Avernum 4 (2005)
There are six games in the Avernum series, I've played and enjoyed 1-3 and so I've now completed number 4.
The main difference between 1-3 and 4 is that 4 starts using a completely different engine than 1-3. Number 4 starts using the Geneforge engine, for a much cleaner and crisper user experience. Also, while 1-3 were remakes of the original trilogy, Avernum 4 is an entirely new game that starts off an entirely new trilogy. So what's new and what's been lost? And how did that effect my enjoyment?
First up, what's missing:
Initially, the game feels less interesting than the first three because gone are a huge raft of environmental exploration varieties. There are no boats and so no river travelling, there is no flying, so no secret areas across cavernous drops, there's no elevation at all in fact, not even walking up slopes and the like, and, most noticeably of all, there's no swamp squares poisoning you, no lava squares burning you and no ice squares freezing you. All the terrain is flat, dry and safe to travel. All of which could indeed be argued make the game more boringer.
Also gone are all the gazillion secret doors hidden in almost every wall, so no more headbanging every single wall square in the hope of finding a cool secret area. In fact there's barely any secret things in the game. Also gone are the many puzzles you might encounter while exploring wizard's towers or deep dungeons. There is some puzzling in a couple of the areas but nothing like what you'd have to do in the original series. All the dragons are gone as well, no dragons at all in Avernum 4, though you can still explore their old homes. All of which could indeed be argued make the game more boringer.
Lots of spells have also gone the way of the Dodo. Most notably the utility spell Light, which illuminates pitch black rooms and dungeons. While there are a couple of dungeons that are too dark IMO and could really do with a light spell, most of the game is bright and provides no such impediment to either exploration or Spell Point management. Also gone is Mass Haste, the most useful spell in the game, resulting in you having to cast Haste individually on every character if you don't want to be chugging potions the whole time, which can be quite the drag. Weirdly though, there are scrolls and wands of Mass Haste. So here, again, much more boringer.
On a similar theme, object identification is no longer a thing, everything is ready-identified and you wont have to pay anyone or sacrifice points into Lore to find out if your weapon is a good'un or a cursed misery. Oh yeah, there aren't any cursed items anymore as a result either. Likewise, all the special abilities have gone, such as potion making and the warrior's Lay-On-Hnads type unique abilities and, similarly, all the special stats have gone, replaced by a basic list of resistances. Finally, spells aren't levelling in strength from 1-3 with all spells at all levels being achievable as an exploration aim. Instead, spells now vary in strength from 1-6 and some spells wont go above strength 2 while others quite easily get to power level 6 and there's no way to get 6 in everything. All of which… etc… boringer.
From a gameplay point of view there's also a couple of annoyances that the new engine brings that were never there in the original trilogy. One of the main ones is that you can't engage combat without entering combat mode. In the original trilogy, if you were wandering around and some respawning rat got in your way, you could just whack it without entering combat mode, which saved a lot of unnecessary clicking. But of more irritation is the fact that you can no longer use your combat turn to defend, you either skip your turn or do something, and skipping your turn is much more irritating as you now have to double-click a character instead of just hitting space bar or the defend button, which, as you can imagine, especially combined with the game's ever so slight lag, particularly between rounds, often results in party members going places you didn't want them to because of the natural chaos of such a system. All of which… boringer.
As you can see, he gave any fence-sitting fans a lot of things to bitch about when he released this game back in 2005. At first assessment it does indeed seem like a downgraded, over-streamlined version of Avernum, which is a lot to pay in exchange for better, cleaner graphics.
But wait. Avernum 4 does add in lots of stuff as well, it's not a one-way street of over-simplification. The added luxuries are:
A World Map. Hooray, at last, finally. No more looking at a quest you picked up three weeks ago and not only forgetting who the person was that gave you the quest but that you can't even remember where the town they live in is even located, usually resulting in half an hour of running round like a headless chicken for no other reason than the game doesn't have a world map. On top of this, he finally implemented fast travel, meaning you can zoom from city to city via a world map list of cities. Admittedly, you don't get this immediately, but when you do get it, OMG, that improves the experience so, so much. Not so boring now.
Because questing is now less irritating-by-design, the quests themselves are much more linear to-boot, very rarely do you have hold onto quests for town after town resulting in a mid-game mind-boggle of 30 unresolved quests, most of which were from people you forgot about weeks ago. For my personality I found it much nicer to have a gameplay loop of dealing with a town's quests while in that town, before moving on, than the old system of quest-jumbling which usually resulted in too much gametime spent backtracking. Also, as a result of less backtracking and fast travel, the game has far fewer environmental respawns, something which I think we can all agree is a plus. Oh yeah, and cows & etc friendly units wont block your travel anymore either, which is fucking marvellous IMO. You can also go in and out of towns seamlessly without changing the screen, so no more loading screens every time you pop in and out of town. Not so boring now.
Combat is, on the whole, vastly more interesting than in the original trilogy. And one might even say more difficult as a result, though in this regard a new player would probably find it a lot harder than an experienced Avernum'er. There's a greater emphasis on elemental counters, a lot of enemies will use ranged attacks and debilitaters such as freezing, stunning, fear, etc, and there's now turrets added to the mix, meaning the old days of mostly hacking down 'regular' mobs and saving your spells for bosses is now a thing of the past. I used a fighter, archer, priest and mage and all of them had a use in practically all the battles and very rarely did different types of encounters result in the same combat routine. The game is also much tighter in it's overall combat balance, one positive of a slightly more linear questing structure (even though the world is still freely explorable). Not so boring now.
Itemisation is also a lot better than the original trilogy. There were always nice items to equip and good loot scattered around so that I was very rarely not taking a lot of time out to try out different items to see how they affected my character sheet. The items themselves felt loads more unique than in previous games and you're wearing unique items almost from the beginning instead of the old trilogy's system of having to wear generic stuff for most of the game and then flooding you with kinda-nice but still not overly exciting things towards the endgame. And, as was said earlier, this time there are scolls and wands that aren't simply copycats of spells you know anyway. Not so boring now.
This time there's no money limit, so no more selling 1,000gp's worth of stuff only to suddenly remember that money vanishes into the void if you already have 20k in gold. So no need to have giant stashes of mediocre loot everywhere and all the running about and forgetting that implies. Some things do now need to be stashed, but very specific things related to the much more interesting crafting system. You don't craft stuff yourself but, instead, it uses the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights crafting method whereby you meet a professional and then provide them with craftables and then they create you either a unique or powerful piece of armour or a nice potion. This is my favourite version of crafting as it doesn't involve mass-clutter craftable items and doesn't require the irritation of recipes and what have you just to make mundane items. It's crafting as something special and exciting. Not so boring now.
Likewise, special skills are no longer hidden like needles in a haystack behind walls of huge monetary expense and isolated NPCs, but now you come across skill providers as a matter of course and can quickly get used to the bonus options available to you well before you've already spent most of your skillpoints the game has available. Also, no more running around to regenerate health and spell points, simply walking into town restores it all. Not so boring now.
So the idea that it's a 'dumbed down' experience is one that I think I'd argue against. For me, it's more a case of 'de-irritated up', in that most of the stuff that's gone was the kind of stuff that was more irritating than enjoyable and in return the game has added loads of stuff the originals really should have been doing anyway.
As for bugs, I only noticed one and I don't even know if it was a bug. The game said that if I go into town any dead party members will be resurrected. However, this never worked for me. Even when I'd learned the resurrect spell, that didn't work either. I wondered if I'd not ticked or unticked a box in the options, but there was nothing in the options. I was only on normal difficulty so it's not a difficulty thing. I googled for people with a similar problem and found no results. So, no idea what was going on there. I didn't mind anyway because reloading upon death is how I play RPGs anyway, it was just weird for me that one of Spiderwebs games actually might have one bug in it!
In terms of the gameworld, Avernum 4 doesn't really add much, you're just questing through the main cave area of Avernum, all places you've been to before. But because it's a different engine, all the areas are different anyway. Like how new cities developed across Europe after they were blitzed, they're the same place, but they're now completely different. However, if the game does have one weak point this is it, as it doesn't add much in the way of the continuing Avernum saga. One is enjoying it simply because RPGing in the caves of Avernum is enjoyable. On the plus side, a new player could play Avernum 4 without ever having played any other Avernum game and find themselves a really good starting point. A game that's even better for newbies than it is for continuous fans.
All in all I really enjoyed my time in Avernum 4. Even after 130 hours of adventuring I still felt like the game ended too soon. What a fantastic gameplay loop this game has. This game got practically everything I like about RPGs just right, even if it was lacking some very important things that would make it stand out more from the crowd. For about two or three days after completing Avernum 4 I was in deep love with gaming once again, my love of gaming renewed and refreshed. I instantly wanted to replay everything I'd ever enjoyed playing after completing this.
A bit too generic and adds nothing much new to the series or wider genre but supplies really good combat and exploration with great itemisation, crafting and, most importantly, a really nice gameplay loop 8/10.