Cool RPG features you want to see again.

[Tyranthraxus]

to be able to bake bread and make cheese? like in Ultima?

You just want to put rat-poison in Lord British`s nreakfast again, don`t you.

[Rush]

Sorry to resurrect this topic, but while reading a bit of this and that tonight (on games)...I felt it was important to include the following feature for possible consideration:

In a perfect world, a good game should be self contained, meaning, based upon speaking with NPC's, and generally exploring a town for information gleaned within books, barrels, crates and what have you... a player should "always" know where he or she should go next. A player should "not" have to scour the web for clues, hints, tips, walk-throughs and the like, "especially" if the player purchased the game.

Rush.

[Evnissyen]

I don't know. ...I mean, I would agree with you in regard to cases like in Planescape where you finally reach a point where you're really like, "Okay, now what?"

But on the other hand... sometimes I think there's too much handholding, in computer games, where the game too often literally tells you, "Okay, this is what you've just found out, remember, and therefore you do this next." So there's no room to let the brain do what it was made for.

Also, there should always be room, I think, for surprises, for things the player would never have thought of pursuing and so just stumbles into: Surprise!


Anyway, in regard to previous mentioned idea(s), 'twould be nice, I would think, if in Eschalon Book III we were allowed to link to the maps of the first two games -- go back to Thaermore/Crakamir and Mistfell -- and explore them under the new narrative context.

...Assuming, that is, that Book III will not take place in either Thaermore or in Mistfell.

My bet/hope: it takes place in Wylderan. Why else have a big separate island?

Actually, even better: Book III is so large we get to explore all the areas shown on Captain Hale's map.

Even better than that: turns out Captain Hale was drunk off his butt half the time and so it turns out the actual world looks quite different from the world he mapped out.

[silverkitty]

Since the world is only like 3x the size of Central Park, I imagine Captain Hale more as a mountain climber with a telescope than as a sailor

[Evnissyen]

...Makes me think back about that shipwrecked cartographer at the beginning of Book I. There should've been some quest to get him a working boat and back on the waters, but... then again, even after I retrieved his sextant for him, he still only wanted to spend all his time drinking.

[Rush]

How about purchasing a game, then, and paying an additional amount to unlock a game manual, for instance, which includes everything you need to know about the game?

Rush.