Siege of Avalon - Continued Development?
 

Alrik writes in with an interesting one, pointing out some pages at Blackfly Studios where one of the original developers has continued development on Siege of Avalon, offering patches that update the game and fix issues.
I'm not sure I understand all the circumstances, because SoA is apparently open-source. Still, interesting - I never got around to playing this one, personally.
More information.

I was really looking forward to the planned sequel, Pillars of Avalon(gender choice is always nice in an rpg, which is something Siege of Avalon didn't have, but Pillars of Avalon would have had). Wish this dev could get permission assemble a small team and to begin development on that.

I remember when this was being developed. IIRC, they were trying a "chapter" kind of release. You buy each chapter separately as they create them. A few small companies were trying this kind of release out. It never caught on back then. If they tried it now they might have a chance. Telltale does an episode release on most of their games and it's worked out well for them.

No credit card back then meant that I didn't buy this, but I picked it up at Target when they released all the chapters/books on a CD. It's OK, but it has one huge flaw that I can't overlook. The walking speed is too slow. It takes forever to get around. If there were more interesting aspects to the game I might overlook that flaw, but as it is I have never gotten that far in the game.

I finished it and, uh, I don't really remember much about it.

I actually think it was a cool game. It doesn't run as well on modern computer though.

I really liked the classless system and how equipment worked.

Naah, common misconception. The engine is open source, the code and the assets of the commercial chapters 2-6 are still copyrighted.

It has since v1.3 patch from 2010. The website clearly says so.

I didn't think it was open-source, just that they had released the source code to the community since some people wanted to make the squeal, Pillars of Avalon, as a fan made project.

EDIT: ok, I see the above post, the engine is open source. I don't see a download link for it though on the sourceforge page.

The pages say that he was an employee of the firm that did SOA.

I have lost my onnections to them, but I assume that the SOAMIGOS German group might have contact to him, and asked him to continue development.

I, like Skavenhorde, picked it up on cd with all the chapters. I did not get far into it, and I dont remember why, although I do remember that issue with the movement speed. Painfully slow. Maybe time to fire it back up and give it another whirl.

If you have Win7 or maybe even WinXP you might want to try out this fix for the game:

Found it over at GoG

Also there is a patch over at Patches Scrolls. I believe ours would be the anthology patch though the 1.4 patch is newer. Not really sure which one to use since the anthology says 1.7.

Post your impressions of the game. I still have it and have eyed it every now and then when I've gotten bored, but I've always held back from replaying because I only have vague bad memories of this game.

I emailed if this was fixed in the patch or if it could be and here was the response I received.

Slowness could be caused by a number of things, most of which have been addressed in the latest patch. Game speed is adjustable in the siege.ini file. Change the interval setting to whatever feels comfortable to you. This value is the millisecond timing between frames.

Definitely have to refire this baby up and give it another whirl now.

Probably because of the combat. It's the only thing I had trouble with at the beginning. Otherwise, it feel a bit like Divine Divinity 1 (with less humor and smaller map).

I do remember some interesting quests, but not that much CC.

I think it's a pre-C&C game.

Blizzard never had C&C in their games either.

What is C&C? I only think of Command and & Conquer when I see that!

I once thought the same as you.
I think this is established as "choice & consequence" nowadays.