RPGWatch Forums - Avernum 6 - Review @ GameBanshee

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Avernum 6 - Review @ GameBanshee

GameBanshee writes in with their review of Avernum 6, penned by Brother None. It's generally positive, describing it as "the best title of the series":

Quote:

A further improvement in design can be seen in quests, both in overarching structure and individual quest design. The main quests are no longer of a linear, one-after-the-other sort, but rather the main quest givers will give you a number of important jobs, and once you have done a couple of them you can move on. Most players will do all the quests regardless, but this does mean that you can do these quests in whichever order you like, or leave quests undone if you don't feel like doing them for whatever reason. In particular, some of the more morally questionable quests at the end are eminently skippable, and I definitely appreciated how the game gave me the option of ignoring half of them if I so chose.
Avernum's open-world nature is still limited by these main quests, and you will have to progress through them to open up new areas. But interestingly enough, Avernum 6 will at times tell you to go to a specific place directly, it being very dangerous for you not to do so. And while it is indeed dangerous, the game won't force you to do so, and you can wander around more freely than you might expect. The game's open-world design is pretty good here, and even when you're doing quests out of order you usually won't break them.

More information.

A good review. I give it 9 out of 10.

How's the interface coming along these days? The only one of Vogel's titles I've played was Nethergate:Resurrection, and the split screen made the map very difficult for me to interpret. If I could actually see the map, I'd be willing to try one more time to get into one of these series.

I played A5, and the map layout was fine, no problem interpreting it. I think A6 is similar.

Quote:

Originally Posted by magerette (Post 1061008204)

How's the interface coming along these days?

Avernum 6's interface is more flexible and better designed than that of A4/5. I don't know what you mean by "actually see the map", but Nethergate Res' interface is closer to that of A4/5.

A6 is all new

Looks functionally identical to A5 :shrug: except for the transparency and prettification.

Quote:

Originally Posted by magerette (Post 1061008204)

Do you mean the way the mini-map size scaled up and down? Nethergate is his only title to do that in years. You have to remember that Nethergate was a spruced up re-release of a very old game (though one of his best, in my opinion).

Need to try that one too….

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thrasher (Post 1061008227)

Looks functionally identical to A5 :shrug: except for the transparency and prettification.

And it leaves more space for the main gameplay field, plus the menus can be moved around. It's not a huge leap, but it is an improvement.

I think A5 allowed you to move the minimap around. Not sure about the character portraits, though.

Thanks for posting the screenshot, Brother None.

By "see the map" I meant see the gameplay area and the A6 one looks much clearer to my aging eyeballs than the one of Nethergate:R here below, where you can see that the area where the actual gameplay occurs is much less, and a lot of the screen is taken up by a pretty unnecessarily large view of the party/char portraits and a bottom dialogue box. I had a hard time seeing smaller interactive objects, like traps and so forth.