Best game in series?

[Lain]

Which one do you think that would be 1 2 or 3

[Sunicle]

I say Book II

[Linus Gustavsson]

Book I - Great starting point, if a bit crude
Book II - Bigger and more balanced then Book I, a great step forwards
Book III - Smaller then Book II, feels oddly less balanced. IT's missing something.

Until the modding tool is released for Book III, I too say Book II.

[MaximB]

Book2 isn't balanced, it's a walk in the park if you are playing a mage.
Book3 is much harder for mages.

[Ps_TresTres]

I thought book 2 was the best. More of a jump from book 1 to book 2 in overall gameplay. Really nice games though.

[Good Night Owl]

I liked book 2. In my opinion none of the games are balanced. But book III was the worst of them for me. What bothers me about not just one book, but the entire series is each game favors certain classes. You have all these choices, but pick the wrong class & stats and you are punished. I got so upset and eventually stopped playing. It's hard to say which is the best, because if you picked the right class, it's a blast!

[Blackadar]

This game is terrible. This is not an "old school" RPG (I've been playing hardcore RPGs since Ultima 3), it's just a bad one. I'm 4 hours in and I have no plan on continuing. I'd return it but it was a gift so I'm stuck with it. But it will go unplayed. Why?

1. The enemies around all seem to be much more difficult, meaning that every battle is a save-and-restore situation. The ones in the Seawardens' Guild? Too tough. The goblins? Too tough. The ones across the water on the raft? Too tough. The ones on the way to Moonstone? Too tough. I'm sorry that I didn't know exactly what was required in the character creation so that I could make progress in the game but I find it absurd that you have to min/max at the character creation step just to get a few hours in the game. I don't want to quicksave before every battle and quick restore when it doesn't go well. That's not playing the game and that's not hardcore either. It's just a bad design.


2. I have 1 gold piece. That's it. Why? I don't know. I had a couple of hundred in a prior save. When I went to load the game I now have 1. Which means I can't identify anything to sell. I can't buy potions. I can't buy food. That tends to limit your options and in a game where I have to consume food to live, I'm on a downhill spiral that will eventually lead me to starving to death. I'd use a cheat or a trainer to fix this, but there doesn't seem to be any out there.

I suppose I could go back to town and rob everyone and everything I can for some gold. But that's not role-playing in the least. It's not something I'm willing to do to fix a bug in the game.

3. Something similar happened with making potions. I went to make a healing potion per the recipe. Success! Great! Then I went to make two others. The ingredients are gone but the potions were never made. Did the potion making somehow fail? There was nothing in the log about it. So again, I'm out ingredients and can't seem to successfully make a healing potion. Bug or working as intended? No idea.

There are literally dozens of RPGs out there to choose from. I don't need to put up with an imbalanced, buggy game.

PS - I went back and checked....I tried Eschalon 2 and now recall after about 15 hours it too bugged out and I lost about 4 hours of gameplay. The dev asked me to send him the save file. I did but never even received the courtesy of a reply. Oh well. I remember that game was better but even then it was not great (never mind the corrupted saves issue).