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A-EftP - Miss the big outdoors


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Just wanted to vent a little.

 

I really miss the huge outdoors from the original Exile game. I was shocked *shocked!* when I first went outdoors in this new version how close together everything is. I well remember playing the first game with a big series of maps laid out on the floor at the foot of my desk to help me find my way around - and loving the huge world and the exploration of it involved in "filling in the maps." Sigh.

 

Little vent over now. cry

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Agreed. The "getting lost" sensation was thrilling. It also made the hunt for the rare objects (Smite, Demonslayer, etc.) that much more challenging. E3 will always be my favorite Spiderweb game, for just those reasons.

 

Jeff is a catering to the market, and I can't blame a guy for feeding his family. The newer games are still an incredible entertainment value.

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The outdoors is not any smaller than in Exile. I think it's actually a bit larger -- there are a few uniquely shaped landforms that definitely seem to be a bit better elaborated (Grahk's Peninsula, I'm looking at you). It might look smaller for 2 reasons:

 

1) Exile displayed a 9x9 grid of map spaces on the screen at once. You can now see FAR more than that on one screen, especially if you have a big monitor.

 

2) Towns now take up a lot more space on the world map. This can make short distances between towns seem shorter (Fort Avernum, Fort Duvno, Silvar, Mertis, the Tower of Magi) -- and it can make tiny distances between towns seem way too tiny (Dharmon, Blosk, Gnass, Fort Emerald). However, this is still orders of magnitude better than A4 where there was less space between Dharmon and Blosk than between many of the buildings within Blosk.

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It's still the addition of roads between Exile and A1 that makes me feel like the wandering and wilderness have been toned down. AEftP doesn't feel really different except for the pylons, and they're a separate issue.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't consider it all bad, though. Not having big white dots for special nodes is nice, and the wandering non-monsters are also a nice change from everything trying to kill you.

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I still like the A4-6 visuals better. I don't like the outdoor-indoor transition, it is jarring and feels completely unnatural. When I am driving down a highway and come to a town, everything stays at the same scale. I don't suddenly grow larger. I find the entrance to a new town in A4-6 much more emotionally satisfying, probably because I can hear the town noise start up and actually see myself entering the town instead of suddenly changing scale and being on a different map. If the game tells me I have traveled a thousand miles, or walked for days, that's fine. I don't need to spend a lot of time moving the characters around.

 

I like to get where I am going in the game, anyway. I'm not interested in getting lost and mapping. I really don't like the zones from Avadon or Geneforge much either, though. I like the contiguous map and the pylons.

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Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S
The outdoors is not any smaller than in Exile. I think it's actually a bit larger -- there are a few uniquely shaped landforms that definitely seem to be a bit better elaborated (Grahk's Peninsula, I'm looking at you). It might look smaller for 2 reasons:

1) Exile displayed a 9x9 grid of map spaces on the screen at once. You can now see FAR more than that on one screen, especially if you have a big monitor. ...

I'll allow for the effect of ancient monitor resolutions/grid size. I don't have a copy of Exile handy, but that is hard to believe. Could I be remembering E2 or E3--and they're significantly larger? It seemed like it would take forever to go hunting for some rare artifact. There were no towns anywhere near the "remote cave" where you'd find, say, Demonslayer.
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I felt that this particular iteration of Avernum recaptured the huge outdoors feeling that it had in the first Avernum/Exile trilogy. While I do agree that it feels a bit smaller than the first iteration of Avernum after you've explored it all, I think it's still a step up from the second trilogy outdoors terrain.

 

You actually get an inkling of the scale of the place; it's a huge network of caves you're exploring, not a subterranean suburb.

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Actually I find the solution of switching scales quite appealing. At first I found the graphic solution unneccessarily cute. It reminds me a lot of games of the strategy genre like settlers and the like. Also I had this narrow feeling of "no outdoors", cause I still remember A4-6 quite well. So the distances really felt weird at first. Meanwhile I'd actually applaud the elegance of the solution. In the A4-6 you could really start getting bored by the distances you had to pass, just because you had forgotten to buy potions or overlooked some secret switch, or whatever. I'd really hate this in this game, where you have to return to so many boss-fights later. Maybe the outdoors is not big if you just look at it, but Jeff provided for a lot of special encounters, which are a really nice solution to extend the graphically shrunken outdoors into a really huge place, where you can also always collect some more XP. Also every nook and cranny is interesting, because – who knows, there might be a new special encounter.

And aren't they cute, the little groups of slimies, spidies, wormsies, slithies, ogrelings, etc. running after your party sometimes for quite a while? Moreover the comments during those encounters increase the richness of the story. I still love many of Jeffs funny ideas and comments. So, yes, at first the "shrunken" outdoors felt a bit awkward, but meanwhile I really love it. I hope Jeff will apply this new engine and style to A2 and A3 as well.

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But how would you effectively add the temporal mechanics of A3 to this type of map? This is surely a door to many many bugs and loopholes.

For example: Resting at an inn should take 8 hours, but in the new games resting is automatic on entering a town, so what would you do? You don't want to rest everytime you enter a town, that would just suck 8 hours off of your schedule making the game nearly impossible to beat without the proper foreknowledge, so you add a dialog box asking you if you want to rest at each city entrance. This becomes annoying very quickly, so you instead return the "resting at the inn for money" option, which was done away with in previous games for reasons I know not (probably just streamlining and comfort).

Another example: Searching town outskirts: Let's say you define all time flow (TF) within a city or cave as x and all TF outside a city or cave as 10x (all per square moved of course), then how would you define the rummaging around a city's wall? You have to define special squares around the city map as x TF (remember it's all equal size scale even though the distances between the different cities and dungeons were shortened) which is a lot of hassle to program, plus the player won't be able to see/know if he is marching in an x TF or a 10x TF (You go around thinking I'll just explore this trash dump which is just a 5 minute walk from here only to find out it took you 5 days to reach) before he actually takes a step into it.

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Sorry, I havn't played A3 yet, so I didn't know that speciality.

I had entered Avernum starting at A4. The need for resting time being totally ignored has puzzled me once and again in the A4-6, when being in Inns, where you could book/buy beds or rooms without any effect, except for a waste of money…

Why hasn't it been continued?

Is it just a special feature of A3?

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Originally Posted By: Erasmus
But how would you effectively add the temporal mechanics of A3 to this type of map?


Well, A3 already had that type of real-time passage thing in there and it had the same type of map transitions. IIRC, the only noticeable passage of time occurred if you were traveling long distances outdoors. I don't think that traveling in the "town" zones actually elapsed any time.

Not sure how Jeff will handle the inn issue, though. It probably wouldn't be *too* much of a hassle to re-implement it, and I wouldn't really mind either.

I just hope that noticeable day/night cycles are included in the remake of A3. That was a really nice touch, I think.
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Time passes with every round and days are a fixed number of rounds. There are only a few events that happen so soon that many town versions are needed.

 

Unless you are excessively slow it's possible to do everything within the 180 day limit and if you don't travel doing all the job board missions you can do it before that incident in the Tower of Magi.

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The indoor/outdoor thing irritates me as well. I feel like when you adjust the sizing of your character from small to large, it does make the outdoor map seem smaller. Why did Jeff do that again? If it was a sentimental nod to the original game, I think it was a poor choice.

 

Put it this way, when I explored the area around Formello, Fort Draco, Motrax's caves in A4-6, it could take me many HOURS to fully map all that area. Days, if you look at A6 and the carefulness of movement required in that area. I mapped that whole area in about an hour this afternoon in A:EftP.

 

You can really see the difference when you enter the dungeons. And in all fairness, it does feel like there are more dungeons in this game. But perhaps that's because so many areas have been converted to dungeons.

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Originally Posted By: MissSea
Put it this way, when I explored the area around Formello, Fort Draco, Motrax's caves in A4-6, it could take me many HOURS to fully map all that area. Days, if you look at A6 and the carefulness of movement required in that area. I mapped that whole area in about an hour this afternoon in A:EftP.

The only reason that area took longer to map in A4 (and especially A6) was because you were constantly stopping to fight battles. If you exclude town and dungeon areas, that map area was about the same size as in E1/A1/AEFTP. And if you include towns and dungeons, then of course there is significantly more area in E1/A1/AEFTP. A4/A6 tended to have more wide passageways and fewer twisty little tunnels, but if anything that makes A4/A6 easier to map.

If you removed all the enemies from the map, I think you'd find that A4/A6 actually map much faster than AEFTP, and don't feel any larger. It seems like what you really miss is fighting enemies on the overworld.
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You're probably right, Slarty. But then why did all the enemies go away? When you start pining for neverending hordes of chitrachs ... wink

 

And the twisty thing makes sense -- as noted in a previous post, Avernum's just been discovered, so to speak. Its walls have yet to be exposed to 100 years of clear-cutting to make room for mushroom farms. But it doesn't change the fact that even in A5, I felt like, "Wow! This place just keeps going and going!"

 

:::shrug::: Different strokes for different folks, yes? smile

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I really liked the option of raiding slith villages (or not raiding, in my case) when I got to the Slith Lands. I guess I wanted some more level-up baddies in the Eastern Gallery to make the bat cave a little easier to take on. Storywise, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense -- most of the forts/towns can deal with the raids, barring a few dungeons. But I understand Jeff adjusted, or is adjusting, the bat cave in the update.

 

I remember trying the demo in A3 and getting my butt handed to me when I was relatively close to the starting point. There was the aforementioned pressure of time to complicate things, but I felt I needed to grind (a lot) in order to be ready to face anything. I guess I'm feeling that need now, and there's not enough stuff to grind on.

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Jeff adjust experience needed upward in both Avadon and Avernum: Escape from the Pit during testing. You originally got 2 more levels in the demo and then he made level 7/8 as the new normal. I guess now you get a little more.

 

He doesn't like parties leveling up too quickly since he has his own ideas about what level you should be in each area.

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Originally Posted By: MissSea
You're probably right, Slarty. But then why did all the enemies go away? When you start pining for neverending hordes of chitrachs ... wink

And the twisty thing makes sense -- as noted in a previous post, Avernum's just been discovered, so to speak. Its walls have yet to be exposed to 100 years of clear-cutting to make room for mushroom farms. But it doesn't change the fact that even in A5, I felt like, "Wow! This place just keeps going and going!"

:::shrug::: Different strokes for different folks, yes? smile

Wait, how does A5 figure into this?
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Originally Posted By: MissSea
Put it this way, when I explored the area around Formello, Fort Draco, Motrax's caves in A4-6, it could take me many HOURS to fully map all that area.


I indicated A5 in the dash. smile

I just feel that when you go from the larger characters in dungeons and towns to that small four person party perspective, it makes the game actually feel smaller. Just my opinion. As Slarty mentioned, I miss the overworld interactions. On that same point, I also miss going into ruined cottages and invading unsuspecting individuals' privacy. Especially when the comments as you move about the place say things like, "Go away" and "Get out!" :::chuckle:::
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Originally Posted By: MissSea
On that same point, I also miss going into ruined cottages and invading unsuspecting individuals' privacy. Especially when the comments as you move about the place say things like, "Go away" and "Get out!"

I miss this too. In A4 there was a quest that required you to deliver a message to a person who, it turned out, was on the second floor of a house near Formello. If you didn't invade all the houses, you would never have any idea where she was.
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Originally Posted By: MissSea
See, I'm a player who enjoys over-leveling. I'll grind out a couple of levels just to make sure I've got enough gas in the tank to get through the bosses with a minimum of fuss.

But I guess that's what the editor's for.


So am I but I don't want to use the Editor, I would like to be able to gain XP (and loot) in respawning areas if I fell I need them. My favorite spiderweb game was Exile 2 for this reason (and its plot which was the best), there were empire's fort to provide me some XP and gold when I wished.
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