Just a thing I'd like to see in 2. If you're going to have multiple different weapon skills, where high levels of skill are meaningful (like you do now, and this is a good thing) then you should have some clear, basic set of characteristics for each weapon type. for example...
- Swords: A common, effective, and popular warrior's weapon. Swords have good damage, medium weight, and generally high accuracy. The most powerful magical weapons tend to be swords, and their criticals, while not as impressive as the sort you can pull off with a good axe or mace, tend to be more common.
- Axes: Axes (particularly the more effective axes) tend to be heavy and a bit unwieldy, but they do an impressive amount of damage, with brutal crits. Axes are also quite effective at demolishing doors, barrels, chests and the like.
- Maces: the higher-end maces are also quite heavy, but are generally a bit more accurate and a bit less damaging than axes. Their crits don't do nearly as much damage, but often stun or cripple the foe. Maces are likewise effective at destroyng the scenery.
- Daggers: generally a weapon for people who don't want to carry something heavier. The dagger's base damage is pretty poor, but they are accurate, and the not uncommon crits can yield some pretty respectable damage when they occur.
- Barehand: the weapon of choice for people who don't have anything. Barehand deals relatively little damage compared to... well... anything, but training in it can be useful to deal with situations in which you have been disarmed, and for casters who want to keep their hands free.
..or whatever.
The point of it is so that players can design their character based on what sorts of weapons they want to wield from the beginning, rather than either picking blindly or looking at the spoiler lists to see what the most effective/easy to get weapons are.
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On a similar note, I'm going to actually come out against skill trainers as you have them here. Having the player able make character design decisions that seem totally reasonable and viable, but turn out to be Just Plain Wrong for reasons completely beyond the character's ability to discern in game? (like, say, buying up cartography, sword skill, divination, and elemental to 5 as quickly as possible.) It just seems... kinda punitive.
I guess I'd like a game where I don't feel like I'm going to be punished with a permagimped character for not having read the spoilers.
mind you, a game where you got a certain number of starting skills at level 1, that you could raise, and otherwise couldn't learn that first level of a skill without a book/trainer? That might be interesting. Wouldn't fit the current story, but it might well be interesting.
Thought about Eschalon 2 - weapon types
Re: Thought about Eschalon 2 - weapon types
How about the effectiveness of certain weapon types versus certain enemies? A dagger or bow probably doesn't do much damage to a skeleton, but a mace or throwing stones does.
Or is this already the case in book 1? If so, I didn't notice...
Or is this already the case in book 1? If so, I didn't notice...