Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

[fantadomat]

Press "F" to spit on innovation!

 

[Junmarko]

Looks like Vogel got himself a new Sprite artist.

https://remusprites.carbonmade.com/

About
I'm a 3d artist with experience in anything sprite-related. I especially love to create and animate characters based on original concept for use in outstanding games. I work fast and being a perfectionist by nature, I strive to always improve and learn new things.

Character Artist - Villain Games LLC /January 2016 - December 2017
Currently: Props Artist - Spiderweb Software, Inc./ February 2018 -

Hehe that's cool.

Man it's been years since I played one of his games - they were my saviour during 2007-2010 University years. Nothing but my brother's hand-me-down IBM Thinkpad from 2004. Lol.

 

[himmy]

”Spiderweb Software founder Jeff Vogel has been making indie games for 24 years, and he has some ideas on how others can do the same game over and over again”

fixed

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/im-st...loper-jeff-vogel-seattles-spiderweb-software/

‘I’m still a humble toymaker’: A chat with veteran indie RPG developer Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software. (Photo: Jeff Vogel)


Jeff Vogel, indie game development’s self-declared “Crazy Old Uncle In the Attic,” has been a one-man production studio for computer RPGs since 1995, when his first game, Exile: Escape From the Pit, was released as shareware. Since then, he’s continued to carve out a niche for himself in the PC games market, publishing series like Geneforge and Avernum through his company, Seattle-based Spiderweb Software.

His most recent release, on Jan. 31, is a second remaster of 2002’s Avernum III: Ruined World.

This past week, he gave a speech at the Game Developers Conference about his time in the industry as a “random shareware weirdo.” In advance of that, he sat down with us to discuss Avernum III, its remaster, and his decades spent singlehandedly developing some truly enormous computer RPGs.

Continue reading for our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Thomas Wilde: You’re mostly a solo act, right?

Jeff Vogel: It’s a mom-and-pop operation. I work with my wife. She is my business manager and does many, many, many jobs interfacing with reality, and I’m the game maker. I just go off into my room for a long time and eventually come out and I have a game. I deal with a lot of freelancers, but the vast majority of our games are just by me.

Wilde: What do your freelancers do for you? I know that you said on Redditthat you code most everything in C++?

Vogel: Yeah, that’s the main thing. We use freelancers for the art. That is one area which we have no talent. We’ve worked with many, many freelance artists over the years. I’m working with a few right now for the new game. Most of my time just art direction, like we’re trying to get a base of art in place and deal with getting a consistent style and stuff like that. But yeah, that’s the main thing we have other people do.

Wilde: So the new game, the one you’re dealing with when you’re done with the iPad port — are you at a place where you can talk about that at all yet?

Vogel: I can give the basic outline I’ve given before. We tend to write one engine just because I’m so small. I have to do a lot of code reuse, so I tend to write one engine and then write a bunch of games in that engine.

I’m making a whole new engine, whole new art, whole new game system, whole new IP, new worlds, new characters. I hope to do a Kickstarter for it sometime in early summer.

I have a couple ideas for a name but we haven’t nailed down the complete name yet. I wish I could give more information about that. All of our games for the last 25 years or so that we’ve been in business have been the same sort of game, basically low-budget, turn-based, very story-heavy, very open-ended fantasy role-playing games. It’s kind of an evergreen genre. It’s a genre that there’s always going to be demand for and that’s something that I have a particular love for and skill with, so the new engine is going to be like that.

There are some people who hope that I’m going to just bust out with this crazy-ass 3D big-budget super fancy thing, but that’s not what I can do, both for lack of budget and lack of interest. And, frankly, lack of technical skill on my part. I’m not the best programmer in the world.

So you know, it’s going to be the same sort of thing we’ve always done and yet very, very different. We need to mix it up a lot every few years just to keep interest.

Wilde: OK, so brand-new everything, but still a single-player CRPG.

Vogel: Yep, it’s still single-player. Multiplayer is something we’ve been asked for again and again, but writing a multiplayer game is very difficult. It requires a lot of technical skill and it’s just, it’s not really something we’re interested in.

We’re a storytelling company. We just telling a single-player story like a novel with lots of fighting, that people can just sort of sit in their room alone and sink into.

Wilde: Playing [the second remaster of] Avernum III, it kind of feels like its time has come around again, that ‘90s-style games are having a renaissance now because of Kickstarter and crowdfunding. I played the Exile demo back in the day. It was on a CD-ROM that came with a Mac magazine.

Vogel: Yep. That used to be where we got a lot of our money.

Wilde: Yeah. You were like my methadone. I had blown through all the old SSI “gold box” [Dungeons & Dragons] games.

Vogel: I’m very familiar with those.

Wilde: I got all the way through to Pools of Darkness, did the bonus dungeon, and… needed more. Then I played a bunch of Exile.

Vogel: Oh, that’s where we always got a lot of our customers.

There are lots of role-playing games out there that are better than ours, I am not gonna deny that, but role-playing game fans, when they finish one role-playing game, they want to play another, and the really big fancy series only come out with games every two or three years. For example, I’m playing Divinity: Original Sin II right now and it’s a very good game. If someone said, hey, I like your game, but I like Divinity more, I’ll just say, enjoy Divinity. You’re going to be done with that, and in six months, you’re going to want another one of those games and I’m going to be here.

Wilde: “The first one’s free, kid.”

Vogel: Pretty much, yeah.

Wilde: That’s awesome.

Vogel: It’s an evergreen genre. There will always be people who want what I sell.

2018’s remaster of Avernum III.

Wilde: This has been your primary job for what, 24 years now?

Vogel: We released our first game for money in January of 1995. We worked through all of 1994. This has been my full-time gig for 24 years now, and it will be for quite a while to come. I think it’s been continuous. I’ve been working on it continuously all that time. I think there are indie developers who might have been working on it continuously for a tiny bit longer than me, but if there are, it’s a very short list. I’ve been doing this longer than just about anybody.

Wilde: You’ve been solo for most, if not all of that time, right?

Vogel: Yeah, I like to keep to myself. I’m a humble toymaker working in my little workshop like Gepetto, making weird entertainments for little boys and girls.

Wilde: I’m talking to enough indie developers right now that that’s really impressive to me. They’ve got a crew behind them and they’re still having a hard time putting out games that, you know, aren’t 40-hour RPGs with huge amounts of stats and lore… but you keep putting these out, one after another, by yourself.

Vogel: I do this for a living because it’s all I’m good for. When I was 5 years old, I would sit in my room for hours at a time with a piece of paper and a pencil, drawing mazes. This is 1975. Nobody had a computer, so I made mazes. From a very young age, doing things like this is just what I do. I was a weird kid.

So one of the reasons I’ve been able to do it for so long is because I’ve gotten really, really good at it. Most developers are young and a lot of them still have rough edges in their workflow or they just haven’t figured out how to do it as efficiently as I have, because I’ve been doing it for so long.

Wilde: So you started with Exile back in 1995.

Vogel: Yes. Avernum III: Ruined World is a remaster of a remaster, which is in itself very unusual. Not many indie game developers have been around long enough to remaster. It’s the same game twice, but yeah, it originally started as our first big hit game, Exile III: Ruined World, which came out in 1997.

Wilde: What got you started on the solo development route? Were you just a garage developer? You said you were born in 1970, so you were 24 when you started working on this?

Vogel: Yes. I was in grad school studying mathematics and I hated it.

Wilde: So in the grand tradition of grad students everywhere, you found something else to do.

Vogel: Pretty much. That’s how you escape grad school. It makes your life so intolerable that you are eventually forced to leave it and figure out what you actually want to do with your life.

My wife at the time had gotten a real job and our dreams came true. We were able to buy an actual computer, so we did that. She was hugely supportive of me and I said, you know, this is driving me crazy. I’ve always wanted to write a real, full-on, put-my-whole-back-into-it computer game. She said, “Great. You do that, and I’ll draw the art for you.” So that was what she did.

I wrote my first game, Exile: Escape From the Pit. During the day, I did my grad school stuff, and at night, I was 24 with unlimited energy. I didn’t need sleep, I didn’t need rest. I just threw myself fully into it and wrote my first game and released it as shareware, which was a thing that existed at the time. And God help me, people bought it.

Spiderweb Software’s Exile: Escape From the Pit, Macintosh version, 1995.

Wilde: I’m not that much younger than you. Like I said, I knew about you from the old Mac demo discs.

Vogel: Yeah. The term shareware has largely disappeared, thank God. Nobody was happier than me when the term indie game came into common use six or seven years ago, because whenever I’d say I was a shareware developer, people would look at me like I was a loser. Like I was wiping windshields with squeegees for spare change.

But “indie developer” has this sort of aura of mystery about it, like Kurt Cobain, or an indie musician. It made me sound infinitely cooler than I am.

Wilde: Yeah, I can see that. “You can’t constrain me with your rules, man.”

Vogel: Yeah, yeah. I was like, I’m dangerous. I’m fighting the system. I’m fighting the man.

In the end, nothing’s changed. I’m still a humble toymaker in my spare bedroom, sitting by myself every day placing orcs.

Geneforge, which was really popular and really beloved. There are people who just love that stuff already bugging me about the remaster for it, which isn’t going to be out for over two years. It came out in like 1999, 2000, and it doesn’t run on the Mac anymore at all. On a computer where it does run, it looks terrible. It has an 800 by 600 play area. It’s the size of a postage stamp in the middle of the monitor. The graphics are humiliating. It absolutely needs a remaster, and it was the same with Avernum III. After 15 years, after 20 years, it’s time.

Spiderweb Software’s Geneforge, 2001.

Wilde: I’m actually kind of surprised to hear that. A lot of developers from the period just let the work stand on its own, and if they do something, it’ll be a sequel or a port but not a full-fledged remaster.

Vogel: That is a choice a lot of them make, and quite frankly, I think that’s a mistake. I mean… remasters are a huge part of the way I stay in business. Remasters enabled us to stay in business. A lot of games from that time are just, by and large, forgotten.

Well, actually, I mean, a lot of indie developers don’t have games from that period, you know, at all, so I’m kind of standing alone in that regard… I mean, thinking back, I can only think of a handful of games that anyone would want remastered at all. Like, Doom is one of them, but Doom is still available and Doom still works.

Wilde: But it did get remastered to play on the Xbox, for example, and on printers and toaster ovens…

Vogel: Yeah, they couldn’t play Doom on everything. And by the way, Doom still holds up. Original Doom is still a lot of fun.

Wilde: Yeah, that’s something that was interesting compared to the 2016 Doom. You play the original Doom and every level in it is meant to be a video game level and has no greater purpose. Whereas in the modern-day, with a lot of shooters like it, it was meant to be a functional place before you ever got there and before the demons showed up. There are a couple of nods to the fact that it’s a game—like who keeps their suits of glowing green power armor in a ventilation shaft?—but there’s a second of placehood there which isn’t there in the original Doom. It kind of looks like it’s set in a military base, but it was made to be a video game level and it is, still, above all else, a video game level.

Vogel: Yeah, it’s the frame. The old designs have a kind of freeness and an unconcern about balance and about reality that I still find delightful.

Modern game design is really good in a lot of senses and in a lot of senses is kind of a plague. Game designers now are so concerned with everything being balanced within an inch of its life and everything being so precise and everything making so much sense.

Another reason I like to remaster the older games is because, you know, when I was a neophyte game designer, I’d just do stuff that was goofy and I don’t feel free to do that anymore. So the old games have this kind of looseness and weirdness and stuff about them that I just can’t get away with anymore. I don’t feel I can get away with it, but I can channel — I can bring back the stuff my young self made.

Wilde: There was certainly some goofy stuff, but to a certain extent, that’s just the nature of the beast. With computer games, especially ‘90s computer games, a lot of them are just weird.

Vogel: There are a lot of games right now that are big hits that maintain that ‘90s goofiness and looseness. Divinity: Original Sin II. They looked at game balance with that and went, nope, we’re not having any of that. We’re just going to let you do the craziest stuff imaginable. If you want to kill the boss by teleporting it into a lava pool with one spell, whatever. It’s your game.

Wilde: Or Goat Simulator. Goat Simulator’s an enormous hit just because, by modern game design standards, it is an objectively terrible game. It’s just silly and fun.

It’s a very good sandbox.

Vogel: Yeah, it’s a cool game, but it’s different from other stuff and that’s important if you want to make money.

 

[Taluntain]

Jeff "In between interviews I make RPGs" Vogel.

 

[Fowyr]

Spiderweb Software’s Exile: Escape From the Pit, Macintosh version, 1995.

Lol wut, it's clearly late version with Exile 3 tileset. They could not even make their homework.

 

[Mustawd]

It’s obvious they just google image sesrched Vogel + Exile.

“Journalists”

 

[V_K]

Spiderweb Software’s Exile: Escape From the Pit, Macintosh version, 1995.

Lol wut, it's clearly late version with Exile 3 tileset. They could not even make their homework.

It’s obvious they just google image sesrched Vogel + Exile.

“Journalists”

Actually, Vogel himself (or whoever runs his site) is to blame for that: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile/exile_shot.html

 

[LESS T_T]

You can watch Vogel's GDC talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Spiderweb

 

[Infinitron]

Jeff Vogel on D:OS 2: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2018/04/divinity-original-sin-2-and-rewards-of.html

lol "indie".

Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the Rewards of Doing One Hard Thing Right


There will never not be a market for a solid RPG.

I recently played indie RPG megahit Divinity: Original Sin 2. I went through it front to back, spending over 90 hours (Normal/Classic difficulty). It'd be a pity to expend so much time if I didn't get a blog post out of it.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 (or DOS2 as I'll call it) is really the ideal of the indie aesthetic. It feels like it's a product of actual humans, and it clearly wants to deliver one pure, special, niche experience. It's a big, weird game that's made a bajillion dollars. It doesn't care about any of the rough edges, as long as it follows its vision purely.

And there are rough edges. There are long periods of time where DOS2 feels like a gigantic clump of rough edges awkwardly glued together.

Let's dive in. It's a big, weird game that's made a bajillion dollars. Plenty to say about it.


In my bag, I have an ancient sword, an arrowhead, panties, a bowl, and wood chips. Any one of them might end up necessary. Never ever drop anything.

What Is DOS2?

It's an enormous, turn-based, story-heavy fantasy RPG with a lot of gameplay and long, very difficult, involved battles. It's a tough game. It's got a lot of wild multiplayer options, though I'll be focusing on single-player stuff. It took me over 90 hours to play, and I skipped a lot of quests.

You don't need to play the previous game to enjoy it. It takes place in a different era or something. I tried to play the previous game, but I got totally stuck because I didn't notice a button hidden behind a ham.

What Does DOS2 Do Well?

I have to start out with the best thing about DOS2, the thing that really makes it compelling: It has turn-based fantasy combat that is actually exciting. The battles are long (1-2 hours), unpredictable, and have an epic feel to them. They are very cool.

I really need to emphasize how remarkable this is. I've been following the RPG genre since the beginning, and I think it's really important to acknowledge what an accomplishment the battles are. It's some next-level stuff.

What Are the Rough Edges?

Every other single thing.


Seriously, I went through the entire game with wood chips in my pack. If case I needed them to craft a stick or something. Jesus Christ, I'm basically 9/10 of a God. Just let me have the stupid stick!

What Is the Story?

This game has tons of writing. Many, many words.

The side quests and the storylines of your companions are reliably well-written and interesting. I enjoyed them.

The main quest is something-something-invasion-of-horrible-monsters-something-something-disorder-in-the-heavens-something-something-become-a-god. I tried to keep track of the story, thought I understood it, and I guess I didn't. I'll get back to that.

What Is the Design Aesthetic?

The general design aesthetic of DOS2 is: If anyone had an idea, any idea at all, it went into the game. The idea won't always be properly developed once it was in, but it will be there.

There's a full crafting system, so I tried to use it. I collected every recipe and material I could find. At the end of the game, I couldn't make anything better than what I could buy at the store with my infinite money.

There's an item identification system. No matter what the game, this is always just busywork.

There are plenty of bugs, still, which gives hardcore RPG gamers that extra exquisite bit of challenge. As of this writing, it's almost impossible to talk to a character who is walking around. You click and nothing happens. It's maddening, which adds to immersion.

And there are many, many unique spells and abilities. You can teleport characters around the battlefield, which is really cool. You can teleport lava onto the battlefield and then teleport enemies into it, killing them instantly and utterly making moot everything else about the battle system, which is less cool. Then your enemies can teleport you into that same lava, which ...

Design tip: Don't put stuff in your design which instantly makes every other aspect of the design unimportant.

There are, again, many spells and abilities. Or, there are ten abilities that are good and that will enable you to progress in the game, and 90 weak abilities that will leave you utterly stuck ten hours in.

This is important.


I love going through these screenshots and seeing how clogged everyone's backpacks get with irrelevant crap. It fills me with resolve: My next game will have only relevant items in it. I'm ditching a lot of junk items.

Another Brutally Punishing Game

DOS2 is very much in the game design tradition of "Make a game super-hard, give almost no information about what abilities are available or what are viable paths to take, expect the player to do a ton of research online, and go f*** yourself."

This game is just plain too hard early on. Based on what I saw in reviews/forums, loosening up the difficulty in Chapter 1 would increase overall customer satisfaction a LOT.

Saying something like this is just inviting abuse. There is a portion of RPG fans who react with rage at any suggestion of removing features or relaxing difficulty, no matter how reasonable the request. But it's still true.

The number of builds that will enable you to escape the first chapter are very limited. It's very easy to end up needing to restart 10 hours in. The advice online for early game builds is scattered and, I found, often very bad.

Seriously, Google "Divinity: Original Sin 2 Builds" and sink into the rabbit hole. Bear in mind, when you see a list like "12 Most Uber-Awesome DOS2 Skills," that article was probably generated as fast as possible to score easy clicks off a hit game, is badly considered, and is lying to you.

(Real talk for normal players: Summoning is very strong. The spells Conjure Incarnate, Power Infusion, and Raise Bone Widow will carry you through this game. Teleportation is also fantastic. Using it to pull the enemy boss right in front of my fighters was my single favorite part of the game.)

There are tons of players who love this aesthetic. RPG fans are gluttons for punishment. A lot of them just want a game to hurt them sometimes. (Or all the time.) A small portion of them will pounce on you if you ever suggest some bit of abuse in an RPG is a mistake (no matter how much it totally is).

It drives me nuts, personally, but it's the big aesthetic now.


The battles tend to devolve into utter, unpredictable chaos. It's pretty awesome.

Rough Edges With Rough Edges

DOS2, for me, still had plenty of bugs, quirks, and stuff that felt half-baked. To show what I mean, here is my summary of how my game ended. At this point, I'd played for over 90 hours and was really ready for it to end. I think, once a player's given you this long, you need to wrap things up in as respectful a way as possible.

I go through a long series of puzzles, some of which are really finicky and require noticing lots of little things. I use a walkthrough. Otherwise it would have taken me forever to search through all those little cubbyholes and boxes and bookshelves for what I needed. (The "Put the painting on the altar" puzzle, in particular, needed more time in the oven.)

I get to the final battle, a multi-hour two-phase cluster-f. As is normal, the entire battlefield becomes covered with fire and spell effects and I can't see where any of the characters are.

I'd already dug into Settings to find the key that makes outlines of all the characters visible, so I use that. Because there are so many characters, however, sometimes to target a specific foe in a crowd I have to zoom in and rotate the camera for a minute to find a few pixels where I can select the enemy.

(God help you if you click wrong, or you'll use your best ability to obliterate an ally. A confirmation dialog when you aim an arrow at your tank or the ground would be welcome.)

Because the fights are so long and tough, you can save in the middle. This is good because the battlefield has lots of different elevations, and the game is constantly telling me my arrows can hit targets that, when I fire them, get blocked by the terrain.

My characters die constantly in the final fight, so I use scrolls to resurrect them. (I feel like DOS2 provides resurrection scrolls as a crutch to not have to balance fights fairly.) I eventually surround the boss with summoned monsters and pummel him to deadness.

Now I get to decide how to remake the world/Heaven/Universe. I've made an effort to follow the plot up until this time, and it seems like I can fix a lot of problems by ascending to Godhood. The game explicitly tells me I can do this to fix the world.

I talk to my companions, who I have all helped out to the maximum extent. They urge me to ascend to Godhood. One of them, who is in love with me and who I have totally made out with, practically begs me to ascend. Everything in the game so far has been pushing me to ascend to Godhood.

I ascend to Godhood. Flashy cutscene.

Then I am on a boat with my companions. I talk to them. They all totally hate me now! My girlfriend reacts to me with disgust. One of them says she'll kill me if she the gets the chance. What the hell!?!??

Come on, Divinity: Original Sin 2! I can't have a tiny bit of satisfaction? I played you for over 90 hours! Throw a dog a bone!


So many battles end with the play area a sea of spell effects. Figure out the key/button that shows outlines of character ASAP.

My Final Takeaway

Again, I must stress, the RPG combat in this game is some of the best I've ever seen. The fights are long but really satisfying when they work right. A lot of the writing is really good. The production values are great. Definitely worth a try if you love old-school RPGs.

But honestly? In the end I was tired. Even the shortest battle takes a while, and I was avoiding conflicts just because I was exhausted with the game. The fighting works great, but overall usability needs a lot of attention.

I won't be getting any DLC or sequels unless things change a lot. I'm glad I had this experience, I really am, but I don't need more of it.

 

[Morkar Left]

It's a big, weird game that's made a bajillion dollars.

Could have been you, Mr. Vogel. Could have been you...

 

[Terra]

But honestly? In the end I was tired. Even the shortest battle takes a while, and I was avoiding conflicts just because I was exhausted with the game.

I'm a fan of Jeff's games, but I haven't played a single one where I didn't feel exactly this way towards the end, Geneforge, Avadon and Avernum all suffer from it and I find myself beelining for the finish line because each game overstayed its welcome, oftentimes due to HP bloat.

I won't be getting any DLC or sequels unless things change a lot. I'm glad I had this experience, I really am, but I don't need more of it.

Ironic, given that if his fanbase shared this sentiment about his own games he'd be in real trouble.

 

[fantadomat]

But honestly? In the end I was tired. Even the shortest battle takes a while, and I was avoiding conflicts just because I was exhausted with the game.

I'm a fan of Jeff's games, but I haven't played a single one where I didn't feel exactly this way towards the end, Geneforge, Avadon and Avernum all suffer from it and I find myself beelining for the finish line because each game overstayed its welcome, oftentimes due to HP bloat.

I won't be getting any DLC or sequels unless things change a lot. I'm glad I had this experience, I really am, but I don't need more of it.

Ironic, given that if his fanbase shared this sentiment about his own games he'd be in real trouble.

I do enjoy his game a lot more then DOS2,they do have a lot more fun exploration and stealing parts.

 

[LESS T_T]

You can watch Vogel's GDC talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Spiderweb

Now on Yotubue:

 

[fantadomat]

The guy is so far up his ass,still makes one of the best CRPGs. Also it seems that he too hates SJWs,even if he is a cuck.

 

[Grauken]

Everyone hates SJWs, even moderate liberals

 

[Beastro]

You can watch Vogel's GDC talk: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Spiderweb

Now on Yotubue:

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I guess he has to curry favour with the Game Journo clique by praising DOS2. Kinda reminds me of when Zizek gently caresses the ego of the EU so he can continue ranting about Google's toilets without his funding being pulled.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

That was a nice watch. He had a whole hell of a lot of nervous tics and it retread some ground from other talks he's done but I get a kick out of hearing from him.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I enjoy Vogel talks, even if it's all the same stuff again. He's got a sensibility about his work I greatly admire.

 

[gaussgunner]

Yeah, he's a master tradesman. Builds what works, over and over again, and complains about it because it's just a fucking job and every job has its annoyances, but a man's gotta make a living and he might as well do it right.

 

[fantadomat]

Yeah, he's a master tradesman. Builds what works, over and over again, and complains about it because it's just a fucking job and every job has its annoyances, but a man's gotta make a living and he might as well do it right.

I am a true grognard,i do enjoy his works because they are the same shit over and over again! I piss on progress and innovation,give the good old tried and tested formula!

 

[gaussgunner]

Aww man, you're making me want to play another Vogel rpg. Hmmm.... it's about time I played Geneforge.

 

[V_K]

Wait, Codex praises Vogel? And not just the games but the talks? What kind of sorcery is it?

 

[Mustawd]

Aww man, you're making me want to play another Vogel rpg. Hmmm.... it's about time I played Geneforge.

FWIW, he mentioned that Geneforge is next in the line of remakes. I plan on waiting till then to play it cuz that awful UI.