficult situations, but are gamers nowadays so pampered they whine with every papercut? Jeez.

I see, thanks for the explanation. Hmm, interesting mechanic there, and after a little thinking on it, I guess it's not bad. Has there been any word why this was done? Just curious; it's gotten me to think about what other things may "benefit" (?) from such tweaking.

"There is a random factor in assigning XP". O_O?! Edit: This reminds me of whole save-just-before-leveling-up-hoping-to-roll-good-stat-increases bs in some games. How much randomization are we talking here, is it just for shared exp, does landing the killing blow count, etc?

No, I agree most games don't track NPCs, but on the other hand, most of them tell you explicitly where person X is - like nailing an arrow in your compass in the HUD, or by spelling it out in the quest log. I find that kinda too hand-holdy for my tastes - an NPC list would at least let me look the person up without resorting to either extreme: explicitly spelling it out for me where to find the person (and if I hadn't encountered him/her before they wouldn't be on the list, so yeah I still have to put in the effort of finding them for the first time), or forcing me to keep track manually by writing this info down outside of the game. Alternately the Journal could allow players to write down our own notes there. At least this would be an in-game solution. I've played the Exile and Avernum games; for every single game in the series I always have a Notepad text file with a list of towns I come across and NPCs I encountered. Surely there's a better way of doing this. I bet most people don't bother to keep track, and when they need to find someone in a hurry, look up an online guide. That really doesn't help with immersion. Hmm, didn't know about the two-round exploit; what I did was cast all my buffs before hitting the encounter trigger. Not being able to delay turns is kind of annoying I guess. Would kinda prefer to open with an aoe spell before having my warrior charge in. Oh well.

Yeah, Avernum's "use" also lit up stuff you could use by tagging them with alphabet hotkeys. Same here. And you're exactly right, it doesn't help my problem, which is seeing at a glance whether something is actually an item on the tile or just part of the tile. Art is too good, first world problems Well, no, I still like the game, but this is irritating.

Got the game last weekend. I played Avernum 1-3 too btw. No Exile but I did watch a friend play Exile 2. Those barrier spells were fun, shame they were taken out. - Junk bag is great - Wait command is eliminated? It's still there. Press '5' on numpad like in Avernum. - The skills are now arranged in a couple of linear-ish trees, but they look so sparse - Journal still does not have NPC tracking Last point is my biggest gripe. A simple "town X: NPC Y: sells Z/is the mayor/sells boats/etc" list would be really helpful. Actually it's exactly what I write down in notepad. First time I played Avernum I'd gone to maybe half a dozen towns until I got a quest to find some NPC I vaguely remembered meeting before. Wasted a ton of time backtracking until I found the person. This taught me to take notes. Why does this second remake still not have even basic NPC tracking? They could add it as an extra tab in the Journal, "Town/NPC list". This was one of the few tedious things I didn't like about the games. While I don't regret my impulse buy (it's frickin' Spiderweb Software, you know it's gonna be fun), this is one of those use cases you'd have thought they'd have fixed. Everything else is mostly familiar. No "look" command though, and it's way harder to determine whether those pretty pixels are actual items or part of the background. Consequently I find myself jamming the "get" command a whole lot more. In Avernum it was pretty clear if something was on a tile, now you have to really pay attention. On the bright side this means the art person did a bang-up job on the game (major props, yo), but I really wish there was a hotkey to toggle highlight items like in action RPGs. Pixel hunting gets tiresome. Or maybe I shouldn't be playing on my huge-ass monitor at such high resolutions. But that's why I upgraded my damn gaming pc