Eschalon: Book II Interview

RPGWatch was able to sit down with Basilisk Games’ Thomas Riegsecker and quiz the indie RPG developer about the next installment in the Eschalon series.

RPGWatch: There were some lengthy discussions about (balance) in Book 1 both between various skills and the common archetypes, such as heavy fighters vs mages and so on. I’m not sure a consensus was reached but my own opinion is that a (pure) build will find the game harder than a fighter/mage (every fighter has a mana pool sitting there, after all). I suspect you don’t mind a little min-maxing but how are you approaching balance in Book II?

Thomas Riegsecker: Well, this is a tough call. Ultimately we want players to have as few limitations as possible when developing their characters. Perhaps you are right that pure builds are more difficult to play than mixed builds, but nowhere in the history of fantasy gaming has it ever been mandated that a pure Mage or Thief should be easy for everyone to play, except perhaps in the past 10 years when RPGs have gone mainstream and developers have strived to make every class accessible to every player. Doesn’t anyone else remember how much of a pain-in-the-ass it was to play a straight Magic User in Dungeons & Dragons, especially during levels 1-5? When you chose to play a Magic User, you accepted this challenge.

Just by the very definition, a pure-class build lacks skills that make a mixed build easier to play. Most seasoned role-players understand these limitations and play their character accordingly. In my opinion this is one of the more favourable aspects of Eschalon- different character builds favour different play styles. No two players or character builds will get the exact same experience.

As it is, despite a few minor balance issues with skill and magic progression, most players have expressed satisfaction with the general balance of Book I (based on a poll we ran a few weeks after release) so we are not planning to make sweeping changes to the system for Book II. We will of course address these skill and magic issues discovered since Book I’s release, and we are also making the end-game areas more difficult because there was clearly a more unified consensus that the final 1/4 of the game was a bit too easy.