I have to leave the basic open-endedness of it alone. There are a lot of things I did in them design-wise that just never really worked, never really came together. They have an almost unprecedented amount of player freedom. It’s super-open-ended in terms of how you develop your characters, how you progress through your game, what political factions you join. I’m still surprised at how enduring it is, although among really serious hardcore RPG fans, a lot of them consider it my great work. The Geneforge series is weirdly - it’s hugely popular. GamesBeat: Which one are you looking forward to redoing the most? So if you want my favorite game, it is not Blades of Avernum. Probably my least favorite was Blades of Avernum, an Avernum game with the scenario construction kit, because it was incredibly draining and incredibly hard to write. Avernum: Escape from the Pit is the first one, and it’s really - I can’t come up with a favorite. Avernum 2 and 3 have storylines that are as good as anything I’ve done. Nethergate, for example, has a really cool setting and a really cool story and a really innovative way of presenting that story, so I really love that game, but I have a hard time saying it’s my favorite because Geneforge is really coolĪvernum 4 and 5 are cool. Vogel: Every game I’ve released has things about it that I think are terrific and ways in which I think they failed. GamesBeat: Do you have a favorite game out of the 22? I have to rewrite the whole Geneforge series. Who knows when that’ll be, but it’s not going to be for a long time. They’re like, “Oh, who’s this guy?” They’re loving it, too. I’m hugely pleased and relieved, because it’s a great design and people love it.Ī lot of new people are picking it up. Avernum 2: Crystal Souls is going great guns. I need to keep making new games, but at the same time, from now on, I could just do rewrites. “Oh, God, you asshole, we don’t wanna hear this, sing ‘Yesterday.'” It’s the same thing. When he did his new songs, you could feel the energy fall out of the audience. I was lucky enough two years ago to see Paul McCartney in concert. To be able to be proud of myself and confident in myself as a developer, I need to make new work.īut it’s like, nobody wants to hear The Rolling Stones’ new songs. Writing new games is very difficult and very draining, but I keep doing it because I need to do it to look at myself in the mirror. At this point, all I can do in any given year is rewrite the game I released 15 years before and release that, and people love it. I have a back catalog that goes for days. Any indication you want to settle down and do something else at this point? That will continue for a long time, because I’m not going anywhere. For example, how far I can push myself before I hit a panic attack. It’s just been a really hard adjustment over the last few years, to just explore my new middle-aged body and brain and figure out what I can ask from them. Vogel: That’ll kick your limbs right out from under you. GamesBeat: There’s the key to a softer brain right there. The technical hurdles get bigger, and at the same time, every year my brain is older and softer. Every year, the things I’m doing are more ambitious. As I’m cruising through my 40s, I’m finding that I can’t ask of myself what I used to. I just sit at my desk and place orcs all day.īut at the same time, writing and making games does require energy and an expenditure of effort. There are people dying working 80-hour weeks in Shenzhen to make iPhones. Jeff Vogel: I feel guilty for describing what I do for a living as work. At the end of the week, I would be so exhausted I could barely keep my eyes open, but it felt good. When I was in my 20s and just started doing this, there was this compulsion to it where I could just work and work and work. Vogel: The most painful lesson I ever had to learn is that I am a mortal being who is growing older, and I’m not in my 20s anymore. Were there lessons that were difficult or painful to learn? GamesBeat: You said you pick up a few tricks each year as you went along. I think people need to embrace more - just making games dumb and unfair. People will know about the grue even now. It’s ridiculous, but it’s a funny, charming kind of ridiculous. They just came up with this clever idea to justify it. But it’s part of the system, so it’s in there. The idea is that if you go in a dark place, you die. That was a fantastic little quirk of design. GamesBeat: It reminds me of the grue in the original text-only adventure, Zork.
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