Avernum 2: Crystal Souls - Rewrites & Price

Jeff Vogel has a new post on his blog that tackles the recent outrage of his raising the price of Avernum 2: Crystal Souls to $20 instead of the usual $10 price point.

He also talks about the new reality of game development.

We have finally announced our next new game. It's Avernum 2: Crystal Souls. It's a complete, ground-up rewrite of Avernum 2, which came out in 2000. It, in turn, was a rewrite of Exile 2: Crystal Souls, which came out in 1996. We at Spiderweb Software are about nothing if not integrity.

You can see a trailer and other info here. Avernum 2 is probably tied with Avernum 3 for our most beloved game, and I know a lot of fans are looking forward to a reboot. Now with better design (I hope), a better interface and graphics (in my opinion), and the ability to run on tablets (yay).

We don't half-ass our rewrites. This one is taking a full year. New material, new quests, a new dungeon, more dialogue, actual boss fights. You might not like our work, but you can't fairly say we're not trying.

But enough self-promotion. I've said a lot of overly self-assured stuff over the last few months about the state of the indie games biz. Now that I'm having to actually make hard choices and release games, I wanted to talk a little about how I'm adjusting to the New Game Reality.