Avernum: Escape From the Pit is an epic fantasy role-playing adventure in a unique and deadly world. Fight to complete up to three game-winning quests. Explore a massive nation of tunnels and caverns, seeking out eighty towns and dungeons. Master over 50 spells and battle disciplines and hunt for hundreds of magical artifacts. Avernum: Escape From the Pit is a total, ground-up rewrite of the last century’s Indie hit Avernum. It will be ready for adventurers in Q4, 2011.

Hit the jump for more info about the plot and some screenshots showing off the game’s newly spiffied-up graphics.

Vogel summarizes the plot of Avernum thusly:

You have been banished to the underworld, never to see the light of day again.

The surface is ruled by the cruel Emperor Hawthorne, master of the Empire. All of the known lands are subject to his brutal command. Everyone who speaks out, who misbehaves, who doesn’t fit in is cast into the dark, volcanic pits of Avernum, far below the surface. There, you are expected to die, a victim of starvation, horrible monsters, or simple despair.

But not all of the Avernites have surrendered. With magic and steel, they are forging a new nation deep underground. You can join them and fight for safety. Or freedom. Or even, if you dare, revenge on the surface-worlders who tried to destroy you.

Although the Mac version is scheduled for release at the end of this year, Windows and iPad versions are not slated for release until the first quater of next year.

We discussed the reaction to Avadon (his latest game), what his next move will be as a game developer, and what the heck Matt Findley could have possibly been thinking when he opened his mouth to Gamasutra. While we were at it, I also pressed him for specifics about his recent development choices, and got some details about what we can expect to see in Avadon 2.

Intrigued? Hit the jump and find out what Mr. Vogel had to say.

As you know, Avadon received a less-than-enthusiastic reaction on the RPG Codex forums. Many there evidently saw Avadon as an attempt to appeal to the casual market by streamlining player choices and ratcheting down in-game difficulty. On your blog, you responded that you have to make design choices that are “best for what you’re trying to do.” For the record, what were you trying to do with Avadon?

Make a good role-playing game, one that is accessible and easy to understand for people new to the genre but has enough gamey details and difficult bits (on harder difficulty levels) to please hardcore gamers. And I think I did a pretty good job at both tasks.

Remember, a gaming genre is only viable if it is trying to bring in new players. If most of the new RPGs are made to be scary to people who have never played them before, it is just bad for the genre.

Your games have appeared on causal game portals like BigFishGames for some time now. Are these the venues you find yourself drawing most new players from?

I honestly don’t know if we’re getting the bulk of new players, but such portals bring in a lot of new faces. The rise of gaming portals has been an enormous good for small indies. I could never get my games on, say, the shelves at Best Buy, but Direct2Drive and Wild Tangent and the like are very good to us.

You’ve stated that Avadon’s sales exceeded your expectations. Without getting into specific numbers, would you say that adopting Avadon’s more linear, class-based approach was a good business decision for Spiderweb?

I can’t point at any one decision in Avadon and say, “That was the one.” Avadon is hundreds and hundreds of discrete decisions, each of which add up to one full game that turned out pretty well. What I will say is that changing everything up every few years is a good decision. I need to keep things fresh to not burn out. I don’t think a lot of people realize how important this is.

How about from a developer sanity perspective? (It seems to me, for instance, that discrete classes would be much, much easier to balance than amorphous balls of skills and stats.)

Not too bad. Happily, Avadon has no PVP. Having to balance classes against each other is the really tough thing to do.

Is there a danger in poking your head out of the small niche you’ve carved for yourself over the many years that you’ve been making games?

Change is always dangerous, but Avadon still very firmly in the same niche we’ve always been in. Low-budget, story-rich, indie RPG. The differences between Avadon and, say, Geneforge is really not that large.

You’ve made an entire career out of designing turn-based RPGs. I’m curious to get your take on the recent Matt Lindley interview scandal. (Is “scandal” the right word? Maybe “controversy.” Anyway.) Did all of those old turn-based RPGs really want to be action games at their heart?

The best way to get attention for your product/blog/whatever is to say outrageous things. Everyone has done it. I have done it. He was putting down the types of games he’s not writing and building up the sort of game he is writing. It’s marketing.

Saying turn-based games are outdated is kind of silly. I mean, people still play Chess, right? Go? Settlers of Catan? Turn-based games are less popular than they used to be, but they will always be a thing.

Have you ever thought about doing a real-time RPG?

Occasionally, but that is a little bit outside both my programming skills and our established niche. Maybe someday, but not for a long time.

Just a few days ago, you mentioned on your blog that you’ve made enough sales to enable you to create Avadon 2. Is Avadon 2 in development?

Not yet. We’re working on the first Avernum rewrite right now. Avadon 2 is next year.

What changes are you planning to make to Avernum 1 in the remake? Will there be substantial changes to the dialog, quests and/or in-game systems, or is it mostly going to be a graphics and interface overhaul?

Everything. We are spending months and doing major changes. To the world, to the storyline, to the game system, to the interface. It will be a major revamp. We aren’t half-assing it, and we hope to provide screenshots and details soon.

However, I want to make one thing very clear. It will still be Avernum. It will have the same story and characters and towns. There is still an outdoors that is huge but separate from the cities. I want to make sure that the things people love about the series are still there.

What will change between Avadon and Avadon 2?

The only thing I’m sure of is that Avadon 2 will have a much flashier demo. That is my main regret about the first Avadon.

Are you sticking to your guns on health regeneration and auto-resurrection of fallen comrades?

Absolutely, without question.

How about outdoor exploration?

Nope. It just doesn’t fit the story. Some sorts of storylines support a big, expansive outdoors to wander around in. (Fallout 3. Elder Scrolls.) Other stories are best served with individual, highly-detailed areas. (Dragon Age: Origins. Avadon.)

If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that you’ve chosen to use detailed indoor environments because of the game’s focus on factional conflict/political intrigue. What would outdoor environments detract from a game like this?

To put it simply, the outdoors isn’t where the game is. If a game is about exploration and travel (and I really enjoy such games), it needs a big outdoors. If the game is about politics and intrigue, it needs to be where the politics and intrigue are. This will not, largely, be in a huge, swooping outdoors.

Is it true that you are not cool anymore?

There has never been a millisecond in which I was cool.

And if so, have you considered making a pile of money in your backyard and setting it on fire?

I try it to do it every year. I just keep failing.

I’ll start with a confession: Avernum 6 is the first Avernum game I’ve played. So I write with a fresh eye toward the thing, rather than seeing it as one in a series of gradually improving games.

The writing in Avernum 6 is truly the game’s backbone, and it ranges from competent to quite good.

Though Jeff Vogel’s characterizations occasionally lack consistency, he has a way with words, and his curmudgeonly narrative voice provided me with chuckles on more than a few occasions. You’ll spend a lot of time exploring, talking to people, and searching things. The dialog and descriptions you get of the game world will arguably provide most of your moment-to-moment entertainment value while playing, so it’s good that Vogel has taken the time to do this well.

Avernum 6, however, lacks a certain level of polish. The portraits for your party members are distractingly amateurish, particularly when compared to the beautiful hand-painted portraits of the other characters you meet during the game. Further, while many of the in-game graphics look pretty good in a still screenshot, few of them animate in-game. The few that do, such as campfires and basic attack animations, don’t look so hot. All in all, the lack of animation doesn’t hurt the experience too terribly, but it is a little strange to see your party members jump from space to adjacent space in short jerks, all the while remaining perfectly rigid.

Treating the in-game characters like playing pieces might work better if the game were more like a strategy board game. However, while the combat system is definitely turn-based (and actually, a bit reminiscent of older games like Dark Sun: Shattered Lands), it’s too simplistic to really give you the feel of playing a tactical board game. Vogel makes no apologies for this: “in a turn-based RPG, with a small number of dudes fighting a small number of dudes, there isn’t much in the way of tactics that is possible. The math isn’t there!” (I don’t think that’s true, personally, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

There isn’t really any music in the game, aside from a pretty neat track that plays while you’re on the title screen. Some people will find the stark silence that accompanies even fairly dramatic events (such as combat) disappointing. Music can do an awful lot to set the mood in an RPG, and not having any in a sprawling adventure like Avernum 6 is a wasted opportunity.

Avernum 6 starts off slowly, with you being gradually introduced to the setting and the game’s mechanics via an extended tutorial. Avernum is a gigantic underground region that has been colonized by people from the surface via a magical portal. However, a blight has afflicted all natural underground sources of food, forcing people to flee or face starvation. You are a lowly private in the Avernum armed forces assigned to guard a food storage area. When the game begins, you’ll find items, equip them, and fight (what else?) rats. Here you can get a peek at someone playing through the tutorial sequence:

I didn’t mind the introduction, though I found it strange that Vogel chose to start the player off as an insignificant peon forced to kill wildlife, considering his views on the subject. Suffice it to say that you are going to spend some time clearing trash monsters at the beginning of Avernum 6, mostly in the form of giant rats and goblins. (Vogel does do us the favor of giving the goblins some personality, however: their leader, Lord Trinket, is as funny and vibrant a villain as any I’ve seen recently in an RPG.)

I think the beginning sequence may be Vogel’s way of working through his feelings about the end of the series. He’s been quite vocal about his ambivalence over bringing Avernum to a close. Vogel is tired of writing the same games over and over, but he’s afraid to turn off the spigot of his success. In many regards, the first mission seems to echo that ambivalence, with Sgt. Nichols and the player both acting as ciphers for Vogel: one nervous and fully aware of the risk of moving on, and the other bored of staying in the same familiar place month after month.

For my part, I’ve fully enjoyed my time spent in Avernum 6. If you’re a fan of old-school turn-based RPGs like Fallout and Arcanum, there’s a pretty good chance that you will like this too. There is a large public demo available for the willing: I suggest you go give it a try and decide for yourself.

The Verdict: 4/5. Avernum 6 is a game that lives and dies by the strength of its writing, and the writing is pretty good. While it lacks a certain level of polish, it offers a solid old-school gaming experience that few games these days even attempt.

Vogel’s company, Spiderweb Software, just released the final chapter of his Avernum series, Avernum 6, on Friday.

The site describes Avernum 6 thusly:

Travel into the strange subterranean land of Avernum, full of dungeons, labyrinths, and constant warfare. A final set of disasters threatens to destroy your homeland in a spasm of famine and warfare. Only you can help your people to get to safety before everything falls apart.

So, it’s probably safe to assume that there’s going to be a lot of warfare involved. Demos are available for both Windows and Mac.