Critique of Eschalon - Learning Cliffs, and real strategy

[Wraith_Magus]

My apologies to anyone on the "TL;DR crowd", but this will be a long one. What I am about to write, however, is not a simple statement, but rather a persuasive argument for a different perspective on this game, and arguing for a different perspective unfortunately takes far more time and verbosity. (Plus, due to the fact that it took me a week to get registered here, I kind of started writing what I wanted to say in notepad, and never particularly stopped...)

This thread is a review/critique of Eschalon: Book I primarily, but I'm putting it here, since I am critiquing the mechanics of the game that a trip to the wiki tells me are largely unchanging throughout the series, and hence, are applicable to Book II, and (probably) Book III, as well. Since Basilisk Wrangler seems to actively read and participate in these forums, I'll largely address this thread to him. (But that is not to say I am excluding anyone from the conversation.)

I am someone who might be called a connoisseur of strategy and RPG games. I bought Eschalon through Steam because I love game mechanics, and love sampling many small indie games for their mechanics before either "digesting" a game (in a superfluously loquacious manner such as this), or just moving on to the next game.

I have read some of this forum's threads, and see that people have complaints about the game, but that they aren't quite arriving at the conclusion to which I have arrived. Some people say this game is "too easy", and others "too hard", but there is a lack of the proper framing of the debate (a lack of the proper terms to define what the problem actually is so that everyone can recognize the problem for what it really is) to make sense of why this is the case.

In this game, I see a main problem, and two smaller problems that serve to obfuscate the main problem:



Problem 1: The Learning Cliff

Simply put, the "Learning Cliff" is the key reason why many newer players think this game is "too hard" when the game is, in fact, too easy. (This is why it is a minor problem that obfuscates the larger problems.)

The simplest way to explain what the Learning Cliff is, I'll say this:

I play Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is frequently described as an "extremely hard" game, and extremely frequently as a "fiendishly complex" game. The second of which is almost true. In truth, the main reason why so many people have trouble with Dwarf Fortress (aside from general interface shittiness) is that the game basically just dumps you out in a field with an interface filled with hundreds of buttons, no manual, no tutorial, and tells you to just do your best to survive, and that, "Losing is Fun". (In other words, keep trying until you get it right.)

In truth, DF has a very simple formula to solving basically every challenge the game will throw at you: excavate an easily-defended area, seal all dangers off with walls, and get a farm running to supply you with infinite resources. After you have established a basic defensible position, (which takes an experienced player only minutes,) you have overcome basically every challenge in the game.

Most players, however, fail in their games not because they are stupid, unskilled, or otherwise incompetent, but because they are simply flooded with tons of junk data and no capacity to make sense of how to figure out what was the actually important information or priorities in the midst of a sea of bloat data. They start worrying about forges or crafting trade goods when only farming is really important.

Comparatively, a regular game has a "learning curve" - Each element of the game is introduced one at a time, explained to the player, and then tested. You start with a little skill, and only need a little skill to advance. Then, you need gradually more and more skill.

This game has a learning cliff - the game's rules are actually very simple, and winning is very easy, but the problem is that players are forced to start out in a character screen that demands they allocate character points at a time when they have no idea how any of the skills they are deciding on buying or not will actually work.

Rather than being a slope, you need to know a ton of information, have many skills, to make any headway on the game at all, but as soon as you do, you have all the tools to conquer every single challenge in the game - it's a flat plateau of difficulty from there on out, and the game is "easy".

This is why IJBall "fails" twice at the game, only to find it "too easy" on his third and every successive playthrough.

Put simply, the game isn't hard, the players just aren't succeeding because you aren't telling them the rules fairly and simply before you ask them to start playing. The only "difficulty" in the game arises from players simply not knowing the rules, and "skill" is defined solely by whether you understand what you are doing or not.

You already tell players who are looking at spells, for example, how much damage fire bolt does, and deep freeze does, (1d3+2 and 1d4+4, respectively,) when they are looking at them in the game so that they can actually compare these spells situationally. (Twice the damage versus three times the cost.) However, you seem to consider it a "spoiler" to tell players that they gain massively more MP regen benefits for the same flat cost the more points they put into Perception, which is something they really need to know in order to make proper decisions.

There is a relatively simple fix for this problem - simply tell players the rules. Give players more information on the character creation screen about what each skill actually does, mechanically. D&D, for example, doesn't consider it a "spoiler" to tell you that a given feat or skill will give you a +1 bonus to a specific list of situations, or how to-hit calculations are made. Tell players fairly and simply what a single point (or rather, every two points) of weapon skill will actually buy a player for their skill points, and then let them compare that to what the exact mechanics of spending their points in other skills will be.

You also need to tell players what challenges they will face (I.E. monsters, and how they will attack you, or in other words, the combat formula, as well as traps and locks,) and then what skills there are that you will need, and what general focus you will need in them to overcome those problems. Critically important is that you list the alternatives to solving problems, because choices are all about opportunity costs. The alternatives to picking a chest's lock (rogue skills), for example, are bashing it (fighter skills) or casting lock melt (wizard skill). Knowing this, and how much focus they have to put into any of the given "paths" in this game they will need to overcome an obstacle, they can actually start making strategic choices about how to build their character even on their first playthrough.

You claim outright on your advertisements for the game that this is a game that demands "strategy" on the part of the players, and that stats are everything... But the basis of strategy is the capacity to predict the ramifications of your choices several moves in advance, and compare opportunity costs rationally. You're asking players to make the most important choice they will ever make in this game completely blind and guessing the first time they play (unless they "cheat" by reading the actual rules on the wiki).

By setting up a learning cliff, you cripple your ability to achieve your game's own stated goal of being "strategic".

For my part, I succeeded in my first game of Dwarf Fortress and am succeeding in my first game of Eschalon for the same reason: When I got to the character creation screen, I stopped and read the forum guides/wiki until I actually understood what decision I was making, rather than making a blind guess. (Again, I do this because I am driven by a love of understanding the underlying mechanics, so stopping to just read the manual is, itself, one of the most enjoyable things about a game for me.)

For reference, currently, I have (as of the writing of this - I didn't realize it would take a week to get registered to these forums, so I just wrote down what I was thinking as I was thinking it,) just gotten to Blackwater in Book I, and am level 5. I first went exploring south to get that sextant so I could train up my cartography skill after I already got the reveal map spell that meant I wouldn't even need the skill in the first place. (I completed the "bar of mithril" quest without any mapping feature at all, incidentally.) I was playing a "pure mage", but now am playing a "sage" (spellcaster with both arcane and divine magic, but no melee capacity), and went to Blackwater early to buy up the "free" skill points from trainers, going through Bordertown to get there. In my haste to get to Blackwater, I came across a lot of thugs that were easily dispatched with precisely 3 level 5 firebolts (average 45 damage against a 40-hp enemy), and was only slightly troubled when I came across a mercenary character, and was forced to use my first potion - a haste I potion that was dirt cheap from the Alchemy trainer. I kited the mercenary to death. Now that I no longer need it, I am going through Grimhold mostly so I can loot it. After that, I'll maybe consider starting on the plot missions, unless there's something else I feel like looting, first. Stat-wise, I am a druid "conjurer" that started with 14 in Intelligence and Perception, and immediately min-maxed Perception to 40 (the extra 2 points of stats for the extra MP per level), and then Intelligence to 20, and will make Wisdom up to 15 as soon as I get levels to do so, so that I can just cast haste myself. MP is not a problem as long as I hide and kite enemies one at a time (just walk back and forth for MP), and there is no reason I couldn't do so in this game.

This, in turn, brings me to the next obvious problem:



Problem 2: Enforced Min-Maxing

To explain this, let me start with a bit of a metaphor...

The most regular complaint people have about BioWare games (at least, before ME3...) was that it was supposedly all about making "tough choices" that were, actually, boring and routine and took no thinking at all. That is, everything boiled down to a "Good" or "Evil" choice where you were rewarded more the more "Good" choices you took as soon as you started traveling down the "Good" path at all. You actually received more rewards the more "Good" you were, so there was utterly no "temptation" to be evil other than "for the lulz". Hence, this series of "tough choices" ultimately boiled down to a single choice made right at the very start of character creation, and then sitting through dialogue trees that constantly congratulated/berated you on this choice for an entire game.

BioWare enforced the choices you made - they created only a single goal, and created only a single route to achieving that goal.

Many games that want to encourage diverse playstyles, and as such, when they give you choices of skills, they have diminishing return upon investment. Games that enforce min-maxing, however, have increasing return upon investment.

Eschalon has enforced min-maxing. That is to say, not only is min-maxing generally a possible way to abuse and beat the game, it's actually the only way to play the game. It has what 3rd ed. D&D min-maxers call "Multiple Attribute Dependency" (MAD) if you try to mix your "classes" of characters - trying to be a wizard or cleric means you need tons of Perception, and don't have points for Strength... but by the time you have that much Perception, you might as well just go full-caster, anyway. In order to be good at bows, you need tons of dexterity, but once you have that, you might as well just use bows all the time, and get the Dex-based rogue skills while you're at it.

Basically put, if an attribute or skill is ever worth putting one point into, (because, opportunity cost-wise, it provides the most benefits compared to any alternative,) then it's basically guaranteed to be worth putting all the rest of the points you have into, as well. The only reason anyone wouldn't min-max is because they're indecisive, which is probably because they are "hedging their bets" due to not understanding the ramifications of their choices because of the Learning Cliff discussed previously.

In fact, the only reason to ever stop putting points into skills is that they often scale horribly. The difference between 36 Perception as a druid and 38 Perception while above ground is tripling the rate of MP regen in Book I, while 33 to 36 is doubling, and 30 to 33 is merely one-and-a-half-times. (Again, increased return upon investment.) But then, you slam into the wall and arbitrarily gain no more serious benefit from Perception so far as MP regen works. (This formula needs serious revision, as it is mechanically backwards.) There is no benefit to many skills over a certain point, while others scale infinitely.

Worst of all, you make the game have "absolute" evasion percentages, (magic resistance and dodging, for example,) which is basically anathema to "strategic" gameplay, since they devolve the game into nothing but a crapshoot of waiting until you get a lucky string of rolls. (Or worse, reloading until you get a lucky roll, because, strategically, the only thing you did "wrong" was to not get a good roll.) Likewise, consider that the air shield spell is basically nothing less than an "invincibility versus archers" spell costing 2 MP and lasting 20 turns. (This deserves its own section to deal with as a problem, however, and is beside the main point of what is most seriously flawed in the game, so I'll leave that problem for another time.)

This, in turn, leads to characters being "One Trick Ponies" that have one move that beats everything the game throws at them.

There are several solutions to this problem. First, you need to start by rebuilding your formulas to scale properly. Use less addition and subtraction, and start using more multiplication or division. (I'll go into this more in a later post.) Next, you need to reformulate skill point costs, and (if you keep linear returns upon investment, like +1 To-Hit every couple weapon skill ranks,) introduce sub-geometric or geometric growth rates on the costs of skills while increasing total skill points per level over levels, similar to how Avernum works. Likewise, similar to Avernum, make the most useful skills cost more than the utility skills. There's no reason skills like lore or spot hidden or cartography should be equal to arcane skills, especially since there are spells that obviate the whole need to use two of those other skills in the first place.

Alternately, you can ditch skill points altogether, and, like Elona, Dwarf Fortress, or The Elder Scrolls, just use "train with use" mechanics. It also obviates the need to "fix" trainers, since you can simply make trainers into people that just let you have, say, the experience of 50 bow shots for 100 gp at the archery range rather than having to grind out that many bow shots normally.

Your entire "class system" itself is something of a misnomer, as well, and you might want to look into cribbing some notes from games like Elona or World of Darkness, and introduce "Potential" or "Affinity" for skills rather than outright classes. (I have tables I can share on this... but that is going off-topic, however, so I'll save it for another post.)



However, these last two problems were just the obfuscating problems that overshadowed what was truly the cause of why the game is so "easy" it's actually boring, and players have to come up with "challenges" just to keep things interesting:

Problem 3: Overly Simplified Rules Creating A "Solved Game"

The reason why there is nothing but a "learning cliff" that turns into a plateau is that all challenges in the game require exactly the same response - there's no "curve" or "slope" past the initial "challenge" of not knowing what the rules of the game are when creating my character.

Functionally speaking, to my mage character, every melee enemy in the game is just a fanged salamander with more hit points. If they resist magic, that's just making combat a bit more of a crap shoot, and maybe I have to use haste to kite the target, or at worst, reload and try again and hope I'm not as unlucky, or just use fleshboil. There's no further strategic thought that has to go into "this enemy is completely immune to the character build this game forced me into min-maxing my character into being, then schizophrenically decided min-maxing was a bad thing, and made immune to elemental magic," that just means you need to use fleshboil, instead. Air shield means I am invincible against archers. Element shield is basically the same thing versus wizards (with enough Intelligence and the rank 6 spell, that's 99% resist, easy).

Mages have the greatest diversity of tactics at their disposal, at that - melee characters are basically faced with always exactly the same "strategy" for everything. That is, just keep punching it until either it dies, or you die.

Yes, you do have some alternative options as a melee fighter, but - and this is the important part - those options have nothing to do with the fact that you are a melee fighter. Those options are almost always either spacial problems or else consumables, available to all characters. So far as melee fighter is concerned, skill-wise, the difference between a "hard" and an "easy" fight is just how big the numbers are, and how many clicks on the icon it takes to make the HPs become 0 and make the peoples fall down.

You also have to realize that, compared to games like Avernum (or D&D), you are severely limiting the number of tactical options a player has by simply having only one "unit on the board" at a time. By comparison to Avernum, (which has very similar character-building mechanics,) you actually have less options for good moves at a time by an order of magnitude for every individual unit you don't have in your party - in a game where every action takes up equal amounts of time, basically all decisions towards achieving a single clear goal - killing the enemy as fast as possible. Because so many of the skills for killing things operate along similar lines in this game, (you are basically just comparing DPS, since there are no situational bonuses or penalties in this game, barring light penalties,) they become little more than "calculations" - what is the most DPS you can get with a move?

To give a far more in-depth example of how much tactical flexibility some really good RPGs can give a player when they advertise many strategic options for solving problems, I'd like to point to the Russian-made game Hammer and Sickle (a spin-off of Silent Storm, and somewhat similar to X-Com if it had far more focus on fewer characters with deeper skill growth). In one event in that game, the villains have taken over the hideout you could have previously used, and are lying in ambush for you. In my game as a sniper character (with a gunner and grenadier support characters), I responded to this by crawling in one of the windows of an abandoned house where one of the enemy snipers was lying in wait for me, and stealth killing him with my sneaky sniper, then crawling through the darkness to snipe one of the other snipers from another house across a narrow alleyway. I started picking off snipers while moving from window to window to keep from being spotted - popping up and letting of a blast before moving on - and some of the incoming "sweeper patrols" that moved as a unit to pick off hiding units like my sniper main character based on the sound of my rifle.

I was on the second floor of this building, and I had my supporting units behind me, watching the stairs. I guess the sweepers that got into my building somehow heard my supporting units, because they weren't willing to charge up the stairwell all nice and single-file so my waiting gunners could mow them down.

It was an impasse - they weren't willing to come up, and I sure couldn't go down those stairs. I could try jumping out a window, but that would expose me in the streets, and there were still other sweepers out there. Then I noticed that parts of the floor were weak, and a thought occurred to me - I still had some C4 left. I planted it down on top of where I could hear the sweepers were on the floor below (facing the stairwell), and then backed up, and detonated it. The destructible environment collapsed, and the explosion stunned the sweepers, at which point I had my grenadier pop up and chuck a grenade down on them before they could recover and run. He and my gunner then hosed the survivors down with their assault rifles.

Compare this to a game that devolves into what essentially amounts to just throwing dice until one side or the other runs out of hit points, and I think you can see which game can offer up a greater selection of strategic choices. (Worth emphasizing is that in Hammer and Sickle, even the enemies were much smarter about how they fought, and forced the player to fight smarter because of that.) Even if you take examples just from D&D, then you can have defensive stances, tripping attacks, disarming attacks, charges, non-lethal attacks, grapples, and more.

Even in single-character games, you can still look at games like Roguelikes, which tend to have many alternatives and very strange, even gimmicky, items, enemies, and obstacles to exploit.

For example, to give weapon skills more diversity in Book II, feats were added... but there's no real tactical choice in using feats, so they keep combat boring - feats are basically always better than a normal attack, have no real downside, and are just "you can use this once per battle" skills. If, however, you had more than one feat to choose from, but could use only one feat per battle, then you start having real tactical choices from the fighter class.

Before I go further on this, I need to define some more terms so that I can be clearly understood, so I want to link two videos from the excellent gaming-analysis group, Extra Credits:

Choice and Conflict - Helps define "real choice" in games, as opposed to "calculations", as well as defining how "incomparables" are key to creating serious choices, and setting up conflicting goals is key to creating strategic choices.

Perfect Imbalance - Less necessary than the first, but this helps set up a better understanding of the sort of "incomparables" that a turn-based game that focuses upon "strategic" choices really needs to deal in. That is, anything that uses the same types of stats are easily compared. Comparing things that have a perfect imbalance, such as stealth bonuses versus bonuses to loot gained if you sneak around enemies creates serious conflict of goals for players of stealthy characters.

To give an example of incomparables, before bringing this back to the main thrust of the argument, look at the issue of weapon weights, for a second. All of your weapons (and materials they are made of) are completely linear in function, not creating any sort of conflict between differing goals. You missed an obvious chance to make a balance of incomparables with your weapons when you went and made ALL the weapon materials successively heavier than any material "less powerful" than the given material - mithril, one of the best weapon materials - is heavier than steel, and functionally virtually identical to adamantium. Even putting aside the whole fact that the whole defining feature of mithril was that it was lighter than steel, it's missing a perfectly good opportunity to make for an actually interesting choice when it comes to weapons: Do you take a stronger weapon, or a lighter weapon? Even if we don't have any more advanced mechanic, like initiative that gets partially determined by weapon weight, just the fact that a magic user can't cast with a weapon heavier than 1/3rd their Strength alone makes light weapons very attractive to magic users. Why didn't you use this existing mechanic to set up an actual strategic choice for the player to consider - using a slightly weaker weapon in exchange for not needing as much Strength, so that they could spend their attribute points elsewhere, probably buffing that magic casting so that they could buff their melee capacity to compensate?

So, to pull this all together for the main argument I am making, this game is "easy" to anyone past the learning cliff, and nowhere near as strategic as it claims, or, for a turn-based game, (where skill is necessarily found in strategic thought, since there is no dexterous skill particularly required,) needs to be in order to be enjoyable. There is only one real challenge in the game - combat - and in that case, there is only one real goal (defeating the enemy), which does not create a tension of conflicting goals, and all tactical choices are comparables; It is an easy measurement of what actions remove the threat of an enemy most quickly, reducing all combat quickly to routine.

Differences in "classes" are true incomparables, and the true choices that separate out how you play one game from another. However, you are kidding yourself if you are saying there are "unlimited character choices", because there are really only 4 choices you can make to solve the only real problem you face in the game (monsters - doors and chests don't require any real strategy and can be skipped) and that is melee weapon (with choice of exact weapon a quibbling difference with little in-game incomparability), ranged weapon, magic (with differences of wizard/cleric being fairly minor), and hiding/running away. You can try to split the difference on these, but except for the "running away" choice, they just don't mix well because of MAD splitting off your attribute points until you are already so well-leveled (because you've been relying upon a "pure" version of a character) that you have enough spare points to be able to splurge on gaining a second specialization. (Marginal exception for cleric-warriors, since taking points out of Str and Dex can be compensated for with "buffs".)

To go back to how fighters have so few tactical options that are actually related to being a melee fighter, let's take a chance to analyze how important consumable items (and classic D&D Vancian Magic) are in RPGs in creating conflicts of goals:

Potions are a perfect object for creating a conflict of a player's short-term and long-term goals. That is, a potion of haste will always be a massive help in any fight... however, then comes that nagging thought. The thought that you can't escape - BUT YOU MIGHT NEED IT LATER. THAT's a conflict of goals, and what creates real strategic choice in a bottle. (And what's the "most powerful" pair of skills in the game? The alchemy skill and ingredient-gathering skills that give you all the potions you'll ever need, so you WON'T "need them later"...)

This is the same as what Vancian Magic did to wizards - you only have a couple level 3 spells as a level 5 or 6 wizard... the DM seems to be ready to throw landscape obstacles at you - you can take a Fly spell with you to bypass obstacles... but then, what if the DM sends a bunch of harpies after you? Better take a fireball, instead. But what if it's a magic-immune golem, instead? You'd be better served with a Haste spell to throw on your fighter, who can use it to deal more damage against nearly any enemy. Those are real strategic choices based upon incomparables. (And come on, you're not going to use that fireball against a bunch of kobolds - you only have one of those, and you'll need it later, so just use a lesser Sleep spell, instead.)

Something worth recognizing is that you also have "Metagame" conflicts of goals, where in-game goals are put in conflict with out-of-game goals, which can actually be terrible for a player enjoying the game. The Extra Credits video showed how the in-game most powerful strategy was also the out-of-game least enjoyable strategy, which created a conflict of goals between doing badly in the game, or not having fun... which generally results in player dissatisfaction no matter how they choose. In this game, save-scumming for better loot or constant re-rolls are a similar form of metagame conflict of goals. You are trading the game going quickly and letting you go through the game at an enjoyable pace for the knowledge that you're getting the best possible loot. (In)comparably, you could just accept a ton of trapped chests with nothing but a femur inside, and lose enjoyment in the game because you feel "cheated" out of a larger haul of loot. Either way, I actually wind up enjoying the game more when treasure chests have deterministic loot so that I don't have to actually feel this conflict.

It's not just "cheating" that suffers from this problem, however. Many of the game's more frustrating aspects (and, generally, most of what leaves me dissatisfied about the game,) is that so many of the in-game choices are basically just this same "best way to play" in-game rewards versus "completely tedious" out-of-game punishments are basically the only choices ever presented in this game.

Take Reveal Map, for example - it has an enemy-tracking function that is the only power in the game that lets me see enemies before they see me on its level 6 casting... and there's no reason to cast anything less than the maximum, because the only reason I DON'T use it all the time is that it's such a pain to continuously cast. I'm trading being able to know how and where all the enemies are in the game for it not being such a godawful slog of casts and camps as it already is.

That's even more the case in what is probably the single most egregiously broken aspect of the game: The "walking the dog" problem. You can quite simply just out-walk a velociraptor. Then, take advantage of zone boundaries to firebolt creatures to death from utter safety. (Incidentally, that's how I got my Citizen's Writ in Book II by killing the Red Wolves in Wolfenwood at level 1...) It's how people do things like beat the game on level 1, if that isn't enough proof of how broken this game is because of relying upon dumb-as-bricks AI and purely melee-based enemies with no running mechanic or actual speed stat.

In other words, if the most powerful strategy in the game that will probably defeat even the most powerful and vile monster you will ever see is probably best set to the tune "Yakkity Sax", there's a problem with the way the game's mechanics works.

And it's not just that this makes the game "too easy" - I can enjoy easy games - it's that it basically means that most of the ways that you have tried to make the game "harder" has actually just made the game more tedious. (Killing a taurax is the same as killing a fanged salamander, but with more HP and so many resists that it takes running away and camping for more MP once or twice to finally grind it down.) And it's always a choice in this game - do I want to play it "right", the way that, strategically, I should play the game if I were thinking about the game the way that you SAY I should be thinking about the game, and playing the best I can... or do I want to have any sort of enjoyment at all?

Another problem that I see people have argued over heavily is the problem of how trainers help enforce min-maxing. The problem is, people haven't really framed this debate rather well, so the debate tends to go nowhere.

What trainers really do is set up badly balanced incomparables. That is, strategically speaking, we have limited resources with which to build our characters, and of these resources, skill points (and to a lesser extent, attribute points,) are the most precious. This is because, in strategic choice, opportunity cost is everything. With enough skill points, you could be skilled in every playstyle at once, so there's always something else you could be spending those skill points on.

Meanwhile, however, trainers are an option to reach the same player goal of a greater diversity of skills, but where the resource you spend isn't your precious skill points, but are, instead, your relatively worthless gold. Yes, relatively worthless, because the actual opportunity cost of spending money on training is negligible. You can always get more than enough money for everything you need, especially with the many tricks for getting more money.

To show how this could actually be remedied into an incomparable choice that actually encourages strategic thought: If you were to take one of the already-suggested solutions to trainers, (that you just plain get 5 uses of the trainer per game, regardless of what your actual skill level,) and then mix in the increasing skill point cost per rank (so that, at its simplest, the first level of a skill costs 1 skill point, second level of a skill costs 2 skill points, third level of a skill costs 3 skill points, etc.) idea, then you create a conflict. That is, buying a skill from a trainer for money at skill level 1 will give you the benefit of having spent 2 skill points to get to level 2 in that skill. Meanwhile, buying that skill from a trainer at level 11 will give you the benefit of 12 skill points worth of actual skill increase. That's a "discount" of 10 whole skill points!

But here's the conflict - the longer you wait to buy those "free skill points" by training, the further in the game you will have already have to be, and higher the level you will need to have been.

Hence, it's a conflict of a player's desire to have the most powerful character they can have, statistically, versus the player's desire to actually use those skills in the game - what's the good of having high skill points on paper, if you've waited until the very end of the game to get them, when you obviously didn't need them, and can't even use them anymore, anyway? (Except, possibly, against some type of "bonus boss".)

When designing a game, you need to recognize what each game element actually adds into the game in terms of what its actual choices or player interactions. Every game element, especially in a game that asks players to "think strategically," has to add a greater selection of real incomparables, and you need to actually be able to understand what choices those incomparables are making players select between from even a "metagame" standpoint.



I have a set of possible solutions to these problems I have laid out (especially the last one), but I would like to first see the response to all that I've written so far. This isn't even starting to get into the problems I see in the magic system, the food system, or how the stealth system is one of those bare-bones affairs where if they can't see you, they just do nothing but sit there and ignore the arrows sticking out of their eyes until they fall over dead.

In a sense, at this point, when Book III is almost finished, and you're just now starting to be at the point where you ask "what sort of series do I start next?" is the best point in time to start asking questions like these. Some changes are best done at the total outset of a game (or series).

Just plain "putting more pieces on the board" alone would add a lot more tactical and strategic depth, and so would diversifying the number and types of skills that comprise "classes" (for example, having more than just two "magic" skills/"schools"), but that gets into the question of just what the next project you're starting will be like? There are a great many games where you can take examples for multi-unit strategic or tactical choices, like Avernum or even Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, whereas games that have only one character tend to demand far more individual tactical options and depth than Eschalon gives, and games like Elona, and some other Roguelikes, are good to point out as examples. If the next game is also single-unit-based, then concepts like stealth, for example, should really see expansion with uses of players purposefully creating sounds (especially through player-built noise-maker "traps" they could trigger remotely, along with actual traps that noise-makers could lure enemies into, which would give rogue character skills actual value), better indication of how stealthy characters are, and other things I could easily fill up a post half as long as this one with that wouldn't even require significantly more sophisticated programming than already exists.

It's just that, as it stands, I want to like this game, but just tend to find it boring since all problems tend to be solvable by repeated firebolting to the face. (Or, if they're immune to firebolts, swap over to fleshboils, which work in exactly the same way, and require absolutely no change in tactics.) The major downside to using magic all the time, the MP cost, is not a serious in-game penalty, but it IS a serious out-of-game penalty to have to go off and constantly camp. And that's one of those metagaming incomparables that wind up hurting the player's enjoyment of the experience as a whole.

In a turn-based game like this, it should be tactically challenging. I should be able to feel clever for overcoming an obstacle or defeating a powerful monster, or else I should feel powerful and viscerally enjoy the destruction, but instead, I just feel like I'm going through the motions. However, it's still not even routine enough to even be a Skinner Box "level grinder", either. I find myself going off to play something else in my Steam bin that's light and casual and fun for five minutes like some random puzzle game to cheer myself up so I can go back to trying to individually kite every last supposedly fearsome cow while in the dark so they never even know I'm there.

[Kreador Freeaxe]

Wraith Magus,

That was an interesting read, even if I disagree with some of your assessments. Some of the things you complain about do change between Book I and Book II (most specifically Air Shield becomes Dense Nimbus, which gives you a chance that incoming missiles will be deflected, increasing with level, rather than a certainty). Maybe the fact that Eschalon was the first cRPG I'd played in more than a decade explains my personal fondness for it, and my not finding it to have a learning cliff so much as a series of learning steps. But, that's why there is room in the world for a lot of games.

[Wraith_Magus]

Wraith Magus,

That was an interesting read, even if I disagree with some of your assessments. Some of the things you complain about do change between Book I and Book II (most specifically Air Shield becomes Dense Nimbus, which gives you a chance that incoming missiles will be deflected, increasing with level, rather than a certainty). Maybe the fact that Eschalon was the first cRPG I'd played in more than a decade explains my personal fondness for it, and my not finding it to have a learning cliff so much as a series of learning steps. But, that's why there is room in the world for a lot of games.

Dense Nimbus is still an absolute evasion percentage, however, which isn't really an improvement. 90% immunity is, strategically speaking, not terribly more imposing than 100% immunity. It just means that it's a higher-level spell that takes up more MP to cast.

For games to truly involve tactical skill, you need to involve less absolute percentages, and more mechanics that actually relate to other mechanics in the game that a player can control.

For example, one of my favorite table-top games was Battletech (AKA MechWarrior), a game where, for those who don't know what it was, you had bipedal tanks as well as regular tanks and planes fighting in futuristic battlefields. You fought through rolling dice for each weapon from each 'mech or other military unit you were willing to fire each turn, 2d6, with the roll you needed based upon to-hit modifiers from the conditions on the board.

If you moved, it's +1 to your to-hit rolls (you needed to roll 1 higher, so positives are bad) for walking, +2 to-hit for running, and +3 if you fired the rocket boosters and jumped. (The more actively you jerk your 'mech around, the more your aim is thrown.) If the target moved, it was a modifier for how far they moved, not their particular style of movement. (Lighter, faster 'mechs could gain a large evasion bonus without throwing off their aim as much.) Each weapon has an ideal range, and the further you are from it, the more modifiers you had to it. If there were woods or buildings or other obstacles in the way, it added more penalties to hit for the cover.

The way that you won was generally to keep the penalties to your opponent's shots higher than your own. Even if your shots are at a to-hit of 11, and theirs are at a 12, then because of how statistics works with 2d6 rolls, you are likely hitting with twice as many shots as they are. (And since you are typically rolling a half-dozen weapons per machine per turn, and need several hits to take down an enemy, law of averages kicks in.) You would carefully consider whether to screw over your own chances of landing a hit to keep your units safer, or whether to go aggressive. You could manipulate the ranges of different weapons if you had the initiative (the advantage of making the other guy move first so you could move where it is most advantageous to yourself before the actual firing phase) so that your guns were only at medium range while theirs were at long, or your short-range guns were in perfect firing position while standing inside their long-range guns' minimum range. If things looked bad, play it safe and wait for the next good opportunity. Or, if you had the advantage, cut the opponent off so that they don't have time to wait for a good opportunity.

Compare this to absolute percentage immunity to different types of attacks that we see in this game, where there's a 90% chance to evade any ranged attack, or straight-up 30% immunity to magic.

One tells you, "look at the board, and think about how you are going to move before you do so, and consider how the opponent will move, as well," while the other says, "your plans don't matter because no matter where you stand, the rolls are all the same, anyway."

There's a giant difference in how it feels to play one game versus the other.

[Wraith_Magus]

Actually, let me try arguing this in a different path...

I sort of wanted to go in this route when writing the first post, anyway, but held off because, believe it or not, I could have gone on a lot longer on several different arguments I held back on...

So let me ask, what, exactly, do you enjoy about this game?

What do you want to enjoy about this game?

And what do you not enjoy about this game, or frustrates you about it?

Trying to distill down the exact reasons for why you like what you like or dislike what you dislike can be an extremely tricky proposition, since we often aren't equipped with the vocabulary to enunciate the exact reasoning behind such things.

Try watching this video on the Aesthetics of Play (AKA, Core Game Aesthetics, what we are looking for in the games we choose to play,) and it'll help me communicate with the same terminology what it was I was dissatisfied about.

For starters, this game may have on its website bullet points for selling the game that it is a narrative-based game, but this isn't really a game you play for the story. Games you play for a desire for Narrative generally start by selling you on the actual plot, not that they have one, or how the mechanics of it being open-world work. If you look at a movie, by comparison, just after they tell you who's in it, (Do you like Tom Hanks? Because Tom Hanks is in this movie! Buy this movie if you like Tom Hanks!) they start telling you what its narrative is about, splashed with talking about how dramatic it is or how it almost won an Oscar (for Oscar-bait) or else how "pulse-pounding action-packed" it is if it's Summer blockbuster trash. (The latter of which would be Sense-Pleasure, incidentally...)

This is a game that, if you really get down to it, tries to sell itself mostly on its last bullet point - that it's like the later Ultimas, like Ultima VIII. (Which is a pity, because I liked the Ultimas better when they had parties in them, like Ultima V.)

This is a game that mostly sells itself on Challenge. It talks constantly about how strategic it is and you have to be to play it. On the page for Book III, it proudly boasts "♦ Book III is not a dumbed-down “RPG for the masses”. Rapid button clicking won’t save you here. Eschalon pays honor to the greatest RPGs of the past, with unlimited character development options and freedom to explore the world as you wish. The difficulty of the game does not scale to your character." (You hear THAT, Skyrim?! We're totally better than you because screw rubber-banding!)

(I should also point out that the game has an explicit goal of Exploration as an aesthetic - "♦ Hundreds of items and dozens of creatures await your discovery. A combination of randomly generated treasure and carefully hidden goodies means that no two games will play the exact same way.")

The problem I have is that it simply fails to deliver on this promise of Challenge.

Challenge is an enjoyable aesthetic because it gives you a sense of accomplishment, as well as lets you feel either clever or powerful or otherwise good about yourself for proving you were capable of overcoming something that posed a serious difficulty to you.

In this game, however, because of its absolute percentages, focus almost purely upon character builds, and obvious enforced min-maxing that makes character builds calculations rather than choices, I felt there was no challenge, and as such, there was no particular point in going forward.



I would also ask, if you are still taking the time to think about what it is you enjoy about the game, if you are actually enjoying what EC calls Abnegation. That is, the "grinding" aspects of the game where you perform what are routine actions over and over in order to gain periodic advancements or rewards. (The reason for why this is enjoyable to many people, in spite of many people often claiming to hate the "level grinding" being the Skinner Box effect.) If the simple act of getting a level up (and desire to get to one) is enjoyable to you, that's probably Abnegation.



I'm going to stop here for now, but I want to pursue two different types of arguments in this thread beyond where I already have gone.

One revolves around the difference between "strategic" and "tactical" challenge, and how to keep challenges interesting in general, and the other revolves around the other gameplay aesthetics. (I.E. the "fun" that the game can have that doesn't revolve around being "hard", but by being an enjoyable Fantasy or place to Explore or Express.)

[Kreador Freeaxe]

Hopefully someone will come along shortly to get into a longer discussion with you, Wraith Magus. I wanted to say that I appreciate the time and effort you put into your critique, and you have some good points, but I just can't pull up the energy for a full fledged discussion of this stuff right now. You find Eschalon very one-dimensional in its approaches to tactics and prefer stuff like Avadon. I enjoy Avadon, but find that overall the group tactics seem pretty dull to me after a couple hours and I come back to the solo adventuring. Such is the nature of the world that different people prefer different things.

[BasiliskWrangler]

Thank you Wraith_Magus for the exceptionally detailed look into Book 1.

I don't think I could possibly address everything you touch on, though it is clear that you have an exceptional understanding of game mechanics as applied to rule balance and strategy. I would open by saying that Book 2 did address some of the shortcomings of Book 1, and while it is technically a better RPG system, it would not likely impress you anymore than the first game. I promise to look more closely at your suggestions, and if not for the Eschalon series, we will certainly apply this information to the next game.

You question over and over what it is about the game that is likable to others; seemingly wondering how any system so flawed could draw a dedicated group of fans. It may be in your over-analysis of the game's ruleset that you fail to consider the softer aspects: the storyline, the charm of the throwback graphics, the puzzles and riddles, the music and ambiance, the thrill of discovery and exploration through handmade dungeons and random loot, and yes- even the flexibility of the system that allows for unique character builds even if they are unbalanced or flawed.

I do not disagree with you that Eschalon's system is prone to min-maxing exploits- but rather than call this a flaw, we've embraced it and encouraged people to see what kind of interesting builds could come out of it. Honestly, the last thing I ever wanted to see was generic, jack-of-all trade characters from all our players. If every skill was perfectly balanced (or removed for being redundant or under-performing) then every character would end up being a clone of one another... a boring pea soup of only the most pertinent attributes and skills, where success through advancement was as guaranteed as it is in...well, Skyrim for example.

As it is now, we see some extremely interesting builds- mage rangers and healer thieves, brute-force tanks and true jack-of-all-trades. And yes, you can fuck up your build, unlike most modern AAA RPGs where you never have to worry about your character because the almighty skill tree will hold your hand.

Again, while it may seem as if I am making excuses some our our game's flaws, I am not. I do see some of our more blatant problems and will work to balance the game out, but ultimately what makes Eschalon enjoyable for many people are the very issues that you bring up. Eschalon can be as easy as building a super tank Sword master, or it can be as hard as making a rogue trying to finish the game with as few kills as possible. That is, I think, why Eschalon has a sizable fan base.

For what it's worth, we are trying to lower the learning curve of Book III so it is easier for new players to get into.

[Wraith_Magus]

You question over and over what it is about the game that is likable to others; seemingly wondering how any system so flawed could draw a dedicated group of fans. It may be in your over-analysis of the game's ruleset that you fail to consider the softer aspects: the storyline, the charm of the throwback graphics, the puzzles and riddles, the music and ambiance, the thrill of discovery and exploration through handmade dungeons and random loot, and yes- even the flexibility of the system that allows for unique character builds even if they are unbalanced or flawed.

I want to start off here, because I believe you are misunderstanding my position.

Simply because I criticize something doesn't mean I think it's awful or irredeemable. I am perhaps too blunt, but I mean what I say in a constructive way. There are certainly positive aspects to this game - ones which I will take care to point out in the future, however, I started at this as trying to put into words the nagging dissatisfaction I had with the game, so as to better analyze and quantify what was as yet just a feeling. The purpose of this is not to be relentlessly negative, but merely to isolate the causes of the irritants, and offer up solutions to them.

I should say, for example, that not everything in the combat of the game is strictly an absolute percentage - one unique and laudable thing this game does is actually involve dynamic shadow due to day/night cycles, weather, or light source radius due to caverns in combat as a situational modifier. (It unfortunately has the side-effect of making anyone who really wants to take advantage of that basically have to just camp until nightfall all the time if they want to take advantage of the bonus overland, which, like MP regen, tends to pit a desire to engage opponents with the greatest possible in-game advantage against the out-of-game desire to not have to sit waiting for the sun to fall every day, but that's heading into the sort of more detailed critiques I want to save for later.)

When I ask someone "what do you like about this game?", I don't mean that as a question that I can't see an answer to, I mean it as a question where I can see multiple answers to.

As I said before, I play Dwarf Fortress quite a bit, and in that game, there are people who play very different types of games in the same game because they enjoy very different things. Some people enjoy building and construction (that is, they seek the aesthetic of Expression, and see the game world as their easel on which they paint,) while some people enjoy the combat aspects, and mod their game to have harder and harder enemies (they see it as a Challenge,) while others play community games and write out massive, detailed, narratives that aren't from the game itself, but are player interpretations of the events of the game (they play for player-built Narrative, rather than defined scripted game narrative,) others (I primarily fall into this category) tend to play simply for the Exploration of the game's mechanics, and how they work and can be guided to new emergent experiences for their own sake.

So, again, I ask, "What do you like about this game?" trying to get very specific answers, not to mock people who do like the game. (Perhaps, "What moments are your favorite moments in this game, and why?" might be a better question to ask in the future, if I reflect upon it.) I have a detailed grasp of what I know of the game, obviously, but I am trying to get at what others know of the game, and why they see it the way that they do to give myself a broader understanding and better holistic perspective.



I am going to continue the response to the rest of your post in a separate post, but I want to actually end this post with a single, coherent message, and do so by asking you the same question, since I so rarely get a chance to speak with developers of the games I am analyzing:

"What is it you like about this game?"

As well as:

"What is it you want to accomplish with the game, and what do you expect players to find as the most fun in the game? Why would players want to play your game?"

[Wraith_Magus]

Thank you Wraith_Magus for the exceptionally detailed look into Book 1.

I don't think I could possibly address everything you touch on, though it is clear that you have an exceptional understanding of game mechanics as applied to rule balance and strategy. I would open by saying that Book 2 did address some of the shortcomings of Book 1, and while it is technically a better RPG system, it would not likely impress you anymore than the first game. I promise to look more closely at your suggestions, and if not for the Eschalon series, we will certainly apply this information to the next game.

While I started off with Book I, I have played Book II.

As I stated before, the problems I have are not really ones addressed in the by the jump from Book I to II. What was changed was more content-related, and the marginal costs and benefits of different attributes and skills. My problem is with the way the mechanics are more fundamentally presented.

That is, when people said it was too easy to kill all the melee enemies in the game with magic, the response was to make enemies have more magic resist or more HP, which basically means the response is to shoot them with more firebolts. The problem I have is that there is little reason to use anything besides a firebolt, and making it take more firebolts doesn't really solve that problem.

I do not disagree with you that Eschalon's system is prone to min-maxing exploits- but rather than call this a flaw, we've embraced it and encouraged people to see what kind of interesting builds could come out of it. Honestly, the last thing I ever wanted to see was generic, jack-of-all trade characters from all our players. If every skill was perfectly balanced (or removed for being redundant or under-performing) then every character would end up being a clone of one another... a boring pea soup of only the most pertinent attributes and skills, where success through advancement was as guaranteed as it is in...well, Skyrim for example.

I would respond that specialization (that is, trying to "be a mage" and putting most of your points into magic skills) isn't the problem.

The problem is more that the game has this system without properly informing the player they are doing anything wrong until several hours into the game, which can easily lead to player frustration. It is also contradictory

Besides which, the way that trainers are currently set up are not really an encouragement to specialize - they're an encouragement to get as far as you can without spending any of your most scarce resource - skill points - until you can bypass a significant chunk of the game so as to reap the greatest benefits. Especially in Book II, trainers give you basically everything you need in several skills, functionally punishing any expenditure of skill points on unnecessary skills like cartography before that point.

The basic effect of such a system is to punish the new players who would need cartography, while rewarding the players who didn't need that skill in the first place, and who seem to complain that the game isn't yet difficult enough for them. This is, I would argue, quite backwards an incentive system to what it seems you actually want.

For what it's worth, we are trying to lower the learning curve of Book III so it is easier for new players to get into.

While that is good to hear, I have to wonder how, exactly, you are going about that? What I worry about is that you might be misidentifying the root cause of why people say the game is too "difficult" for new players, and try to solve the wrong problem.

As it is now, we see some extremely interesting builds- mage rangers and healer thieves, brute-force tanks and true jack-of-all-trades. And yes, you can fuck up your build, unlike most modern AAA RPGs where you never have to worry about your character because the almighty skill tree will hold your hand.

Again, while it may seem as if I am making excuses some our our game's flaws, I am not. I do see some of our more blatant problems and will work to balance the game out, but ultimately what makes Eschalon enjoyable for many people are the very issues that you bring up. Eschalon can be as easy as building a super tank Sword master, or it can be as hard as making a rogue trying to finish the game with as few kills as possible. That is, I think, why Eschalon has a sizable fan base.

Well, wishing to confront criticism with your own account is both perfectly human and laudable. Also, it is largely what I want, anyway, since it helps me to understand what goals you have for this and future games so as to better refine how best to approach you with suggestions to improve on these problems in ways that get you closer to what you want in your games, as well.

However, the problem I am trying to highlight is that those play strategies you just highlighted as the "easy" and "hard" ways to play through the game are actually not any more difficult than one another.

There is no real difficulty in out-walking a threat in this game, or to use stealth, which is a passive effect of characters with such a skill, which is how you would perform a pacifist run. The "challenge" of such a game is often merely in just having the patience to actually pull it off. You have not put any mechanics into the game to prevent the out-walking of velociraptors to the loading zones, or to make enemies intelligently search for stealthing characters that have exited their line of sight, or even made significant mechanics for how stealth operates.

(I should point out that making hiding in shadows easier when standing next to a wall is a good start, however, that the game could really do with more context-sensitive stealth mechanics and better AI that actually remembers the monster just got an arrow in their skull from the shadows before going back to milling about. I could probably do more than a postful if I started on stealth, and should probably just prepare to outline a full-fledged suggestion on that front, but I'm trying to keep relatively focused for now...)

You set up a "pure mage" run as a challenge, but it's honestly no more of a challenge to use magic than it is to use a bow, excepting that you will have to rest for MP recovery that can drag the game on longer if you are a pure mage.

It is, to pull this together more concisely, not a problem, and yes, a positive that you can specialize in a classless system, but that is not the problem I am trying to point out, here.

The problem is that the game's strategic elements effectively end as soon as you've finished creating your character, and much of the rest of the game is just waiting for the skill point allotments you have distributed to play themselves out to either success or failure in the game a great many hours down the road. There's little thinking or strategizing to be done while you just sit and watch the dice play the game for you and resolve your combat as every enemy is dispatched with the same clicking of the same skills you built your character to specialize in.



This actually leads me to start down the path of the "The difference in strategic challenge and tactical challenge" argument I am primed to make, but I actually want to go down the path of the other argument I want to make, in response to this portion of your statement:

And yes, you can fuck up your build, unlike most modern AAA RPGs where you never have to worry about your character because the almighty skill tree will hold your hand.

I like this statement because it helps bore down into the animus behind what you want to build, by way of what you don't want to build. Combined with a lot of what you put in the adverts for the game, it implies a strong "I don't like Skyrim" vibe.

What I really want to ask, though, because of how you made your game, (especially with regards to making everything reliant upon character skill point distributions and levels, or "character skill", rather than in-the-moment player skill in strategic decisions,) whether you actually want your game to be tactically "hard" at all?

Because I think it's worth pointing out what, exactly, Skyrim, itself, was trying to be.

For starters, Skyrim sells its games mostly to the console kiddies that will abandon their game a month after launch, and then worries about its computer-using mod community that keeps the game profiting for years to come later, since they know that community will be there for years to come. So to an extent, they build the game knowing that they're going to let their modders make the game do all the best things their game can do that they're afraid of putting into their actual game. (Including a huge portion of the game's actual narrative - the game presents it for the console kiddies as "DRAGUNZ R BAD - KILL DRAGUNZ!" for a plot, but the actual plot behind it is wrapped up in a philosophical war between Gnosticism and Existentialism... which you only get clues of from the completely optional lore books and a few random clues of actual gameplay.)

And secondly, and importantly, Skyrim isn't meant to be hard. It's not a game whose Core Gameplay Aesthetic is Challenge at all. (In fact, I happily sunk thousands of hours into the TES series without ever once "completing" a single one of their games by finishing their primary plotline. Plots are for suckers. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go off and enjoy picking flowers in a field for a few hours while the Oblivion gates continue to open.)

This is why I bring up the Core Gameplay Aesthetics (another link to the Extra Credits video on it, for convenience sake,) concept in helping to define what it is we like about specific games, and why we play them.

Skyrim is not about Challenge, and is instead ALL about Exploration, Expression, and Fantasy.

You don't have all those character skills and builds in that game to be hard, but in order to let the player organically find how they most enjoy expressing themselves as a character. They have gone to great pains and expense to create vast worlds that have genuine subtleties that make them fun to explore. I genuinely can enjoy when I find out that the texture for the grass in different areas of the game worlds are different in the different Holds or counties of the game. I know I can find flax flowers (useful for mana potions) in profusion around Skingrad, or that I can find a specific type of mushroom growing only on the east-facing side of fallen logs in the areas near Whiterun.



In fact, I should also point out that you claim on your website advertising the game that you have "unlimited character development style", but then argue for why it's better to have a game system that enforces specialization in very specific and narrow skills as also being the best part about the game. If you honestly wanted to make customization (Read: Expression as a Core Gameplay Aesthetic,) a major selling point of the game, you wouldn't take pride in punishing players for picking any but a slim few "best" specializations.

So, again, I ask if you actually want your game to be a Challenge as you play the game, (that is, outside the character creation screen,) rather than just a grind?

I should state that this is an honest question, just like the "what is it you find fun?" question: Many RPGs, especially the great many Wizardry clones out there, genuinely are not trying to be hard, but rather play upon the Abnegation aesthetic, and want to be mentally untaxing and repetitive on purpose. That is exactly why many old RPGs could be defeated by simple level-grinding by walking in circles with the "confirm" button taped down to spam the basic attack command.

Because when you say that you want to go back to "rules-simple" games and rely entirely upon character stats, that's exactly the type of game you are gearing towards - the droning experience point grind - rather than the "each encounter is a serious challenge" you seem to say you want at other times.

When you built the rules-simple combat system in this game, you did so cribbing the notes of the games that were built with Abnegation in mind, not providing a continuous Challenge. (That is, they were "hard" only in that they required you grind a specific amount of levels to beat the next boss before moving on. With sufficient grinding, any challenge would be overcome.) Games that are built with continuous Challenge in mind use mechanics that are meant to be more constantly engaging. (Take, for instance, X-Com, which has levels, for sure, but also focuses with extreme intensity upon making the best tactical decisions possible to the point where even a "perfect" character could easily be killed in a single clumsy move.)

This post is getting rather long, so I think I'm going to break it off, here, but I want to next go into the Food mechanics you have in this game, and explore what aesthetics can be gleaned from it, and why it isn't really providing any game benefit as it stands right now...

[BasiliskWrangler]

"What is it you like about this game?"

As well as:

"What is it you want to accomplish with the game, and what do you expect players to find as the most fun in the game? Why would players want to play your game?"

What is it I like? My original goal was two-fold:

1) Create a game that makes me feel like I am 12 years old again, playing Ultima 2 on an Atari 800 computer system for the first time. For that I needed an intriguing storyline, a seemingly vast world with multiple dungeons, loot galore, and the feeling that I can create any character that I wanted. Now then, looking back, Ultima 2 didn't have any of these things- it was a relatively small world (crammed onto a couple 5.25" disks), with limited character development and just a handful of items. But my mind's eye remembers it as a gloriously humongous adventure, and that is what I wanted Eschalon to feel like. I think we captured that essence fairly well. Most people agree that Eschalon feels like a classic, golden-age RPG.

2) I did not want a game that felt like the characters all had a pre-determined build structure, and were required to follow the plot in a linear fashion. Sure, this is easier to create and it makes it incredibly easy to balance, knowing when and at what level a player will be at in the game. But this craps all over the spirit of a true open game world. What I wanted was a world that was open from the start- go anywhere, try anything. Start the game and walk straight to the End Guy's fortress if you want. Find the best sword in the game as a lever 1 character, if you know where to look.

Did I anticipate that the player might exploit the game rules in order to achieve a dominate character? You betcha. I hoped for it.

So, again, I ask if you actually want your game to be a Challenge as you play the game, (that is, outside the character creation screen,) rather than just a grind?

Of course! But the challenge doesn't lie solely in combat; it is also in the storyline itself- the mystery of the plot, the puzzles and riddles, finding the hidden stashes and Easter eggs, uncovering the different ways to gain entrance into various areas, as well as building a character that can survive the encounters, traps, poisoning, diseases and elements along the way.

You seem to be focused solely on your disappointment of the attribute and skill systems because it is exploitable. This is no fun for you, and that is valid. I agree- some of the exploits should be patched up and we will work on it. I want you to understand that I am in no way offended by your comments- I quite enjoy reading about how deep you've crawled into the system. All I can respond with is: the game, as a whole, represents the kind of RPG I enjoy despite the few balance issues that are present. I admit to being somewhat of a hacker at heart, and exploiting game rules tends to be fun for me. I think that is the most honest reason that Eschalon's system is why it is. Everyone who plays it becomes a bit of a hacker too, uncovering that unique combination of skills and attributes that lets them create an unstoppable hero.

Eschalon was a first step for Basilisk Games. We learned a lot while making it, and overall it has been a success for us. There is no way we could ever hope to please everyone, but that is okay. We're still learning how to make better games every day, and I truly thank you for your insight.

[Wraith_Magus]

Of course! But the challenge doesn't lie solely in combat; it is also in the storyline itself - the mystery of the plot, the puzzles and riddles, finding the hidden stashes and Easter eggs, uncovering the different ways to gain entrance into various areas, as well as building a character that can survive the encounters, traps, poisoning, diseases and elements along the way.

(bolding mine)

I want to start with this because this, right here, tells me an awful lot.

I think what we have here is a clear example of not being able to frame the argument properly in your own mind before you make it.

I bolded that part because it shows that you're actually trying to use the word "challenge" in a way that its definition just plain doesn't support.

How, exactly, is the story part of the challenge?

I'd like to once again reference the fact that when I say the word Challenge, I'm not just saying "difficulty", I'm talking about a Core Gameplay Aesthetic (another link to the definition of that term), which means that the reason we play a game is specifically for the joy of going through the obstacle course it presents.

What you just said was "part of the challenge" is actually its Narrative - which is a completely different aesthetic.

What I was asking you was, "are you sure Challenge is the aesthetic you are REALLY after?" and you responded with, "Sure, the story is part of the Challenge".

In other words, your response kind of tells me that Challenge probably isn't what you're after, but that you've somehow framed the argument in your mind that "challenge" somehow means everything that's good about the game.

Those other things, the wanting to explore the world? Yes, that's a good reason to play a game, as well. That's the aesthetic of Exploration, however, not the aesthetic of Challenge. Wanting to set up your game so as to satisfy the aesthetic of Exploration is indeed a laudable goal, but again, that's actually answering my question in the negative - you don't really want to actually focus upon presenting the player with challenge.

And actually making that distinction is critical to actually being able to rationally deconstruct how things can be changed to deliver upon those goals. If you are fundamentally misdiagnosing the problem, you'll never come across a proper solution except by sheer accident.

When you talk about traps and riddles as part of a challenge, then yes, that is true, they are, certainly possible Challenge for a player to be there for their own enjoyment... and they currently aren't really a challenge in the game at all, which is why I was wanting to go into non-combat challenges as part of the solution to the problem I see in there not actually being much Challenge in the game, currently.

But this is, ultimately, why I have to front-load my argument with so much heady terminology, (and godawful walls of text...) because a large portion of the problem I often see is that people often don't have the proper terms to describe what it is they are actually going after in games. (I should point out that in forums with spoilers that actually collapse, I tend to use those for organizational purposes just to keep the lengths of posts in checks... this basic model BBCode tends to make my posts wind up text bricks, so sorry about that.)

You seem to be focused solely on your disappointment of the attribute and skill systems because it is exploitable.

That's not actually true.

I actually have a list of things I want to go over, I just couldn't possibly dump them all on someone in a single post without basically ensuring that nobody would be capable of reading it. (Speaking of which, I want to get into the food mechanics, still, but I'll probably put that off for tomorrow...) I decided to focus upon the most prominent problem I saw as a means of breaking into the terminology I would use to explore the solutions I was going to suggest.

In fact, half of the argument I want to make is that too much of the game depends upon skill points, and that the game should actually be focused more upon tactical choices ("How do I escape this one death pit?") rather than strategic ones ("How do I build a powerful character that can overcome ANY deathpit?").

This is no fun for you, and that is valid. I agree- some of the exploits should be patched up and we will work on it. I want you to understand that I am in no way offended by your comments- I quite enjoy reading about how deep you've crawled into the system. All I can respond with is: the game, as a whole, represents the kind of RPG I enjoy despite the few balance issues that are present. I admit to being somewhat of a hacker at heart, and exploiting game rules tends to be fun for me. I think that is the most honest reason that Eschalon's system is why it is. Everyone who plays it becomes a bit of a hacker too, uncovering that unique combination of skills and attributes that lets them create an unstoppable hero.

Eschalon was a first step for Basilisk Games. We learned a lot while making it, and overall it has been a success for us. There is no way we could ever hope to please everyone, but that is okay. We're still learning how to make better games every day, and I truly thank you for your insight.

This sort of idea of trying to find a "perfect character build" sort of min-maxer actually again leads me to believe you're not really going for a Challenge as a Core Gameplay Aesthetic.

At least, when you have actually figured out the "best" build, then the game has no more of a challenge (you've solved the one challenge you presented - making the best character), and if you're only playing for the Challenge, then once you've actually decided on what your character will be, there's no point in actually playing the game, since you've already overcome its challenge.

What is it I like? My original goal was two-fold:

1) Create a game that makes me feel like I am 12 years old again, playing Ultima 2 on an Atari 800 computer system for the first time.

The problem with this answer is that it Begs The Question... What did you like about THOSE games?

It's an especially important question because you seem to negate your own answer in the next few sentences:

For that I needed an intriguing storyline, a seemingly vast world with multiple dungeons, loot galore, and the feeling that I can create any character that I wanted. Now then, looking back, Ultima 2 didn't have any of these things- it was a relatively small world (crammed onto a couple 5.25" disks), with limited character development and just a handful of items. But my mind's eye remembers it as a gloriously humongous adventure, and that is what I wanted Eschalon to feel like. I think we captured that essence fairly well. Most people agree that Eschalon feels like a classic, golden-age RPG.

That depends on what game you're trying to liken it to...

Ultimately, there are a lot of games out there that are Wizardry clones that actually are not about challenge at all, but instead about pure Skinner Box-style Abnegation, where you just grind you way to victory.

(And what you ultimately settle on as what you liked about those games was not Challenge at all, but actually "hugeness" is more a characteristic of Exploration as an aesthetic.)

However, if you ask me what a "Golden Age" RPG game would be like, I'd respond with the TSR Gold Box games.

These games actually do try to present Challenge - and they do so by having radically different combat mechanics, among other things.

To throw another link, if you're actually interested in watching all these, Extra Credits explores the difference between Intrinsic and Extrinsic gameplay rewards in this video. To give the short of it, though, the difference between whether a game really has Challenge as its Core Gameplay Aesthetic or not is in whether you are doing something because you enjoy it for its own sake, or because you want to get to something else behind it.

Combat in level-grindy RPGs has extrinsic rewards. You're only killing things to get to something else, like a new level-up, or advancing the plot or something.

In games with intrinsic enjoyment of the mechanics themselves, you don't need to have a reward for your actions, the actions are their own reward. Tetris, for example, has its Core Gameplay Aesthetic in Challenge - you don't want to get to some new level or uncover the next cutscene, you're filling lines because that's the reason you played the game in the first place. The needless, graphic violence of the combat of a game like God of War is the whole reason you play it - players who enjoy that game can happily sit in front of a monster spawn point ripping harpies in half for hours at a time, because they are there for the combat, itself, not the plot.

In a Wizardry style of game, I overcome tons of enemies largely by mashing through the attack button. It wasn't mentally challenging because it wasn't trying to be.

In the Gold Box game style, however, you have much less combat, because you aren't meant to grind it. In fact, you're meant to savor the combat. You aren't just fighting things to get past an obstacle so you can get back to doing what you wanted, you're there solely and specifically for the tactical depth of the combat in the first place.

In my favorite moment of playing a Gold Box game, however, I was playing Pools of Radiance with a party of 6 characters, which, due to it being a very early game with only four classes, meant I had two fighters, one rogue, two clerics, and one wizard. I was either level 2 or level 3, with my casters all level 3 because in that game, you had to PAY for level-ups even after getting the XP, and I couldn't afford to level up my whole party, so I prioritized the magic so I could get level 2 spells.

While exploring, I came across a bunch of signs that obvious bad news was ahead - a whole tribe of orcs, and I'd have to sneak around them or distract them somehow.... SAVING... Yeah, I'm going in.

So there the game loads up a map with... about 50-60 orcs against my characters that aren't even fully level 3 yet. I take one look and assume I'm toast, and happily dive into it.

In this game, you play with the full top-down tile-based combat, and having multiple units to control with different powers makes any given confrontation have far more tactical depth than a game without a grid, or where you have a single character with a limited set of powers. I did what any sane commander would do when faced with such a threat - rushed a doorway, which at least managed to keep only 6 enemies attacking me at a time... from the front - there was a side-path that was open, and would eventually spill over in orcs.

Fortunately, I picked spells for AoE debilitations, not damage purposes, and half my party was a casting class, so I had 4 Hold Persons, 2 Stinking Clouds, and a few Sleep spells. I started Sleeping and Holding a wall of orcs that served as a fleshy bullwark preventing any un-paralyzed orcs from actually getting to my characters at the chokepoints.

Another key decision I made, however, was not actually killing all the orcs with Coup De Grace attacks that instantly kill paralyzed enemies (since they were AoE spells, I Coup De Graced the closest orcs, and kept the "shell" of the furthest orcs as cover) - I carved out two channels of open tiles for orcs to engage me, so that I could limit my exposure to the number of attacks I would receive each round. In effect, I cuddled up into a orcish shield I had carved out of paralyzed orcs.

The Hold Person spells lasted a surprisingly long time, and I got into a rhythm of killing as many as two orcs a round (not counting the easy Coup kills, which I left to my wizard or thief to get so the clerics and fighters could handle the real melee), and only taking a hit once every other round. Still, it didn't take long to run out of Cure spells with only a pair of level 3 clerics, and the orcs would make their saves eventually, and require another dose of my precious few stunning spells.

By the end of the fight, in utter amazement, I actually won the battle. I had no spells left, and my entire party was unconscious (not dead - I actually managed to staunch the bleeding with my wizard of the two dying fighters and one dying cleric in spite of having no training, one on their -9th hit point,) except for the thief, who had only 1 hit point, and my little wizard, who had run out of spells, run out of darts to throw, and in the end she had resorted to charging and knifing the last orc to death in melee.

I was laughing for a half-hour straight after that. My wizard and thief got enough experience from that one fight to level up one and a half times over due to being the only ones conscious. I couldn't carry enough loot from the amazing haul of that fight back to actually pay for a level-up, though.

----

To try to put it in a shorter format, if you want to make a game that is actually a Challenge as a Core Gameplay Aesthetic, you need to start using game mechanics that actually reward situational combat modifiers in a manner more akin to the way that gold ol' hex-based military strategy games work upon, rather than strict absolute evasion probabilities that reward simply having higher numbers that are commonly associated with RPGs that actually don't focus upon challenge.

I can easily give you a list of suggestions on how to do this, but I'd like to first actually confirm what sort of game you're really going after before talking about them...

2) I did not want a game that felt like the characters all had a pre-determined build structure, and were required to follow the plot in a linear fashion. Sure, this is easier to create and it makes it incredibly easy to balance, knowing when and at what level a player will be at in the game. But this craps all over the spirit of a true open game world. What I wanted was a world that was open from the start- go anywhere, try anything. Start the game and walk straight to the End Guy's fortress if you want. Find the best sword in the game as a lever 1 character, if you know where to look.

Did I anticipate that the player might exploit the game rules in order to achieve a dominate character? You betcha. I hoped for it.

If I were to put this into a single word, it would be Exploration as a Core Gameplay Mechanic, and may also touch on Expression when it deals with how the player is built.

Expression in this game is actually quite anemic - you have rudiments of what could have been a good method of player Expression in the Axiom and Origin, but these are never used by the game for anything other than some marginal bonuses, and are typically used as mere stepping-stones in achieving a min-maxed character. (Compare this to how your origin in Mass Effect was used to give you an origin-specific quest to show how that choice changes who Shepherd actually is - that's helping to draw in player Expression.)

This actually brings me to a problem with your Exploration mechanics, but this is getting to be too long of a post, yet again. Suffice to say, the way that you create "hand-drawn" maps but put in procedural loot often actually leads to ways to discourage the sort of Exploration that anyone talking about the joy of an "open game world" actually is meant to deliver upon.

It would be worth looking at ways to introduce better procedural content into the game to make exploration more rewarding without having to hand-paint Avernum-sized worlds with incredible details. (But I'll save that for a later post.)

[munster]

A lot of interesting points raised here, and I'll give a very quick opinion on why I like Eschalon, why I played Books I and II and am anticipating with great pleasure Book III.

I'm not a traditional game player. I know a little about the DnD style games and I didn't cut my teeth playing video games. So your suggestion about starting off the game with a whole infodump of stats would be an immediate turn-off to me. If someone can figure out that 100 XPZ means that in turn 19, AOS hits for-12 versus MLP of -6.5, good luck to them.

That person is not me

What I like is that every character does require a little bit more than merely "shove every available point into strength or wisdom or whatever". So it means that a magic-user needs, or at least can be very much helped by, having at least one level in weapons. Sure, you can construct a pure brute-force warrior or a puny spell-flinger, but starting out a little bit of Jack of all trades is better than immediately trying to be a Master of one.

And it really doesn't cost that much to say "No, this build isn't working, I'll junk this character and roll another". You aren't forced to go so far into the plot that you're stuck with a bad choice, and neither are you left repeating the first few boring encounters over and over until you hone your build.

Walking away from velociraptors saved my puny spell-flinging butt a few times, I can tell you. And yes, when I built up enough levels in Element Shield to be able to walk out onto magma without so much as curling my eyelashes, I did exhibit an unseemly amount of glee at coaxing the Taurax to follow me and turn themselves into barbecue

[Lord_P]

A very in-depth post, indeed. I play Dwarf Fortress as well and I too have banged my head on the learning cliff that seems completely straight.

I just hope this topic doesn't suffer the same fate as my own.

Also munster, who you call a puny spell-flinger? I'll have the Bureau of Mage Supremacy on you!

[munster]

Was forgetting the most important part - the story. I want to know what's going on. I want to know who all these people are. I want to find out where exactly the Orakur come from, are they lying to me/us, and what is the One up to?

And why, precisely, did I think it was a good idea to drink an experimental brain-wiping potion that ends up with me in my underwear in a jungle with no idea who, what, where or why I am?

[Lord_P]

I think it was because Gramuk (or perhaps even the One) was trying to break into your mind to find out the location of the Crux of Ages. You took the potion because, as a member of Crius Vindica, you were sworn to keep the Cruxes safe.

[munster]

Eschalon has enforced min-maxing. That is to say, not only is min-maxing generally a possible way to abuse and beat the game, it's actually the only way to play the game.

See, I disagree with this. I think it comes down to how you (the individual player) want to play the game, and I think Eschalon is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of approaches.

Some people want to create the absolute 100% top maxed-out character of their preferred class and power through the game. Some want to kill the most monsters, or accumulate the most gold, or finish in the fastest time. That's all fine.

Some want to explore the gameworld. Some want to follow the story, not the side-quests. Some want to do every quest and side-quest possible. That's fine too.

As I said, I am very much not an expert player, yet I can play and enjoy the games even though I don't know what exact mechanics and stats are behind the spells I cast. I really don't understand the percentages of damage (I'm mathematically challenged) and for me, if I had to plot out "I'll pick this spell because the conditions in this formula make it worth more to me", then I wouldn't play.

I've played a couple of online games which are just pure grinding to hit levels to get goodies to power up so you can kill more monsters to get points to hit targets imposed on you by the game, and it's ultimately boring and pointless and I get to the point where I say "Enough, I'm not enjoying this, I'm giving up". I've replayed Eschalon, using the experience from my first/third/fifth time through, and enjoyed it every time.

I also very much appreciate the help, strategies, pointers, tips and tricks that the forum members here share. That is a very big plus of the experience.

What you are saying is a different angle on the game and a great way to see how a player of your type would like to improve elements, and that is perfectly valid. But there are a lot of those types of games already out there (you give examples of ones you've played yourself). Eschalon is that little bit different in that it does cater for the pathetic neophyte like myself as well as for the experienced gamer who can calculate dice rolls in his or her head