T w e n t y S i d e d

The biggest loss that RPG’s have suffered as they have evolved over the years is the abandonment of text as a vehicle for environmental data. You know, the cute little text window. Planescape Torment had it. Fallout had it. (Although it was sadly underused in the Fallout series.) The newer games don’t have it, and the games are inevitably more shallow for it.

Modern RPG developers take note: I can see here that the town has been destroyed, but the text that pops up still adds flavor and helps establish a mood. Which is something your fancy full-scene anti-aliasing can’t do.

The mechanics of text window itself aren’t important, but the idea of giving the player some text to further describe what they are seeing is. No matter how good you make the graphics, there are things you can’t convey visually because they aren’t things you can see. What does the room smell like? What’s the temperature like? Humidity? Stuffyness? Low level vibrations? Greasy, oily surfaces? Odd taste in your mouth? Eye irritation? What’s the floor like? Spongy? Muck that pulls on your boots? Slippery? Wobbly or loose bricks? Loose gravel that rolls underfoot? These details add flavor to the gameworld, and you can’t convey them with polygons or sound effects.

Text is also a great way to convey things that the player might not know, but their character would. “These soldiers are wearing the uniform of the royal guard. They probably spend most of their day in or around King Pancibald’s throne room.” I think it’s much smoother to convey that sort of thing in narrative text, as opposed to clumsily working it into NPC dialog and hoping the player stops to chat.

Eschalon Book I reminded me of how useful the text window can be and how much we’ve been missing out with newer games. Words are powerful. Words are potent. Words are so powerful that you can run an entire tabletop game and relate a new, unfamiliar world using nothing but text which you read aloud (or make up on the spot) and convey everything the players need to know. Visuals complement text nicely, but visuals in lieu of text can deprive the player of tremendous depth and subtlety. That’s fine if you’re playing a quick game of “Kill the Monsters and Take Their Stuff“, but most games aspire to be something deeper. And nothing adds depth like well-written prose.

In Eschalon, I liked when I would enter a room and the game would give me a bit of descriptive text. It was, in a lot of ways, like a minor reward. I could have done with more of them, and I would have liked a way to have a description repeated later (hey GM, what did you say this room is like again?) but even the classics I mentioned before were annoyingly short on text for my taste.

The economy in this game is nicely balanced. Far too many games starve you at the start, but then allow the player to accumulate vast sums of wealth, to the point where they should be able to buy and sell towns. Certainly adventuring should make you money, but if it makes you enough cash to employ an army it’s not clear why the player – now one of the wealthiest people in the world – would continue risking their neck for more. Eschalon doesn’t have this problem. At the start I really was starved for cash, and every bit of loot was important. But even in the late stages of the game I still felt like money mattered and I was still being careful with my resources.

I would say the biggest drawback of the game so far is the sheer randomness of it. Aside from the dice-rolling at character creation, there is dice-rolling when you loot objects and (naturally) dice-rolling during combat. It’s not that things shouldn’t be randomized, it’s that the outcomes vary so much. I can trade a few blows with an enemy and die. I reload the game, fight the same enemy and walk away with half my health. In some cases it feels like the strength of my stat-building is overshadowed by the noise of the random number generator. There has to be a pretty big delta between two combatants before the outcome of their battle is at all certain. Randomness should add flavor to a battle, but it shouldn’t be the driving force.

I waited for nightfall so I could sneak back behind this building and loot some containers without getting caught by the town guards. Turns out they’re empty. How disappointing. However, if I load the game I might try again and discover them loaded with fabulous cash and prizes.

Given the tight, well-balanced nature of the economy, the randomness in looting is a bit unwelcome. Loot is randomized when you click on the container. You might get a set of worthless rags. Or you might hit the jackpot and find some great armor. My first character (which I eventually abandoned) never got lucky and I was poor for the first few hours of the game. Note that this is not a bad thing. My second time I got lucky more than once, and ended up with a comfortable surplus. This is also not necessarily a bad thing, although the fact that I had such wildly different outcomes due to randomness led inexorably to the realization that…

I can keep clicking on the same barrel and then reloading the game if I don’t get something good. By doing this, I can make more money in 30 seconds of clicking & reloading than I could in a half hour of just playing the dang game. The incentive to act this way is just too strong, and the rewards are too great. Again, randomizing loot adds variety, but the randomness shouldn’t overshadow the other factors. Randomness should be spice, not the main dish.

Still, I’m now on my fourth character, which should be seen as an indirect endorsement. I wouldn’t have spent so much time with the game if I wasn’t enjoying it. This is, despite my nitpicking, a fun game. The story and character progression are the meat and potatoes here, and I haven’t even touched on those yet. I’ll get to that eventually.

UPDATE: Can I get an “amen”?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Thomas Riegsecker recently provided me with a copy of Eschalon: Book I for review. I realize this makes me dangerously close to something like a mainstream game reviewer / journalist. Note that I don’t plan on acting like a reviewer anytime soon. I’m not going to assign points or give thumbs up / down or any of that nonsense. I’m still going to review the game by analyzing the gameplay mechanics and doing a little armchair game design. (Much easier and safer than real game design, I’m sure.) You’ll have to work out for yourself if it’s something you might want to play. In fact, given that this is an indie title and the author of the game is familiar with my site, I might be even more obsessive than usual. You’ve been warned.

Eschalon: Book I is from Basilisk Games, a developer of old-school style RPG games. The about page sums up their gameplay philosophy with this:

Single player. Turn based. Stat heavy. Story driven.

These are either magic words for you or they aren’t. As graphics have evolved, big-name developers have all but abandoned the old turn-based formulas. If you want an RPG which focuses on strategy in combat instead of reflexes, you either have to check out indie titles or play a ten-year-old game. Some have that real-time / turn-based hybrid gameplay you see in KOTOR or Final Fantasy XII, but for a game that will let you ponder your move without a timer (like in a tabletop game) you need to go back a few years.

Stat-heavy games are, for better or worse, getting rare. A game with heavy stats is able to offer more depth and more replay, at the expense of alienating a good segment of the already-niche RPG demographic. I love them, but they seem to be unpopular. Most developers are favoring the minimalist approach to character building. Oblivion is the only big-title game I’ve played recently with real number-crunching depth behind it, and in that game the whole system was rendered nearly pointless by the auto-leveling monsters.

So Eschalon: Book I is a rare breed of game in this day and age. It revisits gameplay mechanics which have been slowly supplanted or abandoned over the last decade or so. If you’re nostalgic for the old days or want to see what you missed, this is a pretty good example of what RPG’s were like before polygons ruled the world.

Character creation begins, surprisingly enough, with the character creation screen:

The attribute points are set with an interesting blend of dice roll and point-buy. You have eight attributes in all. Strength, Dexterity, Perception, Wisdom, etc. All attributes start with a random value between 7 and 14, and you are then given 15 extra points to spread around as you see fit. There’s nothing really wrong with this system if you’re a normal person, but if you’re like me the dice roll demands that you sit there and pound away at it until you get a “good” set of initial values. There are 8⁸ possible combinations, so the odds of getting all 14’s is only 1 in 16,777,216. Assuming you click once every second, you should hit the magic combination in about 194 days, assuming you never stop to rest. I did manage to stop clicking after a while and live with something less than all 14’s, but you must understand that doing so required an act of willpower on my part.

There are five races (all human) for you to choose from, five outlooks (mostly dealing with religion and philosophy) and five character classes. This offers a nice variety of choices to serve as a starting point, although they don’t really restrict you in the long run. If you choose the “Nefarious” axiom you’re still free to run around helping NPC’s for altruistic reasons if you like. Fighters can acquire skills in magic if they want to.

Like Oblivion, Morrowwind, and Fallout, most of your success in the game is dependant not on your attributes, but on the skills you’ve mastered. There are 24 in all, from Swords to Elemental Magic to Lockpicking. Note that while you start out with certain skills, you’re free to pick up new ones any time you level up. This means that you’re pretty much free to make up your own character class if you want, although this freedom does mean it’s possible to cripple your character in the long run. On my first play-through I was a fighter with a bunch of rogue skills. These extra skills spread my skill points too thin, and I ended up with a guy who was mediocre at a lot of things instead of great at a few things. This made the game really hard, and I was obliged to abandon that character and begin again. The game expects and even demands a little min-maxing, so if you want to explore all the different skills you’re going to have to play through the game more than once.

I seem to have lost all of my memories! The only thing I can remember is… playing about a hundred other games that start out just like this one.

The game begins in the old-school tradition of your character waking up in a strange place to find he has lost all of his memories. RPG players have been down this road many times in the past, but if you’re going to play an old-school RPG you may as well embrace the old-school storytelling. The amnesia thing here is not a hindrance, not a crutch, and in fact it ends up being integral to the plot and not just a device to ease you into the gameworld. Right from the start you’ve got an anonymous benefactor leaving you cryptic notes and enough questions to compel you to get out there and find some answers. The answers come in time, although this wouldn’t be an RPG if finding the answers didn’t mean doing some sidequests for the locals.

The game offers a little freeform fun as well. You can, if you like, begin wandering around the map at random. (It’s big.) This will probably lead to your death early on, but the important thing is that there aren’t any dang plot doors keeping you out. You can also murder and steal in towns, assuming you’ve got the desire and the might to do so. It’s not really of any great benefit to go around offing people (a little short-term monetary gain at the expense of not being able to interact with the person in the future) but I like that the game allows you to do so anyway.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.