googoogjoob

Peter Gabriel. Phil Collins. Henry Agard Wallace. Me.

Henri III of France, Archduke Ernst von Habsburg of Austria, Johan III of Sweden, Ivan IV ("The Terrible") of Russia.

Micah, Starrus, Hawthorne, Prazac, Manfred Redmark, Dorikas, Melanchion, Gladwell.

Avernum 2: Crystal Souls just wholesale replacing the charming hydras with the dull omnipresent hellhounds/rockhounds of the second trilogy was disheartening. The Avernum 3 remake not having any horses, and then having the Alien Beasts just be Kyshakks, was like a punch in the gut.

There's also the issue where- if one is making a game with pixel art, and one wants to add a new item or enemy type to the game, all one has to do (in addition to coding and writing it of course) is do up a simple sprite, and basically anyone can do passable pixel art if they put enough work into it. However, if one is making a game with more detailed art and animations, one must pay precious money to commission professional artists to do the spritework, and then make sure it looks passable from every angle a player might see it from, and then render it into sprites showing it doing every possible animation from every possible angle, etc etc. I think this has to be a major reason why enemy diversity (at least in terms of diversity of enemy appearance) has sort of taken a nosedive in more recent Spiderweb games, especially in the Avadon games (especially since they couldn't have grandfathered-in existing enemy designs and sprites from Avernum or Geneforge). In the first Avadon it feels like you spend 75% of the game fighting some sort of wolf or spider or goblin. I don't think Queen's Wish looks great. But I am hopeful that the change in graphics style will allow for a greater amount and greater diversity of new graphics than any Spiderweb game has had in a good while.

This actually comes up in Avernum 6, with the results you would more or less expect (in the world of Avernum) from a bunch of mages trying to accomplish a major project.

The situation with how turret power is calculated is a little murky... cf this topic, which was never really satisfactorily resolved IIRC.

There are far fewer differences between Nethergate and Resurrection than between any other Spiderweb game and its remake (eg, it's the only remake that has almost entirely identical graphics to the original), and I imagine the thinking is that Resurrection just totally supercedes the original release for that reason, coupled with being more-compatible with newer systems.

And Queen's Wish looks like it's going to be the biggest jump in design between Spiderweb games in almost 20 years.

this has all been a horrible mistake

You can steal anything marked Not Yours which isn't in the direct line of sight of a friendly NPC. There are in fact no ramifications or punishments for doing this. In older Spiderweb games it was actually possible to steal objects in the sight of friendly NPCs, and if you did it enough times they'd attack you, which obviously causes complications.

There's a button on the character info panel that lets you move party members up and down in your party list, with whoever is first in the list walking ahead. I think your primary character is still the one who moves forward alone to open doors or chests, etc, so you just have to get all your party in position before opening a door that might have enemies behind it; since you always go first in combat you can then walk your primary character back from the door and set up your warrior in the gap before any enemies can get through. Only being able to move one tile while adjacent to an enemy is a universal rule that never changes; however, there's a scarab that lets the wearer teleport to any visible tile (and sorceresses and shadowwalkers get teleport skills naturally). (Also, of course, the same rule applies to enemies, so they can't just run past your warrior to kill your weaker characters.)

In the past couple months, I've read: The Sunne in Splendour, by Sharon Kay Penman, which was pretty good but sort of spoiled by my having read her later work first; her later novels are noticeably more mature and cohesive, but this one was still pretty good. Texas, by James Michener, which I sort of hated, not because it was written poorly or not compelling, but because the subject of the book- the history of the state of Texas- is uh. Well, Michener is either unwilling or unable in the novel to gloss over the worse aspects of Texas, so you're stuck with the inescapable awareness while reading the novel that Texas (and most other states in the USA, of course) is a wicked entity built on a foundation of genocide, racism, and petty violence, and it kind of feels like Michener is aware of it too. There are a few little hopeful spots towards the end, but not enough. "Bad people prosper while good people either suffer or fail to change things for the better" is maybe one way of describing history in general, but it doesn't make for a terribly compelling novel... especially when the novel is 1,096 pages long. Insurgent Mexico, by John Reed, which is a very vivid and compelling fly-on-the-wall view of the Mexican Revolution. Almost nothing of the broader history of or trends represented by the Revolution, but a lot of earthy human experience of the Revolution. And now I'm reading The Covenant, which is James Michener's historical epic about South Africa, because I am a fool who learned nothing from reading Texas.

Which endings you can get are determined by how you behave in front of Redbeard. Your companions may or may not be willing to stick with you until the end depending on what you say to them and do for them. Beyond that, there aren't any major plot effects resulting from conversations. Most of the mutually exclusive conversation options exist to allow for a degree of role-playing on the part of the player.

(I wrote a long essay thing here explaining what I meant but then realized most of it was totally irrelevant to the issue at hand so I dumped it all. It is still very tangential to the topic.) I think it's more than just a medium constraints thing. I have no problem with dialogue trees or unrealistically repetitive conversations, any more than I have with the idea of a party of a few adventurers being able to take on and defeat a thousand enemies in a row without lasting injury. The issue I have is with the writing, and the mismatch between the writing, the writers' expectations (that is, that the player will read and want to read all the text they can get). Basically, I think the problem I described, which Avadon also suffers from, although less acutely, is the result of a) the game designers and writers wanting to pump ever-more character and lore stuff into their CRPGs, because players respond positively to that stuff (and the game is written in such a way that it's clear that all the dialogue is MEANT to be read); b) the writers' inspiration and time being finite, meaning more text cannot generally be sustained at a high level of quality and interest to the player; leading to c) poor writing doing a poor job of cloaking the narratological gears turning "under the hood" of the game, making what should come across as an exciting, flowing story come across instead as the result of tired, overworked writers simply going down a checklist of things they have to put in the game- characters whose arcs need resolved, sidequests that have to be completed. It becomes overly-apparent to the player that every character's arc starts and ends when the game starts and ends. Each arc advances in lockstep, moving to the next plot beat at the exact same time. Every companion has a dark problem looming over them from their past, which can conveniently be resolved in a single sidequest, completing which also conveniently makes said companion better at killing people for you. Even the very best CRPGs are, of course, totally mechanistic in this sense, and the illusion that you're interacting with living characters in a living world is an elaborate smoke-and-mirrors trick, but the best CRPGs are written in such a way that you can suspend your disbelief totally and really live in the world of the game. In Avernum 1, the breadth of the game's vision more than makes up for its shallowness, and you only rarely see the gears turning. In Avadon 1, the game is theoretically much deeper, with your companions getting substantial amounts of development, and characters like Redbeard, Miranda, Zhethron, Gryfyn, et al getting more development than almost anyone in the Avernum series does; but it's deeper in an overtly formulaic way that doesn't quite work, with the development coming in regular intervals. Anyway all the point of all this originally was to say that I think the idea of quest hubs aren't necessarily bad, but they inevitably lean towards a more rigid, linear type of design which can too-easily become stifling and unfun. I think that was my point, anyway.

Somewhat tangential, but this reminds me of a horrible experience I had in Shadowrun: Hong Kong, which reflects more generally on a CRPG issue that I've been sort of thinking about: Every time you progress the main quest by another mission in Hong Kong, each NPC in the hub area gets a new conversation you can have with them. However, since each NPC also has their own little character arc, you need to read all the conversations to understand all what's going on with each of them, so if you skip a conversation, go and do another main quest, and come back, any conversation(s) you didn't have yet will be backlogged, and you can have all the conversations you haven't yet had with a given NPC in the correct order at any time- even though the conversations are written as if a span of days or weeks is passing between them, and you're catching up with the characters each time you talk to them. The problem I had was that I skipped out on talking to several characters (a troll family running a nightclub) for most of the game, because they're irrelevant side characters who never give you quests, and their own stories aren't particularly interesting. So, near the end of the game, I went to talk to them before I entered the endgame, and I hadn't found out about the conversation backlog thing yet because I'd been talking to everyone else in the hub regularly, and I had the horrible experience of watching this troll family's (dull, melodramatic, and sort of racist) family drama story arc play out in a twisted way where I'd talk to one character repeatedly, and get a month or more's worth of conversations and story development out of them, then talk to another and get all that from them, etc. When this happened, it was unsettling to me in the way that it exposed how baldly formulaic and mechanistic the game and characters were, and how it exposed this queasy gap between my experience of the game and how the game was "meant" or expected to be experienced, and of course how it exposed how dull and shallow the writing was and how little I had been enjoying it. I've never had anything quite so unpleasant happen in any Spiderweb games, but the Avadons have an unfortunate tendency to edge into territory adjacent to this- where, perversely, the writer/designer's desire to have more plot- and more characters and more quests and more character arcs to flesh out the worldbuilding- results in a less-engaging experience which is more baldly mechanistic, an experience where you eventually come to the realization that you're not talking to these characters (or doing these sidequests, or reading these in-game encyclopedia entries) because you care about them or their stories or the world they live in, but because you're acting compulsively because you want to see all the dialogue and get all the quest rewards and so on. Conversely, although the other Spiderweb series are maybe "shallower" in the execution of the writing or design, with less-developed characters and less in-depth worldbuilding and less dialogue, this actually works better at creating the feeling of a living, breathing world, which you the player feels interested in exploring and learning about; not just in the obvious "show don't tell" sense of having the player learn something about the world by seeing it in the wild instead of reading about it, but in the way it results in a greater diversity of experience and gives the player a greater feeling of agency.

How about those books, folks. I read a lotta good books in the past year (and a few less-than-good ones). October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, by China Mieville: a genuinely exciting and fascinating work of history. Poland, by James Michener: if you've read one Michener novel, you've sort of read them all, I guess. But this one is probably my favorite. A History of Histories, by J W Burrow: a historian gives a guided tour of his favorite chronicles and historical works. Less interesting than it sounded beforehand. Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943, by Antony Beevor: solid and thorough, but weirdly unexciting and unmoving, unless you're into extended descriptions of soldiers freezing and starving to death on the Volga. God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan, by Jonathan Spence: a very good book on a fascinating and important (and horrible and tragic, of course) subject which unfortunately has a very sparse English-language literature. The five Plantagenet historical novels by Sharon Kay Penman: very good novels which manage to bring the historical figures they feature to life vividly, but which are also absolutely scrupulous about historicity and accuracy and verisimilitude beyond the obvious necessarily-fictionalized parts. To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949, by Ian Kershaw: another solid history book, which is thick and detailed but necessarily can't cover everything of import in any great depth. I feel like I understand the period better in the bigger sweeps of it, though, so it was very worth it. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie: methodologically exciting, but actually reading a chapter about the gestures and expressions used by late medieval peasants, heretics or not, is not really actually very fun. For Want of a Nail: If Burgoyne had Won at Saratoga, by Robert Sobel: probably the best "straight" alt-history novel I have ever read; certainly the most focused and thorough. Instantly a favorite book. The Cyberiad; Mortal Engines; The Star Diaries; and The Futurological Congress, by Stanisław Lem: very, very good, and very difficult to say anything concrete about. All nine Sherlock Holmes books, by Arthur Conan Doyle: the good ones are really, really good, but reading them in chronological order is sort of a tragic experience of watching a writer find his footing, mature, and reach brilliance, then slowly trail away into ineptitude. Hav, by Jan Morris: another book which is brilliant but almost impossible, for me anyway, to say anything useful about. Things I am have and am going to read next: currently reading Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino; then, The Sunne in Splendour, by Sharon Kay Penman (and I intend to read her new novel which is meant to be out this year), Texas by James Michener, and then I will probably read at least some of the collected works of H P Lovecraft.

At least this time you apparently get to walk to the linearly-ordered places, instead of just taking a teleporter.

I am very marginally excited by the apparent inclusion in the game of multi-tile enemies.

Changing how Haste works in the later Avernums is necessary to compensate for the reworked AP mechanics: in terms of movement in combat, a later-Avernum character can move before attacking about as far as a Hasted older-Avernum character could before attacking; they just can't (normally) attack twice. In a battle with a lot of movement (which is pretty rare in the Avernums), a newer-Avernum character with new Haste is probably going to perform about as well (relatively) as an older-Avernum character with old Haste. Thus, Battle Fury, which operates basically the same as Haste did in the older Avernums, becomes much more powerful than Haste ever was or could be in the old Avernums.

Jeff Vogel pulls a Robots and Empire, awkwardly fusing together his totally incompatible fictional universes in a way that makes each of them, individually, poorer. It is revealed that Erika, Ghaldring, and Redbeard were all R. Daneel Olivaw in disguise.

Geneforge 1 is already going to be remade as Spiderweb's next project, after Queen's Wish. These are things which might plausibly appear in the remake, in line with new creations being added in Geneforge 4 and special combat acts being added in the later Avernums and the Avernum remakes. This would be a totally different game from Geneforge and is irreconcilable with the design of the game. There doesn't seem to be much point in making a 2d game VR-capable, and real-time 3d graphics are far out of Spiderweb's budget. Further, even if it was in 3d, it's very doubtful that Spiderweb would ever go to the extra effort and expense of making the game VR-capable, as it would almost certainly not net enough extra sales to be worth it. Only two Spiderweb games have ever been ported to Linux for this reason. Remember Spore?

Personally, I think Geneforge should be remade as an FPS.

Well, like I said, you can sort of allot games based on their general outlook and thematic content to various artistic movements, but it is hard to say what an actual artistic movement would look like in the context of video games. The player's interaction with the game complicates everything, and most games design their mechanics based on what players like or know, rather than using them to make an artistic point. Mechanically, the gap between Ultima IV and Avadon is relatively quite small, while the gap between Angband and Evoland is pretty big, despite thematic similarities or differences. There are a lot of consciously deconstructionist games, but they're too disparate in outlook and the use to which they put the tools of deconstruction to really be considered a cohesive "movement": Braid has serious if confused things to say about video games in general, while Evoland has no real ambition to make a statement about the games it parodies, and is mostly oriented around what mechanics (cut down bush with sword to find coin) and iconographic elements (slime monsters) players will recognize and enjoy. Pony Island is mostly designed around what will be the most fun or surprising, and the Karoshi games use the central deconstructive premise as an excuse to devise a bunch of fun puzzles. I think the simulationist impulse in video games, in eg System Shock or Deus Ex (that is, games which model in the gameworld, physically and functionally, objects or characters which have nothing to do with the main mechanics or story of the game: a soda can you can drink or throw, a basketball you can throw through a hoop, characters who go about their business, eating and drinking and going to work without the player's intervention, etc), might be considered an artistic movement or proto-movement.

I don't really have anything else to say about Curses. I like it well enough, it just doesn't engage me very much beyond the puzzlefest structure. 3.5 stars out of 5. I think it's sort of interesting that a few years ago there was sort of an uproar in the popular discourse on video games about "walking simulators" (Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), when games which are essentially "walking sims" (A Mind Forever Voyaging, Photopia) had already existed in IF for decades. I spent a while a few years ago trying to think of what a "modernism" (or realism, or romanticism, etc) might look like in the medium of video games. It is difficult given that the medium has existed entirely after the advent of postmodernism, given that essentially all commercial video games (with some notable exceptions) either deliberately eschew artistic aspirations or have their artistic aspirations mangled by the demands of what will sell, and given that there is little critical literature or coherent theory for video games. There are a lot of little independent art-for-art's-sake games, but they tend to be extremely idiosyncratic and to have limited or incoherent artistic aims. (That is, they are often just "here's a little game mechanic I came up with which I think is sort of cool, but which I have no intent of developing into a full game.") There are games and game developers which might be described as having a modernist perspective on art by analogy with modernism in literature or film etc, but it is very difficult to try to articulate what an artistic movement or set of shared ideals might look like in a video game context- because it can't just pertain to the thematic elements (the story, the art direction, the theatrical direction of cutscenes, the music), but also how these elements all come together, and how they interact with the game mechanics and the player's input.