Good and Bad things about Eschalon1.

[Mongolian]

Some amazing things about Eschalon:
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- Great game overall, similiar to the classic RPG's
- Having the option to play windowed or full screen
- Amazing game engine
- Great graphics
- Not having to specialize my stat points
- Nice ability to choose different quests

Pet peeves about Eschalon:
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- Players should not be able to save-restart during fighting to make sure the best dice rolls happen.
- Players should not be able to save-restart to find treasure until you get what you want.
- It would be really nice if the game had 2 speed modes (fast and normal). My computer's cpu slowed the game down after I would be playing it for a few hours. Perhaps this would solve the problem with a 'fast' mode. It would also just be nice to have a fast mode to speed parts of the game up as it got very monotonous at times.
- Rolling dice in the beggining screen should not happen!!!! If anything, ask the user if they want begginer, medium or hard and then the player gets a blanket # of points.
- Monsters: not enough different kinds! More importantly, more big crazy rare monsters would be nice.
- Not enough puzzles! Was kind of sad having few puzzle-solving riddles.
- Seeing how many hours of my life I wasted. Thanks for making me feel guilty!

[Mongolian]

and Yes, I really enjoyed this game! Just a few things that could really make this game perfect though...

[Zorlac]

- Monsters: not enough different kinds! More importantly, more big crazy rare monsters would be nice.

I agree. I hope they double the monsters in Book 2.

- Not enough puzzles! Was kind of sad having few puzzle-solving riddles.

I agree again. Beating down monsters with strategic skill is rewarding. But solving a nasty puzzle that has you on the brink of looking up the solution on the internet is just as rewarding.

- Rolling dice in the beggining screen should not happen!!!! If anything, ask the user if they want begginer, medium or hard and then the player gets a blanket # of points.

You are a true D&D purist. Kudos. Don't know if that would work with Eschalon. Even classics such as Telengard allowed re-rolling at character formation.

[realmzmaster]

Zorlac,

Which version of D & D or Ad & D are you referring ?
The early version of AD & D allowed for the rolling up of a character based on a d20 and then modified for race and class.

Mongolian

- Rolling dice in the beggining screen should not happen!!!! If anything, ask the user if they want begginer, medium or hard and then the player gets a blanket # of points.

The early old school CRPG were based on those rules and you could re-roll to your hearts content. Why should that change?

Most modern CRPGs have a base amount for each attribute and a set number of points to allocate to them. You could decrease or increase an attribute below the base to increase another attribute after expending the set points as long as it did not violate class or race restrictions. Is that what you are talking about?:

Why not have a system like Ultima IV which use a group of ethical dilemma questions to decide your attributes, race and class?

Re-rolling for treasure or during comabt has been discussed to death! Some agree with your point of view, others disagree? A poll is being taken see:

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1631

and see:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1154

and

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1614

[Mongolian]

wow..you just remembered me of my fav intro to a game. SNES: "Ogre Battle". You got to pick a bunch of tarrot cards and that decided which character you used. Too bad alignment ruined the fun out of wanting to play that game.

And as for stats. I'm just saying, make all stats 10. Choose begginer get:90 points to play with. Intermediate:70, hard:50. And no beggining stat should be able to surpase 20-25. (somewhere in there)

[Zorlac]

Zorlac,

Which version of D & D or Ad & D are you referring ?
The early version of AD & D allowed for the rolling up of a character based on a d20 and then modified for race and class.

- Rolling dice in the beggining screen should not happen!!!! If anything, ask the user if they want begginer, medium or hard and then the player gets a blanket # of points.

realmzmaster: I think it was AD&D. It's been over 20 year since I've played it. But I don't remember being allowed to re-roll at character formation. I thought one could only re-roll if you had an exceptionally low roll.

In some computer based RPG's, I've actually taken the first roll, just to be real. But I did re-roll in Eschalon, it was allowed so I took advantage of it.

[Mongolian]

In some computer based RPG's, I've actually taken the first roll, just to be real. But I did re-roll in Eschalon, it was allowed so I took advantage of it.

Exactly why the resave feature spoils the game despite its great intentions.

[Farwalker]

The early D&D rules did limit rerolling - can't recall what the details were, but I know we ended up using house rules that were a bit more lenient.

From a computer game development perspective there was some purpose to all the rerolling in early (often much simpler) rpgs. If you've ever spent half an hour trying to roll up good stats, you know you're pretty much invested in playing the game for at least a little while. Things have evolved for the better though - crpgs offer more choices and tradeoffs for a player to customize with at the start instead. More enjoyable for the player, more effective in getting them involved in the game too.

[William]

If those are the worst things you can all think of, then you haven't been playing the same game I have. As nice as it is to see a game that tries to be oldschool, Eschalon has so many weaknesses it isn't really funny anymore.

-- Dice rolling. This is bad, as in really bad. A completely ass-backward design decision. Having to roll up your characters was stupid in D&D and it's still stupid now. No, I DON'T want to sit on the character creation screen for twenty minutes trying to get my desired set of stats. I want to play a game and have fun. Baldur's Gate worked really well with a point based system, why can't Eschalon?

-- Retardedly slow movement speed. Another really bad design decision. I can't believe that there are four patches out by now and there STILL isn't an option to double or triple movement speed! Do you people think it's fun or enjoyable to walk past the same boring forest texture for twenty minutes straight because Quick Travel is so horribly limited?

-- Horrible game balance. Ever tried playing a pure mage? It's plain not possible. A full level 6 Compressed Atmosphere spell does about 26-36 damage. It costs 36 Mana. No character can ever regenerate more than 1 Mana every 3 turns. That means it takes a powerful mage some 110 turns to regenerate one mediocre attack. A warrior with good skills can churn out 15-30 damage a turn (not counting criticals) and doesn't need to rest every few swings of his sword. See where this is going? A whole character concept that no one can use because it's so goddamn tedious. Why doesn't high Arcane skill reduce casting cost at least a BIT? [Edit: Also, why do I get called a Necromancer if there isn't ONE spell that allows me to raise some zombies or stuff? At least my Assassin could actually assassinate people.]

-- Boring level design. Just how many maps with the generic "forest fulla' trees" are there, anyway? I've counted six or seven so far. If I had to guess, I'd say there are like five palette sets: Generic forest, generic wasteland/steppe, generic city/buildings, generic cave, generic dungeon. It gets real old real fast, especially coupled with that retardedly slow movement speed.

-- Cookie-cutter NPCs. No one ever says anything interesting. If they don't give you a quest, they might as well not exist. "Witch in the woods", "Powerful wise mage", "Backwoods town mayor", you could play NPC bingo with how stereotypical they are. The goblin in the Whistling Cave was a nice touch, by the way, even if this kind of thing is becoming rather overused in games these days. Remember what's-his-name the kobold from Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide?

-- Complete inability to cancel out of conversations. I hate that, you know? It's annoying, having to save before talking to every NPC because you never know if it's going to force you to make an important decision completely out of the blue. I was damn annoyed when I talked to Lilith for the first time and couldn't check out both conversation paths since my last save was half an hour ago. Multiple conversation paths are nice, but not like that.

-- Fetch Quests. Boooooring! Sorry, for a game that prides itself on it's amount of explorable content, there sure aren't all that many interesting quests around. No one compares well to Ultima VII, of course, but seriously: If those guys could do it almost twenty years ago, why can't you?

-- Small game world. Yeah, this sounds strange, but when you think about it, the game world really isn't that big. It sure FEELS big, but that's because of the glacial pacing. Double the movement speed and the world shrinks by half. This is just artificial stretching of game content, and not in a good way.

-- Dead game world. The game world is only ever given some real exposition in those books you find everywhere and there aren't all that many of them. Why doesn't the priest in the first village say more than "Yo, donate something, will ya?" He could tell me about his god, about the difficulty of running a church all by himself or that farmer's wife that keeps coming to him with black eyes and bruises. Why doesn't he? That's like an hour of extra writing, tops.

-- General lack of things to do. When you look at it, there isn't really much to keep you occupied beyond killing stuff. You could say "So what? It worked for Diablo/Nethack/Angband/Might&Magic", but those games had other things going for them. Might and Magic was seriously huge, not the fake huge Eschalon has going. Diablo and Angband had procedurally generated content and that whole "just one more item" thing that makes people come back to them to this day. Nethack is simply unbelievable chock-full of secrets and things to try out. Ever petrified yourself by falling down the stairs with a cockatrice corpse in your hand? Uh, yeah, me neither.

-- And finally the horrible proofreading that nobody actually did. Sorry, but reading stuff like "succuess" and "thier" instead of "success" and "their" just looks bad and reeks of an unprofessional attitude. I hear is was even worse before patching! If you guys didn't care enough to use a bloody spellchecker then why should anyone else care enough to buy your game? Tell me that.

Well, there's my two dollars. Eschalon really could've been way better than it was. A lot of its problems could be easily fixed by clever patching. Some stuff may be traceable to the low budget. Other stuff is just plain retarded. Anyway, let's hope Book II picks up where Book I left off and avoids the worst blunders.

Cheers,
William

[Unclever title]

While William isn't wrong in stating those things as weaknesses, well some of them mechanically speaking, they really didn't detract from the gameplay.

I found the quick travel to be very useful especially once I was able to place a portal location in a very crucial area where I could not quick travel to (Most of you know probably know where this is).

Proofreading, agreed, spelling mistakes and grammatical errors should not exist except when appropriate to the character or storyline. There's no excuse for this, but then again it's hardly game condemning.

The walking speed was a little slow for my liking, but it wasn't that terrible really, if quick traveling wasn't available then I'd really complain about walking speed.

I did find the NPCs a little bland, but I was intrigued with a few... too bad I couldn't explore them further, ex: the "priest man" of Aridel.

The game world was far from dead. At times those books were pretty much enough, but in addition to that was talk of goblins and the Orakur. Sure the world could use more back story, but that's what sequels are for right?

Lack of things to do? Considering the relatively short length of the game I'd say there was a lot to do, from getting ambushed to falling down into salamander pits to solving riddles in hidden thief caches and other things in unrelated to quests that one could explore and become a part of (Admittedly the ambush was quest related, but likely not quest required.). Or and there were quests too. Though you're absolutely right, the majority of this game was in the killing of things additional pursuits would be greatly appreciated.

Small game world? Yes, but it was a short game.

About conversations, yeah some tweaking should be done, some conversations you should be able to cancel out of, but only some. I mean some of the other conversations are vitally important man, pay attention.

Boring level design? I disagree here, I think we all knew going into the game that it wasn't going to be an incredible graphics experience (I delve in the art of under and over statements!). There was a small number of palettes, but it was enough.

Fetch quests don't bother me so much, I mean half the quests in the game required you to go back to the quest giver anyway, so what's the problem?

Dice rolling, interesting, but not necessarily helpful, potentially frustrating depending on one's standards.

Balance, considering the game rarely requires true masters in any one skill field it is easier to play through with a crossish character, so ANY pure set is going to have challenges, but it all comes down to how you learn to play. I've always found in many games that mage characters require more strategy to use and fighters less, theifs somewhere in between. And too me balance doesn't really figure in to a single player game. Different choices about your character are bound to make it more or less challenging.


All in all I simply want more, longer game, bigger map, more challenging monsters and puzzles and riddles, more side misadventures (like ambushes other than camping), deeper dungeons, towers taller than three stories (Lighthouse doesn't count!) etc. I really enjoyed this game. Needs improvement? Yes, everything does. I know Book II will be better and hope for its soon arrival like so many others here.

[Mongolian]

I will agree that most of what has said here by William is 200% overexagerated, but some really nice points made here. Besides games that are 20 years old, I would be nice to hear some game reccomendations or atleast successful games from such sharp criticism of an enjoyable game.

PS - you enjoyed it enough to play it out it looks in multiple characters for a long way through. Not to mention enough passion for you to come on here and write a long post. Can't say you didn't already get your moneys worth.

[realmzmaster]

-- Horrible game balance. Ever tried playing a pure mage? It's plain not possible. A full level 6 Compressed Atmosphere spell does about 26-36 damage. It costs 36 Mana. No character can ever regenerate more than 1 Mana every 3 turns.

Yes it is possible to play a pure mage, been there and done it. In fact played several characters. Pure mage just takes more strategy.

No this games is not an Action-RPG that requires blazing speed while traveling. Why do you need to double or triple the movement speed? I guess that would mean the monsters get double or quadruple movement speed. This game is not Diablo or any of that irk. The Quick Travel system works very well and is nicely thought out.

You want to compare Eschalon to Baldur's Gate. Did you read the credits for Baldur's Gate and see the number of people working on it. There was a team of programmers, artists, sound people, not to mention producers. The credit naming the people takes up 8 pages More than 140 people worked on the game. You expect an indie publisher who is working on a small budget to produce a Baldur's Gate. It took hundreds of man hours to produce the game. So you expect a small team (that also have other jobs with BW doing most of the programming) to produce the same thing?
I am sure if Basilisk Games had a multi-million dollar budget, they could hire more of everyone and quit their day jobs to devote themselves to totally making games. But they can not.

Fetch quests appeared in every CRPG I have ever played and I have played a lot of them from Rogue to NetHack to Oblivion. Yes NetHack (1987) is a deep game, it has been in development for over 20 years , being a descendant of Hack (1985) which came from Rogue (1980). I think after 28 years of development it should be pretty deep, unfortunately it still is not pretty in the graphics department. But, there are independent people working on that too.

This is the first product from this independent designer. It is excellent first effort. I got my money's worth (that to me is what counts) and I am eagerly awaiting Book II. Is Book I perfect, of course not. But I expect bigger and better in Book II.

[William]

Hey there,

now, don't you all get me wrong, I didn't say that Eschalon didn't do what it set out to do. Very much to the opposite, in fact, because most if not all of these issues are problems that I remember quite distinctly from the olden days as well. As far as capturing the spirit of oldschool RPG gaming goes, this is the real thing, perfectly done. It's so perfect, in fact, that I've come to remember why a lot of this stuff was a bad idea. Oldschool RPG doesn't exist anymore for a reason. It's tedious, mindless and boring. Dungeon Master, by the standards of today, is a joke. So are Eye of the Beholder, Pools of Radiance, Rogue, Moria and Ultima I-III. All those games are horrible dumps of bad design decisions, made before there was an easy way to tell developers just what's wrong with their games. Today, we simply know better.

That's just my personal opinion, of course, and I understand that opinions may differ. I think there are a lot of crappy and shallow RPGs today, and I applaud Basilisk Games for what they managed to do, but I still think I have some valid criticisms here, especially technical stuff like the movement speed. There's no shame in taking good ideas from other games! You're trying to make a product that's fun and relaxing to play, not needlessly aggravating (and it IS aggravating, I know I'm not the only one to be annoyed by that.) As a programmer and old-time gaming enthusiast, I'd really like for this independent franchise to succeed. I've never regretted telling indie devs when they screwed something up, it's only made their games better.

You said:

Twenty minutes? Again, stop exaggerating. Nothing wrong with the movement speed, but then again I don't suffer from a short attention span. And Quick Travel was not horribly limited as you put it, it covered all the important areas. I really wonder how some of you people play this game.

Well, true, I don't usually take a stopwatch when I'm going to play a game, but you really don't need to insult my attention span. The point is that my time is limited and valuable. I have a job, I have family, I have other hobbies. I just don't want to spend ten minutes, maybe more, covering space I already walked through. Yeah, I could. It bores me to tears, though, and makes me want to do something more engaging instead.

Small game world? Yes, but it was a short game.

True, I have to admit as much.

The walking speed was a little slow for my liking, but it wasn't that terrible really, if quick traveling wasn't available then I'd really complain about walking speed.

No this games is not an Action-RPG that requires blazing speed while traveling. Why do you need to double or triple the movement speed? I guess that would mean the monsters get double or quadruple movement speed. This game is not Diablo or any of that irk. The Quick Travel system works very well and is nicely thought out.

Now, as much as you are right that this isn't Diablo, you have to admit that this doesn't make much sense. This game will never be Diablo, simply because everything is turn-based. What does it matter if movement speed doubles for monsters too? This doesn't change the pace of combat, because nothing moves if you don't move first. It's simply a matter of convenience. I had to make the trip to Lilith, the b/witch in the forest, two times. Each time I started from Bordertown. Each time it took me certainly at least five minutes. The first trip was even worse, because of various dead ends in the preceding forest labyrinth. This is something that could be easily fixed with a simple convenience option. "Portal" doesn't even help all that much, because you have to GET it first. And that's not always easy, especially this early in the game.

About conversations, yeah some tweaking should be done, some conversations you should be able to cancel out of, but only some. I mean some of the other conversations are vitally important man, pay attention.

Also true, it makes sense that you shouldn't be able to cancel out of some important conversations, especially of the scripted sort. Its inconvenient, though, and when in doubt I usually support convenience over realism. If it makes people frustrated then it's not a good design decision.

Balance, considering the game rarely requires true masters in any one skill field it is easier to play through with a crossish character, so ANY pure set is going to have challenges, but it all comes down to how you learn to play. I've always found in many games that mage characters require more strategy to use and fighters less, theifs somewhere in between. And too me balance doesn't really figure in to a single player game. Different choices about your character are bound to make it more or less challenging.

Yes it is possible to play a pure mage, been there and done it. In fact played several characters. Pure mage just takes more strategy.

You got me there. Yeah, it's possible, in the same sense that pulling out your own teeth is possible. It hurts, though, and it isn't very fun. I've ascended Wizards in Nethack and Angband before and yeah, tactics and strategy is the name of the game. You can actually kill stuff as a mage type character in those games, though. Eschalon, not so much. It's worse now that spell damage doesn't apply to containers like it used to. Fire Dart was damn useful in V1.0! Right now, though, it's just bad.

One time, I made myself a mage with 50 Intelligence, Perception, Arcane and Meditation, and it was still tedious! That should say something. A warrior with those stats is godly and completely invulnerable. 50 Survival? One HP. Every. Three. Steps. That guy was plain immortal. Twenty goblins at once? No sweat. Minotaur smashing an axe in his face? Wait a second, honey, I'm polishing my sword right now.

Allowing Mana regeneration to increase beyond 1 every 3 is a must if mages are meant to become as fun as warriors are. That, or damage dependent on your Arcane skill, not fixed by casting level. Right now there's no variety and no real feeling of progress, at least to me.

You want to compare Eschalon to Baldur's Gate. Did you read the credits for Baldur's Gate and see the number of people working on it. There was a team of programmers, artists, sound people, not to mention producers. The credit naming the people takes up 8 pages!

True, Baldur's Gate had a budget that indie games can only dream of. However, I'm not stupid, so I know that. That's why I only compared it to Baldur's Gate's character creation screen. Point-based stat assignment isn't something that takes a dev team of twenty people. In fact, given the source code, I could implement that right now and it wouldn't take more than half an hour, tops. It's simply a matter of removing the random number generator and initialising the fields with a certain value. Not hard to do at all, so it should at least be an option, don't you think?

Fetch quests appeared in every CRPG I have ever played and I have played a lot of them from Rogue to NetHack to Oblivion.

Agreed, but then again, Nethack doesn't even really have dialogue. It's the archetypal dungeon romp, so quests are necessarily limited. And Oblivion was just plain bad. Really, I didn't go into this expecting epic writing and dialogues like out of Shakespeare. Not even Planescape: Torment-style quests that could be solved purely through dialogue. It's the little things that make or break a game, though, and the examples I gave - the priest telling me about a battered farm wife - really don't take all that much effort. It just bugs me. It makes me feel the world is just waiting for me to stumble along and make things happen, instead of a place that exists apart from my character. Have you played The Witcher, maybe? Now THAT's a game that immerses you! Of course that's not really a fair comparison, so I'm not going to put that on the same level.

Anyway, I hope you understand that I'm not being willfully unfair or anything. None of the things I mentioned are unsolvable, even for an indie developer, and I hear a lot of them are going to be fixed in Book II anyway. I just thought this needed saying.

William

[realmzmaster]

Point based systems did not exist in the old school RPGs. Basilisk Games design was to recreate that old time feeling and experience. I played all the gold box games, Might & Magic the early Ultimas. Ultima IV had a unique system which I thought was great. Point based or random roll character generation either one works fine for me.

Hindsight is always 20/20, it is easy to say bad design choices. But actually since people played D & D, Tunnels and Trolls and other that roll dice it was expected. The game designer made a good choice in giving their audience what they wanted. When point based RPGs came out, the public's expectations changed. Now, the designer used point based system for character creation.

If you have been following Book I development for a while you knew character creation was going to be random roll. I like random roll, because for me it is a challenge to play a completely random character and complete the game. It is easy to add points for the character you want to create.

In fact I prefer seeing the random roll before you get to pick race and class. The roll automatically eliminates certain classes. Race would then modify the rolls. But that is my opinion.

But, BW achieve what he set out to do, which was to create a retro style CRPG like the ones we played in the early days.

Bad design choice? No, the design is spot on and reminded me why I liked those early CRPGs. Yes, I still pull out my Atari ST to play Dungeon Master and I still have a blast. But, YMMV.

[Eschalonian]

Point based system is NOT an improvement. In fact, that is one of the things that turn me off about the Neverwinter Nights series. The only reason they implement this system is that they want to support multi-player games, and this system would remove the stat disparity among players. It peeves me a great deal that I don't play online, multi-player games, and yet I'm stuck with this system. For me, rolling for stats is much more fun.

If you don't want to roll the dice, then don't. Just accept the first roll you're given. Or, if the first roll is really horrible, just reroll a few more times. You're bound to get something playable within a few attempts. How many seconds can this take? You must be under the impression that the only playable character is a super character that you can only get after 20 minutes of rolling!

It irks me when people insist that the game removes choices, simply because they don't want to take advantage of those choices. It's inexplicable, for example, that the ability to save and restore during a fight is a pet peeve for some people. Why? Because you don't want to do it, and the thought that other people, whom you don't know and whose games have no effect on you whatsoever, are allowed to do it, grates on you? Mind-boggling!

If Eschalon II uses the point-based system, I swear, I will not buy it, and will go back to playing Neverwinter Nights 2.