How One Indie Developer Has Kept the Classic cRPG Alive for 20 Years

Spiderweb Software has been treating us to thousands of hours’ worth of role-playing entertainment over the past 20+ years, and that’s inspired PC Gamer to interview founder Jeff Vogel about this track record of success, the games they’ve released along the way, their most recent endeavor, Avadon 3: The Warborn, and why they haven’t yet pursued a crowd-funded title. A handful of paragraphs:

How did Vogel come to serve that particular demand—and why does he keep doing it? “The indie games biz is super-duper-flooded right now. To write a game that stands out, you need to put real work in it, and you need to do that work in an area that a thousand people aren’t doing already,” he said. “That’s why story-heavy RPGs are a reasonable business to be in. There are a multitude of indie RPGPs out now. However, most of them don’t have good, deep stories, because writing a good story is really hard. What are the story-heavy RPG series now? Pillars of Eternity. Divinity. And not really much else. That gives me actual room in the market to work.”

Vogel started writing stories when he was around 10, and describes himself as a fantasy author who just happens to work in the medium of gaming. It’s a bit surprising, then, that he’s not really a big fan of the fantasy genre. “I read it some, sure, and I even like some of it. The Magician series by Lev Grossman is probably my favorite. It’s just not something I’m drawn to,” he said. “My favorite fiction is realistic fiction in a setting far enough from ours that it is basically fantasy now. I recently reread The Grapes of Wrath and was absolutely entranced.”

And while words are the backbone of the games he creates, he also believes that too much of a good thing is not a good thing at all. When I mentioned Obisidian’s recent claim that its upcoming fantasy RPG Tyranny is built on more than 600,000 words, he seemed downright taken aback. He hasn’t counted the words in his own games since Avernum 3, which came to about 200,000 words; he thinks Avadon 3 weighs in somewhere in the neighborhood of 120,000-150,000.

“But I think huge words counts are a real danger. I mean, 600,000? Good lord! That is longer that The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit put together. That’s a big, big chunk of verbiage. It doesn’t make me want to play the game more,” he said. “I think there is always a peril in flooding the player with words. Designers have discovered the joy of text. Now they have to discover the joy of brevity and skillful editing. You can almost always make a piece of writing better by shortening it. I loved the writing of Stanley Parable, and it didn’t have many words at all. And I’m about halfway through the indie hit Inside. That is a gorgeously written game, and it is entirely wordless.