Avadon 3: The Warborn

[HoboForEternity]

lot of people hate avadon, but i love it. it's worse than geneforge, but i like it better than avernum: eftp. his cycle isn't usually this long.

 

[Baron]

ts;dr

 

[Doktor Best]

I also liked Avadon, it was better than its reputation on codex. Give the man some time, he probably wants to put some extra effort into it because critics were louder than usual on his last games.

 

[Crooked Bee]

 

[HoboForEternity]

yes! :D

unlike most guys here, i love avadon and really excited for this!

 

[almondblight]

Not sure if anything will come of this, but it's at least promising:

My games have long dealt with difficulty by making foes have more health and do more damage. I want to handle this in a smarter way.

I am strongly considering having area of effect spells do friendly fire damage on Hard and Torment level. I want combat positioning in my games to make a difference, and this will be a key part of that. I will also make the more nasty foe abilities (like charm and fear) be more common on higher difficulties.

 

[Severian Silk]

He should make a tactics game. Avadon Tactics.

 

[LESS T_T]

Steam page is live: http://store.steampowered.com/app/460780/

It's coming in September 14th.

Avadon 3: The Warborn is a huge, old-school, indie fantasy role-playing adventure, the conclusion of the epic Avadon trilogy. You are a Hand of Avadon, warrior and spy, judge and executioner, with nearly unlimited power to fight the enemies of your homeland. Your word is Law. However, your lands have been invaded. Barbarians and monsters are rampaging through your home, and you are the only one who has a way to stop them.

Avadon 3: The Warborn is an epic, retro adventure in an enormous and unique world. Choose from five different character classes, each with dozens of unique spells and abilities. Explore cunning dungeons, hunt for hundreds of magical artifacts, and pass judgment on your enemies (or just people you don’t like). Avadon 3 features many different endings. Will you save your people or betray them? Follow orders or claw for more power? We leave those decisions for you.

Key Features:

• Epic fantasy role-playing adventure in an enormous and unique world.
  
• Many different endings. Will you be loyal to your leaders or switch sides and bring them down? The choice is yours!
  
• Five different character classes, with dozens of unique spells and abilities.
  
• Experience an exciting story, with fascinating characters, tough decisions, and many twists and turns.
  
• Dozens of side quests, dungeons, and secrets to discover.
  
• Hundreds of magical items to find. Use powerful crystals to make your artifacts even more powerful.
  
• Huge adventure with lots of replay value. Experience with earlier games is entirely unnecessary to enjoy Avadon 3

 

[Infinitron]

 

[pippin]

I can't hate Spiderweb. I will buy this because I really like his games, even if Avadon wasn't as good as the others.

 

[vonAchdorf]

If only the trailer / loading screen art would sometime be reflected in the game art.

 

[gaussgunner]

However, your lands have been invaded. Barbarians and monsters are rampaging through your home

Translation: A megafuckton of trash mobs in the same old recycled maps.

I can't wait.

 

[HoboForEternity]

aww yisss

 

[Durandal]

so it's just a lower budget Tyranny then

 

[Infinitron]

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2016/05/avadon-3-announcing-new-games-and.html

Avadon 3, Announcing New Games, and Facing Your Inadequacy.


Aaaaaand ... we're off!

We have just announced our newest game, Avadon 3: The Warborn!

It's the final game in the series! At last, you get to end the war, pick a winner, and decide who lives and who dies! (Though we are making sure that the game will still make sense and be satisfying even if you didn't play Avadon 1 and 2.)

It should be out in September, unless things go wrong. Completing this series will bring an end to five frenzied years of my professional life.

I wanted to talk about the game a little, for people who don't know about us, people who do, and people who are interesting in making games in general.

I'll try not to be boring.

If You Don't Know Who the Hell We Are ...

Hi! We're Spiderweb Software. Since 1994, we have created indie, retro, turn-based, huge, epic fantasy role-playing games. We specialize in games with intricate stories that give you a lot of interesting choices. We also like making fun game systems and varied combat with lots of unusual encounters and tactical options.

If that sounds cool, just stop reading this. Go here or here and download a big, free demo. We have always had the biggest demos in the business. If you like what you try, all of our stuff is on Steam.

If You Already Play Our Games ...

Thank you for your support!

We asked for a lot of fan feedback before we started Avadon 3, and we put a lot of it into effect. There are a ton of changes and improvements in this new game. Many long-overdue interface improvements. A lot of rebalancing and new abilities. Fewer trash fights and greater encounter variety.


I managed to generate some pretty decent screenshots this time around.

What Is Avadon About?

If you want the basic facts of the story, they are on the main game page, and I'm tired of rewriting it. (This is the sort of disciplined approach to PR that has enable me to maintain decades of consistent anonymity.)

I'm more interested in talking about the process.

In the 20+ years I've been doing this, I've always had one main habit: I write the sort of game I enjoy playing. They are always RPGs, because I am obsessed with that genre. It's a genre that allows for great variety. (And the basic, addictive elements of which have infected just about every other genre.)

Whenever I'm not sure what to do with a game, I always make the choice I would prefer if I was a player. It's a compass that has almost never steered me wrong.

When I decided to write Avadon, I'd just played Dragon Age: Origins, which is still, for my money, one of the finest RRPGs every made. It made me want to write a similar game: An epic story, full of intrigue, dark fantasy, and touch choices, set in a huge and complex world. I wanted the battles to have their own flavor, with lots of different tactical options and unexpected events, and in which movement and positioning are really important.

I think I succeeded. Kind of. I will say that I enjoy playing Avadon games more than I enjoy playing any of my other games. A lot of my fans don't care for Avadon as much, but that's ok. We write a lot of different sorts of RPGs.


Actual gameplay footage!

But I'm Ready To Move On and Feel Bad About What Has Come Before

Like many creators, I hate looking at the work I've done. Even if it's good, it still pales in comparison to the beautiful image I had in my mind when I began. Looking at the final work can be a painful process.

A painful process, but a helpful one. When you fail to do what you wanted to do, well, failure can be very educational. You just need to look hard and honest at you failures and see what you can do to correct them.

So, some things I'm unhappy with about the Avadon series.

When I was designing Avadon, I was very ambitious. Lynaeus, the continent on which the series takes place, has 5 friendly nations and six hostile nations, each of which has its own politics, history, and so on. I wanted to make a whole world.

In the end, however, I was just one designer.

There are so many factions, wings of government, conflicts, controversies ... Too much for me to keep track of, too much to fully develop. I wrote so much lore I could never find a place to fit into the game. There were so many locations I just wasn't able to give enough time to.

My eyes were bigger than my stomach on this one.

Also, i didn't put as much polish in these games as I should. Avadon 3 will have a lot of careful rebalancing and useful interface improvements. However, these changes should have been in Avadon 2. Honestly, a lot of these things should have been in Avadon 1 so I didn't have to fix them in the first place.

I have a good excuse for some of this. I'm only one person, and I'm getting older and slower. Still, a problem is a problem, and, if I'm asking people for money, I'm still responsible for flaws.

Finally, I've stuck with this particular engine, graphics style, and world style for too long. After I remaster Avernum 3 (our most popular game over the years), I'm going to do something way different. It's well past time.


Actual gameplay footage!

I Also Have Reached My Own Limits

However, the Avadon games have also reached the limits of what I am capable of holding in my single brain. They are the limit for how complex I game I can make without going mad. There's just too many characters, story threads, and so on. After a few months of keeping everything balanced and in my head and making sense, it gets exhausting.

One of the great pleasures in my job is finishing a game and being able to forget everything I've had to hold in my mind, ready for fast access. It's like putting down a heavy weight. I'm really looking forward to letting Avadon drift away. It's been like having to have a second family, only in my head. A weird, dysfunctional, non-existant family. I want it to fade away and leave a blank canvas, that I can fill with other fun stuff.

And, in Avadon's sprawling messiness, I think we made something really neat. Among all of the treasure hunting and epic battles, this is a story about running a fading Empire. You have borders to protect and unlimited power to do so. Will you be cruel or merciful? Will you be dutiful to your country, or will you focus on power for yourself?

Avadon 3 is full of choices, and your decisions will lead to a multitude of possible outcomes. No cop-out twist endings. It won't all have been a dream. We will make sure that the series caps off with a satisfying ending.

We'll be starting an all-new series soon. When we do, it will still be a big, complex game, but it will be big and complex in a different way. At the very least, there will be fewer than 11 countries for you to keep track of.

Back To Work

And that's all for now. Hope you like the screenshots and the trailer. If you're new here and like RPGs, we have 20 years of back catalog to tempt you.

Time to go write a few thousand more words of dialogue!

 

[mutonizer]

These settings, rulesets and stories never interested me but I'm always impressed by the consistancy and dedication. Much respect and as usual I'll probably buy it and never really play it, just to support the dude.

 

[HoboForEternity]

i really like avadon's world and story. really, every lore jeff vogel made is fairly interesting and unique in their own way (with obvious geneforge as his magnum opus, he will never top the geneforge games) but as he really said, the engine is really really getting old, and he really having a bad time keeping things together. he did tease wanting to do kickstarter campaign someday, so i hope he will hire a permanent employee with it, risk stuff a bit with higher budget and more staff and work solely as designer/writer with other people to do the detail/smaller bits.

shouldn't be too hard with 4-5 employees instead of solo-ing everything with freelance artists. or just take an apprentice FFS, maybe someone's good enough, patient enough, and passionate in RPG to continue his legacy, but spiderweb will probably die with him when it does

with good luck, he will live to remaking geneforge games, avernum 3 and 1 last big, new series (with more budget!)

 

[Parsifarka]

Finally, I've stuck with this particular engine, graphics style, and world style for too long. After I remaster Avernum 3 (our most popular game over the years), I'm going to do something way different. It's well past time.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Finally, I've stuck with this particular engine, graphics style, and world style for too long. After I remaster Avernum 3 (our most popular game over the years), I'm going to do something way different. It's well past time.

Unity incoming :D

 

[animlboogy]

Finally, I've stuck with this particular engine, graphics style, and world style for too long. After I remaster Avernum 3 (our most popular game over the years), I'm going to do something way different. It's well past time.

Unity incoming :D

Here's the one context where that's incredibly good news.

 

[Infinitron]

Jeff looking for Mac beta testers: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/testing/beta_test.html

 

[Crooked Bee]

So this is coming out on September 14th: http://toucharcade.com/2016/08/10/avadon-3-release-date/

 

[HoboForEternity]

Hype :D

 

[Infinitron]

Yeah, we already knew that from the Steam page. Why didn't he announce it then?

 

[Brutan]

i really like avadon's world and story. really, every lore jeff vogel made is fairly interesting and unique in their own way (with obvious geneforge as his magnum opus, he will never top the geneforge games) but as he really said, the engine is really really getting old, and he really having a bad time keeping things together. he did tease wanting to do kickstarter campaign someday, so i hope he will hire a permanent employee with it, risk stuff a bit with higher budget and more staff and work solely as designer/writer with other people to do the detail/smaller bits.

shouldn't be too hard with 4-5 employees instead of solo-ing everything with freelance artists. or just take an apprentice FFS, maybe someone's good enough, patient enough, and passionate in RPG to continue his legacy, but spiderweb will probably die with him when it does

with good luck, he will live to remaking geneforge games, avernum 3 and 1 last big, new series (with more budget!)

Can you give some examples of Avadon's lore that are so great? I want to get excited about the game.