This game is actually a remake of the first Avernum, originally released as Exile: Escape From the Pit. The remake runs on the most up-to-date version of the Avernum engine and features dramatically improved graphics.

True to the original, AEFtP features three separate quests that can win you the game, offering a degree of flexibility we seldom see in RPGs of any description. The basic plot premise follows:

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.

For reasons unknown (perhaps simple bad luck), AEFtP was released on Wednesday, the exact same day as Legend of Grimrock, all but guaranteeing that it would be overshadowed in terms of news coverage. Luckily, a variety of sites have reviews up nonetheless. Most of the reviews are fairly positive, though one reviewer has inexplicably concluded that the graphics in this remake are unchanged from those in the original. (Um, no.)

You can pick up Avernum: Escape From the Pit for $20 from the Spiderweb Software web store if you want it on a Mac or Windows PC. (Worth noting: if you’ve purchased any other Avernum game in the past, you can get a $10 discount.) To get the game on iPad, you can nab it for $9.99 from the app store.

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.

Avadon has had a remarkably short development cycle since its  announcement in May of last year, which makes Vogel’s remarks that he spent “an unusual amount of time on it” a little comical. (Avernum 6 was released for Windows just a few months prior to the announcement of Avadon.)

Rather than simply post a rant, however, I decided to put the question to a handful of other indie RPG developers:

Some designers have demonized narrative as an inherently limiting and unnecessary distraction from the emergent storytelling arising out of pure gameplay. Why have narrative in games?

As you might expect, I received a variety of interesting and thoughtful responses:

Jeff Vogel: Someone is demonizing narrative? Really? That seems odd.

Emergent gameplay is great, if you can get it. It is a very difficult thing to do. But storytelling, whatever the medium, is one of the oldest and most fundamental human activities. Human brains are naturally receptive to telling and being told stories. As long as that is true, people will use games to tell stories.

Thomas Riegsecker: Narrative is certainly not required for all games, and in some cases in can be unnecessary baggage for the player. When it comes to role-playing games, one world think that a strong narrative is an absolute requirement. However, countless variations of Rogue shows that you can have a marvelous role-playing experience with little more than a single sentence explaining the goal. Likewise, many successful mainstream RPGs rely on nothing more than the overused plot of “Kill the powerful bad guy”, and any narrative in between the start and end of the game is really unnecessary.

However, narrative can be exceptionally rewarding as well. It can turn a generic role-playing game into a unforgettable one if done correctly. Certainly, when someone fondly remembers an RPG that they enjoyed playing years ago, it is often the story they remember and not the hours of level grinding and monster killing. Likewise, narration can guide the player through a seemingly immense world, preventing that unwelcome feeling of “I don’t know what I should be doing now”. Overall, it really is a player preference. As a developer, I need to find that balance between not enough narrative and too much narrative that will give a rewarding role-playing experience to as many potential customers as possible.

Amanda Fitch: I don’t think narrative is limiting and unnecessary, but if it is presented in manner which takes the player out of the game, then yes, it isn’t any fun.

Jay Barnson: I think I may be one of those demonizers. Sorry ’bout that. Didn’t mean to give any more ammunition to the haters.

Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.

Nevertheless, I love a good story in games. It’s a big part of why I’m such a fan of RPGs – I love the stories. The human brain is hard-wired to tune into stories. And I think even a mediocre story is more fun when you get to live it through a game. So in spite interactivity and narrative being something of a shotgun marriage, it works. The big question is how to make it work better. The almost universal approach today is to reach some compromise between the two, and keep trying to find a happier medium that works best for each game. Another, much more challenging approach, would be to rig the game mechanics to encourage adherence to more dramatic narrative formulas. Score bonus points for making dramatically interesting mistakes or something. And interactively build the narrative around player actions. We see glimmers of that in the Left 4 Dead series, where the AI engine seems to spawn enemies more based on the rhythm of the game than on location.

It’s not an easy blend. Narrative and gameplay are always going to have contradictory goals and tend to inhibit each other. But I also feel that the blend of contradictory elements is often greater than a sum of its parts.

[EDIT: We have a late entry! Added below.]

Vince D. Weller: Narrative is a good feature. I doubt that there are many people who’d tell you that they don’t like a good story in their games, so the problem isn’t that narrative is some kinda outdated thing of the past that gets in the way of emergent gameplay (I’ve yet to see a game that actually delivers it, but that’s a different story), but that like any other feature it can suck for one reason or the other. A story can be bad. A story can be uninspiring. A story can fail to grab the player and make him care (Alpha Protocol). A story can suffocate the player (Witcher, many Bioware games). Much like anything else, good story-telling is a talent. Not everyone can tell a good story, especially in a video game format. If you can’t, then it’s better to skip the narrative and focus on features that can replace it, like the sandbox elements, for example. If you can, then it won’t take much effort to make the story flexible enough to support decision-making and it would enhance your game. Simple as that.

As for narrative being limiting when it comes to emergent gameplay, I disagree. There are many ways to craft a story that doesn’t force the player to move along a pre-determined and very narrow path, but lets the player make decisions and craft his or her own story within the story arc. I can tell you what these ways are, but it’s boring, so let me throw stones at Jay instead:

“Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.”

The amount of drama depends entirely on the story-teller and the paths he creates for the player. If there is a path that can be described as the optimal path to victory, then yes, it’s boring and uninspiring, but only because the story-teller has failed. That’s what consequences of your actions are for. By applying consequences to the hero’s actions you can infuse the story with as much drama as you need and make the “optimal path to victory” the “hero does in the end” path, should you so desire, or “the hero fucks everything up, so things now are way worse than before, so thanks a lot, you fucking douchebag” path, not to mention the much desired “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” path where the seemingly optimal, no-brainer options lead to the hero slowly become the villain, without even realizing it. I assume that the moment when the player realizes what his hero has become would be quite precious.

So, the moral of this story is that choices without consequences don’t mean much and it’s the consequences that are the link between the traditional storytelling and emergent gameplay.

You are a servant of Avadon. The Black Fortress. Your job is to protect the Pact, five nations that have banded together in a fragile alliance. The purpose of the Pact: To hold back the waves of invaders that seek to destroy you.

Outside the lands of the Pact, there are limitless threats. Barbarians. Fading, jealous empires. Titans and unspeakable horrors. The warriors and spies of Avadon are charged to keep them at bay, weak and divided. You fight in the shadows, rooting out small threats before they have the chance to grow. Your resources are unlimited, and your word is law.

But a dark time is coming. Assassins are killing Avadon’s warriors, and a hidden enemy plots to unite all of your homeland’s foes. If you cannot discover and destroy this conspiracy, and soon, your people face total destruction. But beware. The defenders of Avadon are being picked off, one by one, and you are the next target.

While the plot sounds decidedly Baldur’s Gate-y, the in-game screenshots they’ve posted look an awful lot like Avernum VI, albeit with much nicer character portraits and GUI design. (This probably shouldn’t surprise anyone.)

Also, just because I find it interesting, here is a recent blog post Jeff wrote evangelizing the reuse of old game engines and assets for RPGs.

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.