Exile Iii

Exile III: Ruined World is the 1997 third entry in Spiderweb Software's Exile RPG series, designed by Jeff Vogel. It moves the long-running cavern saga to the surface world and ships as $25 Macintosh shareware with a refined one-click interface and the engine that would soon power Blades of Exile.

Setting and story

After two games spent escaping and consolidating the underground refuge of Avernum, the people of Exile have built Upper Exile, a network of shallow cave-cities pressed against the surface. The party is sent topside as scouts to survey the long-hostile Empire, only to find the surface itself dying: crops fail, plagues spread, and unknown creatures called the Vahnatai-related blight ravage province after province. The game's central question shifts from escape to whether Exile and the Empire can put down centuries of grievance to save the world together.

Gameplay

Players control a six-character party across three interlocked modes: outdoor exploration on a coarse map, town interaction with shops and dialog trees, and tactical turn-based combat on a fine grid. Skills, mage and priest spell schools, and a deep item economy carry forward from earlier Exile games, but the structure is more reactive: plagues and monster invasions sweep specific provinces on a global timer, so where the party goes and when changes which towns can still be saved.

Engine and technical changes

Exile III introduces an automap, an improved one-click dialog interface, and tighter art direction over Exile II. The Mac release requires System 7, a 13-inch screen, and 256 colors, and runs on 68k and PowerPC Macs. The same engine, extended with a scenario editor, became the basis of Blades of Exile a few months later.

Development and release

Vogel and Spiderweb shipped the Mac version as $25 shareware in February 1997 directly via Spidweb.com (then via wolfenet.com) and through Info-Mac mirrors, with a Windows port following later that year. Multiple maintenance releases (1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.0.3) followed to fix balance and platform issues. The game was remade as Avernum 3 in 2002 and again as Avernum: Ruined World in 2018; the original Exile trilogy was made freeware by Spiderweb in July 2013.

Reception and legacy

Computer Gaming World called Exile III a "remarkably deep" traditional RPG, and the game won the 1998 ZDNet Shareware Game of the Year award. Reviewers praised the non-linear province-by-province structure and the volume of content for a shareware price; criticism, as with the rest of the series, targeted the modest tile graphics.

Its lasting importance is twofold. First, it cemented Spiderweb's model of long, deep shareware RPGs at a time when the commercial industry was abandoning the form. Second, its engine became Blades of Exile's runtime, indirectly producing hundreds of community-authored scenarios over the following decade.