The Drunken Lizard Pub

I just finished playing the game one time through. Overall, fantastic game. Excellent use of atmosphere. The wide empty spaces. Dark dungeons. Westwillow was a great idea. But, I'm left with the feeling that the game is, well, a little unfinished.

In no particular order...

* Autowalk... would be nice to be able to point to a destination, and have the character go there. Which would be helped by:
* Be able to view the rest of the map, instead of forcing the display to center on the current character.
* Which would require that we hide parts of the map that aren't in visual view from your current location. Makes figuring out dungeons etc much easier when you can see what you're going to be running into. I can't imagine this being too difficult, the minimap updates itself based on what you should be able to see, not on the contents of the main screen.
* Smarter foes. They hardly ever act as a group. You can typically cause them to separate, and pick them off one by one.
* Also, you attack them, then disappear for a little while (though hide in shadows), and then they just lose interest in you, as though you'd never been there. This is especially true between saving and loading: NPCs forget what they were doing. Perhaps those in your immediate vicinity should not?
* Magic using NPCs.
* Healing NPCs. The first borehead I killed, I was able to sleep and regenerate my mana, return, and continue from where I had last left off.
* Two new difficulty options: can't save with enemies nearby, and autosave into quicksave slot when you're poisoned or diseased.
* Alchemy in the heat of battle? Why should this be possible?
* Spells that take multiple turns to cast.
* More signs of sentient life in the world. Farms, maybe?
* Enemies smart enough to avoid hostile terrain. General Ghorr seemed perfectly happy to stand in a lava square and attack.
* Too static a story. The player seems to be the only agent capable of affecting the world. Not that I expect NPCs to run around and visibly do things, but the story could be constructed such that actions you take affect the world at a macro level. I think the only example of that in the game (which I didn't experience myself, but saw mention in the forums) was taking all the wolf pups would result in a snow wolf invasion.
* Enemy magic users.
* Better recipe book. I spent 750 to get all recipes, but then I had to look into the forums to figure out exactly what they did.
* Game seems to favor some weapons far more than others. Kill boreheads, get an awesome axe. Takes a while to get other special weapons. You don't even get the named sword until talushorn.
* And trainers. No piercing weapon trainer? If there isn't, there should be an achievement related to this.
* The level advancement exploit: keep off hitting the + button until you're in a jam, hit it, and then suddenly have all your points back. Then continue kicking ass. Works even in the middle of a battle.

As I wrote this list, I could clearly see the tradeoffs BW has had to make. Unlike most other turn based RPG games I've encountered, encounters are not controlled. You don't go into a special battle mode. Which makes it more difficult to control what the character does when enemies are encountered. Making a skill based system work seems harder than a class based one, but is much more fun for the flexibility it offers. (My character was not that well put together, a cleaving cleric with an interest in alchemy and bows. Too spread out.) The game became remarkably different post Port Kuudad. Until Port Kuudad, there were lots of characters willing to give you little jobs and quests. This nearly dries up after you get done with Port Kuudad. I think I got only three or four quests the rest of the game.

I really hope Book II does well enough for BW to be able to justify Book III.

smsmsm wrote: * Healing NPCs. The first borehead I killed, I was able to sleep and regenerate my mana, return, and continue from where I had last left off.

Mire trolls were added to combat this problem, but they are the only ones that regenerate.

* Two new difficulty options: can't save with enemies nearby, and autosave into quicksave slot when you're poisoned or diseased.

This was added for the hardcore players and is optional.

Randomizer wrote:

* Two new difficulty options: can't save with enemies nearby, and autosave into quicksave slot when you're poisoned or diseased.

This was added for the hardcore players and is optional.

Right you are... I don't remember the option reading this way in 1.01 when I had started the game, but then that could just be faulty memory.

The point about favoured weapons is very reasonable. It makes no sense to go for one of the weapons that has no trainer, or no trainer until very late into the game.

One of the things that bugs me is the tiny population of Khudaad. It's got about 5 people living in it, 4 more shopkeepers, the rest are guards. Largest port? Please. That's no larger than a village.

Actually... I think that may be my biggest problem with this game. The inhabited areas don't feel... inhabited. They're more like waypoints for the one adventurer in the world. Some other games have done this better, making cities and villages larger, so they actually feel like they're living, breathing places.

It's a resources thing, no doubt; lack of time, money, and the fact that it's basically just one person, albeit a brilliant person, making the game.
Also notice how many buildings in Port Kuudad are just empty spaces. A sign saying 'for sale' has to make this acceptable, but the real reason for it you and I can easily guess.

I believe Book II was originally planned for February 2009 or thereabouts, so I'm glad we've got it now, even in this somewat Spartan form.

Interesting thread. Another point: no outlying farms or other support systems for towns. Even empty buildings could contain random enemies to add a little action. Also NPCs with their own little quests or even simple dialog would be a nice touch.

Hmm, I'm sure it's been brought up before, but BW and Toady One (armok be with him) of Bay12 share a bunch of similarities. They both have grand, one person projects that could use the input of their avid player base, but won't make use of the resources available to them because it could weaken the game if a direct competitor came out.

I can see their predicament, but imagine the world BW could create if we were creating entire cities or areas between us. No longer would Eschalon be limited to a fairly small geographical area, instead we could play through entire continents if we so chose, with unique and engaging NPCs, quests, items etc spread throughout and given flavour by the minds of dozens of players invested in the universe and the game.

"The Plan" as it stands is that with the release of Book III, or soon after it, assuming it can be made to work, BW will release editing tools to allow the community to create mods and add-ons to the games (at least Books II and III--Book I runs on a slightly different engine).

Balancing the changes to the engine from Book I to Book II took a lot longer than BW expected, I think, which crunched the development time on content. A number of the frequent users here did make contributions to the content in Book II (thank CrazyBernie for the skill-book texts), and there are areas for expansion (there's a free add-on dungeon which will hopefully be ready in the next few weeks). But some things were left out (originally, there was going to be a special side quest for each character class to add a little more distinction to your first selection) because development ran a lot longer than planned for.

Would I love it if there were 40 more quests and associated NPCs? Absolutely, but having spent several hundred hours on Book II since it was released, I can't say I'm unhappy with my investment.

smsmsm wrote:* Magic using NPCs.
* Enemy magic users.

That would definitely be cool, esp. the latter. There was one such NPC in Book I, if you attacked him - unfortunately, his magic-using has consistently crashed the game...

smsmsm wrote:* Alchemy in the heat of battle? Why should this be possible?

If you mean potion drinking, I don't see the problem with it.

If you mean actual potion mixing... yeah, you're probably right: that's a bit of an 'exploit' (though one I've appreciated in the past!! ).

smsmsm wrote:* Enemies smart enough to avoid hostile terrain. General Ghorr seemed perfectly happy to stand in a lava square and attack.

Enemy A.I. was improved between Book I and Book II - looks like it'll need to be improved again going into Book III...

smsmsm wrote:* Game seems to favor some weapons far more than others. Kill boreheads, get an awesome axe. Takes a while to get other special weapons. You don't even get the named sword until talushorn.

I somewhat agree on this point - from all accounts, Book II is now too favorable to Mages; and not being able to obtain named weapons for all the available combat skills in Mistfell/Nor'land ain't cool.

smsmsm wrote:* And trainers. No piercing weapon trainer? If there isn't, there should be an achievement related to this.

This has been discussed elsewhere - both Books have been somewhat light on what Skills are available to training, IMHO.

smsmsm wrote:* The level advancement exploit: keep off hitting the + button until you're in a jam, hit it, and then suddenly have all your points back. Then continue kicking ass. Works even in the middle of a battle.

Eh... I can't get too worked up about this one. Heck - I consider it a "feature", not a "bug"...

Oh, and there is another named sword before the one in Talushorn (if you take the side trip before heading to Edon). Still very late in the game, though I think you can get to it earlier if you want. I've never tried going into the tower before Erubor sends me with the cup.

Kreador Freeaxe wrote:Oh, and there is another named sword before the one in Talushorn (if you take the side trip before heading to Edon). Still very late in the game, though I think you can get to it earlier if you want. I've never tried going into the tower before Erubor sends me with the cup.

Yeah, so long as you don't mess up the portcullises (by "solving" it with Portal spells, etc), you can go back there mulitple times. On my first playthrough I went through Lorewitch relatively early in the game.

Rowanas wrote:The point about favoured weapons is very reasonable. It makes no sense to go for one of the weapons that has no trainer, or no trainer until very late into the game.

Having a trainer appear later in the game is cool. Having trainers behave like books would be better though (as has been mentioned in another thread): have them add a certain number of points, rather than take you to a max. Otherwise I end up feeling like I've been cheated out of some skill points.

IJBall wrote:

smsmsm wrote:* Alchemy in the heat of battle? Why should this be possible?

If you mean actual potion mixing... yeah, you're probably right: that's a bit of an 'exploit' (though one I've appreciated in the past!! ).

I meant mixing.

If a game editor does happen, I think I might take a crack at contributing content. I hope there's a scripting language in the engine for adding content other than terrain and objects. That would be really cool. And some straightforward mechanism for combining all that new content into the existing game world