The Drunken Lizard Pub

I just finished the game, and just for kicks, I tried the *OTHER* way, shift-attacking the final NPC.

First time, I got horribly swarmed. Even though I had a huge stockpile of potions, I was not able to keep up in combat. The best place I could find to fight was a (object)Me(object) gap which still let 3 guards attack me.

Second time, I used the following method to kill all of the guards and gained the title. SPOILER

The most important buff here is HASTE, the most overpowered spell in the whole game. Cast haste, then kill the Chancelor, then use the chairs to trick the guards into clumping up on the bottom left side. With haste on, you can sprint through the line of guards before holes close up and reach the pedastal where you are supposed to put in the Crux of the Ages. There, you can use the gate to squish guards one by one. You can even kill them in groups of 2 and 3, because the ones in the back forget about you. You can use (Hasted) attack->backup combo to get in free hits while kiting them in the long hallway.

END SPOILER

My thoughts on your game:

First off, KUDOS. Great indie game, great atmosphere, awesome old-school RPG charm. I love it, and this is coming from a long jaded RPGer who you won over from the biggest AAA of em all, World of Warcraft (at least for the 3 days this game lasted). You managed to do what no other game could -- that is, pull me away from WOW for more than a day at a time.

Things to improve on for book 2:

Balance. Cartography and Pick Lock are useless when Elemental gives the same benefits. In my game, I typecasted a Virtuous Paladin, with nothing in pick lock and elemental. I quickly found out that you could achieve the same effect as opening a lock by taking off your weapon and bashing the door/treasure chest repeatedly with your bare knuckles. It gave me a chuckle seeing the character slave away at a chest, bleeding with every hit, taking short breaks to heal up and long 12 hour naps to recover mana -- and after 3 days of bashing and bleeding out more than humanly possible, and getting dreaded Dungeon Fever disease to boot, to find a pitful 13 gold and a chunk of meat. I mean sure, it was delicious meat, but, that's just wrong!

Spell selections. Some spells are too powerful (Haste, Melt Lock) while some are useless. Some (portal) are too fun and useful to be sequestered into a high-end elemental book. Most times, casting a high level version of a spell was not as good as casting many lower-level versions. The only time "game-time-units" is important, that is, in heat of combat, you can cheat with low level spells through the overpowered spell Haste.

Voice. It would improve immersion dramatically if the main character, NPCS, and monsters talked out loud. You don't have to splurge on professional voice actors. Just publicize it on the webpage and your fanbase will submit the sound files. One of the strongest draw of this game is the well-written story slowly revealing the main character, and I found myself wanting to hear his voice many times. God, can you imagine the scene

[+] SPOILER

where the main character has to kill his own brother in the torture room? With correct voicing and background music, that could be turned into one of the memorable moments in video game history [endspoiler]

Disease and Curse. GIT RID OF THESE! PLEEEEASE!! Getting disease is not fun and discourages exploration. Most times I Quicksave before touching a corpse or chest out of fear of disease. One, it is costly to cure, even at full HP /mana. Second, it forces the player to take a long break from playing to walk back to town. And lastly, it makes the player paranoid and save game excessively. Which brings me to the last point--

Save-Load. This is the bane of a lot of RPGs, and for good reason. Don't like the treasure you got? Save-load. Mess'd up on a conversation piece and pissed that king off? Save-load. Stepped on a trap and got turned into a frog with super high charisma? Save-load. In short, in games where saving has no penalty or limitations, players tend to avoid all negative consequences of their choices, and in turn, start not caring about their choices. Heck, if it turns out bad, just save-load! The one thing I can recommend to solve this is to award one or two save "tokens" every level. That would make choices actually meaningful.

Again, great game. You guys should be proud, and I cannot wait till book 2. I wonder how long it will take before a map editor becomes available? It would be extremely badass to let players make their own mini-RPGs and maps based on the same or even altered ruleset.

Thank you for the compliments, KraveChocolate!! We'll add your suggestions to the list as we begin the development of Book II.

Congrats on finishing the game the hard way!

Well i did it the hard way as well=)
i cant say it was difficult but i had to be on guard and dont forget to drink potionsin time to kill them all =))

It was kinda fast with my uber mage=)

My stats


Im The Destroyer now=)

The key to victory in my case was quite simple:
Stoneskin+chameleon+haste+ health and mana potions III + supernova (6th level)


BTW i didnt get how to make a trip to the Ash Island

the boat there at the Gulf Of Madria was of no use for me

KraveChocolate wrote:Disease and Curse. GIT RID OF THESE! PLEEEEASE!! Getting disease is not fun and discourages exploration. Most times I Quicksave before touching a corpse or chest out of fear of disease. One, it is costly to cure, even at full HP /mana. Second, it forces the player to take a long break from playing to walk back to town. And lastly, it makes the player paranoid and save game excessively. Which brings me to the last point--

I loved that addon to the game, just keep a few potions with you and it is not a problem. You have more than enough gold anyway.

KraveChocolate wrote:Save-Load. This is the bane of a lot of RPGs, and for good reason. Don't like the treasure you got? Save-load. Mess'd up on a conversation piece and pissed that king off? Save-load. Stepped on a trap and got turned into a frog with super high charisma? Save-load. In short, in games where saving has no penalty or limitations, players tend to avoid all negative consequences of their choices, and in turn, start not caring about their choices. Heck, if it turns out bad, just save-load! The one thing I can recommend to solve this is to award one or two save "tokens" every level. That would make choices actually meaningful.

No offence, but you kind of contradict yourself...
You mention you use quick save before looting each corpse etc, due to fear of disease and still you bash the ability to save?

Personally I save very rarly, usally only when I exit the game. Sure this means I need to replay a few hours a few times, but it brings much more exitement in my opinion.

So yes, I agree with your view regarding save games. Though if you dont like it, do like me instead of using quick save every few minutes.

It is not like anyone is forcing you to save the game.

I disagree with the voice part, I don't like voice-over's in games and they are rarely done very well. For a small indie company I doubt it would be worth the cost.

Got the Destroyer title as well. What I did was use a hell of a lot mana potions, mana fortify potions and a couple of invisibility III potions and then Mass Boiled them until they were all soft and gooey.

A typo I found in the epilogue text "viscous" goblin horde should be viscious I suppose, although the former could be...interesting.

EDIT: Also used up my last supply of demon's oil before they could close the distance and I had to "disappear", but it did fairly minimal damage all in all. Those guards are tough.

i got the title too, it wasn't so dificult...i made a portal where the pedestal for the crux is, then another in the middle of the plants(behind the throne) and another one about 4 squares in front of the throne.
so i just had to keep using supernova until my mana run out and teleport back to the crux pedestal and sleep, then teleport back to the plants and use supernova again(the second teleport in front of the throne is for when theres too much ppl on the first)so i did this until killed then all at once MUAHAHAH



(sry for possible grammar errors)

SPOILERS. WATCH OUT.

dudims wrote: so i just had to keep using supernova until my mana run out and teleport back to the crux pedestal and sleep, then teleport back to the plants and use supernova again(the second teleport in front of the throne is for when theres too much ppl on the first)so i did this until killed then all at once MUAHAHAH

Can you imagine being those guards? "AUUUUUUUUUGH-.... He's gone. Well, guess we're safe. Better guard here, just in cas-AAAUUUUUUUUUGH..." etc.

I just got the title as well. I did the happy ending first, (after selling out the kingdom to see what would happen.) I was hoping I could become King of Theramore by killilng the Chancellor, I mean, I can just hack down any enemies the kingdom might have, and who's going to challenge me? WHO!? I'm a bigger monster than...well, any of the other monsters.

My character was generic sword man, with some heavy divination magic. Before battle, spam off haste, bless, ogre strength, and leatherskin (yeah, I was too lazy to buy stoneskin), and then kill the old man. When the guards showed up, I threw my demon oil around (which I had been saving for that big final battle), but that didn't do much. So, I just hacked them all down. I managed to bottleneck them a bit, so I could kill them one at a time, but still had to drink about 3 health Elixer 3s. After that, I hunted down the injured guy that ran away, and BAM! ...I bought a farm. I guess the character's aspirations weren't as grandiose as my own...

Anyway! Comments.

I had a lot of fun with this game. Personally, I LOVE SAVE/LOADING. NEVER TAKE THIS OUT. I don't have a huge amount of time to spend on games, and this makes it so I don't have to run through it multiple times (as much). Which I like. If you want your decisions to be more meaningful, I dono, snap off the F2 key on your keyboard or something, but don't ruin it for the rest of us!

I originally started the game as a rogue, but he sucked. I always missed with my bow, and then always missed with my dagger when they got close. Frustrating. Also, never enough cash for arrows or lockpicks, which was also frustrating. Was I doing something wrong? Is there actually sneak attack damage? No one seemed particularly surprised when I attacked them...

My second try was a magic user. It went pretty well, but constantly having to sleep after killing a single enemy really got tedious. I know, it's been said you need to stock up on potions, but then you can't afford spells, which is worse. I think that could use some adjustment maybe?

The last build was the one that got me destroyer, fighter with divination magic. I had a ton of fun with this one. Though, my one suggestion would be giving players an option for what weapon type they start with... I didn't touch any of the other kinds, because I spent all my points boosting sword skill.

Aside from these issues, it'd be nice to have some kind of run feature, or faster movement in the next game... I don't mind travelling through areas and having to fight, but watching a little man walk for 15 minutes with nothing happening gets dull fast.

I think I circumvented large portions of the story as well, I never found Lilith, or used that boat, and who knows what else I missed. Still! Very fun. I look forward to your next game.

I'm deeply against voice-acting in RPGs. It just makes game bigger and more expensive to produce. I usually turn off all sound & music in games, because they irrate me, but that's just me. But bad voice-acting can really kill a game. I hated every second of cut-scenes in HoMM V, because actors sounded so stupid.

Alos, BasiliskWrangler, PLEASE don't ever limit save/load! Let the people who don't like them play in IronMan mode maybe, but don't make save limits mandatory.

KraveChocolate, just a note of thanks. Your post's mention of World of Warcraft prompted me to check it out. Now I have something to while waiting for the Basilisk Book II game.

@KraveChocolate: unfortunately, in current versions of the game, you can't use the Crux of Ages chamber grille to kill guards.

I don't get it: how is Elemental better than Cartography - Cartography is a unique skill and nothing else substitutes for it?

BTW if you get the Unarmed Combat skill (you don't have to take it past the basic level) you can bash chests without taking damage.

@ a couple of people who mentioned the boat - no, nobody gets to use it. It was originally intended to take you to Ash Island, but this was never implemented and may never be now. If it is, it won't be until after Book II is released - and then we'll all be too busy!

I have to say I agree with the people who don't want voice overs or getting rid of Quick Saves.

Save -Load is a father and husband's best friend. I rarely play games that do not have a save-load that I can use at anytime and anywhere. Too many times I have had to give up the computer so my wife or children can use it. (Yes! I have more than one computer, but my wife and youngest child are in college. One of my oldest children is a teacher and the other is a designer.) The Save-load also enables me to play for 15-30 minutes at a time. So I can squeeze in gameplay at odd times.

I recently played SilverFall to completion. Silverfall allows you to save at anytime but when you reload you will be at the last city you passed through. Now imagine there you are sitting playing and you are half way through the quest which requires you to get to the next city and your mate or child needs the computer. You save. You know you will have to fight through everything again, because everything respawns after you save. I love save-load. If someone wishes to abuse the system then that is their choice.

The voice acting in most computer games is poor. Rarely does it add anything to the game. Music on the other hand can add that atmospheric effect. I really like the music in Eschalon.

the biggest AAA of em all, World of Warcraft

Laughing... Out... Loud...

As far as I'm concerned World of Warcraft is the biggest Waste Of Time "of em all" (and I'm sure many people would agree with me). I played it for a week and got fed up with the retarded system of enemies spawning all over the terrain at equally spaced intervals, and the lack of open combat and the crappy turn-based battle system and... oh god... anyways, I don't want to change the thread subject TOO much so...

Congrats on Eschalon! Awsome game, played it through with every class I could conceive... can't wait for Book 2!