Wow. I had actually forgotten about Avadon. Screw the new M&B I’m buying this on Monday. Trying to follow my new self imposed budget is a bitch.
Cool. That’s my birthday. I’ll gift myself.
Anyone knows an average/approximation of time to complete each game?
One of the reviews I read indicated that the game was designed for each playthrough to be roughly 25-35 hours, with a lot of replayability.
OOh, nice. Thanks!
Is this coming to Steam?
Jeff wants it there. Probably better to buy it directly from him though, so he gets all the money.
About damn time!
I just bought the mac version on Saturday and have been playing almost non-stop since then. Glad to see the PC version is out now; I just downloaded it, plugged in my registration code, copied my saved games off the mac and bam, in business.
While looking around I noticed the map of Avernum 1,2,4 and 6 are the same. 3 is set on the surface and 5 somewhere else. Avadon is instead 20% smaller/shorter compared to previous games.
I wonder if it doesn’t get incredibly boring playing through the same maps over and over across games.
Also still looking to how long each game is for a play through. I’m reading very contrasting comments.
That’s because they all have tons of side quests. They are long games, and well worth the money. I have never seen ANYONE complain about the length of one of these games.
I’ve beta tested Spiderweb games for years. It’s definitely shorter than A6 but I don’t meticulously count the hours…30-ish? It’s a decent length, to my mind. Not too short but it doesn’t overstay.
Re Avernum maps, the actual in-game details are quite different from game to game. Jeff doesn’t worry about “canon” too much…the same town will be different from game to game, for example. I’m sure it bothers some people but I always found them very different. That said, I’ve never played them back-to-back - I play one new Spiderweb game every year when they are released.
Well it can be kind of cool to revisit an old area and see what has changed.
Not sure I like the weird sleek, gothic-looking text window, I also can’t change the font’s size no matter what settings I use.
Nevertheless I like what I’m playing so far, the writing is nothing spectacular as usual, but the dialogue and characters look more polished and sharp than what I’m used to in Spiderweb games. I have nothing against a slightly shorter lenght, as Spiderweb games from my perspective tend to have a lot of filler dungeons that serve no real purpose.
I can see the little influences from Dragon Age: the enemies and the party slowly wearing each other down, no death (auto-resurrection after a character is beaten), auto-regeneration of health and mana, the mage has an attack that it can spam at will for free, cooldowns for skills… not sure I like most of them at it seems to be primarily a mean to target a lower common denominator, but well the game still seems like it has a lot to offer.
I’m downloading the demo as I type this. I’ve been considering getting the Avernum games for a while now, but haven’t so far. Even though many people seem to really like those games, I’m not sure I would, judging from the (admittedly few) reviews I’ve read.
This game seems very promising, though. Maybe it’ll be my gateway into Spiderweb games. :)
The games are set several years apart from each other. I found it kind of interesting to see how the towns and such change. There’s always a few characters who were around for the earlier games who survived to the later ones. Avernum has a really nice sense of place, imo.
Avadon … I’m downloading but I’m not going to play it until I’ve finished Geneforge.
I am really in the mood for this kind of game, and have been waiting for Avadon to come over to Windows for the last few weeks. Really happy that it’s finally out! I’ll be snagging it tonight.
c’mon ipad version…
Short:
Engine is in great shape. A big departure from the Geneforge series is the irregularity of the ares in terms of shape/size. This gives the game a far more organic feel. About the only down side is that it’s not possible to control where you enter an individual area (as you could in geneforge). It just occasionally means extra walking.
Any complaints about quest markers at this point are made by people who are very obviously pod people.
The ability changes are something of an adjustment. No more spamming fireballs/searing orbs/etc. Vitality (I think it’s called vitality) is the blue resource. It’s not the best name. It does not refresh between fights (so far). But you really won’t be using a ton of abilities in fights.
Occasionally your party members will banter with each other or you. But this is done BG2 style. that is, you’ll be walking along without a care in the world and then a dialog box will appear, forcing you to start or exit a conversation. I have enjoyed the banter - there is less of it than you would expect from a Bioware game, obviously - but the implementation makes me want to kill someone. I need to speak to Jeff about this.
There is a. . . well I’m not sure what to call it. Trash bag - it’s for putting the obvious sellables. I think it might be infinite but I am not sure. It’s not bad, but an interface tweak or two would make it a lot nicer.