Eschalon: Book II Question of the Week

The 4th question of the week is up on the Eschalon forum and deals, amongst other things, with walking speed.

[Saxon1974] Do you have an estimated gameplay hours for this one? I think I heard it would be much larger than book I which I think was about 30 hours, so Im guessing it will be longer than that. Is the walking speed being changed at all? (I didn’t have a problem with it but I know alot of people wanted to be able to walk faster).
[Unclever title] You mentioned three major regions for Book II, a temperate region, arctic region, and a volcanic region. About how large are these regions in comparison to the familiar Thaermore? In adddition, about how long can we expect this game to be? (ballpark estimate if necessary).

Book II will be longer than Book I in terms of more quests and areas to explore. But like Book I, Book II’s length is largely going to be determined by how much extra stuff you do. It would be impossible to say how much time will be required since everyone plays at different speeds, but we would like to provide a 40-hour experience for the average player. In comparison, Book I was a 20-25 hour game for most people.

The walking speed has improved by about 20%, so your character does walk with a quicker pace than in Book I.

Each of the 3 regions in the game will roughly be the size of Thaermore (perhaps a bit smaller). But two of the areas (Arctic and Volcanic) are less populated than the temperate zone, so players can expect larger expanses of “wilderness” (i.e. areas that are explorable but not necessarily critical to the main storyline).