I Couldn't Manage To Finish Avernum 1 - Go To 2?

[Kruenpiper]

I got bogged down in the middle of Avernum 1. It seemed like it wanted to be linear with the difficulty curve but was open so there was a lot of wandering around, trial and error. I lost interest. I liked the setting. The gameplay was decent but I didn't like the structure and pacing of the game.

Is Avernum 2 better? Can I skip 1 and try 2? Or if I didn't like 1 is it worth trying 2?

[hrafnskald]

Avernum 2 and 3 are both fun. The interface and leveling system is very similar, but the story line is different.

Avernum 2: you start out in an isolated outpost under attack. There are mysterious magic barriers everywhere for the first third of the game. Once the barriers are brought down, it becomes more open world, with gating by difficulty.

Avernum 3: you start out in an outpost near the surface, and start exploring the surface world, which has plagues of monsters rampaging around.

They can be played in any order. 3 is the least linear, all three can be fun :)

[pabloquema]

Hi Kruenpiper. You may already have an answer to your question, but I want to add a response here as I think I know what you mean. In short, Crystal Souls is very similar in its structure to the first game; for me, difficulty level makes all the difference.

I've played the 2011 version of Escape From the Pit, and didn't quite complete it (2/3, got distracted before going after Hawthorne). I'm currently playing through Crystal Souls. I find that, on Normal difficulty, the game has some leeway: you can explore the open-world area, and indeed visit all the towns and settlements, so long as you're a bit careful about random mobs in certain areas. At Hard difficulty it's different: almost all fight scenes are either at the edge of what your party can handle, or beyond it, and there's no clear way to tell whether a particular delve is realistic for your party or not until you do it.

I'd strongly recommend playing at Normal difficulty throughout because Hard isn't well-balanced. Normal difficulty allows you to take punts at difficult delves and sometimes get away with it; Hard difficulty requires you to follow the exact sequence of level-appropriate steps, which means boring and frustrating trial and error, which you seem to be familiar with. In that sense, Crystal Souls is exactly the same as the first Avernum - in fact you'll visit many of the same locations, which may impact your enjoyment of the second episode. The story's decent, it is worth seeing through, but if the try-and-fail vibe of EftP bothered you, you'll have an even worse time with Crystal Souls.

If you want extra challenge, don't change the difficulty setting - reduce your party size. Going down to 3, or 2, or even just 1 party member will obviously make things more difficult, given the game's action economy; however, the concentration of XPs and consumables on a smaller party offsets this enough to make it interesting. Hard difficulty is just boring.