Finished Eschalon Book 1

Just finished this. I explored every pixel and it weighed in around 45 hours. I wanted to give some impressions. The game has a decent if derivative plot, more than ample to keep you going. The quest system is classic old school, where you'll find yourself completing something many hours and many maps (ala Baldurs Gate) away from the quest originator. There is not alot of hand holding on this one, you may want to consider WRITING DOWN the names of adjacent maps since exact locations can be easily forgotten when a region on the map you carry is composed of multiple maps in a North, South, East, West and sometimes Central config.

The combat, at least the way I played it was classic kiting toggling magic and ranged. I never built a skill for melee and never needed it, so I can't comment. I was quite powerful by end game. The combat is FUN, and reminds me heavily of Divine Divinity. Thankfully, there is no respawn. There is a random rest encounter system again ala Baldurs Gate.

Graphically the game is quaint, with decent animations, solid sounds and excellent if generic fantasy music. The light score is guaranteed to get stuck in your head! I personally loved the whole package.

What else can I say? I really enjoyed this. I had to hit the interweb for two things which I blame the game for since I won't take responsibility for my inadequacies I'm frankly stunned that this was developed by one person.

Amazing job Basilisk!

Good job.
Now take your sweet ass time with the second book.

And about the Wrangler, yup, he has quite a lot of love to give.
Let's see what he has in store for us in the last tome. (says he whom hath not yet completed act II).

Yes, Eschalon Book 1 is a solid indie game and for a one man job a very respectable accomplishment. However…

Originally Posted by ToddMcF2002
The combat is FUN, and reminds me heavily of Divine Divinity.

I have to disagree here. The combat is OK and it is fun for a while, but I started to grow tired of it by the mid-game (or so) and found it way too repetetive in the end, melee combat in particular. I guess the spell caster way would have been more varied, but my own character was melee and archery based with minimal magic and the combat should've been fun with a melee character too. In Book 1 it regrettably was not. Had there been more options and more different enemies, I think the combat had remained interesting. As it was, there were precious few options and types of enemies.

Come to think of it, the game has surprisingly few types of enemies, maybe around dozen different foes (wild guess, it's been years since I played the game). Of course it's understandlable for a one man effort, doing sprites for different enemies is an ardurous task, but it doesn't remove the fact that fighting the same lizards/goblins/bandits/taurax/whatever over and over gets quite repetetive fast. Maybe Basilisk should've borrowed a page out of MMO design and just recolor the existing sprites to produce different varieties of enemies (you know, brown-shirted goblin, red-shirted goblin, etc.). When you're doing a turn-based single character CRPG you need to provide a wide variety of enemies to fight. I'm not saying just recoloring would've done the trick, there should have been a difference in abilities and tactics of course too (even as simple as brown-shirted goblins are your bog standard gobbos, red-shirted ones a bit stronger and better armed, etc.).

It was a good indie game and on an indie scale a solid four stars out of five, but combat surely wasn't its strong point, IMO.

Well playing a pure melee build is boring in 9 out of 10 otherwise fine RPGs, so I wouldn't fault the game for picking a boring role.

Tanks are great if it is party based, but otherwise you lose the fun of being nimble.

Book 2 is a bit of a shock. The economy with repairs, food and the effect on rest recovering makes it pretty tough early on. Vendors have less inventory and it refreshes slowly. No arrow hording! Opponents are simply more powerful and can cause resource sinks. I don't mind that part of the ramp up however.

What I have to complain about is lore. I can appreciate not being able to identify magic properties on items…but when I can't identify a mundane gem as a freaking GEM it's gone too far folks! And that is after wasting the stingy skill points on a basic lore skill. I'm not pleased about that. Inevitably a vendor will identify the item…at it's full price?!? That's stacking things a bit too much against the fledgling player in my opinion.

Otherwise Book 2 is fantastic as expected and my arcane elemental archer is panning out again.

Just a quick correction, but I didn't say I was playing a pure melee build. I was playing a melee/archer character with some magic (with c. 4-5 spells). I certainly wasn't just whacking enemies with a blunt object all those c. 20 hours it took to play through Book 1.

However, I still maintain that even a pure melee build should be viable and fun to play in a CRPG. It shouldn't automatically equal boring and there are CRPGs where it doesn't. If we, for the sake of parity, look at indie turn-based CRPGs and leave out magic altogether, there is e.g. Knights of the Chalice which has tremendously exiting and fun melee combat. Also many roguelikes have solid melee gameplay which is varied and fun even without magic (most recent example would be Dungeons of Dredmor, which I got to play a few hours yesterday evening). Fun melee combat is doable.

If a CRPG has lots of combat, which most do, it should be designed so that all forms of combat are fun, not just magic. It aggrevates me that magic usually receives a lot of design creativity in CRPGs, but melee and archery are usually just left with the most basic options (Attack - Don't Attack). There ought to be variety in melee/archery too (with different types of attack, combat feats, etc.). Easier said than done, I know, but we shouldn't be content with just the bare basics. Justice for melee builds, I say!!