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Originally written by Saltweed:

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Originally written by Andrea:

Remember - Vogel doesn't want to make games with any sort of intellectual value. As he stated himself, he's gearing his games towards 8-year-olds who want to go out and butcher baddies. Plot, etc. are all secondary concerns.

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Um, I'm quite sure he wants to do games with intellectual value. And from what I've seen, he has succeeded quite well.
Exile games are not brain food. Play a few more games and you'll wonder if Jeff took a lot of elements from a book. There are clever turns, but clever turns and an abysmal greater whole do not an intellectual work make.
Sure, they are no brain-blowers but who needs those, anyway? Games should first and foremost be games. If I specifically want an intellectual experience, I go read a good book or something.
This is a statement that is often broken out when someone wants to defend a game against charges of it being mindless and doesn't know how. It's not a defense, it's a statement of willful ignorance. Saying a game is not meant to have any intellectual content, and that such is a secondary concern, is basically the sort of attitude that's flooding the market with idiotic shooters and really, really bad RPGs. Saying 'screw plot, screw atmosphere, we've got a GAME to play here!' is basically inviting people to abuse a viable storytelling genre.

Since I don't own BoE, I don't know what uber-intelligent plots you guys have created.
You are missing out. The preceding is the understatement of the century. Blades is Vogel's finest work, bar none. I have the sneaking feeling that the BoA editor comes off as crippled and useless because he didn't like the idea of people creating works better than his with his tools. (For examples, see the Comprehensive Scenario Reviews at the Lyceum, play the top 10, compare to any given Exile. Chances are it's going to fall about at par.)

Nontheless, I'm quite fine with Jeff's current 8-years-old policy.
I'm not. Treating good gameplay as an excuse to expect less rather than something by which you should expect more is an abusive tactic and should be scorned.

EDIT: Also, you can hardly blame him for trying to make money. Even if it means the standard of the games isn't as high as you would hope.
I can and I will blame him for trying to make money, especially at the expense of his customer base. I think it killed everyone in the BoE community, by far and large the biggest faction of the Spidweb community, when they first found out that Jeff Vogel would prefer to make money on some derivative nonsense (the Avernums are a wonderful, original work, much like they were five years before Av1 was released) than to make his best product work.

I think something really breaks inside when someone who you idolized as a person and a programmer basically looks you in the face and says 'I only care about all of you because of your wallets'. Hang around the Lyceum at some point, and you'll find I'm not too far wrong on that one, if at all.

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