Don't waste your money on this game

[Wraith_Magus]

I bought this game on sale for only a couple bucks, and even so, I regretted it.

This game is honestly most like an RPG Maker game titled "My First RPG", except that the nostalgia-blindness is incurred by Ultima games without understanding what made the Ultima games actually work.

There is essentially only one enemy that you fight over and over, and only a couple ways to play. Sure, there might be skills to put skill points into, but there's no reason to put points into anything but weapon skills or magic.

Probably the worst part is how terribly slow it all is. Each step takes about a second, combat can easily run a wizard-type down 40 MP, which means you get 3 seconds of combat followed by having to camp for a minute to regain the MP, the treasure you get from exploring and opening a trapped, locked chest, is more likely to be a piece of string than anything of value, and it takes about 5 minutes to walk from town to a dungeon if you go back to sell your stuff.

It basically plays like Diablo, if Diablo were slower, had less variety, were stripped down further of rules, and were just relentlessly duller than it already was.

It's just overall lazy design, beyond that. All the game features are added on scattershot, and serve no cohesive purpose. You can walk through where the designer forgot to make walls.

Worse, it has one of the more actively hostile communities for a game, and even the developers are keen to join in heckling any critics.

[Paladin Larec]

Why does it take you so long to go back to town when fast travelling there lets you go back in merely a second?

Also, about the combat being slow...I bet you'd drop dead if you ever played any of the D&D Goldbox games I grew up on or attempted to play Temple of Elemental Evil. Sorry to say, but Turn based is finally making a comeback in PC RPGs. (Shadowrun Returns, Wasteland, Divinity Original Sin, Obsidian's Project Eternity, Might & Magic 10, Chaos Chronicles, Blackguards, etc etc) So you might want to get used to it. That's the way RPGs were always meant to be played. This isn't Diablo.

[Wraith_Magus]

It doesn't take that long to get back to town, it takes you that long to get back to the DUNGEON once you've gone to town. You can only quick travel to the towns, but not back.

And to your other point, I grew up on the Gold Box games, loved the new Temple of Elemental Evil, love X-Com, and my favorite genre is the turn-based strategy game.

This game is not strategic in any sense of the term. I compare it to Diablo because, without anything to actually consider or even do as a player besides spam clicking on things, that's what most comes to mind.

Of course, it's not a perfect comparison - Diablo actually had barely enough depth to make me want to swap abilities from time to time, rather than using the basic first level spell from start to finish of the game simply because it was the most cost-efficient. Plus, it took me several hours longer to discover just what a pointless endless grind Diablo was as opposed to this game.

Face facts: We aren't so starved for turn-based games anymore that we have to instantly laud any game that actually follows that format as some sort of holy grail. This game is an amateurish paint-by-numbers RPG that, were it trying to wallow in the nostalgia of JRPGs instead of western ones, would simply have been lifted straight out of RPG Maker with no real attempt at adding anything else in. This game is nothing but a single clone-stamped monster repeated ad infinitum, randomized chests, Diablo-style "Sword with level 5 material and a +2 fire enchantment", and dumb-as-bricks AI. All the much-lauded real estate in this game is wasted by how utterly barren the landscape actually is.

Most awful games are awful because the ambitions of the developers far outstripped their competency. I can still somewhat forgive that, however. This game is awful because it LACKED ambition to be anything other than "sorta like a "golden era" RPG", and as soon as it had the barest bones of the game like that, it stopped. That's just something I can't forgive in a game - it's pure laziness.

Even for a Zynga-style nothing-but-a-lazy-cash-grab game, this game does terribly, since even Zynga is capable of picking a single theme and running with it. This game is so utterly devoid of thought, it's rule set is literally just an amalgamation of any random rules from any random game it could rip off, with no regards whatsoever to how well they will fit in the system. Why does the supposedly classless game simply rip off the D&D-style magic classes by simply making "Wizard" a single skill that gives you the benefits of a half dozen other skills at once? Because the developer never thought to do anything else but rip off D&D, or even consider how different a point-buy system would make his game from D&D.

Honestly, rather than asking me if I don't understand strategic gameplay, I have to ask if you don't understand how RPGs have evolved if you are trying to defend this game. Those classic golden era games were games that were CONSTANTLY re-inventing themselves (Ultima never stuck to a formula for more than a few games, and this game is explicitly trying to re-created Ultima,) and yet this game lacks the ambition to do leave its comfort blanket.

Maybe you should try playing games outside your comfort zone before attacking others? Go play Dragon Age: Origins. It's pseudo real-time, but has far more strategy than this game does. Play Disgaea if you insist on something simpler. Go play one of the crafting-centric turn-based RPGs by Gust, like Atelier Rorona if you really want to broaden your horizons.

[Communist Batman]

It's a 3-6 dollar game depending on if you bought it on sale... Seriously man what did you expect? If you want a game with all those features, buy an old game that is now this cheap. This game is very much made for someone who's already played through those games or is afraid of dealing with compatibility issues. I play this game in my down time at work and it's great.

[Wraith_Magus]

I compared this game to older games because that is exactly the sort of game it compares itself to. It claims to be "carefully designed to feel like the great old school RPGs of the past such as Ultima, Might & Magic, and Wizardry" right on its adverts next to the "buy" button. It overtly slams the styles of games like Diablo on those same adverts, yet fails to rise above the gameplay of the very thing it is slamming.

Why is it unfair to compare this game to the games it has already compared itself to just because of price?

(I would also point out that the sequel is selling for basically twice the price in spite of being basically the same game, but for marginal tweaks to some skills that actually make the game worse for further enforcing the min-maxing.)

Still, if we are to move the goalposts, and require that this game be judged only based upon value for price, then why not compare this game to games that are available for free? As those games have no price, obvoiusly, this game would have to have infinitely better play value for its infinitely higher price, right?

Even under that condition, this game fails to compare positively to free games like NetHack or Elona, which are even built around similar rules systems of turn-and-tile-based movement and actions.

NetHack features a tremendous number of interesting monsters and challenges in the game. It is filled with surprises and "Yet Another Stupid Death" in a game that actually tries to make losing become fun, rather than just another reload. A floating eye is a vastly different creature from a gnome or a succubus. The game is stuffed full of clever tricks the dev team came up with to add to the joy of discovering what was in the game.

Eschalon features essentially just the same single monster rinsed-and-repeated ad infinitum. Every monster is just a dumb melee drone that moves directly at you and then punches until HP reaches zero. The (incredibly rare) exception to this is the archer type enemy... which stops at three steps away before spamming attacks, rather than just stopping at one step away. Oh, right, and you can become completely invulnerable to those enemies with a single spell, thus rendering it all moot.

NetHack doesn't stop there - while Eschalon has locks and traps that are meaningless lacks of challenges because you can simply bash them all or soak the damage, leaving no real challenge in the game but for the tedious combat, NetHack is full of interesting gameplay with its numerous challenges.

Eschalon claims to have a classless character creation system, but it ultimately gives you skills that actually have no use beyond a certain "cap" of points, and the game will utterly fail to tell you about them. Since nothing in this game challenges you besides combat, anyway, there are really only three classes, (yes, classes, regardless of its protestations otherwise,) anyway, and that is in whether you take weapons skills, magic skills, or a mixture of both. (Which is, itself, basically the exact same thing as the original Diablo...) To add insult to injury, the game even provides trainers that give you those skills to the levels that you'll actually need them basically for free, thus further removing any reason to spend points on any skill that isn't a weapons or magic skill.

Elona, meanwhile, has you pick a class that determines your initial skill levels, but nothing more - you can buy more skills as you see fit, and truly create wildly different characters. I've played most of the last 20 or so hours of play on that game, in which I've easily spent well over 200 hours, just training as a musician so that I can perform during the "Party Time!" quests for more platinum coins I can use to purchase more training for more skills. I haven't even felt a need to dive into a dungeon in game months. (Although it is dropping my adventurer ranking for not doing so...)

Elona succeeds in delivering what Eschalon promised, but failed to deliver: a truly classless system that offers a nigh-infinite number of playstyles, and it does it for free.

Elona is a game that practically has more crafting skills you may choose not to ever invest in than Eschalon has in total. Elona is a game that constantly lets you feel you are building up to an ever-greater payoff than the one before, and ingeniously incentivizes the playing of a wide variety of truly different quests to keep gameplay from bogging down in the sameness that Eschalon melts into.

I was fed up with Eschalon after less than 5 hours. (Honestly, I'm not sure how long I actually spent playing the game; Steam says more time than that, but being as I had to just go watch TV to get some entertainment in - and I even honestly closed out the game and just plain played a puzzle game at a few points simply to have something to engage my brain for a change after playing Eschalon - so it's fairly pure guesswork on my part.)

I have had thousands of hours of fun with Dwarf Fortress, and will continue to do so, and that is also a free game. That is something that I can't say for any but a couple of games that demand money for the right to play them.

I don't need to put the price of the game on the scale when I judge how good a game is, because I've played free games far better than AAA schlock games.

A good developer can create a game on a budget and sell it as a budget game that still manages to be quite enjoyable in spite of not having the money for graphics or production values. Spiderweb Games creates the sorts of games Basilisk Games obviously can't.

In fact, every aspect of this game had me comparing it to another game, asking "why didn't they just copy this other game that did this better?" The imbalanced-to-the-point-of-broken skills and combat system are obviously mismatches to the game type. Why did this game copy D&D for its magic system when it could have tried a better magic system more suited for a classless system? It's a simple lack of stopping to think things through, or to actually take the time to make those critical comparisons on the developer's part.

Still, that's just beating around the bush of Eschalon's truest failing: Nothing about it is fun at all. Combat is a tedious click-fests with none of the strategy it promised. That is saying nothing of the CONSTANT need to just sit and camp, which makes everything take far, far too long. Exploration is a tedious click-fest with a large, but an ultimately completely empty world but for a few random barrels and more tedious fights. That's not even starting to talk about the dull, meandering pace of the main character that, again, just serves to stretch out the game with long stretches of just waiting to get done tasks as trivial as walking from point A to point B. Treasures are more trouble than they're worth, with me finding string in a trapped, locked chest far off the beaten path, while I can find full plate mail suits in rain barrels behind the tavern because of the random treasure allocation with no sanity checks. The story is trite and anemic. It doesn't take long to discover that everything about this game's "difficulty" is found in the character creation screen, and as soon as you realize this game is all about min-maxing, it's a cakewalk to the point of being tedious. Everything in this game is tedium. It's just plain PAINFUL to play this game.

Simply because a game is cheap is no excuse for a game not to be fun. Even if the amount of money lost on it is trivial, there is no reason to spend your valuable time on such things.

People who are considreing playing this game deserve to be warned of what it actually is.

[valkymaera]

I greatly appreciated this review, as a thorough glance into what's in store.

[negatus]

Durn. I already bought both games on sale after playing with the demo. Since Steam won't refund my purchases, I'm stuck. Hopefully I won't have wraith_magus's vitriolic reaction when I finally get around to them.

[Ml33tninja]

"Eschalon has locks and traps that are meaningless lacks of challenges because you can simply bash them all or soak the damage, leaving no real challenge in the game" I disagree you could bash them and risk breaking your weapon or lockpick for extra exp. which believe it or not adds up.
Honestly the first time I played I lost all interest with the game due messing up my character and mid point I got stuck. After starting again Im getting into it. Making a ranger/warrior with special perk(lockpick, dodge) has been a wonder and change my view of the game I like the random loot and came across some grab finds. I can see why you dont like but I consider it a great buy(paid less than 8 for Book 1 and 2 on GOG.com)

[Wraith_Magus]

When I say that locks and traps provide meaningless challenges, I mean that they don't require any real thinking or effort on the player's part.

If I'm a wizard, bashing a door means just casting firebolt at it until it runs out of hit points, or casting the spell I have specifically for that action. It means that I'm going to spend some-odd amount of MP that I get back immediately just by resting just like every other use of MP.

I got that first easter egg behind the door by simply resting and casting low-level firebolts constantly for about 3 game days. Sure, it was 1% damage per bolt, but when there's nothing STOPPING me from doing that, why wouldn't I?

Bashing with a weapon requires just having one extra cheap weapon you don't mind breaking.

Yes, you can spend character points on lock picking, and yes, you can get experience points for it, but not enough to make up for the character points spent on lock picking in the first place (you need to spend far more than just one level's worth of skill points to get lock picking anywhere near the level you'll need it...) so having bashing as a viable alternative severely limits the utility of lock picking as a skill.

Regardless of which of the three you take, the real problem is that there is nothing to really consider or engage the player when you get to that locked chest or door - you've picked your method of dealing with locks, and it just requires clicking until resolved.

Even if the minigames are stupid, most of the AAA games nowadays will throw in some sort of minigame for lock picking or hacking or whatever simply because waiting for a bar to fill up or empty out isn't engaging or exciting for the player in any way. Eschalon lock picking is just rolling dice until you get a number you like and bashing is waiting for the bar to empty out.

The problem is that those locks add nothing to the enjoyment of the game - they're just there because locks are "supposed to be" in dungeons, without really understanding why those old-school games had those locks in the first place. (It was to force your party to take/put up with the rogue. But this game doesn't have parties, and you don't need to take rogue skills, so it is really just there because other games had them, and it doesn't really know what to do with them.)



As for random loot, I have to ask...

Why does this game advertise proudly that it doesn't have rubber-banded enemies? (Because that lets you have challenging, out-of-your-character's depth encounters, and places where your character is overpowered. It also helps create the sense of advancement. In all, not something I'd complain about.)

Now... why does this game, at the same time, have rubber-banded TREASURE?

All the reasons that the game shouldn't have rubber-banded enemies apply just the same to treasures, as well. In fact, it makes the game absurd to have rubber-banded treasures when it doesn't have rubber-banded enemies, because it means I'm rewarded for not opening chests at low-levels, and then I can get adamantine axes from the barrels outside the taverns, while the locked chest behind the traps in the pits of the dungeon I was in a couple of character levels ago would only give me a few arrows.

If I do take up the challenge of fighting higher-level monsters in dangerous areas, I don't get higher-level rewards for my actions, but curb-stomping the goblins from early areas much later in the game vomits high-level treasures on my character.

To get the best equipment in the game, one should just camp in the wasp cave to fight the random goblins (because that encounter chart makes sense...) without opening up any of the random barrels in town until you get up to the higher character levels.

These are just a few of the problems of rather schizophrenic game design that indicate that the designers just don't really think through what sort of game they want to make, besides "something like Ultima". They're taking bits and pieces of things that worked without understanding WHY they worked, or how they can make them work in the context of the game they are building. It's a critical failure of curiosity to not understand the machine you are trying to build before you build it.

[Shoes]

I respectfully disagree with the majority of your opinions!
Also, you've spent 'only a couple bucks' and managed around 5 hours game time and ~4 vitriolic posts out of it... that's a pretty good deal really?

Originally posted by wraith_magus:

Worse, it has one of the more actively hostile communities for a game, and even the developers are keen to join in heckling any critics.

^^ It appears you've been mocked on their forums and you're now here for vengeance ;)
"Don't buy this game guise!!"

[nomadredd]

Well, I bought this on GOG and i have finished the game in 26 hrs. Compared to Diablo 3, this which was a shi-tty buy... this was a very very good buy. I love the game I indent to play it up to Book III. I am now playing Book 2 just 2 hr and the changes are really nice. I find I enjoy Book 2 better than Skyrim.

And for reference, I have high regards for this game like I do Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout 1,2,Tactics, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.

Sucks you dont like it... but hardcore RPG gamer will be fine here just right.

I mean you complain about some mechanics and maybe the engine is not top-notch with it's simple creature fights. Yes I think they can add more depth into it but in my opinion the mechanics are okay. I like the story, the text. I like the stat, the calligraphy. I like the sounds, the focus on being stat heavy. Makes you think about how you distribute your point efficiently.

So now im on book II, Im playing Hardcore mode... :)

[Wraith_Magus]

While people have tried to characterize my reviews of the game as "vitriolic", which is fair enough in its own right, that doesn't make for an excuse to simply dismiss the fact that I had supporting arguments for what I said.

Some of you who are supporting the game are obviously doing better than others, but simply saying "I like the fights even though they are all very simple" doesn't really make an effective counter-argument to my arguments against the game for being overly dumbed-down to the point of essentially all fights being the exact same thing.

My response to nomadredd would be, "OK, so you like the game... WHY do you like the game? What about the game is enjoyable?" Just saying you like or dislike something is utterly meaningless.

Who here buys anything based on reviews from someone saying "This gets 4 points because I didn't like it," and, "This gets 9 points because I really liked it," when it conveys no meaningful information?

If you want to talk about why the forums being hostile is important, (and I have read plenty of professional reviews that cite how the creators of a game behave if they are unwilling to aknowledge flaws in a game,) then it does help to define who, exactly, a game is actually made for, and by extension, whether it's made for anyone reading that review. If someone is incapable of responding to any argument with anything more than "I disagree" and then speaking like a 4-channer, it says a lot about the value of that poster's judgement.

Likewise, the unwillingness of the game's maker to handle criticisms, and encouraging harrassment of anyone who does so on their forums says a lot about where the game company will go in the future. This is the reason why it is mentioned with regards to games like FTL or The War Z, because it says that anyone who has complaints about the game in its current state aren't likely to see any improvements over the next few iterations of the game.

This, in turn, also leads into the main criticism I have of the game - that it has no real idea of what it really wants to be. Its schizophrenic design has multiple elements that work against the whole. If the developer ever decided on what the game was supposed to be, or how it was supposed to be enjoyed, rather than just adding in the kitchen sink, it may have been salvaged into a good game.

Instead, the second game is actually worse than the first, and that trend shows no signs of stopping.



Take food, for example. If you want to play "hardcore" mode in the second game, then that basically means that you have a food meter.

You fill the food meter by right-clicking on the food items in your inventory when it gets low. If you are low on food, you can buy some at a store for trivial amounts of GP. That's it. It's the slight inconvenience of having to remember to go back to the grocery store for more potatoes every other day.

It doesn't add anything to the game, it was just added because the developer wanted to add something, and the players who were listened to (who liked the current game) suggested it.

Eschalon doesn't just tack the system on, it actually just makes it an option, and says it's "hardcore mode" if you play with food on. Any game reviewer will tell you that the first thing they do in a game is look at the options menu - because it tells you what things a developer couldn't decide would actually make the game better or worse. Graphic, audio, and controls options are givens, but anything else says something about the indecision of the developer. Here, they spent time and effort on a whole mechanic that they couldn't even decide added anything to the game, (it didn't,) so they made it optional (and called it "difficulty" because they don't know what that means) due to being scared that it would just annoy players.

The other options that make up "hardcore mode" are weapon repair and two options that are basically there just to stop you from savescumming. There's little reason not to enable to two options that stop savescumming, since God knows this game is tedious enough even before you start constantly reloading just to get better rolls of the dice, and the repair option is another glaring example of a game mechanic the developers couldn't justify even to themselves.

Repair and food both have whole skills (that you are required to sink several levels worth of skill points into in order to make any serious use of them) dedicated just to ameliorating the negative effects of those mechanics. Granted, Survival can also be used for farming alchemy ingredients for yet another cash farming technique that is only bounded by how utterly tedious it is simply camping out in the field for game days on end.

The fact that they are willing to let you take a chunk of the game out as an option tells you how little those mechanics actually had to do with the rest of the game, or what their purposes were. A developer with a better sense of what the player was supposed to be doing and enjoying about the game doesn't need to do things like that.

Food mechanics should only be put into a game if it furthers the enjoyment of the game somehow. Maybe it's challenge, (in which case, you have to make actually getting food a serious challenge in and of itself, which means you can't just buy it at a store,) maybe it's

NetHack has a food mechanic for a reason. NetHack makes food challenging for two major reasons: First, it's not nearly so common, so getting food is not just stopping by a store during your down time, it's something that you actively have to pursue as a goal. Second, it plays well with the difficulty of identification already in the game, and forces the player to take risks, or rely even more upon their short supply of identification resources or their knowledge of the game. Food rots, so you can't keep much of it around for long. Canned food might have botulism, so it's a risk to try eating some. Eating unknown foods is a massive risk, as many foods can kill you. It's all part of the overarching theme of the game, which is about trying to find a path to survival.

Food is in NetHack because it makes surviving even harder than it already is.

For immersion, see this mod to Skyrim - http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=13685 . It's not about food, (although the author says they're going to add food to it,) but about the fact that Skyrim is supposed to be a very, very cold place, and that you don't feel it if you can swim in an ocean with iceburgs floating around in it naked for days without any adverse effects. In Skyrim, they put deer in the forests and salmon leaping up rapids. People who mod in food to Skyrim (or played Hardcore mode in Fallout New Vegas) and then get their food by stalking and killing deer with their avatar's own simulated hands do so for the thrill of living out a simulated harsh life.

You can even include food to play around with the existing combat mechanics, and just make it supplemental to the rest of the game. Some games (especially JRPGs) make different foods give stat-ups, so food is a part of your character customization scheme. You only get to eat once a day, so choosing to eat Int-boosting fish instead of Con-boosting pasta is like putting character points into Int instead of Con. It's an extension of the character-building mechanics.

... So why is food in Eschalon Book II?

----

I compare this game to Diablo for several good reasons: One being the afore-mentioned fact that the game's own advertising compares itself to Diablo.

The other, however, is that Diablo (and most have forgotten, or the non-hardcore RPG players would never have learned) was actually just a roguelike that was made real-time and severely dumbed down in order to make roguelikes appeal to a broader audience. (As well as to make it multiplayer, which, itself, made the game appeal to a much, much broader audience.) Diablo was dumbed down to essentially reflexive gameplay for those who don't want any particular strategy outside of character builds and spamming clicks.

I compare Eschalon and Diablo because Eschalon has Diablo's dumbed-down mechanics and single-minded focus upon simply having a character with enough points all in one skill and spamming that skill until everything stops moving, without having the real-time gameplay that was supposed to make up for the lack of strategic depth. In Diablo's case, you're trading strategic skill for reflexes, because it's a Blizzard game, and that's all they really do. In Eschalon's case, it just leaves you with a giant hole in the gameplay that isn't filled by anything. You don't have to be clever to play, and you don't need good reflexes to play. There is a critical lack of engagement on the player's part during the whole "actually playing the game" part of the game, since everything is decided in the skill point allocation screen.

----

I also honestly have to question why people keep referring to the game's plot as somehow being a selling point. I mean, maybe you like some of the elements of the plot, that's fine, but I hardly see how "having a good story" really applies to a game with such a minimal amount of plot as this game. The whole of the main plot is all laid out in about a half-dozen infodumps of a page or so of text. All jokes of how much I can type aside, I've probably already written as much text in this thread as is in the main plot. That's not to say that the plot is automatically BAD, but you don't play a game with this small an amount of story for its story.

Again, the reason I harp on the weakness of the combat system is becuase combat is basically the only thing this game has. It doesn't have an engaging enough story to sell the game on story, its world is too barren to make exploration or immersion interesting, and its character-building system is both absurdly abusable AND enforces the necessity of abusing it in the name of "challenge". (The last one being a problem in comparison to the likes of Elona, Arcanum, Dungeons of Dreadmore, or Skyrim, where I can accomplish my goals in myriad different ways besides just straight damage-dealing in most cases. It also antagonizes the casual players who are the only players that would actually appreciate the simplicity of the combat.)

----

I'm honestly left with the impression that nomadredd and I have very different ideas of what a "Hardcore" RPG player is, since he named basically only the highest-named AAA RPGs that basically any western RPG player has already played. I'm comparing the game to the likes of NetHack, Elona, or any of the games out of Spiderweb Games, which are the far more niche titles that define a more hardcore player's search for games that keep the appetite for new experiences fed.

I get the impression (and it's helped that everyone seems to only reference games from about a decade ago or modern non-RPGs) that the only reason some people like this game is because they've simply not played RPGs in years, and don't know they can expect much better, even from indie games.

Or is the fact that it's a really simple game actually what you like about it? I've certainly rammed through Wizardry-clones, especially of the JRPG variety, before as gameboy games simply to have something that takes no mental effort at all for simple zoning out in a waiting room before. However, such games follow a better, more streamlined format than this, where they are, at least, easier to grind. They also have much more in-depth character customization. (For examples, look at the Etrian Odyssey games, especially the later ones.) If that's the case, however, I wouldn't characterize any game based entirely around clicking for hours to grind levels as being "hardcore", that's actually a defining trait of casual RPGs.

All of that, however, just points back to the schizophrenic game design philosophy at the core of all the problems in this game. It wants to be hardcore, but is too simple to appeal to hardcore players, while at the same time, it's too unforgiving for the casuals. None of its mechanics make sense with the other mechanics, so they all end up detracting from one another. (You can even turn whole chunks of the second game off, they're so unrelated to one another.) It doesn't have rubber-banded monsters so that you can sneak into dangerous territory, but then, the loot you get for taking on a greater challenge is the same as the loot you get for curb-stomping level 1 enemies, because the LOOT is rubber-banded even though the challenge of the enemies is not. It has great big tracts of land, and fills them with nothing but a few barrels of randomized loot you can find anywhere, so there's no particular reason to actually go exploring any of that land.

This game demonstrates why simply copying games that had good ideas doesn't produce anything of value, even compared to what it is copying - you have to understand what made those ideas good, and how to make even small, iterative refinements on what broke new ground to make something of value. This game just copies from multiple different sources, and doesn't understand how the elements it copies will play out differently when you are putting them in different circumstances. It doesn't bother to understand why a game used random or rubber-banded items or monsters before throwing them in or out of the game.

[Shoes]

The reason I simply said that I 'disagreed' was because I was being polite. I too could produce a failure of a manifesto in game design... but I consider my time valuable. I knew you'd produce a novella response! You didn't disappoint either. There's no way I (or anyone with logic) would engage in that heh.
I guess I was baited in by the thread title.

Actually, you've swung me round. I'm now kinda angry that I've spent so much time playing (if you can even call it 'playing') this game. My memories created in Eschalon are all but meaningless to me now.
Thinking about it further, they could've easily improved it by introducing better, tried and tested mechanics, like Rocket Jumping from Quake - that way you could travel faster around map.
They could've also substituted barren forests with something like racetracks - it was really exciting and worked great in Wip3out.
I was really looking forward to playing Book II... but now I just want a refund.

Conclusion: Don't waste your money on this game*

*it's not Wip3out or Quake, your mileage may vary.

[nomadredd]

@wraith_magus

Wow that was such a long text. For a game you dont like, you really spend time writing against it. It is like you can only hate the thing that you can potentially love. The opposite of love is indifference... that you dont really care. Maybe deep inside your mind you love the game but it fails you in some aspects? :D

Anyway, too bad for you. I mean a lot of people like it. I like the game truly. I had this much fun playing FTL or Terraria or Dont Starve. Very nice indie games in my opinion. I would rate them as enjoyable as Far Cry 3 or Morrowind. Skyrim was a bit of a let down though, but I played it as soon as it was released without mods maybe once I get back it would be a nice game. :)

Anyway, chill, it is just a game. You dont like it? You move to the next. I have 100+ games in my steam account and several in GOG... but now, my attention is at this game... and it is sweet as nectar.. :D Too bad you it does not taste as good for you.

And yes... it's the story. Im so in love with the story too.

[zero.cool.is.god]

I think a lot of people confuse “I don’t like his game” with “This is a bad game.” And after reading the 6 pages worth of text that @wraith_magus wrote I can only imagine that he is either a troll, or boiling over with fury because no publisher wants to buy his overly offensive and biased amature reviews.

[Wraith_Magus]

Yes, a lot of people do confuse not liking a game with giving an explanation of why a game is a bad game.

One involves a (sometimes rather long and thorougly explained) list of verifiable facts about a game with reasons as to why the game does not qualify as a good game, and the other is simply a statment of opinion.

I was trying to explain why one can't simply dismiss facts about a game by saying that you have a different opinion on that very point.

The problem is that so few of the game's proponents seem incapable of responding to factual statements about the game's flaws, (flaws that even many of the game's own proponents agreed with on the game's forums,) without having to just resort to throwing around accusations of trolling.

Because, clearly, there's no way anyone can state facts about a game, the whole world is subjective reality, and that way, if someone says something I dislike, I can just pretend there is nothing objective about the world.

After all, we don't have time to write out any sort of supporting argument for what we spit out and expect everyone to read, but have time to respond to angrily protest how little time we have, right?