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Avernum 2: Crystal Souls

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The reason Avernum 4-6 are available for sale on Steam is that he doesn't plan to remake them. Of course, he could change his mind at some point.
 

cruelio

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Vogel is better than most AAA producers despite his weird Bioware fetisch.

Brutal damning by faint praise

The reason Avernum 4-6 are available for sale on Steam is that he doesn't plan to remake them. Of course, he could change his mind at some point.

He also spent years lambasting the indie gaming pricing race to the bottom then he released avadon and a month later was selling it for less than half price and preemptively wrote on his blog no, he wasn't giving refunds. So yes, good plan relying on the word of the Square-Enix of shitty indie rpgs.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
It takes some talent to come across as an edgy prick even to a forum full of people who already dislike Jeff Vogel. :salute:
 

roshan

Arcane
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So, how good are the Vogel games exactly? And which is the best one? I'd like one with the best gameplay but do need something with decent graphics and an intuitive interface. I'm guessing that I would have to pick between the Avadon games and the Avernum rewrites?
 

AMG

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Considering you were disappointed by Fallout, you should probably give Vogelware a wide berth.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
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So, how good are the Vogel games exactly? And which is the best one? I'd like one with the best gameplay but do need something with decent graphics and an intuitive interface. I'm guessing that I would have to pick between the Avadon games and the Avernum rewrites?

Get the Avernum I rewrite on Steam for 2$ at the moment (until tomorrow). It's a more interesting (and more Vogel'ian) world than Avadon.
 

the_shadow

Arcane
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Dec 30, 2011
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1,179
So, how good are the Vogel games exactly? And which is the best one? I'd like one with the best gameplay but do need something with decent graphics and an intuitive interface. I'm guessing that I would have to pick between the Avadon games and the Avernum rewrites?

YMMV. I grew up playing Vogelware, so the re-remakes seem pretty stale to me. I'd recommend Avernum 6, as well as the Geneforge series, although I didn't particularly like GF3 and 4. You should also look into Nethergate. Although it's a small game compared to Jeff's other titles, it feels more polished. He did a lot of research in regards to Celtic/Roman history and lore, and the Celtic and Roman scenarios intertwine nicely.
 

Kem0sabe

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Reading through Vogel's latest tweets and he is ever deeper into the degenerate rabbit hole.

'If in your RPG I find over 10 crates to search in any location, I am quitting. Also, if the stupid barrel is empty, don't let me search it.'

'Crafting systems in RPGs are getting SO intrusive and overdone. Dude, I'm here to take over Mordor, not Etsy. #cranky #moremurderplease'

'Want all RPGs to have a toggle I can flip to never see any crafting materials or recipes. If I don't take it off a corpse, I don't want it.'

' Then you kill a boss and it just drops RARE crafting materials. Ooh. SO excited. I wanted a badass magic sword, but I got 1/8 of one instead'
 

Multi-headed Cow

Guest
To be fair I agree with 90% of that. The only part of it that slightly gets my manly tightey whiteys in a bunch is searching 10 crates in one location is fine in some (Very few) games. I almost always completely ignore crafting in RPGs if I can at all avoid it.

Edit: Although to clarify, I mean PC-crafting skills and shit. If there are one or two "BRING ME THE METEOR THAT FELL INTO THE RIVER STYX DURING A FULL MOON" NPCs crafting you a thing for one or two pieces, that's a-ok.
 

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
'Also, if the stupid barrel is empty, don't let me search it.'

Doesn't the novelty of checking containers kinda wear off if one always finds some more or less insignificant shit there and knows it....
 

Explorerbc

Arcane
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Nov 22, 2012
Messages
1,170
I don't know if that's a bit ironic. Escape from the Pit had a lot of trash for you to loot.

In the beginning, I would hoard bricks, rocks, pots, candles etc only to find out you can't do anything with them, you can't sell them or use them in any way, they are just there. If I remember correctly most crates were a disappointment after a while
 

Night Goat

The Immovable Autism
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Codex 2013 Codex 2014
Fuck crafting. Ever since WoW had crafting in it and became really popular, every fucking RPG has to check off a "has crafting" box on a checklist and it's always shit.
 
Self-Ejected

Bubbles

I'm forever blowing
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Fuck crafting. Ever since WoW had crafting in it and became really popular, every fucking RPG has to check off a "has crafting" box on a checklist and it's always shit.

Neo Scavenger and Underrail would be worse games without their crafting mechanics.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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I agree with all of his points here. In a survival game like NEO Scavenger, dumpster diving and crafting are thematically appropriate and interesting systems. In the typical high fantasy RPG, they are completely at odds with the narrative source material. The fact that a major pillar of MOTB's gameplay is sifting through containers, organizing your inventory, properly kitting out your characters, and crafting stuff is mindboggling: none of that has much to do with a high-fantasy, supernatural setting.
 

Pope Amole II

Nerd Commando Game Studios
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Eh, it's his usual hypocrisy - all his games have ridiculous amounts of trash loot (you loot a lot of containers only to find minor stuff that is worth something, but not that much and, essentially, it's just there to stretch the game) and his Avernums also have a weapon crafting system (not that complicated, but still) and a potion crafting system (which can be rather grindy or, rather, it needs to be grinded to gain some noticeable profits).

Considering that all that is present in his recent Avernum 2... Yeah.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays the virtue. If he should be criticized, it's for the games, not the tweets. I found the trash in his old games annoying because the combination of trash / encumberance / constant cashflow problems / no in-game price on running loops between dungeons and towns meant that I spent a huge amount of time acting as a mule. That said, muling in the Exile setting is frankly much more thematically consistent than dumpster diving in KOTOR or MOTB. And it was a lot easier to collect the actual loot, even if the muling was a pain. Finally, Vogel's games seemed to include all that trash in homage to the Ultima series -- i.e., for simulationist reasons -- but modern RPGs include them for "gameplay" reasons: magical items lying in midden heaps and so forth.

Also, while I'm at it, let me say that not only is looting/crafting in most RPGs non-thematic, it's actually anti-thematic. For example, the idea that you'd find a light saber crystal in a random crate and be able to build your 17th light saber from it, swapping from one light saber to the next in order to get a small incremental benefit, basically is a way of saying, "Light sabers are neither iconic or intimately connected to their owner." Same with fantasy heroes and their weapons of choice. PS:T does this better than most, at least, but it's frankly silly that you have situations like a warrior who has led a long and illustrious adventuring career discovering a better weapon than the one he's carrying within 35 seconds of joining the party. It would be like Arthur not merely drawing the sword from the stone and getting Excalibur from the lady in the lake, but also getting a rapier from a tree spirit, a magic axe as a wedding gift from Guinivere, and buying an echanted broadsword from an itinerant merchant at Camlann. At that point, you might as well not have weapons in the plot at all.

In most RPGs, loot mechanics add almost nothing to the XP gained by grinding combat and exist merely as a timesink for neurotic players. As a neurotic person, it's probably what finally did in RPGs for me. That and pingpong FedEx quests.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I agree with all of his points here. In a survival game like NEO Scavenger, dumpster diving and crafting are thematically appropriate and interesting systems. In the typical high fantasy RPG, they are completely at odds with the narrative source material. The fact that a major pillar of MOTB's gameplay is sifting through containers, organizing your inventory, properly kitting out your characters, and crafting stuff is mindboggling: none of that has much to do with a high-fantasy, supernatural setting.

Interesting that you bring up MOTB as an example. Wasn't the crafting in that game largely based on "spirit essences"? I think those were somewhat appropriate, insofar as the game can be said to have had a kind of mechanistic approach towards its "spirit" and "soul"-based metaphysics.
 

Kem0sabe

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Finding epic treasure with your heroes is one of the pillars of a fantasy rpg, crafting not so much... But the quest to craft or reforge a suitably mystical item is also an rpg staple, so for me it's bearable and if well implemented quite enjoyable.

What Vogel let's on from his latest tweets and random Bioware inspired thoughts, is that he wants streamlined experiences, where the player is just in it for the theme park ride and emotional engagement to the plot.
 
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MRY

Wormwood Studios
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A limited number of important crafting quests -- like building your first light saber in KOTOR -- are totally reasonable. As a significant gameplay mechanic, it makes sense only in scavenger settings. Even then, I question whether it makes sense to have it so involved, rather than boiling it down to something much more straightforward (say, a "parts" currency, rare schematics, and perhaps each schematic needing one or two unique components). The greater variety of "ingredients" may be more thematically appropriate in scavenger settings, but it's just not very much fun -- like all manner of grind, it fuels players' compulsive needs while temporarily assuaging them, rather than encouraging them to make mechanically and thematically meaningful choices. Grinding is not (in my opinion) the kind of gameplay "depth" that we should applaud.

MOTB tried to dress up its crafting mechanics with appropriate verbiage, but very few of the crafting items you got were tied to the game's themes: you could harvest rare items here and there from important NPCs, but that was about it (as I recall). "Vampire who is fighting or feeding his craving, which both makes him stronger and more vulnerable" is an iconic theme; "while meanwhile stopping to craft throwaway trinkets from the souls of dead gods" is a farce. It's only marginally better than jRPG heroes stopping to play collectible card games as the world verges on coming to an end.[*] Gold Box games had vast amount of trash loot to gather from combats, but that was mostly for simulationist reasons (like the stupid gigantic inventories of indistuishable weapons). At least there, the looting was fast and it made a little bit of thematic sense that starting adventures would make a point of gathering up junk to sell. The idea of the Spirit Eater stopping to rifle through a dead foes bloody rags for a handful of gold coins is ridiculous. And no one enjoys doing it, except in the sense that we crave our addictions and will claim to enjoy engaging in them to pretend our behavior isn't compulsive. (E.g., "I love posting about design theory! It's so rewarding!") If your loot system warrants a "hold this button to highlight containers" button, then it is indefensible. If you think to yourself, "I need to put some good stuff in barrels sometimes or players will never be rewarded for dumpster diving," then you are cynical or insane, and you should just add an achievement Searched Every Barrel and take the loot out entirely.

It may not be possible to get gamers to give up their addictions cold turkey, but the first step is recognizing that there's a problem, so I guess I'm cautiously optimistic about Vogel's position.

is that he wants streamlined experiences
In general, streamlining is good. It is bad when you are cutting away meaningful material or the details that give the game character: for example, if you remove strategic combat choices in order to leave more time for awesome animations, that is "streamlining" only in the procrustean sense. The fact that some developers have used "streamlining" as an excuse for simplifying meaningful mechanics doesn't mean that we should applaud developers for retaining pointless grinds and feedback loops, especially when those timesinks actively hurt other parts of the game (like themes or narrative).

[* Of course no one is really troubled by it because we've gotten so used to so-called "ludonarrative dissonance"; ultimately MOTB probably did a better job than most at trying to bridge that gap with crafting, but the simpler solution would be to just leave the system out, or hone it to a less fiddly and more meaningful state. That said, it's easy to say, "Don't pander to the masses" when you don't need to move copies, don't have a publisher and licensor to answer to, etc. Add to this my usual disclaimer that MOTB is certainly in my top five RPGs, perhaps top two.]
 
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TOME

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Is this actually worth playing? I remember I tried Escape from the pit but didn't like it one bit. The skill tree was awful compared to earlier avernums and the new game engine didn't agree with my old gaming pc.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Nah, avernum 2 isn't worth it, unless you're looking for a very long and simple dungeon crawl with plenty of trash mobs. There's no story with multiple paths/perspectives like in the geneforge series, and the world is pretty dull.

Go get gene forge and nethergate instead, those are some of the best rpgs available
 

TOME

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Just to clarify, I have played Avernums 1-4 and Geneforges 1-5, plus Nethergate. It's the new engine and skill systems I'm wondering.
 

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