What is a retro-RPG? It is not, as one game industry bigwig told me with a condescending smirk several years ago, soon after leaving his last Important Administrative Position in food production, (A game that looks bad.) He was simply doing what VPs have done since time immemorial, accepting superficial talking points of their new corporate culture as the divine truth. If a game hasn’t got the latest graphics, as this version of that truth goes, it won’t sell, and of course it won’t get the latest graphics if the developers haven’t got corporate patronage. So what the bigwig in question was really saying, is that (A retro-RPG is a game that doesn’t have the latest graphics, because they haven’t got the backing of a corporation like the one that hired me, which is the only kind of game creator that matters. And the only reason I’m speaking to you right now is because my fellow VPs won’t let me into the conference room since I smell bad.)
Many of us who play retro-RPGs would add that graphics don’t tell the whole story, and that a lot depends on the individual game. Planescape: Torment offers arguably the most well-developed and thoughtful plot and party NPCs of any RPG ever made. Ultima VII remains unrivalled for player interactivity with a huge, detailed environment. Betrayal at Krondor had a unique combat system, a world that changed over time, and in its traps and riddles the best system of non-physical game puzzles ever made. There’s no reason to belittle these titles, or to scorn playing them years later. What they offer is evergreen.
Then, there is a class of retro-RPGs that don’t stand out, but make for good playing sessions, nonetheless. As a group, they present the advantages of inexpensive cost, pain-free installation, and low memory guzzling. Among these, Eschalon: Book I wears its retro-styling with pride.
Starting Out
The game plays in 800 x 600, and launches in windowed or fullscreen mode. You start out by selecting one of five areas of origin, belief systems, and classes. Your origin gives you bonuses to one or more of the eight basic game stats; beliefs trade off spells or specials for disadvantages; and classes.? Classes actually mean very little in the game. Fighters get the Swords skill, while Rangers receive the Bows skill. This means that classes are only mildly differentiated, in a game which puts a premium on the development of stats and 24 skills. I don’t have a problem with this, but as so often happens in such games Divine Divinity comes to mind the seeming openness of personal development actually conceals a very small number of effective paths to success. While there are various ways to open chests and get to one’s tactical goals, professions as such lack the colorful individuality that aid player-defined replayability in titles like Baldur’s Gate II.
As a result, rogues receive no bonus to backstabbing, which considerably weakens the attractions of the class. As for magick users (the term for mages), their spell damage simply doesn’t keep pace with the increase in enemy power as the game progresses. Your best bet is to become a melee fighter specializing in a single weapon type, perhaps with sidelines in archery and alchemy: the former to kill things at a distance, the latter to create useful potions (with a nice selection, here) and enchantments.
Once past that point, you’re sent out into the world, armed, and not exactly very dangerous. You’ve possibly got a spell or two, perhaps a weapon hopefully a good starting one, maybe not and a few basic pieces of equipment. Your best bet is to take your gold and supplies to the nearest town.
Out to the World
No 3D realtime graphics, here, but who cares? Eschalon: Book I uses isometric views and representative 2D object visuals that are detailed, realistically stylized, and pleasing. Animations are good. Little touches, like the differences in strength and color of path lighting based on the method the player character uses (a torch, lantern, or one of a couple of spells), show the quality of the product. (Though I found the dungeons too dark, regardless. Thomas Riegsecker, who runs Basilisk Games, tells me that only 1 out of 10 beta testers reported this, but that they’re working on a longterm solution.) Sound is handled effectively to indicate nearby activity. Dialog overlay screens are attractively styled, and adorned with NPC faces. Mousing over your inventory screen brings up appropriate information about each item you’ve got. The music and sound effects are pleasant if not memorable, and the variety of artwork keeps the game graphically fresh and appealing.
When you enter cities, too, each shop is individually designed, and looks good. My only gripe on this score concerns the displayed content in the gameworld’s shops, which is just for show. This is an area where I think Divine Divinity’s developers had the right idea: create a series of stackable, small objects, and use them in such a way that the player can see them, and interact with them. Note that ring sitting on a countertop? If you click on it, you should be able to pick it up, and it should vanish from view. There are too many objects on view in Eschalon: Book I that don’t exist, whatever your eyes may tell you, alongside others that do.
Once you talk to a merchant you can see their true inventories, which are nicely stocked, if not overwhelming in their variety of goods. Prices are high, twice those that merchants will pay for items, but that’s to be expected. You can always improve your Mercantile skill to lower the cost, and/or find a wearable that gives you a bonus in it. Alchemy, too, plays into this system. At low levels, ingredients are more expensive to purchase from a magic shop than finished potions, but as you raise your Alchemy skill, the potions you produce increase in quality. Finally, you’re able to sell back potions you make at a good price advantage over the cost of their ingredients, but by then, the items you want to buy are more expensive. You still can’t afford them outright, and the cash your potions bring in need to be weighed against the value they provide against foes. This offers tradeoffs as there should be in a well-balanced game.
Kudos to the Eschalon: Book I team, as well, for creating a convincingly non-linear RPG that mixes a direct main plot with a goodly number of side quests, and avoids ramping the difficulty up too much, too quickly, if you decide to take The Grand Tour, instead. Not that you won’t be killed easily if you travel too far away, at least if you try and fight or box yourself into a corner. I don’t like the too restrictive pathways through the linked map sections, but at least there’s a great deal of territory to explore. It’s worth exploring, too, because Basilisk has created plenty of mini-encounter spots, where minor collections of monsters hang around a body or treasure chest. Sometimes their proximity is well-motivated, but at other times it feels rote, with the monsters obviously placed to furnish the obligatory challenge.
Another annoyance is the burden of long distance travel in the game. You spend a lot of your daytime hours the only period when I, at least, could actually see much of what was going on wandering to and from quest sites, to town shops, and back. The presence of teleportal locations help somewhat, but they were far too few. And invariably, when I left a spot in a complex, winding dungeon, it was difficult to remember exactly my way back, or important features along the way that I wanted to recall, later. The ability to notate via the automap function would have greatly assisted this.
The Writing
This is the area in which Eschalon: Book I does worst. Its plot is both hackneyed and unimaginatively handled. Overused plots can at times be disguised by good characterization, but the NPC comments you read in the game are pedestrian, if competent. The gameworld itself is largely unchanging, so NPCs have nothing new to add once you’ve exhausted their initial repertoire of comments and worked through their quests. A more important issue is the dialog trees, which are frankly ridiculous. You know the kind:
(Hello, hero! Will you help me find something valuable?)
1) Sure, I’ll help you. I’m a hero!
2) No way. I don’t want your stinkin’ experience points.
3) Not a chance! You’re 10 levels above me and you sell stuff I need, but I’m going to commit suicide by trying to kill you, anyway!
My phrasing is parodistic, and typical of the way dialog trees are handled in many RPGs. It’s unfortunately accurate here, too. There is no attempt made to create reasonable dialog choices. You can accept quests which is what you bought the game for anyway, remember? or reject them, or try to kill an NPC that assists and rewards you. I find this inexplicable in an RPG that shows so much effort placed into building a proper visual roleplaying atmosphere. Reasonable dialog trees should have been created that offered complex, hidden loops, checks to NPC attitude, and NPC comments on items or experiences the player had been through to foster a sense of involvement. Or at the very least, these rotten dialog branches should have been removed, and quests simply given without additional embarrassment.
Fighting the Good Fight
Combat in Eschalon: Book I is simple, straightforward, and effective. There are no GURPS-style attacks on individual body parts, or scaled attacks that bring with them various chances of accuracy, damage, and possible defense. You use a weapon (one of two you can keep ready and switch between with a click), and you’re told if your attack succeeded, or failed. If it did damage, you find out how much. I don’t have any problem with this simplicity, which was the standard back in the days of third person, turn-based RPGs (always allowing for a few exceptions, like Origin Systems’ clumsy but fascinating Knights of Legend). Especially as Basilisk has placed some sneakily effective strategic elements that can influence battle such as the occasional portcullis that can be sent crashing down on the bodies of your enemies, or powerful, friendly NPCs that you can lure attackers back to. Too bad there aren’t more, because each outside battle area and every dungeon eventually becomes monotonous. Too many attacks are simple, direct combat situations with one type of enemy, in very similar surroundings. You end up killing two, three or four of that creature, sleeping to regain lost health and mana, killing again, and sleeping again, with few physical puzzles and none that require thought.
Enemies are well chosen and varied throughout the game, but exhibit only moderately effective AI. Some will move back and forth one square on the other side of a fence while you fill them full of arrows, until they die. Archers don’t scamper away when you approach them with a melee weapon drawn. There are no signs of enemies supporting one another with spells, as happened to such striking effect in Wizardry 8. Each dungeon is logically and cleverly designed according to a specific purpose, with various areas that make sense in context: so you won’t expect to find a library in an ordinary mine. All dungeons are also single level, but the fixed rewards you find (as opposed to the randomized ones) are not out of keeping with what you might figure on acquiring, given the level of difficulty.
You kill; they die. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, if you do it right. And if something dies, depending on the type of creature, you may find items left behind. The selection of items on corpses in Eschalon: Book I is appropriate. I’ve yet to encounter any flying insects carrying about magic scrolls ,as they did years ago in a deservedly bashed title, Might and Magic IX. On the other hand, some players may raise an eyebrow or two over the great disparity in quantity and quality of items found on many corpses and in chests. Typically, the number of goodies can range between none and four, and between a container that’s empty and one filled with items whose worth totals 1500 coins or more. I have seen no evidence that there is any factor balancing out what a character finds over time. This poor treasure distribution begins with character generation, so I’ve been left with newly created PCs that have ranged from exceptionally poor and quickly dead to those who were comfortably flush, and could afford healing and magical potions.
This is the way Divine Divinity operates, with a broad disparity of item content in goody containers. I don’t say it’s wrong, but I wish Basilisk had offered players an element of control at game start on the degree of variance, both in numbers and value of what you find. As it is, I’m sure that quite a few people will become annoyed after a series of unsatisfactory hauls, and fall into the easy habit of saving and rechecking chests/corpses to get a better deal. It’s only natural even though it’s very anti-roleplaying, too.
Conclusions
One other factor needs to be considered, here. Eschalon: Book I is not the product of even a moderately small company, but essentially due to the efforts of one person. As such, my numerous criticisms above need to be considered in light of what is possible under such circumstances. It doesn’t make the writing in the game any better, but it does make what has been accomplished in graphics and game flow much more impressive, in my opinion.
In any case, I like Eschalon: Book I. Although at times it comes across as sketchy in content, there’s a good deal to enjoy: the artwork, the low resource requirements, the relatively large, open field for gameplay. Combat is handled well, challenges increase gradually but sensibly if you go the fighter route and remain cautious in travel, and dungeons are appropriately varied. If it doesn’t require a great deal of thought, that only makes it more of a casual game than some other RPGs, the kind of thing you can pick up for a few minutes to an hour, then put away and play again a day or a week later. It isn’t compelling, urging you to see what new challenge or brilliantly devised quest lies around the next corner. But it is fun. And that means a good deal.
