So what is this game's preference?

[Death Knight]

Ive played avernum series and wasnt the biggest pro. I got into geneforge a bit. Now i ask what is the deal with avadon?

 

Is it like geneforge where you can use persuasion and guile to get through problems or is it mostly just a turnbased-arpg?

[Alorael at Large]

It's not like Geneforge or a slew of RPGs in which your stats give you more options in dialogue that give you options to talk your way through obstacles or into getting help. It's not like Avernum in that you aren't the good guys saving the world from bad guys.

 

You're in a position of power, and you can order people around to a degree. People will want different things from you, and you can abuse your authority for fun and profit, especially the latter. You can take quests, not do them, and lie about it.

 

At the end of the day, though, guile isn't going to get you very far. You get to weigh in on the conflicts of the story, but you're still going to go through the story as it's set down with less forks in the road than Geneforge gives you. And most of the way you're going to be killing most of your problems.

 

—Alorael, who would say it's probably more Geneforge-like than Avernum-like. It's a world that runs on ambiguity, and you get to decide who you're going to back when push comes to shove.

[Randomizer]

For the main quest path you don't have many choices. No matter what you say most of the time you are forced to kill people at least in the beginning of the game. It's the side quests where you have choices in helping people and whether to kill some that others want dead.

 

As Alorael says there isn't the clear cut good and evil of Avernum. Lots of decisions are going to haunt you if you have any morality.

[Marak]

I know I personally struggled with a lot of Quests and heck, even dialogue options.

 

Trying to be the bad-ass Hand of Avadon while still maintaining some compassion for the helpless villager is a tough road to walk.

 

To the OP: the tone and the combat are different enough from previous Spiderweb titles to at least warrant a look. In particular, the combat benefits from a lack of mindless Area of Effect spell spamming and rewarding the use of synergy between character classes. Try a playthrough of the Demo areas on Normal or even Hard and see if you feel challenged.

 

This game, to me, is the opposite of most Spiderweb games I've played. Usually they start off very strongly and then kind of lose steam as the main plot goes along (*cough* Avernum 6 *cough*) but I found this game to be just the opposite. I wasn't terribly impressed with the Demo or even the first post-Demo mission, but after a while, I found myself drawn into the plot and the fact that I wasn't the Pristine Good Guy beating up the Unerringly Immoral Bad Guys. I found myself simultaneously looking forward to and dreading each choice I had to make - because your choices are never black and white, and someone is always going to pay the price. Makes for compelling gaming, if you're into that sort of thing. Which I am.

[Necris Omega]

The greatest difference between Avadon and every other Spiderweb based game is how decisively character driven it is.

 

The game isn't written as such you are "Random Brave Adventurers" and the NPCs aren't "there strictly to service said Adventurers" - it really takes a (I have got to stop using this reference, even if it's true) more Dragon Age type angle, where its the people and specifically your companions who decide the plot of the game. The environment is there, sure, but it's not the primary driving factor behind the mechanizations of what's going on.

 

It's very different from Spiderweb's classics, but definitely worth a look.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Marak

Trying to be the bad-ass Hand of Avadon while still maintaining some compassion for the helpless villager is a tough road to walk.

Yeah, I discovered that almost immediately, and all I have is the demo.

Quote:

Try a playthrough of the Demo areas on Normal or even Hard and see if you feel challenged.

I played through (I think) almost the entire demo on Normal, and I had no real challenge until I went to clear out the wretches in Zhethron's lair. I'm considering starting over on Hard or Torment, just to see if it's just as much of a breeze (probably not, but worth finding out).

That said, I'm pretty much enjoying the game thus far. My only complaint is that the demo is so tiny compared to the other Spiderweb games; you get a good feel for the game, but it would have been nice to have one or two more areas to explore.

EDIT: I'd also like less of the items I find to be worthless. I don't need the money right now, but I probably will by endgame.

[Death Knight]

Just started playing a little while ago. One thing i noticed was that like you all said, it is character driven in that you really cant do certain things with certain chars.

 

I rolled up a shaman with the mindset that maybe i could use melee that was aided by magic. When i got to the game, unfortunately i couldnt use most of the melee weapons. too bad, but whatever.

 

I decided Im going to play as the shadowwalker instead. One things for sure, there are definitely some evil characters. I get to the first main woman and she flat out told me, those that fail redbeard die. She even laughed, i thought that was interesting. Most games i play characters and npcs arent that brutal and bold in the tutorial of the game. Im not sure what will happen next.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: The Mystic

My only complaint is that the demo is so tiny compared to the other Spiderweb games; you get a good feel for the game, but it would have been nice to have one or two more areas to explore.

Originally Posted By: Jeff

By the way, while my demos are smaller than they used to be, they are still some of the longest demos out there. My demos used to be longer than some other full games, but, to be brutally honest, that's just bad business.

The demo is still pretty large compared to most games, it seems. We're just spoiled kids that are used to having really long demos, so Avadon's demo seems short by comparison within Spiderweb.

[The Mystic]

The hugeness of some of the demos is actually what got me hooked on Spiderweb's games to begin with. Some of Jeff's demos took me several days to play through (the original Exile trilogy took me about a week or two per game); most other game demos I've played were completed in 10-15 minutes--if I was lucky--so I never really considered them worth the little money I had at the time. To this day, the only non-freeware, non-"bargain basement" games on my computer are Jeff's.

 

I'm not saying that Jeff should make demos as enormous as they once were; in his own words, "that's just bad business." A demo that's just a little bit bigger than the one for Avadon would be about perfect.

[Marak]

I tend to agree, when the Demo Demon popped up I was admit I was a little disappointed. I think like you said, one more area or just a few more quests REALLY would have hooked me. I bought the game for a number of reasons (supporting Jeff with real-life cash = more games down the road and prior excellence being the two biggest) but I'm completely comfortable in saying that the Avadon Demo did not hook me. I really got hooked right about the time I returned to the Kva for the 2nd set of missions there. Now obviously, that's way, way too long for the Demo but something in between those two would be nice for the Avadon 2 Demo's length.

 

But that's just the greedy consumer in me talking. =p

 

Also re: Death Knight, the Shaman isn't meant to melee. The game doesn't make it terribly clear, but she's a caster. If you have her staff-type weapon selected (instead of her ranged slot) she actually does a long-range Lightning attack that scales with "weapon damage" and (very slightly with) Intellect for 0 Fatigue. Sort of like a magic bow with infinite ammo and slightly shorter range. Once I figured that out, and I got my Wolf summon to charge in and bite things for me, it was smooth sailing.