Critique of Eschalon - Learning Cliffs, and real strategy

[munster]

I think it was because Gramuk (or perhaps even the One) was trying to break into your mind to find out the location of the Crux of Ages. You took the potion because, as a member of Crius Vindica, you were sworn to keep the Cruxes safe.

Yeah, but "I will mind-wipe myself so I have no idea that there's even an enemy out there to be wary of, so that if that enemy catches up to me, I am toast" seems to me to lack something in strategic finesse

That's not a criticism of Basilisk Wrangler, by the way; it's fascinating to start off anew each time with no idea what's going on. I like that you can have an in-game character so stupid as not to be able to remember what a potato is (and it can all be blamed on 'that experimental mind-wiping potion I drank, otherwise I'm a genius').

Obviously, things were so desperate that turning your brain into a sieve was the better option, but it does make you (the character) seem a bit over-enthusiastic about untried methods

[Wraith_Magus]

While I thank you in the interest in this thread - I know that not terribly many people will read all the way through one of the threads I write when I really get going - I do have to ask that you stay at least somewhat on-topic, since I'm focused pretty much entirely upon ways to make the gameplay mechanics better deliver upon the Core Gameplay Aesthetics that make the game enjoyable, which has nothing to do with the specifics of the plot.

I'm not a traditional game player. I know a little about the DnD style games and I didn't cut my teeth playing video games. So your suggestion about starting off the game with a whole infodump of stats would be an immediate turn-off to me. If someone can figure out that 100 XPZ means that in turn 19, AOS hits for-12 versus MLP of -6.5, good luck to them.

That person is not me

What I am suggesting is just putting into the manual what the exact effect of a skill point in a weapons skill actually does, or else making up some sort of quick tutorial-like crash course that just tells players what sort of things they can expect of the game before they build their characters. It's already up on the wiki, for example, that every 1 point of Perception at character creation is worth 2 MP, and every 5 points of Perception is worth 1 MP per level from there on out, while Intelligence (or Wisdom for Healers) is worth exactly half that.

If you are going to build a game where, as BasiliskWrangler himself said in his last post, ("Did I anticipate that the player might exploit the game rules in order to achieve a dominate character? You betcha. I hoped for it.") people who figure this out and try to specialize their character towards getting as much MP as possible so they can cast more spells and specialize as a mage, then it only makes sense that you actually give people this information up-front so that they don't have to wait for a year's worth of completely tedious player trial-and-error to find out these formulas when you could have just told players the things they were eventually going to know from the start.

If YOU don't want to read the rules before making a wild guess and trying to play a game through sheer trial-and-error gameplay, then you're still perfectly welcome to ignore the manual and do so, what I am suggesting does not hinder you in any way from doing so, but you should speak for yourself, and recognize that not all players do such a thing.

What I like is that every character does require a little bit more than merely "shove every available point into strength or wisdom or whatever". So it means that a magic-user needs, or at least can be very much helped by, having at least one level in weapons. Sure, you can construct a pure brute-force warrior or a puny spell-flinger, but starting out a little bit of Jack of all trades is better than immediately trying to be a Master of one.

The problem with this statement is...

Well, sorry to be so blunt, but you're just plain dead wrong.

If you want to be a wizard, and you buy a level in any weapon skill at the start, then you have just permanently wasted 3 skill points for nothing. You only theoretically get 105 skill points the whole game, and you're spending 3 points on a skill you don't even want to use, and could get for free later, anyway.

Because you can just plain buy low level skill ranks in half of the skills, are cheaper to buy the low-level skills, cost mere gold, which is trivially easy to come across, the first level costs three times as many skill points as any other, virtually all skills are largely worthless until a sizable number of skill points are invested, AND you have no cost growth for geometric returns, every skill point-related mechanic in the game punishes buying any more skills than strictly necessary.

There is absolutely no reason you can't get into Port Kuudad on nothing but a level 1 firebolt (thanks in no small part to the way turns are handled, which lets you out-walk any threat in the game), and I should know, because I did so on my first playthrough, and it is the common way of doing things for most of the powergamers in the forums, judging by a cursory glance at their builds in some of the threads. From there, if you want a weapon skill so badly, just buy one from Sonya. (Although, to be honest, I have no idea why you'd ever want to launch a single melee attack in this game, and have yet to do so in any of my playthroughs.)

The only thing you need to do is just walk away from any monster you aren't going to kill before they get to melee range. I killed most of the wolves in Wolfenwood by simply "walking the dog" to the loading screen, resting up, moving back onto the screen from slightly further away from the wolf, firing off firebolts until they got to melee range, then walking away from them again, and abusing the loading screen.

There is no need for any strategy other than this for any enemy that relies upon melee attacks alone, and this, combined with the one-turn-one-move time system in this game, alone, is one of the biggest single reasons this game has no challenge to it whatsoever.

And yes, you can beat the final boss at level 1 using no weapons skills at all, and no, it's not any "harder", it's actually easier to play that way, it's just that it makes the game even more boring than it already was.

And while I'm at it, let me deal with this:

Eschalon has enforced min-maxing. That is to say, not only is min-maxing generally a possible way to abuse and beat the game, it's actually the only way to play the game.

See, I disagree with this. I think it comes down to how you (the individual player) want to play the game, and I think Eschalon is flexible enough to accommodate a variety of approaches.

This is a complete misunderstanding of the argument I was making.

Enforced Min-Maxing is any system that has linear or better growth on returns for non-growing investment.

Simply speaking, if you look at a set of skills or attributes you can buy, and see that one attribute is the best choice, and buy that skill or attribute the first time, and, with your next chance to buy skills or attributes, nothing has changed to give you any reason to want to buy something else, you have Enforced Min-Maxing.

People who want to get good at bows have two attributes they can buy, for example, Dexterity and Speed... but Dexterity does everything Speed can do, but also does more, and costs exactly the same... so is there any reason to buy Speed? Ever? As in, is there even a point to that attribute at all? Buy Dexterity every time, without thinking about it, it's a "challenge" in the game to figure out how to best build your character, but the problem was solved within a couple minutes of first starting up the game, and there's nothing else to "challenge" you for the rest of the game.

Again, this is a problem of how the game focuses all its challenge upon Character Creation, and none upon the actual in-the-game tactics.

What you go on to say with the rest of that post - that exploration can be fun - is true, and that's all well and good, but I first have to make clear the distinction that (and let me highlight how important this is,) this isn't part of the Challenge. What I am trying to do here is to first define the goals clearly so that we can actually talk about what game mechanics actually help achieve those goals.

And it really doesn't cost that much to say "No, this build isn't working, I'll junk this character and roll another". You aren't forced to go so far into the plot that you're stuck with a bad choice, and neither are you left repeating the first few boring encounters over and over until you hone your build.

Once again, speak for yourself.

I almost never restart RPGs, even the ones I'm positively in love with.

After the investment that must be done, especially in games with such a heavy focus upon character stat balancing, it becomes a massive emotional drain to have to restart any such RPG. (I tried playing through Skyrim, for example, with an "initial" character just to enjoy vanilla before the construction kit, and all its glorious mods came out, thinking I'd play a different character from the start when I did so, but, nope, I'll just continue putting 1000+ hours on my one and only character.)

I play with a heavy Exploration focus, myself, and I don't play an RPG without knowing I have turned over every rock and counted every worm. If I have to restart the whole game and restart counting the rock worms from scratch, it's something so dispiriting that I probably will just pick up the next game in my pile and abandon the old game forever.

Walking away from velociraptors saved my puny spell-flinging butt a few times, I can tell you. And yes, when I built up enough levels in Element Shield to be able to walk out onto magma without so much as curling my eyelashes, I did exhibit an unseemly amount of glee at coaxing the Taurax to follow me and turn themselves into barbecue

But you're missing the point of this whole argument, here:

There's only one reason to do anything but using that same strategy over and over again, and that reason is not a good reason - that reason is merely because it's utterly boring.

That strategy right there is the only strategy you need to complete the whole game, even from level 1.

Worse, doing the same boring thing over and over and over and over without any sort of variation at all is considered the "Challenge" playthrough of the game.

In short, the "challenge" of the game is having the mental stamina to do something boring for hours on end.

The problem I'm trying to highlight here is that for Challenge to be a true Core Gameplay Aesthetic, the Challenge itself has to be the fun part. If you want a game that focuses on fighting monsters to be a fun challenge, you have to make each fight interesting and varied and exciting and require that a player come up with unique and interesting solutions to each and every fight they come across - and there's no reason to do anything but the same old thing every single time.

THAT is the whole problem.

This is what I'm trying to coax people into understanding - that the game needs significantly more depth in its mechanics to really support the concept that this is a game that is fun because it demands "Strategic Thinking" on the part of the player. (In fact, you led off your comment talking about how you quite happily enjoy this game because you completely don't care about strategic thinking, which in and of itself shows how wrong that claim that this game is strategic really is...)

[Kreador Freeaxe]

It sounds like you're saying that, because it is possible to beat the game with nothing but firebolts from a level 1 mage, that anyone who would choose to do anything different with the game to see how else the puzzles can be solved and what other tactics are available must be stupid.

To answer your earlier question, I love the Eschalon games for the thrill of discovery and the joy of the puzzles (how to play the game with various types of characters I also consider one of the puzzles).

For other people here, part of the fun has been figuring out those formulae (which have never been precisely confirmed by BW, but are good enough to play by). So your suggestion of putting it in up front would be to enhance your game play enjoyment at the expense of someone else's enjoyment.

I understand why you are saying the game bores you. And some of the elements you discuss (such as the possibility of increasing costs for stats or skills as the levels increase) would make a potentially richer game. That doesn't mean the game is "broken," but merely that it does not succeed for you. There are a significant number of players like you, and the success of these games shows there are a significant number of players like the rest of us.

We're not wrong or stupid for enjoying the game as it exists. I believe you understand that, even though it doesn't come across well in the way you write your posts.

[Wraith_Magus]

It sounds like you're saying that, because it is possible to beat the game with nothing but firebolts from a level 1 mage, that anyone who would choose to do anything different with the game to see how else the puzzles can be solved and what other tactics are available must be stupid.

To answer your earlier question, I love the Eschalon games for the thrill of discovery and the joy of the puzzles (how to play the game with various types of characters I also consider one of the puzzles).

For other people here, part of the fun has been figuring out those formulae (which have never been precisely confirmed by BW, but are good enough to play by). So your suggestion of putting it in up front would be to enhance your game play enjoyment at the expense of someone else's enjoyment.

I understand why you are saying the game bores you. And some of the elements you discuss (such as the possibility of increasing costs for stats or skills as the levels increase) would make a potentially richer game. That doesn't mean the game is "broken," but merely that it does not succeed for you. There are a significant number of players like you, and the success of these games shows there are a significant number of players like the rest of us.

We're not wrong or stupid for enjoying the game as it exists. I believe you understand that, even though it doesn't come across well in the way you write your posts.

Not exactly. You're misunderstanding the nature of my argument.

You see, you're trying to put my argument into some box of preconceived notions of either praising or slamming a game, but that's not the nature of how I am trying to make my argument - I'm trying to get people to think about this game from a different perspective.

What I am saying is why the game is not based on challenge, (and that if it is supposed to be, then he's going about it all wrong,) because that is what BasiliskWrangler has already framed his conception of the game around, and arguing anything else first requires breaking down that conception before I can start building up the new one.

You can already see that he's starting to make the same arguments others are making in response to my argument - that there are things fun about this game that don't revolve around the game being devilishly hard or forcing constant evolving strategies... which is exactly the frame of mind I want others to be in, because that's the basis of my argument.

Either this game is supposed to be about the challenge, in which case the fundamentals of this game need to be reworked in order to make it so that a level 1 character can't beat the game using the same tactic over and over again (and hence, the game has actual challenges,) or else the game developer needs to acknowledge that he's not really going for challenge, and should focus upon the other aspects of the game that are what he found enjoyable. (And that isn't to say that the game can't be both a challenge and enjoyable in other ways, for that matter.)

I'll finally start on that food mechanics critique in the next post, since this conversation has obviously gone on far enough to start talking about aesthetics beyond mere Challenge.

[Spencerbutch]

Dearest Wraith Magus;

if the Eschalon series doesn't work for you, consider asking yourself why you are here? if 1000+ hours on the same skyrim account is for you, then perhaps you should turn on your xbox. (ps3? ) i myself am an ex-mmorpg player, with 160+ days on a Runescape account, and hundreds of hours on ROTMG [(http://realmofthemadgod.com)] obviously these are both very different games from eschalon, but i find myself playing eschalon instead of other games time and time again. as for asking where the appeal in the game lies, i really am not sure yet. maybe after my 4th or 5th playthrough with an entirely different character and play style i will be bored, or maybe i will just want to play more.

so, if you feel like using the same strategy over and over works, be my guest. i will keep on trying every obscure and strange way i can think of, even if it is "ineffecient" or "Broken". if you are the type of person who sees this as a waste of time, have fun on skyrim approaching each troll, mammoth, and bandit group the same way


as i wrote this before the most recent post, i have one (more) thing to say
make your own challenge

[munster]

If you want to be a wizard, and you buy a level in any weapon skill at the start, then you have just permanently wasted 3 skill points for nothing. You only theoretically get 105 skill points the whole game, and you're spending 3 points on a skill you don't even want to use, and could get for free later, anyway.

Well, here we go where it's everyone to his own taste, as the old woman said when she kissed the cow

From my own experience, and speaking only from that, I did find it useful when starting off to have at least one level in, say, bashing weapons or the like. Before I got enough points for juicy spells like Lock Melt or Firebolt, it was "open this chest/door/barrel by bashing it" or "hit that catacomb rat/green ooze with a stick". Once I got past the first few encounters with small, easy monsters and got a few points under my belt, then I could concentrate on (in my case) building up my mage so he could zap anyone and anything from a distance (chortling evilly while doing so, as he zapped them out of their socks - take that, outlaws and brigands who thought I would be quick, easy prey on the remote and ill-maintained roads between the villages and the cities!)

Ahem. Leaving my mage's megalomaniacal delusions of grandeur to one side, it seems you prefer party-oriented games where you can get down to the nuts and bolts of the mechanics and figure out the optimum build and best strategy, and that's your privilege.

Again, speaking only for myself, I soon got tired of (for instance) Torchlight because I found myself slogging through the same dungeons killing mobs of monsters merely to level up. Eschelon, on the other hand, I wanted to go on to the next quest because I wanted to find out the next step in the plan and What Happened Next (which to date seems to be: discover nefarious plan, recover stolen crux, get zapped by The One, start from square one again).

Sure, if you want, you can camp and exploit the alchemy skill by generating resources and making your own potions for personal use or for sale. You can wait for mobs of monsters to respawn and kill them off for points. Or you can dodge the slimes and the velociraptors and sneak around and swipe the goodies.

I like Eschelon precisely because I can solo it without needing a party of four or five to have any hope of finishing. I don't have to make sure that I'm on exactly the right square before I can launch an attack, or that if I don't hit the monster within two units of its position I'm toast. I like that I have the option to run away and come back another day (or never) and still have a chance to fulfil the quest.

You make a good point about aesthetic appeal and why different players play for different aims and goals. Eschelon appeals to my aesthetics. That's all I can say.

[munster]

What I am trying to do here is to first define the goals clearly so that we can actually talk about what game mechanics actually help achieve those goals.

Again, speaking only for myself and not intending to say this is the only right or pure way to play any game.

My goals? To have fun. To be engaged by the game world. To try and get to the end without screwing up so badly that I need to restart over and over. Not to spend ages killing hordes just to get points just to get levels just to get strong enough/to get enough goodies to take out the final boss (that is, to organically get more experience and strength through playing so that by the time I get to the end levels, I can have a fighting chance, not calculating from the minute I wake up in my fisherman's hut with only my socks and an apple that I need to start levelling up skill this or stat that in order to tromp all over the Evil Evilness of Ultimate Evil and Its Minions).

What I don't want to do? Sit down and read through a manual that brings back bad memories of secondary school maths textbooks where I have to fill in the equations and memorise the formulae in order to plan out a battle strategy. That's partly why I tend to play magic-users rather than archers or paladins or the likes; I don't much care about swinging a sword and working out strategy and tactics. I'm more interested to know who Sylvia living in the woods is, and why she has giant wasps guarding her doorstep. Or if I can find a book of ancient lore that will let me decipher the dwarven hieroglyphics so I can fill in the history of their culture. Or are there any dragons still alive? Or can I take this boat to that island? And pirates - threat to the shipping lanes likely to maroon me on that sandbar or nothing I have to worry about?

I nearly forgot the best bit - blowing up barrels of gunpowder arranged in aesthetically-pleasing patterns! Fire makes everything better

[munster]

a level 1 character can't beat the game using the same tactic over and over again

For you, using the same tactic is obviously boring, and I do get that. But for me, for instance: I discovered barbequed Taurax quite by accident, when I was fleeing a patrol and they boxed me in so that I had no escape route other than to try and cross the lava stream. I wasn't tough enough to fight them (a good swing or two from one of them and I was dead as a mackerel) so running away was my only option.

So I cast Element Armour and headed out, thinking they'd never try and follow me across boiling, bubbling magma. They followed me out, which I did not expect. They sank after a few steps, with a pathetic moo and leaving behind nothing but a juicy broiled steak, which I did not expect.

This was a new and unusual way of killing an otherwise too-strong for me foe, which I did not anticipate. And I also did not anticipate the grin of unholy glee which spread itself over my face as I blatantly sought out Taurax patrols, coaxed them to follow me by keeping just far enough out of bowshot range but going slowly enough so that they would keep after me, then casting my protective spell and heading out onto the lava.

Result? Malicious laughter as I watched them sink to their fiery molten doom and a quite unjustified feeling of triumph

And I don't think I would have figured that little trick out, no matter how assiduously I pored over the stats in the manual. That, my friend, is part of the fun part of this game.

[munster]

Summary as far as I can figure out?

Not enough number-crunching for those what likes that.

[Wraith_Magus]

OK, before I let myself get distracted responding to someone else, again...

FOOD MECHANICS!



I want to use this post to work down from these abstract high-level concepts I am talking about into the small-bore, so as to give people a better understanding of the argument I am making.

To start with, however, I want to go back to make positively clear on the definition of the terms I am using.

Aesthetics are the reasons why we play games. If you say that the thing you most enjoy about a game is the sense of the hugeness of the game world, and wanting to look around it and experience just the fun of looking around such a huge and varied world, then what you are talking about is the aesthetic of Exploration - the joy that comes from just plain discovering new places in a game. This is an entirely different aesthetic from Challenge - when the game is fun because you enjoy the actual act of the overcoming of the obstacles the game throws at you. (Again, if you play a game like Bejewelled or Sudoku, those are games that are entirely based upon Challenge - you play them because you find the very act of overcoming their puzzles to be an enjoyable act.)

Mechanics, the way that the game is programmed, exist to deliver upon those aesthetics. Because the purpose of mechanics are to deliver to players different aesthetics, which are the things players can enjoy about a game, you can judge a mechanic's effectiveness by how well it delivers upon its intended aesthetics. And yes, mechanics can deliver more than one aesthetic.

Core Gameplay Aesthetics are the biggest reasons why you enjoy, and ultimately, play a game. Most games only have 2 or 3 Core Gameplay Aesthetics, and those are the reasons you play them. Sudoku, to use a simple example again, is based upon Challenge and Abnegation - if you enjoy playing those at all, it is because you like having everything reduced down to simple, logical steps that are easy to understand and "zone out" over (Abnegation), as well as the little joy of feeling clever for being able to deduce the exact numbers you need to fill out the boxes (Challenge).



So, onto the discussion of the food mechanics introduced in Book II, which are a smaller-bore, more concrete example of a rather independent mechanic system in the game, which makes it easier to dissect and discuss in terms of aesthetics in the absence of other game mechanics.

If I were to rate how the mechanics for food work currently, honestly, I'd give it a "fair" rating. The mechanics actually do provide some positive aesthetic to the game, even if they aren't providing the Challenge that the game claims they are providing (along with experience point bonuses), but do help present some Fantasy for the player in the sense that it helps complete part of the notion that you're really out there camping, making do on rat meat and water skins in the desert.

The thing is, it doesn't do this terribly effectively. There's no real challenge to feeding yourself even from the start, when you can just buy all the food you really need for pennies and get infinite water at a well, and you are not really ever sent to places where you're really, truly challenged to have to scrounge up food or given the feeling of being a real survivalist.



Challenge and Fantasy are the two aesthetics I can see most easily satisfied with such mechanics.

Games like NetHack involve food for challenge - it's actually quite dangerous to just try to find something to eat in that game; More than a few adventurers wind up dying just because of botulism from some food they took a risk eating. Need for food pushes you onward in the game, encouraging actions that involve risks you otherwise would not take because you are in a press to get access to safer food.

However, the game that I think best incorporates hunger mechanics into Challenge (and Fantasy at the same time) is the game Lost In Blue. In that game, you play as a shipwrecked young adult on a deserted island who has to survive while exploring the island for some way to contact civilization and get rescue. Food is the whole core of all the challenges in the game - you are tied to a base camp you generally must return to every day for food preparation purposes (and sharing what food you have gathered with fellow survivors) and so how far you can go is generally limited by your need to gather more food and bring it back within that one day. The various block puzzles and hurdles in the path to exploration are all fairly easily solvable with time, but time is hunger in this game, and as such, everything relates to how efficiently you can gather food.

However, basically all the game's enjoyable moments tend to revolve around the gathering of that food, as well, which is why it's such a good Challenge aesthetic. You start out merely running along the shoreline looking for shellfish to sustain yourself on, or sampling mushrooms (where what each color mushroom does is randomized on game start, so you can't know ahead of time what each mushroom actually does until you sample some - and one is the highly beneficial "caffeine 'shroom" that temporarily slows down depletion of the energy meter, making dashing or shoving heavy objects free for a limited time,) but you can eventually fashion crude spears to spear fish with, fishing rods, cages for catching wild animals, or even bows and arrows to hunt boar or other large game.

Building food systems for Challenge, however, tends to require that you genuinely build the game around making it seriously hard to keep yourself fed. (Making food so cheap and easy to stock up on in the first place severely undermines that challenge. Worse, the whole tier 1 cleric spell that lets you summon food infinitely for free kind of blows a hole straight through any conceivable challenge there.)

Alternately, you can produce a system where mere sustenance is not terribly difficult in and of itself, but where there are obviously superior foodstuffs out there that do require overcoming challenges to secure, and therefore can force an enjoyable challenge to try getting. (For example, if you could keep yourself full for five straight game days and get a permanent +2 to Strength if you ate a Dragon Steak, it'd be worth going to crazy lengths to try to get it.)



Fantasy is also an aesthetic that food systems can deliver on quite well - and which doesn't necessitate quite as much recalibration of the rest of the game mechanics.

Fantasy is the aesthetic of being able to enjoy the sense that you are actually transported to some other living, breathing world. "Realism" in a general sense helps to lend Fantasy (ironically enough) to a game, and the realism of having to actually eat does help, although it has to be presented in the game in a way that is actually meaningful in order for the fantasy to really sink in.

Like with challenge, there isn't really much fantasy added to a game when you just have to go to the local tavern, spend some trivial amount of money for food, and then max out a food bar, or manually have to punch a button to keep a hunger meter down.

Building up the fantasy requires that you do things in such a way that it gives you a better sense of you being the character, and an occasional stop at a supermarket and punching the right-click on a stack of rat meat doesn't really give one the sense of being a wild outdoorsman.



Even though this isn't actually directly food-related, I'd like to point to the Skyrim mod Frostfall for a wonderful example of how to incorporate Fantasy into a game. In this mod, the coldness of those frigid mountaintops or glacial waters actually starts to come to life by actually introducing a mechanic for your character getting cold and freezing to death unless they take steps to preserve their body heat, such as making sure they only sleep in colder climates after building a fire and building a warm tent.

Skyrim is a game that already has a good deal of effort put into creating what could have been a wonderful fantasy that was seemingly left on the cutting room floor mostly to help sell the game to the people who just wanted to bash things, but where the modding community allows for a great deal of Fantasy to be put into the game.

The game also has plenty of ways to make you feel like an outdoorsman - you can hunt deer, catch fish... and don't actually need to eat them without having to mod it in.



This, then, is the problem of how food is handled in the game as it stands - it doesn't really do anything but require the player occasionally click on a food item, and doesn't really provide players with any sense of being an explorer or surviving harsh conditions (even when they are eating quite disgusting things) when they do so.

What could be done to remedy this is to help create those conditions of either Challenge or Fantasy. In fact, you could even include Expression if you were to use some of those Origin or Axiom in this.

Take, for example, if there were a player character "Mood" or "Patience" mechanic, as well.

This could be a bar that represents how many tedious or disgusting things that sort of character would be willing to do. For example, wade through filth, or, more importantly, to do things like constantly search for either traps or treasure or for roots or berries, or to do things like go out and chop wood or make alchemical products or set traps or any other non-combat thing that gives the player an advantage, but takes up character time.

This, then, is like an "MP" bar for using non-magical skills, and it could be recovered by doing things that are comforting to the character, such as eating good food and drinking things they find comforting.

This comforting thing could be dependent upon the type of character - a nefarious character might love the finest wines to relax, or enjoy killing things or making them suffer, while a druidic character might refuse all alcohol, and get their enjoyment from drinking herbal teas (which may be gathered by using an herb-gathering skill that, itself, may hurt the mood bar).

Food quality in general can also be mood-affecting - you're not going to have a satisfied character (and if that does things like drop the character's attentiveness towards traps, or disallow some skill uses if they are in a nasty enough mood, then that's a problem...) if you feed them nothing but a diet of insects and rat meat, but they'll be just peachy on a diet of constant steak and potatoes.



It's also worth pointing out that you should be able to take away the micromanagement of some of these mechanics, so that they don't particularly wear on a player. In particular, I find it kind of silly that a character seemingly can't eat while quick traveling on their own without you manually telling them to. One of the older Oblivion food systems I remember included a special "mess kit" container that let you just dump the food you wanted to eat, in order, into the mess kit, and when it was time to eat, you just ate the top thing in the list. Simply queuing up waterskins to be imbibed automatically, especially when on the road, is a way that lets the player not have to spend so much time specifically looking at a food bar and manually punching an "eat" command.

[MyGameCompany]

This was a new and unusual way of killing an otherwise too-strong for me foe, which I did not anticipate. And I also did not anticipate the grin of unholy glee which spread itself over my face as I blatantly sought out Taurax patrols, coaxed them to follow me by keeping just far enough out of bowshot range but going slowly enough so that they would keep after me, then casting my protective spell and heading out onto the lava.

Result? Malicious laughter as I watched them sink to their fiery molten doom and a quite unjustified feeling of triumph

And I don't think I would have figured that little trick out, no matter how assiduously I pored over the stats in the manual. That, my friend, is part of the fun part of this game.

I did not know I could do that! Now I want to replay it again and try that!

I have had similar discoveries that made the game fun for me. My favorite was when I was on my way to Bordertown and I ran into a bunch of bandits that were kicking my butt. So I decided to make a run for the town, hoping to duck inside a building for cover and buy some healing potions. When I got to the town, the bow trainer and blacksmith ran to meet me and helped fight off the bandits!

I, too, enjoy the game as-is. I don't think anything is broken. I like that I can build any kind of character I want and experiment with builds. I like that you can stand toe-to-toe with a bunch of enemies and try to slug it out, or you can use your environment to help you (using a door as a choke point, using shadows to hide and attack by stealth, using demon oil to block their path and shoot at them from a distance, etc). The game offers plenty of different ways and tactics that you can discover and employ to get through it. I like that I can go anywhere I want, at any time. I love the story. I love the puzzles. And I have fun every time I play these games. And yes, I've played each of them through at least a dozen different times - even though I already know the story and where everything is. I think it's partly because different character builds open and close different doors and different avenues of tactics and opportunities, and partly because there are so many different ways of approaching situations and puzzles, that it's fun to experiment. But most of all, I just find it fun!

Wraith_Magus, I think you're seriously over-analyzing this game and trying to shoehorn it to fit into a very specific mold that you have in mind. Just enjoy it for what it is. And if you don't, that's ok. There are plenty of other games out there.

[Wraith_Magus]

I'll respond mostly just to munster, since he's one of the only ones genuinely trying to have a conversation.




The thing about it is, Munster, I'm not saying it's a bad thing when you find a new strategy to use. In fact, it's a great thing. My problem is that the way that the game is currently set up, there are too few ways to actually find those new ways to do things.

What I was disagreeing with the last time I wrote a post in response to you wasn't that you somehow shouldn't be having fun, but that you are trying to say that something I defined as objectively measurable was, in fact, an opinion. (And you continued to do so in the next post.)

It is objectively measurable whether something has a ruleset that puts forwards "Enforced Min-Maxing" - it is defined as when the rules are set up in such a way that there is no mechanical disincentive to min-max, and that there are reasons why you would. In fact, it is on the advertisement of the game itself, and it was stated by the developer of the game in this very thread that trying to make min-maxing not just possible, but encouraged was a cognizant choice of the developer, so I think it's actually quite safe to say that this game does have mechanics that encourage min-maxing.

Whether you then min-maxed or not is irrelevant to that definition. It's somewhat like saying that I have, to use the Sudoku metaphor again, devised the most efficient technique of correctly answering a Sudoku puzzle, and you responded that in your opinion you can also have fun taking all day on a single puzzle, or that you can just answer every block with a "3" because that's your favorite number, and having fun is all a subjective experience. That's great, but it's really just ignoring the whole point of what I was just talking about.

You can't just dismiss any complaint anyone has about a game by saying that it's all just an opinion, and you can't have any objective, measurable criteria for what makes a good game, because all that does is, ultimately, the same thing as what some other posters in this thread have done, and just say that they are completely uninterested in hearing anything they don't want to hear. By saying such a thing, it's functionally the same as saying that there's no point in discussing games or trying to improve them in any way at all, because everyone is just using their own totally subjective opinions anyway.

----

Now, you liked parts of this game, that's great, I liked some of those same parts, too, but at the same time, I found that those parts were relatively few and far between, and, more importantly, there wasn't quite so much reason to actually look for them.

You see, that part where you found a new way to kill a bunch of tauraxs? That's called Emergent Gameplay.

Emergent Gameplay is one of those things that adds tremendous depth to gameplay, strategic and otherwise, and it's actually one of the goals of most developers to try to bring about the most emergent gameplay possible with the least need for complication.

Emergent gameplay comes about when multiple systems in a game are capable of interacting in ways that are wholly unpredictable. Dwarf Fortress, for example, is very well known for having a great deal of emergent behavior thanks to its sheer complexity, and large number of systems all "sharing the same space" in the spacial simulation - because so many different "moving parts" of the same machine occupy the same space, they can all be manipulated into interfering with all the different systems.

The thing I'm trying to argue for is that there just isn't enough of that emergent gameplay in the game as it stands, and part of the reason for that is that this game's ruleset has an over-reliance upon absolute systems that do not allow for different mechanics to actually influence one-another.

For example, currently, the lighting system allows for some limited emergent behavior where it is better for a ranger to fight in the dark with spells like Predator's Sight on - the darkness helps them evade attacks, while the spell mitigates the penalties they, themselves face. This, however, encourages player to only fight in the dark, because that's how you get the greatest advantage of those spells.

These things are situational combat modifiers, which lead to emergent behavior, and which are different from the "keeps their hands to themselves" mechanics that simply involve having more armor points leading to a reduced percentages of getting hit.

Compare this to a game like Battletech, which I mentioned before, where you have modifiers for things like where you are standing, or how much you had just recently moved, or games like X-Com, where relative positions and cover are critical to accuracy, and add in other factors into the game, and you can create a combat situation where your success is far less determined by how much you did "number-crunching" (the very thing you don't particularly want to do) in the earliest stages of playing the game, and far more emphasis would be put upon how you actually tried to adventure.



Again, I'm not in any way trying to say you shouldn't be having fun, but that if there were certain things done differently, it would be possible to have more of that same fun more of the time in this game.

[BasiliskWrangler]

@Prismatic Maelstrom: Thanks for the support bro, but don't let what Wraith_Magus says provoke you. It's not worth getting in a war of words over.

@Wraith_Magus: It's clear that you do like the game, at least enough to write such detailed posts. If you really hated Eschalon, you wouldn't bother. Come on, admit it: you like Eschalon. Please, continue to post your thoughts. I am not likely to respond to everything, but I do try to read it all. But be aware that there are many fans here, and if the tone of your posts are overly negative, you are likely to get bad reactions from others.

[edit] Left out words.

[Wraith_Magus]

Reducing this into a "do I like this game or not?" discussion completely deflates the point of the discussion.

The entire point of the exercise is not to have JUST personal feelings about things, but to strip away what are just emotional biases in gaming to understand how to rationally and objectively to build a better game.

The key point of this whole exercise is understanding WHY someone enjoys something they enjoy, and WHY they don't like the parts they don't like so that the information gained can actually be turned into the knowledge that lets a better game be built.

It is these same biases and unwillingness to actually analyze what it is they like about a game, and how that can be brought forward to include a greater degree of the game in the future that I am trying to cut through.

People only go into "wagon-circling mode" and try to declare to themselves that someone is "bashing a game just because they don't like the game" when they are trying to find an excuse not to have to listen to something they don't want to hear.

To answer MyGameCompany, there is no such thing as over-analysis, there is only insufficient data to reach a fully supported conclusion.

I am rigorously analyzing the game because I enjoy the act of rigorous analysis for its own sake. (It is intrinsically enjoyable and an aesthetic of Discovery.)

I enjoy rational argument, although I do appreciate it when people would show the courtesy of actually understanding what my argument is before arguing against "my own" argument, rather than just making up some fictitious strawman argument to argue against for their own self-satisfaction.

If you are the sort of person who can't be bothered to read such a long thread and would rather being doing something else with your time because you don't find such discussion enjoyable, (and that, in and of itself, is perfectly understandable,) then maybe you're the ones who should be playing Skyrim, instead, rather than doing the very game you are supposedly "defending" (when in actuality, it is nothing more than your own egos you are defending by association with the game,) harm by generally telling anyone who would be interested in the game but for some of its flaws that they aren't welcome to play the games in the first place, and shouldn't bother paying for any future games, either. The reason why the restaurant industry will comp a meal for poor service is that any one dissatisfied customer generally means losing 10 potential customers for the bad press they will receive.

It doesn't cost you a thing to just not post in a thread you don't want to read. (To do otherwise shows how blind you are to how conceited your statements are. )





You, BasiliskWrangler, even started off by saying that one of your initial goals of creating this game was to recreate a sense of nostalgia for a game from your past, but then recognized that you were viewing your childhood (as we all do) with some seriously rose-tinted glasses.

You talk about wanting to create a system where you aren't constrained by class, but your mechanics actually are built around concepts like a "cleric spell list" that makes no sense for someone trying to accomplish that goal.

Why do you use a D&D-style spell list for the magic skills, when those were spell lists built to give class-restrained characters greater flexibility with their spells than a strict class straight-jacket would allow? You could easily create a greater array of skills that give spell lists if you want players to pick and choose what specific types of spells they want to use. Why is the game set up so that "cleric" spells and "wizard" spells are partially exclusive to one another, but both sets of spells involve direct-damage attack magic, and both spell list involve mirror-image versions of basically the same spells, seemingly as if you were trying to balance these two skills as if they were "classes" in and of themselves?

Wouldn't it make more sense, if your goal was to create a sense that the characters you created were not defined by "classes" to instead have a far greater set of magic-related skills where you specifically invested skill points into "buffs", or "direct damage spells", or even "fire spells" versus "ice spells", along with a "this is a trap-busting spell" skill?

In fact, I really have to ask why you set up the game so that so many of the skills you can choose are made obsolete if you are a magic-user? You COULD spend a ton of points on lock picking, or you could just be a "wizard", and use lock melting for the same or less number of skill points, and that would also save you skill points to spend on skullduggery, because there's a trap-busting spell, as well. There's no point in putting points in survival if you can just magic up infinite food. Why bother learning cartography when those points you already put into elemental magic to bust traps also gives you as many cartography points as you will ever need?

It's not that having a magic alternative to a mundane skill isn't fine, but it's that the skill system currently means that two skills that cost the same as any other skill also happen to utterly obsolete several other skills at the same time.

I do encourage and think it's a great idea to start thinking of non-combat problems, (such as needing food, searching for traps or treasures, evading traps, busting locks, and even probably more challenges that aren't yet in the game,) but that if you are going to do so, that you rethink how valuable your skills actually are, and build your skills so that a few skills don't just do everything. Splitting it up so that you have a "this is the skill for dexterous types to pick locks" and "this is the skill for high-magic types to pick locks" pair of skills to choose from gives you less obvious alternatives, and punishes the people who are more interested in player expression and less interested in strict analytical min-maxing a greater chance to enjoy the game.

And this fact that you want to move away from classes, but crib all your skills and spells directly from class-based systems really highlights my argument: That the game is built with schizophrenic design. The game claims to want to present a Challenge as an aesthetic, where you can't just rely upon level-grinding to win, but that it uses the rules of a game that was nothing but a level-grinding abnegation game. You claim to want to create a game that allows for unlimited character personalization or class types, but then you use the rules of a class-based system where you strictly enforce that players really only use four basic types of characters. (In fact, starting off players in a Character Creation screen where they have to pick a class!) These things show a design philosophy that lacks a clear idea of what it actually wants to be.

In fact, I do still want to ask, "What, exactly, should a player's experience with your games actually be? Why would they want to play your games? What, exactly, will they find fun about them?"

Because if what you want is a strategic RPG game, then what you want to do is start trying to make your game more like an X-Com. If what you want is to try to make the game expansive, and involve a great deal of exploration, then you might want to look more towards a Roguelike or even, yes, a game like Skyrim to understand better how to deliver on such an emotion to the player. If what you want is to create a game where the player is given ultimate freedom to express themselves through finding a set of skills that best suits their purposes and building a character that reflects "themselves" in their character's shoes, then it's time to look at mechanics that gives a far greater array of skills to choose from, a much more in-depth character sheet and more meaningful background choices or dialogue options, and a look at some of the mechanics of games that encourage that exact sort of enjoyment of the game. If what you want is a Golden Age level grinder, then there's ways to accomplish that, too.

In fact, you actually use enough rules from Abnegation games that are nothing but pure "level grinding" games that I honestly wondered if that was what you actually wanted to make in the first place.

Level-grinding games, as much maligned as they are, actually do have a place and a purpose. I play games like Etrian Odyssey while I put on the news, or play an audio book (best way to read by far), or go on an exercise bike because they are RPGs that involve a lot of number-crunching to build your character so as to just use one skill over and over and over, and then involve basically no thought at all as you play through the game and level up.

The thing is, you included just enough actual tactics in this game to screw up playing this game with no brainpower at all, but not really enough tactical meat to present itself as a true tactical game.

It's that very schizophrenia that keeps it from capitalizing on any of its strengths, which is why I'm trying to ask you which one you actually do want:

Do you want a game where stats are God, and everything is determined by character build?

or

Do you want a game where tactics are everything, and a level 30 character can be beaten by a level 1 monster if mishandled badly enough?

If you can't be clear on what it is you really want to do, then the game will wind up with half-hearted mechanics that don't really deliver on much of anything without frustrations. You can pick more than one of those goals, such as having a giant, open world, and having a serious tactical game where your levels are not nearly as important as situational tactics, but it becomes a problem when the mechanics you pick to build the game are actually defeating what your own stated purpose is in building the game.

[BasiliskWrangler]

there is no such thing as over-analysis, there is only insufficient data to reach a fully supported conclusion.

Over-analysis is quite real. It is clear that you have reach this point, and I will show you:

The entire point of the exercise is not to have JUST personal feelings about things, but to strip away what are just emotional biases in gaming to understand how to rationally and objectively to build a better game.

The key point of this whole exercise is understanding WHY someone enjoys something they enjoy, and WHY they don't like the parts they don't like so that the information gained can actually be turned into the knowledge that lets a better game be built.

Are you a Vulcan? Human preferences isn't about "stripping away emotion" to rationally look at something in order to understand why you like it. It's okay to like something "just because". Why do I like Coke over Pepsi? Why do you prefer red over blue? Why do you like Centipede over Space Invaders? Sometimes, it really is just a personal preference that doesn't require technical or psychological analysis.

You talk about wanting to create a system where you aren't constrained by class, but your mechanics actually are built around concepts like a "cleric spell list" that makes no sense for someone trying to accomplish that goal. ... Why do you use a D&D-style spell list for the magic skills, when those were spell lists built to give class-restrained characters greater flexibility with their spells than a strict class straight-jacket would allow?

Wrong. Class doesn't determine your spells, only your Skills do. Your class in simply a moniker to model your character after. Be a Rogue, but spend some skill points on learning Divination magic. Nothing wrong with that.

Wouldn't it make more sense, if your goal was to create a sense that the characters you created were not defined by "classes" to instead have a far greater set of magic-related skills where you specifically invested skill points into "buffs", or "direct damage spells", or even "fire spells" versus "ice spells", along with a "this is a trap-busting spell" skill?

Yeah, this is pretty much what Eschalon is all about. This is my first clue that you don't really know as much about the game as you appear to. You can be anything you want in Eschalon- dabble in Divination and Elemental Magicks, try out some Alchemy, and dedicate as much or as little to it as you want. Is there a lock in your way? Bash the chest open. Pick the lock. Find the key. Melt the lock. That is 4 possible ways to open nearly any locked chest in the game. How many other RPGs allow this level of freedom? We made the game SPECIFICALLY this way so that any kind of character build could discover a way to play the game to the best of their ability.

In fact, I do still want to ask, "What, exactly, should a player's experience with your games actually be? Why would they want to play your games? What, exactly, will they find fun about them?"

Just answered this in the above paragraph.

Do you want a game where stats are God, and everything is determined by character build?

I favor this.

or...Do you want a game where tactics are everything, and a level 30 character can be beaten by a level 1 monster if mishandled badly enough?

I feel like this is the type of game you want. Strategy is everything. So, if we apply this to real life we could say: if you are a fully outfitted and trained Marine (level 30) and you faced a giant sewer rat (level 1), but you "mishandled" the encounter, the rat is going to kill you. Yes, perhaps if you laid on the ground and did nothing while the rodent chewed on you for two days, you might die. Eschalon works the same way: take your level 30 character, strip off his armor, and stand in front of a rat. Now press the space bar over and over until your horrible tactics kill your character. Being able to mismanage and kill your experienced character is not a mark of a good game, only that you suck as a gamer.

Look, I think you have a lot of valid points, but I truly think you are going waaay overboard on the analysis of the game. But please, I enjoy your comments, so don't let me discourage you from continuing.