Eschalon Book II is the second game in the Eschalon series by Basilisk Games. Eschalon is an isometric, nonlinear wRPG reminiscent of Fallout and Baldur’s Gate. It does almost everything well, but there are a few areas where the game fails to live up to its promise.

Let’s talk about the things Eschalon does well. First of all, Eschalon is beautiful. The visuals all hang together perfectly, the scenery is vivid and lush, and all sorts of neat little environmental details really help the world come alive. Plus, everything you would expect to be animated is animated. (I’m looking at you, Avernum.)

Eschalon’s music is also very well-produced and atmospheric. It’s generally pretty unobtrusive, which is nice, since you’ll be hearing it a lot. On the other hand, it’s not very memorable.

The Eschalon game engine is simply superb. Everything is turn-based, but if you keep moving, it looks positively real-time. Hunger, thirst, gradually degrading equipment, changing weather and day/night cycles make you constantly aware of the passage of time. Eschalon feels like a survival game at times–it’s thrilling to play an RPG where your character faces a real risk of starvation if you don’t plan ahead. Darkness has noticeable effects on visibility and on your ability to successfully hit things in combat. You’ll need to stock up on torches to get much done underground or late at night.

The engine plays to Eschalon’s strengths: namely, exploration and loot collection. The world of Eschalon is huge, and once you get Cartography, if you’re anything like me, you’ll find yourself compulsively traversing the wilderness in an attempt to simply map it all. I found myself wanting to put extra points into Cartography even when I didn’t really need to, simply because of how satisfying it was to watch the mini-map fill up with color.

The world of Eschalon contains many unmarked secrets. Wandering around, I often found myself stumbling across hidden caves, obelisks, bandit camps, and nests of unfriendly wildlife, to say nothing of abandoned chests full of loot. Occasionally, I would be led back to one of these places with a side quest later in the game, which I actually found disappointing: it was much more satisfying to find something no one else knew about, even in the fiction of the game world.

I have only two complaints about the exploration and survival aspects of Eschalon. The first is small but not insignificant: you can only view your Cartography maps as an auto-scrolling mini-map for the current area. You cannot create your own world map, or even pan the auto-map for whatever area you are in. This rarely has any impact on the gameplay, but it does make it hard for the player to look back on his or her mapping handiwork, which in turn cuts down on the satisfaction of having explored vast swathes of wilderness.

My second complaint is the fact that the main character evidently suffers from some kind of food-related learning disability. He is unable to recognize a potato or a cabbage without outside help. You literally have to take him to a magic store and pay money in order for the store clerk to tell him that the potato he is holding is a potato. Even worse, you can’t just tell him to eat the damn potato without identifying it, and once it’s been identified and eaten, he won’t recognize any new potatoes if you happen to find another one.

The only way your character is going to recognize staple foods is if you create him with a high Intelligence score. But the only characters who actually use Intelligence for much of anything are wizards. Which leads me to conclude that it is an act of magic in the world of Eschalon to know what a cabbage is.

Intelligence snafus aside, character creation in Eschalon is robust. Characters are eminently customizable, with a half dozen races, religions, and classes. There is also a full array of skills to choose from ranging from weapon skills to foraging, schools of magic to lock picking, dodging to cartography. Each religion functions like a Fallout perk, in that it comes with one advantage and one disadvantage (though you can always opt for Agnostic, which confers no advantages or disadvantages). Players who like tinkering with character stats will delight in the large array of options at their disposal here.

There is only one thing conspicuously missing from the skill list: pick-pocketing. There are so many chests scattered around the world that this doesn’t matter much for purposes of making money, but there are certain instances where it matters quite a lot for purposes of good role-playing. A good thief character ought to be able to simply lift items off of NPCs rather than having to bargain with them (or kill them).

Eschalon is competently written, with pleasant if rather unremarkable prose. NPCs you meet in the game will converse with you via dialog trees. However, there is an unfortunate paucity of memorable characters and dialog alternatives to color your interactions with them.

You have no Charisma or Personality stat, so there are rarely more than one or two ways a conversation can go. Most conversation trees give you two branches at a time: one “I’m ending this conversation” branch, and one “I’m continuing this conversation” branch. That’s mostly it. Consequently, the hand that guides conversations forward never manages to stay out of sight. You will always know that you are talking with a “Give a Side Quest” or “Advance the Plot” marionette. For a game so plainly about exploration, the inability to meaningfully explore other characters is a major oversight.

This stinginess with dialog options extends to the quests. Just to be clear: the non-dialog-driven quests in Eschalon are nicely non-linear, with multiple ways of achieving the same objective. Entering Port Kuudad, for instance, can be accomplished in a wide variety of different ways, few of them immediately apparent when you first arrive at the outer gates.

But once you start talking to NPCs, all this non-linearity goes out the window. Eschalon reprises one of the problems that plagued the original Baldur’s Gate: encounters that always devolve into fights no matter what you say or do.

Worse, quest-related dialog in Eschalon only supports one objective at a time, leaving you no room to manipulate the characters you’re dealing with. The game, in fact, affirmatively forbids you the opportunity to say one thing and do another. If you say you’re going to do something in conversation with a character, the game will oftentimes actually rewrite the quest in your quest book so that you can only complete the quest in that fashion. You cannot tell a lie. It’s like you’re playing Lil’ George Washington.

While I found the linearity of in-game dialog disappointing, it wasn’t bad enough to sabotage my enjoyment of the game. That honor was reserved for something else entirely: the learning curve. I played the game on Normal with default game settings. I played four different games this way, each with a different character. My conclusion? Eschalon Book II is balls-hard for the uninitiated. I’m talking billiard balls dipped in titanium.

To begin with, it is surprisingly easy to create an utterly useless character. I started off trying for a Cleric, typically a versatile, well-balanced character in wRPG tradition. “Yeah!” I said to myself. “A good melee fighter with healing spells–I’ll be self-sufficient and powerful in no time!”

Um, yeah. I began the game, left my cottage, and was promptly attacked by a giant rat. He immediately bit me, transmitting some sort of loathsome disease. Troll Syphilis or something like that. It cut two of my primary combat stats down by 50%. “Okay,” I thought, “I’m a priest. This will be easy to deal with. Where is my Cure Disease spell?”

Um, yeah. I had none. I didn’t even have a healing spell. All I had was something called Flesh Boil, which just sounded like a particularly nasty symptom of Troll Syphilis. So with my combat skills down lower than Verne Troyer doing the limbo, I only barely managed to survive the very first encounter in the game. I made it to town, slept, and bought some healing magic. “Okay–now I can heal myself. I’m a legit cleric. Time to try combat again.” It wasn’t long before I started fighting some black molds and needed healing. “Great!” I thought.  “Time to invoke the divine powers of healing!”

Um, yeah. You don’t get divine powers. In Eschalon, “healers” are basically just crummy wizards. I was carrying a sword, and the somatic requirements of my healing spell meant that I needed to have my hands free. So in other words, my disease-ridden “healer” couldn’t even use a basic healing spell on himself without disarming in the middle of a crowd of monsters.  I decided at that point that he actually deserved to die, and I left him to the care of the black molds.

My fighter fared substantially better. At first. But by the time I reached the second town, the quests required me to take down monsters way beyond my poor fighter’s ability to kill. I took a job to kill a sentinel plant, which looks like a giant spiky corn stalk. I figured I would walk in with my sword and walk out with creamed corn, but no: instead, the corn creamed me. I just kept swinging and swinging and missing and missing. (How does a corn stalk dodge a sword?) And then I was dead.

There is a continuum in game battle systems between luck and skill, randomness and determinism. Chess is 100% deterministic, the outcome of a match 100% decided by player skill. Games like Fire Emblem add randomness into the equation, turning the proceedings into a game of risk management. There can be a lot of strategy in risk management. But there have to be enough mechanisms under player control to stack the odds in his/her favor.

Most games with randomized hit/miss/damage accomplish this feat by giving the player a party to control. Eschalon’s cousins Baldur’s Gate and Arcanum do this. Avernum does it too. You have different characters with different abilities, and smart positioning and use of their respective strengths will usually triumph over bad luck.

Eschalon does not have this going for it. You are one character. Tactics consist primarily of using different combat stances and deciding when to use potions or run away. But for the most part, whatever your character’s hit percentage is, that’s it. You’re stuck with that and whatever the dice give you. And unfortunately, the way the game is balanced, characters spend so much time missing, they should be on the back of a milk carton.

I just know people are going to show up here and comment that I suck at combat in Eschalon. I mean, okay, I did die over and over again. But there’s nothing to suck at. Oh, sure, maybe I could have given my character a bow to take ranged potshots with. But that would have been a minimum of three skill points I’d need to take away from my sword skill, and even with me pouring all of my offensive skill points into swords, I could barely hit anything for the first 10 hours of the game. It would have just been me accidentally hitting cows and passerby with arrows, then drawing my sword in time to start a fresh batch of missing everything I swung at.

Wizards don’t get off easy, either. Their spells always hit, which is a godsend, but the early spells don’t deal much damage unless you jack up their level (and associated mana cost). And once enemies close the distance with a wizard, it’s time for the bookie to pack up and go home, because that fight is over with. Absolutely ensuring that wizards die constantly is the fact that it is nearly impossible to use hit-and-run tactics in Eschalon. This isn’t Fallout, where your move distance is determined by your character’s speed. For every space you move, enemies move one space. You can jack your character’s speed up to 30, and this will still hold true. (I checked.) So enemies will always maintain distance with you when you run away, unless you manage to interpose some obstacles to mess with the game’s pathfinding AI.

I finally managed a playable character with my second fighter, a blunt weapon user named Bash-ette. I rolled as close to straight 14s as I could get, then poured every single point I could into two stats and two skills: Strength and Dexterity, Blunt Weapons and Light Armor. I found and completed every single side quest I could in the initial area, leveling up and pumping all of my new points into those four skills and stats. I was level 6 by the time I made it to Everdale. I was just barely able to survive the quests in that area.

I now believe that I could create a non-combat-centric character and survive–maybe even do well. But it took about 20 hours of play time for me to figure out how that could possibly work (hint: run away from everything, save up your money, and try to get into Port Kuudad so you can buy combat training and complete all those quests you skipped from earlier). This will appeal to some people: this is a game that rewards patience and repeated playthroughs. This will turn off others: it takes a long time to reach a level of familiarity with the game world that permits even a single successful playthrough.

The verdict: 4/5. Eschalon Book II is enthusiastically recommended for patient players who don’t mind dying all the time while they figure out how to survive in the game, and cautiously recommended for others who don’t mind playing on easy.

Rather than simply post a rant, however, I decided to put the question to a handful of other indie RPG developers:

Some designers have demonized narrative as an inherently limiting and unnecessary distraction from the emergent storytelling arising out of pure gameplay. Why have narrative in games?

As you might expect, I received a variety of interesting and thoughtful responses:

Jeff Vogel: Someone is demonizing narrative? Really? That seems odd.

Emergent gameplay is great, if you can get it. It is a very difficult thing to do. But storytelling, whatever the medium, is one of the oldest and most fundamental human activities. Human brains are naturally receptive to telling and being told stories. As long as that is true, people will use games to tell stories.

Thomas Riegsecker: Narrative is certainly not required for all games, and in some cases in can be unnecessary baggage for the player. When it comes to role-playing games, one world think that a strong narrative is an absolute requirement. However, countless variations of Rogue shows that you can have a marvelous role-playing experience with little more than a single sentence explaining the goal. Likewise, many successful mainstream RPGs rely on nothing more than the overused plot of “Kill the powerful bad guy”, and any narrative in between the start and end of the game is really unnecessary.

However, narrative can be exceptionally rewarding as well. It can turn a generic role-playing game into a unforgettable one if done correctly. Certainly, when someone fondly remembers an RPG that they enjoyed playing years ago, it is often the story they remember and not the hours of level grinding and monster killing. Likewise, narration can guide the player through a seemingly immense world, preventing that unwelcome feeling of “I don’t know what I should be doing now”. Overall, it really is a player preference. As a developer, I need to find that balance between not enough narrative and too much narrative that will give a rewarding role-playing experience to as many potential customers as possible.

Amanda Fitch: I don’t think narrative is limiting and unnecessary, but if it is presented in manner which takes the player out of the game, then yes, it isn’t any fun.

Jay Barnson: I think I may be one of those demonizers. Sorry ’bout that. Didn’t mean to give any more ammunition to the haters.

Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.

Nevertheless, I love a good story in games. It’s a big part of why I’m such a fan of RPGs – I love the stories. The human brain is hard-wired to tune into stories. And I think even a mediocre story is more fun when you get to live it through a game. So in spite interactivity and narrative being something of a shotgun marriage, it works. The big question is how to make it work better. The almost universal approach today is to reach some compromise between the two, and keep trying to find a happier medium that works best for each game. Another, much more challenging approach, would be to rig the game mechanics to encourage adherence to more dramatic narrative formulas. Score bonus points for making dramatically interesting mistakes or something. And interactively build the narrative around player actions. We see glimmers of that in the Left 4 Dead series, where the AI engine seems to spawn enemies more based on the rhythm of the game than on location.

It’s not an easy blend. Narrative and gameplay are always going to have contradictory goals and tend to inhibit each other. But I also feel that the blend of contradictory elements is often greater than a sum of its parts.

[EDIT: We have a late entry! Added below.]

Vince D. Weller: Narrative is a good feature. I doubt that there are many people who’d tell you that they don’t like a good story in their games, so the problem isn’t that narrative is some kinda outdated thing of the past that gets in the way of emergent gameplay (I’ve yet to see a game that actually delivers it, but that’s a different story), but that like any other feature it can suck for one reason or the other. A story can be bad. A story can be uninspiring. A story can fail to grab the player and make him care (Alpha Protocol). A story can suffocate the player (Witcher, many Bioware games). Much like anything else, good story-telling is a talent. Not everyone can tell a good story, especially in a video game format. If you can’t, then it’s better to skip the narrative and focus on features that can replace it, like the sandbox elements, for example. If you can, then it won’t take much effort to make the story flexible enough to support decision-making and it would enhance your game. Simple as that.

As for narrative being limiting when it comes to emergent gameplay, I disagree. There are many ways to craft a story that doesn’t force the player to move along a pre-determined and very narrow path, but lets the player make decisions and craft his or her own story within the story arc. I can tell you what these ways are, but it’s boring, so let me throw stones at Jay instead:

“Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.”

The amount of drama depends entirely on the story-teller and the paths he creates for the player. If there is a path that can be described as the optimal path to victory, then yes, it’s boring and uninspiring, but only because the story-teller has failed. That’s what consequences of your actions are for. By applying consequences to the hero’s actions you can infuse the story with as much drama as you need and make the “optimal path to victory” the “hero does in the end” path, should you so desire, or “the hero fucks everything up, so things now are way worse than before, so thanks a lot, you fucking douchebag” path, not to mention the much desired “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” path where the seemingly optimal, no-brainer options lead to the hero slowly become the villain, without even realizing it. I assume that the moment when the player realizes what his hero has become would be quite precious.

So, the moral of this story is that choices without consequences don’t mean much and it’s the consequences that are the link between the traditional storytelling and emergent gameplay.

Rampant Coyote: There are a lot of modern RPGs being released on PC and consoles (not to mention MMORPGs) that all promise evolved, superior gameplay – but apparently there’s enough of an underserved “niche” out there to have made it worthwhile for you to continue on with the Eschalon series. What do games like the Eschalon series have to offer a gamer in a world full of games like Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, and World of Warcraft?

Thomas Riegsecker: World of Warcraft is awesome in so many ways, and it has altered the landscape of gaming forever. But to me, when I enter that game, I feel as though I am just one of a million other would-be-heroes. Everyone there wants to be the best, the most respected, the one with the coolest mounts and weapons and spells. I don’t find that competition enjoyable. Now in Eschalon, you are the hero. There is no one else there to compete with. Every dungeon you come across if fresh to your eyes- it is pristine and untouched, waiting for you to unlock its secrets. No one else has come before you to raid it and leave their garbage behind.

This sense of “this world was made just for you” is what I love about single-player RPGs.

Check out the full interview here.