Compared to Avernum, it feels very restrictive.And it's not just the map doing it. There are some secrets to find, but for instance paths through dense shrubbery can only be found by quest-related NPCs opening them for you. Even within individual maps the entire experience of exploration is excessively guided, with frequent use of unpickable doors or impassable portcullises guiding you until the game feels the need to open them for you.
Locations can not be unlocked before an NPC does it for you, and the only NPCs that can do so are typically main plot-related NPCs or followers, with the story structured to see you constantly return to Avadon to be sent to the next area of the game's choice. This is an understandable tradeoff, but I personally feel Avadon went a bit far in it. They also create a situation where you are forced to choose between two sides, but they aren't clearly good or evil sides, instead providing realistic political choices for the player to take.Progression and ChoicesThis kind of well-paced story is really hard to tell in anything but a linear narrative, which restricts some of the freeroaming known from Avernum and Geneforge. The writing isn't always amazing and some NPCs tend to be too obvious exposition-dispensers, but the pacing of more and more details being unveiled, and the locations chosen to do so, are brilliantly set up to guide you so that major events in the storyline may still surprise you, but always make sense. A setting that looks like a boring old onion at the beginning carefully peels away its layers before your eyes in a (highly guided) storyline. But as you move into new areas, where Avadon's grip is less strong, you meet open or hidden defiance, and learn more about its actual power and how its used.I personally feel that this is the game's strongest point. As a Hand, you represent this 'invulnerable' fortress, and initially this meets the kind of subservient responses you would expect. It needs a veneer of invulnerability, that you discover to be beset in a variety of ways throughout the game. Even the world map looks like it could come straight from the inside jacket of a fantasy novel, with an alliance of five nations called the Midlands Pact sitting in the middle, bordered by fallen empires or wild lands threatening their security.Where Avernum had its underground prison setting and Geneforge has its geneforging and rebellion, Avadon doesn't have an obvious hook.
The interface is intuitive and easy to use, especially for Spiderweb veterans.Setting and StoryAvadon gives us fairly typical high-fantasy fare, presenting us with magic-rich, medieval-type nations struggling with threats of wretches (goblins) and titans (giants), as well as upholding unsteady alliances with dragons and other powerful factions. They are functional and sufficient for many players, but won't exactly tempt people expecting anything close to mainstream AAA graphics. The graphics are the best Spiderweb has done so far but there's still a lot of asset recycling. Like other Spiderweb games, it has no music but pretty solid sound design. Like older Spiderweb games, it's still a top-down turn-based RPG, with a heavy focus on exploration and turn-based party mechanics.