I don't get where this hate is coming from. Well, probably because I said anything bad at all about a game which you love.
And that is probably also why you exaggerate and claim that I miss "epic sound".
Actually I said that before is that it was ok for me to disable sound in Avernum and turn on exterior music instead. And I also said that I have no problems with sound like in Eye of the Beholder.
The games you played when you grew up are old. But old does not mean low production value. And the low production value is clearly visible on all of the Spiderweb games, even the newest where is main title is actually a free available track (maybe you recognize the "similarity" in these videos)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r49_wtnc2Go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U7wqQPvXHs
And soundwise you realize this at every corner of the game and moreso in the older Geneforge titles, where you can hear the "background noise" of each audio file as it sounds like someone accidently activated his microphone and kept it running during the whole time.
Yes, the screenshots are visible in the store page. But that means that Geneforge1 has the same quality of graphics as Avernum does, doesn't it?
Well, one thing is, that you can't really say from there that the resolution of the older games is lower than the new ones (1680x1050 (Avernum) vs 800x600(Geneforge) actually makes a big difference). In addition the production value of the graphics isn't apparent either.
Would you still play it if it was monochrom with a resolution of 320*200 due to the game mechanics and the story?
The game mechanics arent so perfect either. As Todd pointed out in Avadon for example you can't position your characters manually. I didn't even realized this as a particular negative point as the whole controls in combat are quite screwed. Multiple clicks for a single spell every time because the hotbar is too small is one thing. But a Combat AI where your characters always take the direct path, even if it's the worst one, is another story. I mean, you get used to it after some hours, and instead of moving your Character from A to B you make him run at C before so that he takes the correct path to B within combat.
I guess you should take off your rose-tinted glasses and be a little more realistic.
It's fine if you love the game.
All I am saying is, that the older titles are below what people might initially expect.
And that there is no point in buying the bundle right now except of supporting spiderweb. Even if you want to play all games you are better off with buying one game and keep playing it, till the other ones are on steam sales which will probably be in a couple of weeks anyways.
And to back this up, just take a look at these pages:
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/Avadon/achievements
http://steamcommunity.com/stats/AvernumEscapeFromthePit/achievements
What these lists are telling us, is that more than 63% of all people who wanted to give Avadon a try did not make it through the first 3 hours or so.
Something similar goes for Avernum. 20% stopped within the first hour. And 65% didn't finish the first "real" quest (which takes a couple of hours).
This means that lots of people who bought these games, aware of the screenshots and the trailers, were pushed away by it anyways. And as I sad I have two friends where exactly this happened.
Of course these statistics aren't 100% accurate and people reading this page might cope with a bit more (/less).
But we are talking about the new games here, with the old ones the discrepancy will be even much higher.