Avadon Black Fortress - Can a retro rpg survive in 2012?

I have been playing a bit of "Avadon, The Black Fortress" from Spiderweb software. This is an unashamedly old school party based rpg that looks like it could have been made twenty years ago but hides a rich gaming experience underneath its ugly exterior. With its strong storyline and deep character development the game reminds me of the original Fallout and even Planescape Torment which is high  praise indeed. I have about twenty hours played and I am less than half way through my first play through so there is plenty of entertainment value in here.

Even as I was enjoying the game myself I did wonder if a younger audience would be prepared to see beyond the dated graphics and somewhat clunky controls. Happily Jeff Vogel the owner of Spiderweb software which created this game is a vocal member of the indie gaming community and he keeps an informative blog. Spiderweb is doing very well, thank you very much. Games like the Avernum and Geneforge sagas have been paying the bills since 1995 and they have actually seen a huge increase in sales since the recent release of their games on Steam and the Ipad. Perhaps the Steam buyers are old timers like myself but I doubt that is the case for the Ipad. I think it is safe to conclude that this is not just a nostalgia kick.

One of the most interesting things on Jeff's blog is following his reactions over time to the falling price of indie games. Spiderweb used to be a company that sold a small number of games at €25 a pop. Back in 2009 Jeff railed against services like Steam which were pushing the prices of indie games down to a few dollars. As Jeff says they were "creating the impression of insulting cheapness" through constant sales. Although Jeff maintained this line for quite a while he eventually gave in to market forces and experimented with discounted pricing on both Steam and the Ipad. Happily this was a success and Spiderweb appears to have successfully transitioned into a company which now sells a much larger volume of games at lower price points with overall revenues  increased. This sorted list of of Jeff's blog posts on pricing should allow you to follow the shift in Jeff's thinking.  Start at the bottom and work up for correct chronological order.

Many of Spiderweb's games are still $20 which puts them beyond impulse purchase territory for many gamers. They have sizeable free demo's however so just download one of their games and try it out to see if it is worth spending your cash. You can pick up a couple of the games on Steam for less than a tenner and Avadon itself is currently on half price sale so well worth it.

NBI Wrap-up. all the advice in one place!!!

When Syp asked me to give some advice to newbie bloggers I found myself in something of a quandary. I have been blogging for almost six years but I am not sure I have gleaned any pearly wisdom in that time to pass on. That is why I decided to pick individual posts from the history of his blog that stick in my mind and in telling the story behind those posts I hope to have highlighted a few useful lessons. All that remains is to to try and summarise all the lessons here in this my closing post of Newbie blogger Initiative 2012.

I guess the lesson from my first story behind the post is that sometimes events in a game can surprise you by raising real life issues. While this can be problematic for gaming it makes great writing material.

My  second story behind the post has a couple of different lessons: Writing about a popular new game just after release is a great time to be a blogger and also if you get bored just writing yet another ten rats try writing in character. It might not get you traffic but it sure is a lot of fun.

The third story behind the post is a reminder that you are the boss of your blog and you can go off topic once in a while and write some personal stuff.  It may not win you readers but you just might write some of your favourite ever posts this way.

The fourth story behind the post has two lessons again. The most obvious lesson is to reccommend any gaming blogger to have at  EVE. Even if you hate the game you are bound to get a couple of good posts out of it. The more geneal lesson however is that blogging gives you a completely new way of evaluating a game. In many ways whether or not you enjoy the game becomes scondary to how well it will write.

In my final story behind the post I decided to go all sensible and make the fairly straightfoward reccommendation that bloggers use simple informative titles for any post that wants to attract readers.

Oops, almost forgot. My last and perhaps most important piece of advice: Go back and read your old posts. I know of no better way to enjoy the fruits of your creativity. 

Thats it from me for this years NBI. Happy gaming and happy writing.

NBI The Story behind the post #5

This is my final story behind the post so I had better make an effort to give some useful advice for  a change and not just advice on how to write posts that no one ever reads!

Checking back through Blogger's statistics this is my most viewed post ever: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2008/12/lotro-forgotten-treasury.html

It is a tolerably competent after action report of a fairly challenging mid game instance in Lotro but it didn't stand out in my mind when I wrote it. Yet it pulled in a heap of readers and continues to pull them in to this day.

Why was this post so popular? In the first place I think it is because it was a helpful post about an area of a popular game that many players experienced diffculties with. Those who struggled with the instance came looking for solutions and those who overcame it came looking for alternative methods. None of this would have got me traffic however if I hadn't given the post the simplest most obvious name possible.  Even today my post is number 2 on a Google Search for Forgotten Treasuy and that is where all these visitors have come from. Google is extremely friendly towards bloggers but if you want it to help you then you have to help yourself first by using simple obvious names for your posts and for your blog. 

The value of a Brand: Diablo 3 versus Dungeon Siege 3

It is not by chance that I have an Android phone while my wife uses an Apple product. After eighteen years of marriage it has become patently clear that we hold mutually opposing views on the value of branding. My lovely wife is a brand junkie. She has an inherent distrust of generic products and if possible she will always go for the most expensive market leading brand. I on the other hand am not so much a brand agnostic as a brand atheist. I actively seek out cheaper products and avoid buying the market leader ever. I will trawl the internet and walk the roads for lesser known alternatives and nothing pleases me quite so much as finding a little known product that costs less and performs better that the brand leader.  

I am sure this opposition was a cause of strife in the early years of our union but 18 years of happy marriage has a way of moulding a couple's habits together. Compromises become so embedded you forget they are even there. At this stage we apply our preferences to our own private purchases and simply take for granted that the labels in our larder change dramatically depending on who does the grocery shopping.

If I were in militant mood I might boast at my thriftiness in comparison to my wife's indulgence but to be honest over the years I have come to see a certain logic in her position. It is not so much a matter of brand snobbery as a matter of guaranteed performance. For every story of a bargain I picked up that met our needs she could counter with examples of shoddy substitutes that performed as meagerly as they cost.

When you buy a phone from Apple, a car from Mercedes, a tin of beans from Heinz or a detergent from Proctor and Gamble you may or may not be getting the best product and you probably aren't getting the cheapest product. You are however almost certainly getting a product which does what you expect it to do. If I were in the mood for a rant I would point out that the reason big brands usually meet expectations is because we, sheep like consumers that we are, fall for their hype and allow them to mould our expectations to miraculaously coincide with the capabilities of their own offering. Regardless, whether it is due to brainwashing or not, buy a well known brand and you are buying insurance against dissapointment.

What has this got to do with gaming? Well Tobold today wrote a piece musing on the value of the brand to Diablo 3. In a somewhat dismissive summary of the game he suggest that the Diablo brand adds as much as 20 points to the review score. I think he may be missing the point. You cannot judge Diablo without taking into account the implicit promise of the brand. The generally positive impressions I have read from others is that the game play is exactly what they expect in a Diablo game with a high degree of polish on top. This is the promise of the brand fulfilled and the game is going to make a tonne of money for Blizzard. Indeed the only question marks on the horizon relate to the innovations of requiring an always on internet and the advent of a real money auction house but it seems likely at this stage that customers may complain about these for a while but still keep playing.

Contrast this with Dungeon Siege 3. Dungeon Siege never commanded quite as much respect as Diablo but it is nevertheless a very successful brand and one would expect a sequel to benefit from that. The game itself is very good and highly enjoyable but it is not what Dungeon Siege fans expected. They expected a hack and slash dungeon crawl, what they got is closer to third person action adventure. Rather than profiting from the brand the game seems to have suffered because of it with luke warm reviews and complaints from many customers. The implicit promise of branding was not honoured and the brand itself has been tarnished.

Thumbs up for Dungeon Siege 3

I have just completed  Dungeon Siege 3 and I am giving the game a very strong thumbs up. As long as you don't approach the game with set expectations of what a hack and slash adventure should be then you will find a very enjoyable action adventure game with one of the best stories I have ever seen in a dungeon crawler. Mind you that is isn't saying much but it is refreshing to have some kind of coherent wrapper for your spree of rampant monster killing.

Yes the game has flaws even if you set aside the prejudice that "it isn't a real Hack and Slash". The biggest complaint for single player is that the itemisation and stat systems are somewhat random and generally confusing. Nevertheless it is still a great single player experience.

Multi-player has come in for criticism because it is a lot less flexible than it should be. You can help out another player by "driving" a character in their game but you cannot bring your own character. I can see the disadvantages of this system but I am  having a lot of fun playing co-op with my daughter. She is playing through on easy setting and I drop in to give her a hand whenever I am around. It literally is drop in / drop out. I pick up a second controller press a button and I get into the game.  If I drop the controller then after a few seconds my character reverts to AI control. Overall I think this system is great for local co-op where you are helping out a friend or family member but I can see why it seems rather pointless for internet play. Why would you want to jump into a strangers game and just help them out with no lasting benefit to your own character?

Warning to PC players: As with most 3rd person action games these days an Xbox 360 controller is strongly recommended and that means two are needed for local co-op.

NBI The story behind the post #4

You know you have caught the blogging bug when you start to judge gaming experiences by how well they will write. Getting pod killed in he harsh world of EVE is not a pleasant experience but the first time it happened to me I was inspired to write this post: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.com/2008/05/podded.html.

The game's lore suggests that memories are instantly tranferred to a clone at the moment of death but I used a bit of poetic license to imagine the first thoughts of someone waking up in a clone body with no memory of the fiery death of their predecessor.

I think it works and I like the post very much. At the end the newly revived clone dis-owns the foolishness that got his predecessor killed. This was actually a true reflection of my own thoughts about the game at that point. Getting pod killed for the first time is a right of passage in the game. I have heard of several players who never made it past that point. Those who persist are likely to be pod killed many times more in the future but it is that first death to the guns of another player that makes you grow up. You may have heard that EVE is a harsh game but until you have your plans ruined by another player you cannot really appreciate what that means. Perhaps the hardest lesson is that you have no one to blame but yourself. Someone else may have fired the shot it was your own foolishness which gave them the opportunity to do it.

For a relatively niche game EVE punches far above is weight in terms of write-ability. I know of no other mmorpg that provides so much drama and intrigue at every level of the game and I could have picked several other EVE tales for this "story behind he post" slot.