KickStarter Geneforge 1 - Mutagen - remake from Spiderweb Software

[Dayyālu]

Have you seen what he did to the character system in the latest Avernum remake?

I'll be blunt, I haven't played the Avernum remakes because seriously I've already finished the same game twice it's enough

I'd argue in good faith though that the Exile/Avernum mechanics were far more "in-depth" than Geneforge's: there isn't a lot of material to ruin in a GF1's remake. I hope. HOPE.

I think there's more at stake than just that. For example I'm afraid that Vogel is going to ditch the awesome and atmospheric 2d art of the original.

I love that art. But yes, it's already obvious he'll go for awful 3d models because ITS HAAARD TO FIND ARTISTS AND I NEED MY STUFF TO LOOK AS SHIT AS POSSIBLE BECAUSE REASONS

Vogel just doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on what made him great. Or an even worse case is that he does understand what made his previous works great, but he hates it and keeps trying to redefine himself, and utterly failing at it each and every time.

I think someone here or on the Queen's Wish thread made the best evaluation of Vogel: he's an industry survivor, not a veteran. Despite his neverending claims of being INDUSTRY VETERAN SUPREME when you get to read what he's writing he sounds like a crazy, lazy and out of touch old man, and he lucked out during the Great RPG drought and the indie boom. He doesn't know why his games were good, he doesn't care, and he doesn't want to improve, being too scared to do anything different.

So I hope this time the thing will work at our advantage.

 

[V_K]

I'll be blunt, I haven't played the Avernum remakes because seriously I've already finished the same game twice it's enough

Well they got skill trees now:

On the positive note though, the ink art ist still in.

 

[Pope Amole II]

I think there's more at stake than just that. For example I'm afraid that Vogel is going to ditch the awesome and atmospheric 2d art of the original.

Actually ordering new art for a new game? HOW DARE YOU!!!

Nah, the most precious thing that can (and most likely will) get ruined are the open-world natures of both Geneforge 1 and 2. Let's not forget that you could've traversed and completed those games in pretty much whatever order, as long as you could've broken through zone defenses. My fondest memories of G1 was sending suicidal waves of Fyodor Dostoevskis at that big, scari 6x (or was it 8x?) fortification at the middle of the map. And wouldn't you know, the little fyoras that could eventually prevailed. Press F to pay respect to all the fyoras that fallen, though.

G2 had a bit of linear start but afterwards there was still an open world to discover and, actually, exploration sequence created lots of powerplay possibilities, especially if you've chosen to go full Yojimbo way. Alas, since G3 Vogel became enamoured with the Bioware formula (of all the things!) which lead to G3 itself being the weakest part of the series. The linearity was somewhat subdued in 4 and 5, but it wasn't the freedom of the first dilogy.

 

[Dayyālu]

G3 was a weird attempt, aye. Self-contained hubs gave him less work to do, and the companions were the dreadful sign of things to come. On the other hand, G3's approach refined gave us in G4 my personal favourite area, the Swamps of Monarch (one of my fondest GF memory is being a Rebel Agent but in reality a Shaper agent but selling Shaper secrets to the Rebels up to the point they trust me to get even better secrets to sell back to the Shapers. It felt organic, and great infiltration work).

Well, we'll need to see what the hell he's going for. He's lazy, but you can't redo GF1 and cutting factions, alternate solutions to fights and roaming, it would simply be Avernum lite. Let's hope for the best.

On the positive note though, the ink art ist still in.

I dimly remember people strongly asking for the Phil Foglio art, probably managed to burrow even in Vogelìs thick skull.

 

[Tyranicon]

Geneforge is one of the best rpg series ever, if not the outright best. Geneforge 1 also makes for a good stand-alone, self-contained game, so even better. I hope this goes well. I will no doubt purchase it.

It's not like it can turn out as bad as Queen's Wish, right? Right??

Never got around to Queen's Wish, what was so bad about it?

 

[Dayyālu]

Never got around to Queen's Wish, what was so bad about it?

It's dull and badly designed. Also graphically horrendous, but that's not a particular problem for Spiderweb's output.

Why it's dull? I'd argue it gets somewhat better the further you progress, but the beginning is honestly almost childish in writing and execution, and you have to endure half-assed lore dumps on boring nations you don't give a fuck about. Even the map is designed as lazily as possible, a Triskele island with you in the middle and the Three Nations neatly closed in their own lands. It gets a tad better the further you progress, but the beginning is really on "Your First RPGMaker game" levels.

Mechanically it's messy. Vogel wanted to do something new, and he managed to redo RPGmaker mechanics. I am not joking. All your characters are disposable bags of HP that you are expected to respec when you find something you can't deal with, dungeons trash is costantly respawning (only boss count for "finishing a dungeon") and both healing items and energy regen items are purposefully kept in short supply to force you to respec. Again, it improves after the beginning, but the first 2-3 hours of Queen's Wish have essentially endless trash combat with respawning mobs if you don't clear dungeons in one go. Character builds are trivial and insanely simplified. Also, there aren't "characters" per se, there is only your protagonist (mechanically almost equal to everyone else) and disposable followers with no lines. Think creations in Geneforge, just dull.

Items are linked to "forts" that you need to upgrade, exploration is moot bar for getting resources to upgrade forts to get better equipment. Sounds interesting in practice, but it merely means that you need to hunt for vendor trash to upgrade buildings to get better items instead of, well, getting directly better items. Clunky and unnecessary. Also, the optimal way to play is to beeline for forts and ignore everything else.

On the graphics side, it's atrocious, but after a while you stop noticing: the only amusing thing is that Vogel defended with tooth and nail the shitty graphics and lack of soundtrack because "he can't afford better" and "it's his vision" causing general ridicule even in less-anger prone community than the 'Dex (they were making fun of him on Reddit, by chrissakes).

 

[Tyranicon]

Never got around to Queen's Wish, what was so bad about it?

It's dull and badly designed. Also graphically horrendous, but that's not a particular problem for Spiderweb's output.

Why it's dull? I'd argue it gets somewhat better the further you progress, but the beginning is honestly almost childish in writing and execution, and you have to endure half-assed lore dumps on boring nations you don't give a fuck about. Even the map is designed as lazily as possible, a Triskele island with you in the middle and the Three Nations neatly closed in their own lands. It gets a tad better the further you progress, but the beginning is really on "Your First RPGMaker game" levels.

Mechanically it's messy. Vogel wanted to do something new, and he managed to redo RPGmaker mechanics. I am not joking. All your characters are disposable bags of HP that you are expected to respec when you find something you can't deal with, dungeons trash is costantly respawning (only boss count for "finishing a dungeon") and both healing items and energy regen items are purposefully kept in short supply to force you to respec. Again, it improves after the beginning, but the first 2-3 hours of Queen's Wish have essentially endless trash combat with respawning mobs if you don't clear dungeons in one go. Character builds are trivial and insanely simplified. Also, there aren't "characters" per se, there is only your protagonist (mechanically almost equal to everyone else) and disposable followers with no lines. Think creations in Geneforge, just dull.

Items are linked to "forts" that you need to upgrade, exploration is moot bar for getting resources to upgrade forts to get better equipment. Sounds interesting in practice, but it merely means that you need to hunt for vendor trash to upgrade buildings to get better items instead of, well, getting directly better items. Clunky and unnecessary. Also, the optimal way to play is to beeline for forts and ignore everything else.

On the graphics side, it's atrocious, but after a while you stop noticing: the only amusing thing is that Vogel defended with tooth and nail the shitty graphics and lack of soundtrack because "he can't afford better" and "it's his vision" causing general ridicule even in less-anger prone community than the 'Dex (they were making fun of him on Reddit, by chrissakes).

Thanks, pretty insightful. As much as I personally like the man, his arguement for having shit graphics doesnt hold water because between assets shops and starving artists, art is as about cheap as it has ever been.

 

[Tito Anic]

Geneforge saga is brilliant and needs no reworks. It would be cool if Jeff tried to tie loose ends - maybe expand universe, introduce new civilization(Sholai)

 

[Dayyālu]

Thanks, pretty insightful. As much as I personally like the man, his arguement for having shit graphics doesnt hold water because between assets shops and starving artists, art is as about cheap as it has ever been.

Considering that you are a developer, maybe you'll find interesting Vogel's original thoughts:

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-all-of-our-games-look-like-crap.html

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-am-cheapest-bastard-in-indie-games.html

Again, it feels that his arguments are mostly to defend laziness. Or maybe he suffers from some malady that inhibits good sense in cheap graphics.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

 

[Tyranicon]

Thanks, pretty insightful. As much as I personally like the man, his arguement for having shit graphics doesnt hold water because between assets shops and starving artists, art is as about cheap as it has ever been.

Considering that you are a developer, maybe you'll find interesting Vogel's original thoughts:

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/why-all-of-our-games-look-like-crap.html

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-am-cheapest-bastard-in-indie-games.html

Again, it feels that his arguments are mostly to defend laziness. Or maybe he suffers from some malady that inhibits good sense in cheap graphics.

Yup, I've been keeping up with his blog, even though it gets updated 3 times a year or something. I think he's just too cemented in his dev process, and he's not interested in looking for newer artists.

Also, what happened with the previous posts?

 

[Drowed]

Vogel just doesn't seem to have a firm grasp on what made him great. Or an even worse case is that he does understand what made his previous works great, but he hates it and keeps trying to redefine himself, and utterly failing at it each and every time.

Vogel reminds me of Lucas, but on an indie / super small scale. A mixture of circumstances, limitations and restrictions made him able to create something interesting and unique. But when those limitations no longer existed and he had more "freedom" to do things the way he wanted, as he saw fit, the end result was no longer so positive.

In fact, it is curious to note that this kind of situation is not uncommon: many creative minds work much better with direction, when they are forced to follow external determinations, or when there are great restrictions that force them to deal with certain things in an innovative and creative way. But at the moment that this no longer happens, well... It seems that the subtle balance that kept the result collapse and everything goes to shit.

 

[Dayyālu]

Also, what happened with the previous posts?

The Dark Gods took them.

Or a moderator took weird decisions about splitting threads and reassigning content, one of the two!

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I really like Geneforge's UI. The green is ugly, but who cares? I like having the inventory out in the open like that. It's one of Vogel's best designed interfaces. Everything that you need is right there-inventory, health, maps, and creations. The only submenu in the game is the character stats screen.

 

[jungl]

queens wish was shit. Everything about the game is shit. fort system is more dumb then pillars 1. world design is shit, character customization is shit, combat encounters are shit, can barely interact with the environment is shit. There are dozens of rpgmaker games more fun and entertaining. Its arguably the worst game I played all year. You have to be a real lover of shit to play through the whole game. I have strong feeling vogel is going to somehow make this remake worse. This guy is going to become even more indie and niche then he already is.

 

[Tyranicon]

queens wish was shit. Everything about the game is shit. fort system is more dumb then pillars 1. world design is shit, character customization is shit, combat encounters are shit, can barely interact with the environment is shit. There are dozens of rpgmaker games more fun and entertaining. Its arguably the worst game I played all year. You have to be a real lover of shit to play through the whole game. I have strong feeling vogel is going to somehow make this remake worse. This guy is going to become even more indie and niche then he already is.

Does the Queen's Wish end up in some mainstream incest porn scenario, because that's totally the vibe I get from the game.

Also, pretty hard for Vogel to be more indie than he is. He's the epitome of a solodev at this point.

 

[curds]

Geneforge could use a new UI, navigating the inventory was a nightmare mildly annoying. Don't think the whole series needs a remake however. Not unexpected though, given Vogel's history.

 

[Ranarama]

I'm sick of fucking remakes. It may be a gamble, but rolling the dice on anything new is better than a UI mod.

 

[Rafidur]

From his AMA:


(Queen's Wish seems extremely simplified compared to your other games. Is the Geneforge remake also going to go in that direction?)
"Geneforge remaster will stay very faithful to the original."

"I am REALLY looking forware to remastering the Geneforge games. I promise I'll do them justice."

(Will it be purely a remaster or will there be new content as well?)
"We want to put new content, zones, quests, etc in each game."

 

[Gibson]

I'm spoiled from playing Amplitude games. "Right-click to close menu" should become an industry standard.

THIS!
SO!
MUCH!
THIS

The first time i right-clicked to close the menu on EL it was like "dude, no fucking way"+"how is this not ALWAYS a thing"
Amplitude have aesthetics well over 9000.

Queue jeff Vogel games...

 

[Terra]

I found G5 to be the weakest entry personally, despite their faults, both 3 and 4 had their merits. I like Alwan and Greta's opposing interjections and ideologies, I definitely found it added to the experience to have them with you for as long as possible in G3. G4 was interesting in that you were playing both sides and you had the Monarch where both sides essentially had to join up iirc against a stronger foe. Maybe I was just burnt out but the only real things that stick in my mind from G5 are finally getting to take out the long standing faction leaders/members, I didn't find approach of making you Rawal's slave particularly compelling. G1 & 2 remain my favourite entries, with the first setting the stage and 2 giving you the opportunity to powergame, join all factions then betray everyone and report in to the shaper council at the end.

 

[fantadomat]

Lets hope that it is not horrible as queen's garbage.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

To be fair, I think that church now gets more traffic than before after this "accident." I recall that news day. I was laughing pretty hard at the new Monkey Savior.

 

[Agesilaus]

Geneforge remake is coming

Hmm something does not seem right in that image. That's clearly the starting docks, and yet... that drayk-boat appears to be unhurt.





EDIT: On the other hand... damn Geneforge is a good game. Less than 5 minutes in and I'm being sucked into an amazing RPG. I usually only play G2 and G5, but I decided to revisit G1 and G4.

 

[JDR13]

Geneforge is one of the best rpg series ever, if not the outright best.