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Wasn't Avadon supposed to be his attempt to make a spiderweb equivalent of Dragon Age? I'd say he succeeded 
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Jul 12, 2013 22:18
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In the recent AMA he responded to that question specifically by stating that he would prefer to have a small number of well-balanced spells that each fill a particular niche than a poo poo ton of spells that are mostly crappily implemented.
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Jul 17, 2013 23:14
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mastervj posted:My personal take is that he is selling better more from bigger exposure he's getting than from streamlining gameplay. I liked Avadon quite a bit, but the character classes and development did nothing for me. Also, I don't know why he always mentions steam and the humble bundle, and almost never gog. It would cost him nothing and give him even bigger exposure among the no-DRM crowd (even if the games are actually DRM free?). Many of his games are already on GOG, Avernum 1-6, geneforge series, and avadon are all there at least.
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Jul 18, 2013 04:42
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JustJeff88 posted:He doesn't seem to mention GOG as much when he talks about distribution - feels like he's doing them a bit of a disservice. that's because GOG is still a small service compared to the marketing monster that valve created. It pays off to talk about stuff being available on steam because everybody who plays games on their computers knows what steam is but many people have never heard of GOG. It's interesting that it played out that way, considering that I personally think the steam client is slow and bloated and definitely prefer the GOG web interface - but it had to do with the timing of boxed PC games dying out and valve releasing HL2 with steam all in the same few years. It was the perfect moment to launch a real DD service and valve totally capitalized on it. Speaking of interface, the fact that you have to open steam to play your games is a stroke of genius too. I like GOG and all but I never go there unless I'm cruising for a sale or i heard from someone else that a game I want launched there. Steam on the other hand has ads in my face literally every day. andrew smash fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jul 18, 2013 |
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Jul 18, 2013 17:43
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JustJeff88 posted:He could still mention it - GOG has more of his games than Steam, and it only takes a second. Valve does not need any help, and GOG is better in some ways. I like not having ads slammed in my face every waking moment, and I don't entirely trust Steam because their "offline mode" is a load of pisswiffle. I love the fact that I could download every GOG game I own, which is a lot, put them on a hard drive and play them anywhere with electricity. Not everyone has an internet connection every waking moment of their lives. I don't disagree with any of this, I just think it probably bumps his sales more to mention steam than it does to mention GOG. That's all. Red Mundus posted:Is there a way to raise the max "to-hit" percentage to 100% instead of 95%? Because missing 4 times in row is when at 95% is giving me an ulcer. Not sure, but i agree that it's annoying. Personally I think missing at all is annoying, and generally hate anything that feels like there's a time during which nothing is progressing (so I hate status effects like stun or daze or whatever when used on PCs) but it's hard to get around that in an explicitly old-school RPG.
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Jul 19, 2013 06:12
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Eventually you'll learn to pick them out of the background. That's mostly cash fodder anyway, I don't think there are any important items just lying around without a text prompt or a prominent chest.
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Jul 25, 2013 03:35
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Something worth noting: you basically should never buy gear in this game. Money is somewhat scarce, save it for skills/spells and certain consumables. Armor and weapons and most basic potions are found in abundance. The exception might be right at the start of the game. Buy better poo poo then if you want to give yourself an edge but very quickly you'll be getting magic equipment from bosses or quests and the basic stuff drops aplenty from random dudes.
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Jul 26, 2013 05:52
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Does anybody else find ward of thoughts utterly worthless? It's supremely irritating to cast it specifically when i know i'm going to be fighting something with charm attacks only to have my two fighters charmed in the first round anyway. In fact it's making me not want to finish the game, considering the sudden proliferation of enemies with mind effects like gazers and cryo drakes. It sucks because i'm steamrolling everything else, but the only ability in the entire game that is supposed to be a defense against thought attacks doesn't seem to work at all. Edit: haha, also, enemies with mass heal can suck my balls. It doesn't make them any more likely to win a fight but holy gently caress does it make fights take longer. andrew smash fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Jul 26, 2013 |
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Jul 26, 2013 13:51
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Red Mundus posted:I feel the same way. Since it was my only ward I used it anyway but once I got ward of Steel I used that and then finally settled on ward of elements later on. The charm spell is like this too, in my opinion. Even at level 3 the spell always failed to work. I have all that poo poo, i'm in the final quests of the game. The problem with unshackle mind is that it is single target so if both fighters get charmed one of them will one shot my priest regardless of which one i cure.
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Jul 26, 2013 14:01
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Dragonwagon posted:In Geneforge how much leadership/mechanics should I aim for to have access to everything? Imo they shouldn't level independently at all. They get skillpoints but you have to spend essence or whatever it's called to use them anyway. You're better off pumping the skill and considering them disposable, that way new monsters have better skills without increasing in cost.
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Aug 1, 2013 18:23
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GreenNight posted:Defeating Hawthorne in Escape from the Pit is way more a pain in the rear end than I remember from Avernum. Just beat it on Normal, can't imagine doing it on hard. i did it with 4 brooches instead of 5. whoops.
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Aug 2, 2013 22:23
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keyvin posted:Am I missing something, or are healing potions hard to come by at the beginning of A:EftP? IIRC they're a bit sparse in the early but you'll be swimming in them before too long. I certainly never felt crunched for potions and I spend them liberally.
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Jan 5, 2014 20:56
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I was planning on playing avadon for real sometime soon ; which class is most fun to choose for your PC?
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Feb 28, 2014 00:20
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Thuryl posted:For Avadon 1, probably Shadowwalker. They've got incredible survivability, especially if you do a Dex/evasion-based build with just enough Str to wear heavy armour, and they can also pick locks, teleport around while stunning entire groups of enemies, do AoE damage... they're just a really strong and versatile class in general. Cool, thanks. I've played the first mission like three separate times and just never got into the rest of it but i have some free time coming up and want to clear it.
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Feb 28, 2014 04:21
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I'm not sure why it matters. Just add links to the other games in steam and you can launch them all from the same place.
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Mar 7, 2014 00:36
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MagusofStars posted:The other games do have just as much lore in them, but usually it's not as blatantly obvious and concentrated. Avadon's lore is mostly concentrated in the books, which tell you everything about a single topic, like an "Avadon History 101". The other series (Avernum and Geneforge both) have just as much lore, but spread among several different people - There's one guy who tells you how the Empire found out about Avernum in the first place, a second guy who tells about the initial exploration, a third talking about how they formed Avernum's government, etc. Yeah I like Vogel's approach to lore, you have to go looking for it but it's there. Back when I had time /cared about fantasy game lore I could read it all, now that I mostly play rpgs to kill lots of mook enemies I can just click the books, take the xp and move on. I'm really glad there are no unskippable cutscenes etc.
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Mar 9, 2014 18:38
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The game scales so that consumables that are useful early quickly become poo poo. There's little point to hoarding your wands of fire, just pop em when you feel line it.
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Mar 14, 2014 20:41
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JustJeff88 posted:"Last Dream" (moronic title) on Steam that's $5 and reminds me a ton of Final Fantasy 1. You know there's a reason they called it that right?
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Mar 16, 2014 05:26
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Start wIth one of his late generation games, as you go back further the UIs get more arcane. The games can sometimes be tough, but more than honest difficulty you'll occasionally get frustrated with the encounters because he's really just not good at tightly built tactical combats. Generally if I lose a character in an encounter (not counting geneforge, I play that series using my critters as cannon fodder) or fail an encounter entirely it's due to the enemies having some sort of scripted advantage it's impossible to anticipate. There's a section in avadon where you can try to sneak by some patrolling enemies who will summon help that is in aggregate way more powerful than your party. They do this by running toward a point (once you've alerted them) where they then alert groups of monsters waiting offscreen. I decided to get around this by jumping them as they came around a corner and using the game's combat engine to keep them from escaping (in combat you can only move one tile per turn through squares adjacent to an enemy, meaning if you start next to one you can only retreat by one tile a turn if they follow you. Basically the spiderweb version of attacks of opportunity from d&d). I set my group up to use this rule to grab the sentry and prevent it from calling for help only to discover that specific monster had an ability never seen before or since that allowed it to ignore that rule arbitrarily, presumably because vogel didn't want his scripted encounter to be outwitted. I think that kind of design punishes the player for creativity and is crappy.
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Mar 17, 2014 12:48
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Thuryl posted:Yeah, he's kind of a jerk about that sort of thing. People who have beta-tested his games have lots of stories about how they solved a combat in a way he didn't anticipate and he edited the fight specifically to rule out that solution in the next beta. Yeah, while these games have grids they're not really tactical games in any way. I have basically accepted that the way to get through tougher encounters is to gain levels.
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Mar 17, 2014 13:27
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Arrhythmia posted:I think the worst is when an enemy just turns out to be immune to a damage type. It's pretty consistent in A:EftP, but absolutely all over the wall in Avadon. Like, of course a slavering hell hound takes fire damage, but a rabid hell hound is immune. And of course I just happen to meet them the time I decide to bring my sorceress along. I sort of agree but less for damage types than debuffs. The hellhound thing sounds like an oversight, I think the entire class is supposed to be immune. Pretty much every major enemy is immune to debuffs (or their resists are so high it's basically equivalent) which is stupid and just reminds me of final fantasy. Although golems should not be immune to acid damage. They are made of rock, not glass or plastic ffs.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:00
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Katreus posted:So I just finished Nethergate: Resurrection lately. Assuming I'm trying to go from earliest UI to latest UI, the next one would should be the Geneforge series, right? (Or was Geneforge supposed to be first?) Play a shaper, they are easy mode. Let your little dudes walk all over everything. Also, don't bother leveling up individual units that you've summoned, it's not worth it (they take more essence when they level up). Just level the spells that you use to make them and summon new ones. Look online for a spoiler about lockpicking, the skill directly reduces how many picks you need to open a lock of a given difficulty so beyond an optimal point based on how many picks you can get in the game it does nothing for you and you don't want to waste points in it. Otherwise go hog wild.
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Sep 14, 2014 15:26
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Something that's worth remembering is that Vogel isn't all that great at designing tactical combat systems; this isn't temple of elemental evil or even baldur's gate-level tactics you're dealing with. It looks like it at first, with a totally turn-based combat engine, movement ranges, AP, etc, but honestly the progression curve is basically that of a JRPG. The answer to encounters that are difficult isn't (generally) clever positioning, pulling, stealth, or ambushes - it's making your numbers bigger until they beat the numbers of the other guys.
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Sep 14, 2014 16:14
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I just bought ruined world and I have to say the thing Jeff accomplishes that continues to impress me most is shipping a game with like 80+ hours of gameplay that weighs in under 300 Mb
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Feb 13, 2018 22:04
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gently caress it, i backed for $30. Why not.
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May 30, 2018 17:31
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The Kickstarter reached its funding goal.
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May 31, 2018 22:27
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I’m gonna go against the consensus and say that if you’re a serious player of tactics or strategy games you’ll probably find the combat kind of bad. There’s not much depth and you don’t have many, if any tools to control the map. The grid may as well not be there imo. That said I still enjoyed the games, just don’t go into them expecting zones of control, attacks of opportunity, etc.
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Jul 8, 2018 00:31
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I'm really glad this game got made. Jeff Vogel owns. Spiderweb is the only company I instabuy every game from sight unseen.
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Sep 12, 2019 04:38
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Anybody know if there's a more firm date on an iOS release?
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Sep 13, 2019 22:18
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