Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

Yeah, this isn't said enough. Avadon had really great boss fights, many of which were almost puzzle like in their design (the major exception being the final, optional, redbeard fight which, while having a neat gimmick in theory, was truly fucking awful in practice. It's been a while, but I remember it being 4 respawning spawning vases that had to be destroyed first in order to have a brief window in which you could harm redbeard. The problem being, that each vase was only vulnerable to one damage type and the vases were in two different rooms, so it was really fucking hard to damage them and keep your party alive when only 1 or 2 party members could even damage any given vase and you had to be spread out across 2 rooms. That fight will take you 45 minutes to complete on normal and you very well could be wiped at any point.) Since then, though, Vogel seems to have reverted back to his standard, "Dude with tons of hitpoints periodically spawns waves of minions while you slowly whittle away at his health" model. Which is a shame, as apart from that one fight, Avadon's boss fights were a high watermark for Spiderweb's combat design.

 

Is anyone here a registered member on Spiderweb Software's forum? IncendiaryDevice ?


Because I have yet to understand why this man will not go on Matt Chat. I have personally emailed him and asked him to go on there. Matt said he has reached out multiple times, as have some other of his viewers, and received no response? WTF??

I would really enjoy an interview series, but this man is competing against Pierre from KoTC for dumbest business savvy developers.


Can someone post on there, so he can at least see it? FFS...

*kicks a rock*

 

HoboForEternity ?

Scrooge ?

pippin ?

Pope Amole II ?


Someoooooonnnee???

 

I'm a member, but Vogel claims not to read his forums. He does pop in when new games are released, but tends to only to respond in the technical issue sections. So I can't really think of anywhere to post on the forums where he'd see it. He does check his e-mail, so provided you didn't format it like spam or something he'll probably see it via e-mail. Otherwise, Spiderweb does have a business phone line. If he doesn't respond to e-mail, I'd leave a professional sounding message.

That said, there are lots of hardcore fans over at the forums who know his habits better than I. If you just make an account and ask them (in the general discussion section) the best way to get in contact with Vogel to set up an interview, they will probably know better than I.

 

I guess I'm going full normie on this one. *warms up his best phone voice*. Call him in a few hours. It's 6am here, so not time yet.

Thanks Juan_Carlo.

 

No, I'm not a member over there

 

I am a member over there, but not really that active.

But i think he said when avadon 3 is announced he read the forums, especially when new games are coming out.

But dude is low profile as fuck, i rarely see him do an interview. All info about spiderweb we got trough their own channel like twitter, forum or his personal blog post

 

Low profile? He has a blog and twitter and apparently is on reddit since he did an AMA. I don't do any of that but if I was worthy of an interview with Matt, or the Codex, I'd make the time.

 

I've heard he replies to emails, so you might want to try that.

 

Tried that. No response. I'll call the business line, since I own all the old Avernums and Avadons and his remakes.

 

PC Gamer feature on Jeff Vogel and his business: http://www.pcgamer.com/how-one-indie-developer-has-kept-the-classic-crpg-alive-for-20-years/

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The first wizard I ever killed was the wireframe master of the Dungeons of Daggorath, at the end of a grinding slog through five grid-based, monochromatic levels that took me most of a summer to finish. I've played (and loved) a lot of RPGs since then, but it's been a long time since I've dug into one like Avadon 3: The Warborn. It's not just retro-flavored, it's retro, full stop: Top-down and grid-based, with simplistic graphics (or primitive, if you want to be less charitable about it), minimal sound and visual effects, no music or voice acting, and lots of reading. It feels like it belongs to a generation of games where the 'c' in 'cRPG' was an important distinction, because most people still thought of RPGs as pen-and-paper games.

Some RPGs in recent memory, like Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity and inXile'sWasteland 2, promised to bring back that old-school feeling. Avadon feels old.

And yet it's managed to find an audience. Not just the Avadon trilogy—developer Spiderweb Software has been making games like Avadon for more than 20 years, long enough for the games industry to move on while it continues to make a very particular kind of RPG. There aren't a lot of people playing games like Avadon, but Spiderweb's survival shows there's still a small group of players hungry for RPGs that genuinely feel like they'd run on a Pentium. Experiences like those can't fall back on swanky eye candy or sprawling first-person worlds to draw in their players, so they rely on something that sometimes feels downright novel these days: Telling a good story.

Spiderweb Software is a tiny outfit, consisting of two full-time employees, Jeff Vogel and his wife Mariann Krizsan, backed by “a goodly number of freelancers, mainly for PR and art.” Since releasing its first game, Exile: Escape From the Pit in 1995, Spiderweb has established a well-earned reputation for crafting sprawling, story-heavy RPGs of the sort that are rarely seen anymore in mainstream games. They aren't pretty, but they're laden with story, characters, and interesting—and difficult—choices. It's a narrow niche, but one that has served Spiderweb well.

How did Vogel come to serve that particular demand—and why does he keep doing it? “The indie games biz is super-duper-flooded right now. To write a game that stands out, you need to put real work in it, and you need to do that work in an area that a thousand people aren’t doing already,” he said. “That’s why story-heavy RPGs are a reasonable business to be in. There are a multitude of indie RPGPs out now. However, most of them don’t have good, deep stories, because writing a good story is really hard. What are the story-heavy RPG series now? Pillars of Eternity. Divinity. And not really much else. That gives me actual room in the market to work.”

Vogel started writing stories when he was around 10, and describes himself as a fantasy author who just happens to work in the medium of gaming. It's a bit surprising, then, that he's not really a big fan of the fantasy genre. “I read it some, sure, and I even like some of it. The Magician series by Lev Grossman is probably my favorite. It’s just not something I’m drawn to,” he said. “My favorite fiction is realistic fiction in a setting far enough from ours that it is basically fantasy now. I recently reread The Grapes of Wrath and was absolutely entranced.”

And while words are the backbone of the games he creates, he also believes that too much of a good thing is not a good thing at all. When I mentioned Obisidian's recent claim that its upcoming fantasy RPG Tyranny is built on more than 600,000 words, he seemed downright taken aback. He hasn't counted the words in his own games since Avernum 3, which came to about 200,000 words; he thinks Avadon 3 weighs in somewhere in the neighborhood of 120,000-150,000.

“But I think huge words counts are a real danger. I mean, 600,000? Good lord! That is longer that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit put together. That’s a big, big chunk of verbiage. It doesn’t make me want to play the game more,” he said. “I think there is always a peril in flooding the player with words. Designers have discovered the joy of text. Now they have to discover the joy of brevity and skillful editing. You can almost always make a piece of writing better by shortening it. I loved the writing of Stanley Parable, and it didn’t have many words at all. And I’m about halfway through the indie hit Inside. That is a gorgeously written game, and it is entirely wordless.”

The loyal fans
Vogel's appreciation for well-written videogames is shared by his fans. I spoke to some Avadon 3 beta testers, including homemakers, a data analyst, a computer science graduate student, and a theater manager at a major university. Despite the obvious diversity of the group, they do share some commonalities.

They tend to be older than the “average” gamer (no teenagers screaming into headsets in this lot); they have a long-standing (but not necessarily fanatical) interest in the RPG genre, citing influences ranging from Angband and Super Mario RPG to Morrowind, KOTOR, Dragon Age, and The Witcher; and they all say the storytelling is what brought them to Spiderweb, and keeps them there.

“The stories are always great. Jeff is a brilliant writer,” one fan, who goes by the name Istara, explained. “Spiderweb also really forces you to make moral choices, and there's usually no one 'perfect' 100 percent righteous choice. In this regard they have deeper replayability. The Companion system for Avadon is also cool, getting them to like you so they all stick with you.”

recent AMA that he's always one bad game away from getting a job selling shoes, has never pursued crowdfunding. Keeping things small and avoiding overreach helped keep costs down, as did the fact that most of Spiderweb's projects are multi-game series.


Crowdfunding may not have revolutionized the indie game scene in quite the way some of us thought it would. “The illusions have all fallen away. Everyone now sees indie gaming for what it is: An extremely difficult, blood-sport kind of business,” Vogel said. But he's not making a principled stand against asking for money up-front, either. In fact, the first-ever Spiderweb Software Kickstarter is on the way. In two or three years.

“In two years or so I’m going to throw everything out and write a whole new game engine. When I do that, I think a Kickstarter will be a good idea,” he said. “All of those [earlier] games were sequels or remasters, so I didn’t need the money. I could self-fund and keep all the early sales for myself. Never forget: Kickstarter = presales. For our new engine, however, we will need some funding to get all the graphics redone. That doesn’t come cheap. So we are planning a Kickstarter in early 2018 or so.”

But don't look for a dramatic change in his approach to graphics, or anything else, when the new technology comes into play. Vogel said in his AMA that making good graphics requires a skill-set and resources that he doesn't have, and that he will “never, ever” be able to please gamers who are in it for the eye candy. “I will never write a really pretty game. I have to go for the Undertale crowd: people who can look past a mostly not-so-pretty game to the cool stuff under,” he said. “Our next game series, which I'll do after Avernum 3, will have all-new graphics. But honestly? You'll still hate them. They'll be a different low-budget thing that you hate. And that's fair. You can love or not-love what you want. But I have the budget I have and I do what I can.”

That will probably suit his fans just fine.

Special thanks to Istara, Trish Hausmann, Meredith Dixon, Danielle Rapoport, Ben K, and Madcat for their invaluable help.

There are some interesting points like that he thinks his niche is still there, why he was taken aback by hearing Tyranny has over 600K words, and quotes from his loyal fans/beta testers, but I think most interesting bit is that Vogel will do a Kickstarter in early 2018 o_O for a game with a new engine:

 

so it is after avernum: ruined world remake right?

 

Rebuild of Avernum: George Lucas Special Edition

 

God if he has a Blades of Avernum-type game editor as a streth goal I will piss my pants. Probably not though. But still....

 

Jeff is right to be afraid of Tyranny's 600 000 words.

I'm playing his Geneforge 5 right now (only played a demo when it was released) and I'm remembering how surprisingly good it is considering the visuals. His writing gets to the point. His explanation of situations and puzzles do not assume I'm an idiot. His characters do not take my heroics for granted and simultaneously they do not descend into the edgy dark fantasy with blood and betrayal.

I liked Pillars of Eternity for the gameplay (mostly end game when combat systems comes together) and I've liked the world too, but oooh boy, wouldn't it benefit from someone cutting all those walls of text to get them to the point. I've just finished Dragon Age Origins and it's a boring grind-fest with my character DNA was synthesized from Manowar song but it had a right idea of writing walls of text of lore and hiding it into books and in-game library. I recall Witcher 3 and Might & Magic X did this recently too. Those huge chunks of text look good in a game like Planescape Torment where your hero is defined as a philosopher with club in the world were philosophy crafts reality. But in Pillars of Eternity (and Tyranny, I presume) you can be a mercenary or a wild brute and it would only make sense for most characters not caring about world lore and art and culture and examining every detail unless it affects them directly. BioWare, of course, is afraid of boring player with too much time without dehumanizing grind - so they go too far with separating lore from the game; but Spiderweb is spot on with its balance between classic RPG combat, puzzles, exploration, progression and reading as part of all those activities.

 

Vogel dont post on his own forums, more then occasionally (yeah i got an account there) when something picks his interest, but as said he do respond to emails.

Although, Mustawd, he could be ignoring you because you come from the Codex LOL

Yeah that was a good move on his behalf, i had much fun with that editor.

 

He said many times he regretted making Blades because it didn't sell particularly better than normal Exile games, but also (in his mind) encouraged people to not buy his new games, since all he does is make more copies of the same game that could be created in said editor. I have fond memories of his early games, but Vogel is the exact opposite of a bro.

 

That does make sense from a business perspective - especially his business of remaking Exile until the sun goes Supernova.

 

Clearly his idea of a game is new* content. When his engine breaks down after a decade or so, he gets a new engine and proceeds to spend the next decade remaking all his old games for it. This is the #1 role model for indie rpg devs.


*may contain up to 99% recycled material

 

each generation have it's own avernum. it's good to know my children someday will be playing avernum remake's remake's remake

 

Wasn't his main argument "they were a lot more work but the sales were a lot fewer"? Besides, it's not like either Blades game really cut into his sales.