Played Eschalon I and am tackling Eschalon II at the moment. I think the hunger/thirst mechanic is pretty lame in this game so I generally disable it. I haven't done that yet this time, but I probably will eventually. I'm spoiled by real survival games, so a half baked attempt just irritates me
There's a coincidence, I've been playing Eschalon Book II myself the past few weeks. I'm near the end now and will be writing up a mini-review either next week or the week after in the Finished thread.
Regarding the hunger/thirst: The first time I pressed play I found it to be awful. However, I looked up various methods to attain food and found that a build very close to the one I'd already made could work the system just fine:
A mage with a small side in Divinitation skills can summon both food and water out of thin air. My mage is currently 31 Elemental and 8 Divine (+4 from swap-outable rings). The mage has the create water spell and the cleric has the create food spell. This has worked fine all game and enables the mechanic to be relevant but only marginally without being offensive and enables the game to be played on recommended settings. A fighter/rogue with five in Elemental and Divine would work as well, as would a cleric with 5 in elemental.
I know what you mean though, the general intention of it doesn't really work as a key mechanic, it's either too much of a hassle without those spells or to less of a hassle with them.
3 is much, much smaller. The complaints of the first two games was too much empty walking. The 3rd game is really short in comparison.
As per usual it's a case of solving the problem with the wrong solution because the problem had been phrased wrong. I've yet to play the third game, but if I was asked what the main problem was I'd say that the character moves too slowly, or, rather, there's no speed toggles depending on what type of exploring one is doing. Most open world RPGs have too much empty space walking, the good ones don't make you notice it, and, in some cases, make you love it.
Another solution that would be more in keeping with the game's other mechanics would be to make movement speed dependent on a skill/stat combo, like mana or health regen speeds. Or do like IWD did and have some boots of speed that actually make you travel quicker with no other benefit, that you can swap in and out of use when needed.
Making the game smaller seems like a real arse-about-face way of both looking at and solving the 'problem', lmao.
