Eschalon: Book I reviews

Hi there, first of all, I like to play this game. The developers took their time for a good story with lots of small adventures on the side which all make sense more or less. Here are my critics which were maybe already dealt with in Book II and III. Maybe it´s still helpful for new players. - The tutorial is missing and lots of explanations, hints and the like. This leads to things like me buying and wearing light armor (while having the heavy armor skill) and decreasing effectivly my armor rating which really does not make sense in any way. Took me some fights and wasting of precious coin to realize that. The same goes for the character creation where you can choose between boons without knowing anything about their impact (i. e. choosing "druidic": How do I know if more combats are in the wilderness or underground? How shall I estimate if it´s a good idea to choose this religion? The same goes for blessing/curses. How shall I estimate if its worth taking the risk´to be more vulnerable to curses?). As a beginner you are forced to make a more or less blind decision. - the "Pick locks" system leads (because of the price of 30 Gold per Lock Pick and long travel times to merchants) to a "save and restore" way of dealing with locks (Heh, don´t tell me that you did not do that, too). The developers should have anticipated that and implemented another system - if you don´t focus maximum on combat (or maybe even if you do, I don´t know) you easily end up in camping after every second fight to restore your HP. But since it takes quite some time to regain the HP you will encounter more enemies during resting which is really frustrating. I have delayed playing more than once because of that. It´s boring and annoying to camp and/or run away from monsters all the time. - I like it that enemies are not dropping things all the time ( like in many games when wild animals dropping gold and stuff) but humanoid enemies should definitly drop a bit more stuff just to be realistic. It´s just makes no sense killing an armed goblin without him dropping not a single gold coin of value. - speaking of realism: There are barrels in the wilderness containing gold coins and stuff... That´s just stupid imho. There should be an easy other way to provide players with rewards (like corpses, a cache in a tree or in the ground or whatever) - monsters can kill npc´s! Those who gives adventures or own shops! You really need to notify players about that up front! Loosing an npc to a monster could have a serious impact on the game don´t you think? - automap is not working without having the skill cartography. I like that idea but I want to be notified about that not only in the description of the skill. It´s just too important imho. - you can be killed by stepping on a thornbush... come on... who´s idea was that? I wanna kill him (by throwing him in a bush with thorns...) - there is no hint that tells me that I can smash things like barrels, chests and the like. And there is no hint either that in doing that I could destroy the used weapons. Again: The game provides esspecially n the beginning way to little coin and a player should get notified about those things up front. Still: I like and recommend this game. Edit: Well, I cant say that this game is not good for some real frustrations. The idea of implementing curses and diseases that need to be cured with effort or big money, the fact that acid from traps or animals can destroy your armor and weapons brings the player one more time to the point of just reloading instead of playing it out. Loosing a weapon worth 1000 gold or running around in a dungeon cursed or diseases is just way too frustrating. Thats a big thumbs down for this game. When you just refixed your equipment and made some changes to the hotkeys of spells and did not save and then run into a trap that destroys the weapon you just bought you just want to kill somebody. Cheers and have fun, Kribskraps