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an interesting idea i had


Sss-Chah

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If by "new engine", you mean Avernum 4/5's strange hybrid engine, I don't think it's going to happen. It's been brought up many times that Blades of Avernum was a bad business move for SW, due to the time and energy involved in making a game that didn't sell very well. And yes, I believe Jeff said he would not be making another Blades game.

 

I think a better question is "If Jeff re-made Blades with the new engine, would anyone design for it?" I certainly wouldn't, but my scenarios tend to be rooted in a kind of aesthetic that the new engine really doesn't allow.

 

Originally Posted By: Dahak
Actually I just want the current engine fixed.

 

...oh, right. And this.

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Originally Posted By: The Tree guy
I think a better question is "If Jeff re-made Blades with the new engine, would anyone design for it?" I certainly wouldn't


Ephesos brings up a good point. Remember, Avernum's meaning of existence was that it was meant to be a remake/upgrade of Exile. Avernum is also a more success series than Geneforge, so at the time it would have made more sense to make. The situation has not really change four years later. Avernum's second trilogy isn't all that popular to most followers of Avernum 1-3, and BoA. Now you can argue which of the three is better, but when it comes right down to it, Avernum holds more value money wise as a whole to Spiderweb than Geneforge. So, a BoA 2 doesn't have a shot in hell of succeding. As a matter of fact, it makes much more sense to attempt a BoG instead of a BoA 2.

The Last Archon
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There would be no purpose really to making second Blades of Avernum from Jeff's point of view: It would be trying to get players to pay money for an extension to something that's already extensible. There's not a great deal in the A4+ engine that's fundamentally different from the earlier engine. Lack of outdoors is the biggest alteration, and that has already been repeatedly demonstrated in third party scenarios. More to the point, BoA is widely known to have been a financial failure. Building it required a great deal of effort on Jeff's part, and the game was unfortunately doomed to never sell well. It was for this reason that Jeff declared the game the last of its type that he would create. Also, to the best of my knowledge, Jeff has never stated that he has any plan to release the game as open source. This is currently something that players, myself included, have hoped based on the precedent set by BoE.

 

"Blades of Geneforge", for all the times it is brought up, is a dead end idea. Not only has Jeff stated that he will never make another Blades game, which must include one based on Geneforge, but in many ways Geneforge doesn't provide much to differentiate it from Avernum in terms of making a separate extensible game engine. The fundamental points which define the Geneforge games are the semi-customizable creations, and the faction based plots. The latter doesn't depend on the engine, but on the talent and inclination of the designers, and the former doesn't seem to provide enough substance to base an entire new engine on. Jeff could have done it easily enough with any of the engines he has thus far built, needing only some simple user-interface additions.

 

As far as fixing up BoA itself goes, one must remember that Jeff has little motivation to do so. I doubt sales of the game would jump much if he put a month into making the improvements for which we designers clamor. Frankly I was quite happily surprised at the effort he put in to bring the game more up to date for Intel based Macs. (Even if he horribly broke the open dialog. Sigh.) Some changes, like alpha channel handling, would be very worthwhile, but would also require fundamental alteration of the game engine; neither graphics format that the engine currently supports can supply alpha channels, for instance. Jeff's newer engines use a more modern OpenGL drawing system, but this might still require a good deal of work for Jeff to back port. This is really an area where the fans could take over; if Jeff is indeed not making money from the game and chooses to let us take over maintaining it then we can waste as much time making additions to it as we want, without distracting him from working on his newer games. However, releasing the game is up to him, and can only happen when he chooses.

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Originally Posted By: Niemand
There's not a great deal in the A4+ engine that's fundamentally different from the earlier engine.
Feats?

Originally Posted By: Niemand
The fundamental points which define the Geneforge games are the semi-customizable creations, and the faction based plots. [...] Jeff could have done it easily enough with any of the engines he has thus far built, needing only some simple user-interface additions.
Also real-time rather than turn-based, different action point system...
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My point is that it doesn't seem to me to be enough of a basis for Jeff to create an entire new game to sell. You can't sell a product very well if it's too similar to another one that many of your customers have already bought.

 

I haven't played A5 with its 'feats', but in part it's because as a player, I don't care. The realtime (mostly) engine involves a lot of work under the hood to build and ends up playing nearly the same as the turn based engine. (I have played a good chunk of A4 and demos of most of the Geneforges.) The argument is moot anyway if Jeff doesn't want to build more Blades games; he's the only one who can decide if he will, and he's in a far better position to assess his reasons than we are.

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Originally Posted By: Niemand
I haven't played A5 with its 'feats'


If the "feats" are what I assume they are (as in combat disciplines) at a very basic level, they're buffs you give yourself during combat. You know them all from the start of the game, but can't use them until your combat skills are high enough. They were fun for a while, and then became just as repetitive as shielding/blessing before fights.

They'd be really easy to bring other to BoA, in the form of special spells, too, so that argument is a moot.

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