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Enkidu

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Everything posted by Enkidu

  1. I'm not sure if that's the reality, maybe it is. But I'd think the kind of player who doesn't think his character build through is at least as often a hoarder of items (as a mindset), as a min/maxer. I think that offensive items should definitely be more powerful. Could be rarer and more expensive in that case, too. I do sometimes use items since I can often do it without it displacing my main action (and probably most often it's a healing item), but that is just very underwhelming. Enemies using wands being a proper threat would be nice, too. Also a way to keep items in bigger relevance into the lategame would be to have the HP and Damage output scale a bit less. On the topic of cutting out the HP scaling for difficulty: That's awesome. It really made playing on Torment a real slog, when even trash mobs often took a long time to whittle down regardless of if they were any real threat or not (similarly I'd like if there was a tad less trash mobs - it gets repetitive, if there was less of it I could play through these games quicker and have time to play more of them). I wonder also if you're planning to keep the attribute system as is? It's pretty boring currently, in Avadon and Avernum remakes. Just pump the dmg dealing stat and maybe endurance, that's it...
  2. Actually I was somewhat annoyed by how the world in the new Avernum actually looks smaller than in original Exile/Avernum. The distances in tiles between things are pretty much the same, but things in the world are much bigger - Fort Avernum for example, being 5x5 tiles instead of 3x3 like it was before. That together with the simplifications to the food/rest/etc systems, and also the absence of a day counter, kinda diminished the "adventuring" feel of the game.
  3. First time players probably won't pick Torment as their difficulty either. And I'd imagine having no challenge, with just left-clicking everything to death, isn't the most engaging experience to lure an RPG newbie in. For someone who's mostly interested in the story that's perfectly serviceable, sure (many newbies might well enjoy complex combat too once presented with it), but for a longer time RPG player, who isn't necessarily familiar with Jeffs earlier work it doesn't paint a good picture. Personally I probably won't pick up the full game, I'm sure you'd actually get some interesting abilities and fights later on in the end game, but I don't feel like trudging the early-game boredom to reach it at the moment.
  4. Well, that's just bad design. People are gonna make their purchase decision based on the demo. If the demo offers no challenge even on supposedly "torment" difficulty, then that's gonna put a ton of people off. Why would anyone picking a Torment difficutly want a slow easing up of many hours of gameplay? This kind of boring phase also make replaying more of a chore than it needs to be.
  5. The simulationist things earlier Spidweb games had - need to carry food, resting, limit on weight of backpack, training with a trainer, looking for secret passages, healing, etc. - did serve a good purpose (also, why was the day counter removed, even in Avernum:EftP!). They gave a sense of adventure into the game, a context for the fighting. I don't say all of that change was bad, but when it's all stripped away like now, a combat encounter is a much more boring affair when there's practically zero risk of any loss of any kind. A trash combat is a very rote action too, similar to the resting, healing you used to do in between them was actually something that provided you with variety. Now all you do is click through fights, pick up items, rinse and repeat. Outside of boss fights and conversations with real choices, there's very little thinking to be done no matter how simplistic. Fights instanced like this don't make me feel powerful, since there's no challenge. Clearing a dungeon in a single go, when it wasn't a given, that made me feel good. Carefully using your abilities and items to make them last as long as you can, not rocket science but fun regardless. Even if all you have at stake is how often you have to return to town - nobody wants to return to town after each rat. So you are encouraged to put in effort and work efficiently. And when you're running low on resources, you always want to search one more corner and beat another fight, before returning to town, until you inevitably must make that trip, which also allows you to sell your loot and buy spells and such. Now you don't have that, it doesn't matter what you do in a single fight so you just left click on the rebels or rats until they die, or use an ability, it doesn't matter if you do. Not that you'd have much opportunity to vary from that early on, either, since you don't have nearly the variety of spells available compared to earlygame Exile/Avernum or Nethergate, or number of party members. TL;DR: fighting trash mobs, without the pacing and meaning the hp/mp management gives it, is not interesting. When you remove all rote actions but one, the one activity left (fighting) becomes much more tedious than before. The game doesn't feel like leading an adventuring party anymore as much, but more of a rat killing and loot collecting simulator.
  6. The problem is that when there's no attrition, a majority of battles become meaningless tedium. When you're balancing on a per-battle basis, every encounter should then be potentially lethal. In a game where every battle drains your hp and/or mana, even an easy encounter does something to drain your reserves. But when you auto-regen after every battle, a battle where you didn't have to strain your resources and use consumables (or vitality, though there seems to be more than enough to go around regardless) is only free xp basically. Of course if you can make a round trip to town without losing anything but some of your own time, it does give you a kind of an get out of jail free-card - which does defeat the purpose of the attrition somewhat, but not entirely, since there is still penalty for the player to go recharge (time), even if it's not really a penalty in the gameworld. But when the game has gone the way of ease in this matter, I think the right solution would be to cut the trash mob fights a lot as well, and focus on tough battles where you risk dying unless you give it your all. After all, the amount of them is a very common complaint against Spidweb games.
  7. Sounds like a problem more with the dexterity stat than being allocate freely. If a character with high enough certain stat is near invincible then that is a problem no matter how easily or hard that stat is to raise. If you'd cap the to-hit of enemies to be, say, 20% at lowest, dexterity in moderate amounts is still great for damage avoidance but going overboard will only help you with the most accurate monsters. Plus making other stats more essential, to raise some amount at least, if you lack intelligence you'll be really vulnerable to mind-effecting spells for example, and make this not easily countered by just carrying a correct resistance item. Also it's a matter of AI, will they pick their targets and spells based on what'll do the best damage or just lash some attack wherever? Oh and something that really made the game more abstract than the earlier iterations - lack of resting (and just the A4-6 style reinvirogation upon entering town) and more importantly, lack of a day counter. I couldn't tell if the course of the game happened over a month, a year, or 10 years. But it did often feel, in conjunction with the smaller feeling world map, that the trip from a town to the next was just a case of a few minutes. Oh and the starting dungeon was awful I felt, worst part of the game. The enemies are trivial even on torment but it takes time to repeatedly do it with new test parties. So I had to start a party, not allocate any points to anyone before the end of the dungeon and finish it, so I could start in the similar spot as A1 or E1. An easy linear dungeon is ok as an optional tutorial, but in every other way the beginning of A1/E1 was better since you had total freedom on what to do, a whole world open before you instead of a linear path. Also I like having a lot of points to allocate right upon startup, so restarting the game is more interesting when the starting builds aren't so samey always. Usually I'd like to start a few times over, with different parties or just different finetuning of characters, and see what I like most
  8. So I've just murdered Hawthorne, (Grah-Hoth still to go when I get around to it), and here's some thoughts on the game (playing on torment). Well, mostly focusing on the things I didn't like, so hopefully they'll be improved for the remake of the 2nd one. -The character system felt really lackluster for the most part. You basically have to put vast majority of your allocatable points into the stat that governs your attack, or you're almost totally gimped since you cannot hit anything. And because of this you cannot realistically have a character that's good or even decent at 2 different kinds of attacks. Which is boring. So basically I felt like there's not much to pick but a single path on the tree to follow, plus deciding who in the party puts points into the utility skills. A priest-warrior tank was the only sensible "multiclass" build I could think of, putting points into endurance/strength and you can use the priest spells which dont target enemies (healing and summoning) pretty well (since they dont have to-hit rolls), plus able to take a lot of damage. Also when everyone gets the unallocatable stat points and extra hp and mp on every level up, it homogenises things a lot. Eventually everyone gets enough strength that the weight limits of equipment aren't any problem, and everyone ends up with enough hp that nothing can 1shot them even if they never allocated points into Endurance. Now for example if dexterity increased melee attack accuracy, missile accuracy, and evasion, and strength increased melee attack accuracy, melee attack damage, and missile attack damage, and equipment weight allowance, they'd both be valuable to both a mainly melee and mainly archer character. And intelligence If you'd get 2 stat points each level up to allocate as you wish, (but not both in same stat maybe), there'd be much more choice. And HP and MP not increasing unless you specifically allocated points to intelligence/endurance, so you'd actually need to do that. -Not enough variance in monsters. Mostly considering the basic mobs and not the bosses which do have varied abilities and scripts often (and there's also some mobs with specific gimmicks like multiplying slimes, etc). Most things gain more HP, better to-hit, better damage rolls, , better resistances etc. fairly uniformly as you progress through the game, though damage types and specific resistances might vary. But there could easily be more differentiation, with just the basic stats you have - a big zombie might have tons of hp and hit hard, but have lousy to-hit and evasion values. And another monster might be very agile, hard to hit and accurate, dealing good damage, but have very low hp for its level. Simple things like that would reward using right offense and right defense on the correct targets, and would make going all out on either evasion or damage reduction as a means of defense, less rewarding. -Offensive items almost always seemed like a waste of time. They just didn't seem to do much, compared to using items that affect your party or using normal attacks - not worht the action points it'd taken to use them, so ended up just selling them mostly. -Healing spells are too powerful. Winning a combat is often a case of whether you can withstand damage for one round so that your healer(s) is alive, then get back to full hp with some group heal plus possibly healing items. Then whittle the enemy down a little, heal again, and eventually you'll win. Also that the enemies are big sacks of hp, with poor or no healing, compared to the party being fragile but constantly regenerating, is not good - would be nicer to have similar stats and rules for both partymembers and enemies, at least human(oid) enemies that is. -The above points combined make the game in a way, a bit too linear - there's a hard limit often in where you can go, based on just whether you'll get one-shotted or not. Of course I'm not saying you should be able to go anywhere anytime. But if you didn't get so much free HP on levelup, the enemies wouldn't have to scale their damage, to-hit, and hp just to compensate the automatic increases the player gets each level. If you'd only receive the single stat point, and the skill increases, the monsters wouldn't have to scale to that, and you'd have more freedom on where you can go - and if there'd be more powerful, but limited use items like offensive wands, you would have more freedom still - but with a price of using up those stuffs faster, the tougher the area you're in. -The world map. Compared to the Exiles and A1-3, it feels a lot smaller. Yes, the tile layout is almost 1:1 but that's not the full story. For example Fort Avernum is 5x5 tiles in this game, 3x3 in Avernum 1. So of course that'll make the journey between two locations feel twice as short, even if you traverse about as many tiles in both games. Also the character and monster sprites are taller in comparison to the map, as well as houses placed on the map. -The secret passages aren't as interesting as in the Avernum 1. -Enemy boss scripts shouldn't be tied to their HP so often. For example the slith boss on the island, with the slimes in the corridor - the fight was much easier once you figure out not to hit the leader unless you're out of other targets, so you avoid fighting the slimes at the ssame time as the -I wasn't able to properly fight Erika, or the king. They just roll over and die, that's lame! I want to fight these guys just for the hell of it, just to see what happens, what kind of abilites they have and can I beat them. That the game doesn't acknowledge that, is really disappointing. -The economy could be a bit different. Mostly you ever buy spells and skills, weapons armor etc. aren't worth the buying price in comparison. If you'd keep the prices you get when selling loot, and lower the prices for when you buy items - I think it'd give a lot more valid choices for the player on how to spend their cash. But overall, I did finish and enjoy the game. The combat is in a lot of ways better than in A1-3 for example, where I remember lategame, your evasion stopped often 95% of enemy attacks and highlevel summons could cast the same summoning spell that called them in, and so on. It was a basic fun RPG with loot, varied locations, some more choices too with the added content compared to the original... Also what's the current situation, is Jeff working on Avadon 2, Avernum: Crystal Souls, another game, or just spending his time doing coke? Some time since his last release and no news of upcoming games that I've noted.
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