The Drunken Lizard Pub

Some ideas:
Spells of a particular class:
- Rouge to throw a smoke bomb and hide from attackers
- Mage to make spherical shield and reflect spells and arrows thrown at him from a distance

new adventures
Coaches can send tasks for extra points

Missing gear to open the door and determined blacksmith to produce in return for service

Pirate island with treasure

New skills such as blacksmith and jeweler

Yes there are more hidden items but nesamo in caves and everywhere: swords buried in a field, hidden in library books

Arena with levels of difficulty to add more experience

To be completely honest, the best idea I just thought of from reading your post, would be to have a book 4. In that way, there's more of a chance of cool ideas like that happening. I know that I should be glad that book 3 is coming soon, but I kinda wish it wouldn't end

I don't think there will be a Book IV. They'll have other projects after Book III is out.

BasiliskWrangler wrote:@Vroqren:
There will be no Book IV.
The Eschalon series will be mothballed/retired/packed-up after Book III, so that we can focus 100% on a new game with a new engine. We don't want to be known as the game studio that just produces one game series.

This is from my topic in General Chat.

Maybe... *speculation mode activated* the Book III tools are intended to make the game live longer. Everyone knows that Warcraft 3 was the last of the RTS series, but the World Editor has kept it running to this day.

Alignment has some nice mods to character play in book 1 and 2, but there are no penalties for playing against your alignment.

What I would to see in Eschalon 3 or if it's too late, 4, is some kind of alignment scale perhaps.

It would not be difficult to distinguish good from bad actions (at least generally):

- attacking an NPC or killing a guard are obviously evil (most of the time)
- neutral or a little evil - refusing to take on a quest to help someone in need

If you wrack up enough evil actions, your alignment would change from good to neutral and eventually to evil. Once that happens, the mods to your character would change.

Similarly, if you start playing all good - helping people with their quests etc...you might change from evil to neutral to good.

One other problem.... most of the time it pays much more to be good. If you are evil, you'd miss out on quests half the time. There should be more evil only quests...

timothypfox wrote:Alignment has some nice mods to character play in book 1 and 2, but there are no penalties for playing against your alignment.

What I would to see in Eschalon 3 or if it's too late, 4, is some kind of alignment scale perhaps.

It would not be difficult to distinguish good from bad actions (at least generally):

- attacking an NPC or killing a guard are obviously evil (most of the time)
- neutral or a little evil - refusing to take on a quest to help someone in need

If you wrack up enough evil actions, your alignment would change from good to neutral and eventually to evil. Once that happens, the mods to your character would change.

Similarly, if you start playing all good - helping people with their quests etc...you might change from evil to neutral to good.

One other problem.... most of the time it pays much more to be good. If you are evil, you'd miss out on quests half the time. There should be more evil only quests...

Some good ideas. Let me tell you what I think of them:

The refusing to help thing should also be made more deeper. In Books 1 and 2 there was no reason at all not to accept a quest. But Book 2 had the awesome Lycanthrope quest that made us choose. Obviously I chose wrong.

Playing against your alignment should maybe cause penalties or alignment shifts. Nefarious characters would feel stupid for helping mere peasants and Virtuous characters would feel bad for killing them. Ofcourse the alignment system must be fixed before that: virtuous characters are just useless.

On a related note: it doesn't always pay more to be good. The last time I played Book 2 it went very macabre in Eastwillow. I step inside the town hall, murder Brelinda and steal the ledger.

I like your ideas, timothypfox. The alignment thing has bothered me a bit too. There should certainly be some penalty or alignment change for playing inconsistent with your alignment.

I don't think the game should prevent you from playing against your alignment, but it should certainly have some kind of impact if you do.