Eschalon: Book I

I haven’t given it a run yet (no mirrors for the demo), but by all accounts it’s a lot like Ultima 7. Vast, rewarded exploration and a lot of nice touches (like getting diseased from searching corpses).

There’s actually not that many skills. Like, less than twenty counting the weapons and armor skills (light, heavy; swords, axes)

I’ll have to check this one out.

Also: Do not taunt Tiger Sauce.

Hehe it’s not like it’s as much as a full-price PC game. I’m quite surprised at the reaction to the price.

Sure it’s not as much as a new full-price PC game, but considering that graphically it looks like something from ten years ago, I don’t think it has much right throwing around that kind of price tag. Not that graphics are all that important, mind you, but if I’m going to buy more of the same, I at least want it to look pretty.

yeah I would have considered paying that much 10 years ago… the game doesnt look that great. And if I want a game like that theres a bunch on gametap already & thats only 10 a month.

On a side note, I have to wonder about the in-game implications of being Agnostic in that game…

“It cannot be neither proven nor disproven that I have 4th level cleric spells.”

This looks interesting, grabbing the demo now.

Also, does anybody know of any games similar to this (and preferably free >.>) with a level/campaign editor to make new levels and send to friends? Thanks in advance.

“Generic Fantasy Syndrome”

That’s part of the reason I like Styrateg way more than it probably deserves. It’s a medieval fantasy game that takes place in a setting that actually resembles Europe in the dark ages instead of the “Samurai Tolkien” setting that half cRPGs seem to take place in, and “Blade Runner Tolkien” that the other half do.

I googled “Samurai Tolkien” and I still have no idea what it means.

Skyleak, “earths possible futures” is pretty darned broad there.

Really though, it’s not that hard to develop an alternate world that is non “generic fantast”

step 1 – NO ELVES, DWARVES, OR ORCS!

step 2 – create a non bipedal sentient race.

step 3 – create an insect sentient race, preferably something non playable, maybe a hive mind or alternative consciousness.

step 4 – No Clerics, No Wizards. If you’re going to include druids call them naturalists, try to downplay their ‘magic’

step 5 – Make everyone wear pointy shoes.

step 6 – drastically change the availability of raw materials, and the avilable biome. Extrapolate the effects of this on technology and the knock on effect to culture.

step 7 – profit

I’m not really sure what is wrong with the genre.. Dwarf fortress is pretty awesome and it doesn’t really divert from the standard cliche tolkein dwarf dwarf. I haven’t tried this game yet so I’m not defending it, I’m just saying the standard fantasy setting can still make for some great games.

As the official tigsource administrator, I’m banning you for making your opinions known, Lailoken.

An RPG where you play a giant praying mantis would be pretty rad.

Or what about an RPG where you play something that other people can ride on? (Like a GIANT FRIGGIN’ PRAYING MANTIS.)

You start off by carrying peasants from their houses to the local tavern, but as you gain more experience, you have more important people riding you. At the end of the game, the king himself rides you into battle against the dark lord (or whatever).

IT’S A SOLID GOLD IDEA.

Hmm, I was waiting for a new crpg with a fantasy setting so maybe that’s why I’m not bothered by the setting. New settings are great and all, but sometimes you just want to play in the comfort zone where you know what’s what.

Derek:

That’s actually a great idea! Talk about giving the “errand boy quests” some purpose. “Hello young adventurer, could you please carry me to the forest so I can fetch my ladder that I lost? It’s a great ladder, I really miss it.” Somewhat like a Crazy Taxi RPG :)

Or… You could make a puzzle game out of it. Imagine a dungeon with lots of traps and stuff, and you need to transport a party of adventurers through the dungeon. The adventurers will act on their own, using some kind of AI, but your job is to “pick them up” and move them between rooms, and maybe to locations they can’t reach themselves (such as jumping over shafts). Actually… I’m gonna make a game like this one day!

Anyway, on topic: I played the game. I think it’s “ok” and a good job for an indie company. There were some annoying things about the GUI, but I got used to it. The story is blah (so far), and the monsters and items are uninspiring.

I got stuck in the first dungeon, though. There are two green slimey monsters in my path, which appears unkillable by my PC. Could somebody give me a hint, please? :)

“For starters, adding in gimmicky sentient races has been ruining fantasy for a long time now (especially when they’re just a human body with an animal head tacked on). Besides, when it comes down to it, we don’t know what would motivate a sentient insect (or whatever). We can guess, but they’ll ultimately just end up acting like humans anyway – especially if they’re PCs, because no-one would really want to play a character whose motivations they can’t understand; and typical ant/termite/bee activities would quickly degenerate into fedex quests anyway (‘bring grain of sand.’ ‘Collect and regurgitate leaf’). If they’re NPCs, the player has to be able to communicate with them, which in turn means they can’t really be very ‘alien.’ Again, if the player can’t understand ‘em, they can’t sympathise; if the player can’t sympathise, they might as well be those slime puddles in the dungeon if they’re hostile, or a peaceful piece of ambient wildlife.”

I don’t think you’re using your imagination enough. There are a lot of strawmen in your argument. Non-human sentient races shouldn’t ruin fantasy if it’s done correctly; a sentient race based on evolved ants needn’t require that all activities boil down to being a worker ant. Your point about them being NPCs is only valid if the player is human – and the whole point of fantasy is that you can make things up, there’s no reason why the player wouldn’t be able to communicate with other races or be allowed to by some means. Communicating with aliens doesn’t make them non-alien, it just makes them less alien. Alien just means unknown. If there’s no reason the player can’t communicate with other races (and there isn’t, provided you can weave it into the world / story well, which it sounds like you personally can’t imagine), then the rest of your points about them being slimes are irrelevant.

Forgive the text wall.

@ haowan: I think you’ve missed the point. Its not really relevant whether the PC is human or not. Yes, you can communicate with anything that can talk (or has telepathic powers etc.), but can you understand them? And if you can’t understand them, are they good characters? Hardly. If any given NPC doesn’t have fleshed out motivations that the player can discern, then all they’re really going to be good for is handing out quests, selling the PCs weapons or providing a bad guy – like the Myrmidex in The Savage Empire.
Take Solaris (I’ll use a sci-fi example, since the aliens in that genre have the capacity to be far more interesting than fantasy’s ‘demihumans,’ but usually aren’t). The creature there is far more convincing BECAUSE the humans can’t understand what the hell its doing. Lem never bothers to ascribe any motivation to the alien when it creates the manifestations. If we understood why, after all, then the alien is on the fast track to being anthropomorphised, and when that happens you’ve got a big human blob who just happens to be from a weird culture (and the entire point of the book – pointing out ‘the limits of human understanding,’ as Peter Nicholls puts it – would be undermined). You say that ‘alien just means unknown,’ but unknown does not mean knowable. Nor should it, so far as I’m concerned.

My point in that regard is, in short, if the player can comprehend something, and communicate EFFECTIVELY (I probably should have put it that way earlier) then what you have is not an alien being, but a human with extra arms and perhaps a poisonous bite attack. Not to mention another sentient race in a genre that’s already cluttered with them – wouldn’t it make better sense just to make them a different human culture with a prediliction for using poison? That way no-one has to resort to any ‘magically created being’ explanations as to how exactly they evolved, especially if they appear in concert with humans or other traditional fantasy races.

Look – I’m not saying there’s no place in fantasy for this sort of thing. But let’s be honest. The best fantasy works of the past one hundred years or so have been centred around human or human-esque protagonists, and feature predominantly human characters and enemies. I’m talking Howard, Vance, Wolfe, Leiber, Peake, Ashton Smith, Moorcock, and even (although I hate to admit it) Tolkien. Several of those goons wrote on thoroughly bizarre societies and places; but the basic, human, psychology of the characters made them sympathetic, and prevents the reader from scratching their head too much (unless you’re reading Smith without a dictionary to hand, but that’s a wholly different thing).

In other words, I’m not questioning the capacity of a PC to learn new languages or whatever. I just don’t think that dumping in a sort of creature that’s uncommon to the fantasy genre is any real way to get away from creating a cliched world. I also dislike the fact that a lot of writers ascribe human motivations to alien beings, since I think it detracts from their ‘alien-ness,’ for lack of a better term. I prefer my sci-fi alien free, and my fantasy without TOO many extra sentient races (have you read any China Mieville? The poster child for world over-population. I mean, honestly, cactus people?!).

If we accept that a genuinely alien species may not be comprehensible by humanity, then you have to admit that, however many limbs the protagonist has, you can’t get away from mankind in fantasy because the writer is going to be telling a fundamentally human story.
And that’s a pithy (or twee? You decide) enough point for me to finish on, I think. Thanks for reading.
Oh, I’ll include my email if you (or anyone else) would like to continue this discussion, since we’re pretty off topic right now.

Piffle, Lord Rocket, you lack imagination. You can certainly create a non-human race in a fantasy realm that’s more than just humans with pointy ears. Here’s an idea off the top of my head and if any indie developers here want to run with it, gawd bless ya!

Deep under the earth a hive of sentient insects live, unconcerned with matters of the surface. But lately more and more humans have been climbing deep into caves and attacking outposts of your hive with fire and magic. The queen wants to know the source of these attacks so she creates a small brood of mimics that can take the shape and memory of any human who the hive has properly digested. The reason the queen only creates a small brood is because she needs the majority of her nutrients to protect against the predation of rival queens.

Your character would proceed to the overworld, have skills, use weapons, and go on worldly quests. Secretly this character would have hidden insect abilities like their jaw would split in half into deadly mandibles or could climb walls like an ant but the queen doesn’t allow you to use these in public.

Save points would be hidden holes where you could crawl back down to an outpost of the hive and secret your memories for the use of the whole brood. If you die, an identical brood member with all your last secreted skills and memories crawls out, devours your corpse, and takes your equipment.

And while you would seem like a traveling adventurer, your loyalty lies utterly with the queen without any sense of morality or individuality. So say the local king sends you to save the princess who has been kidnapped and offered as a sacrifice to a dragon. You could succeed in saving the princess and she would throw her arms around you and swear her undying love for you, but the hive queen would order you to bring her to the hive to be digested and you would take her to a save hole where skttering workers would carry her screaming into the depths.

Then next chapter you would play a mimic of the princess being escorted by the adventurer mimic back to her grateful father to gather information for the queen from a better position. Say the real princess was an enchantress of some skill, the mimic would have some of that magic ability in addition to the swordplay skills the brood learned from the previous adventurer. You would upgrade human skills only by digesting a human with a higher skill level than the brood presently possesses. As you complete objectives, the queen would reward your brood by granting them nutrients that could be spent on improving your insect abilities or buying new ones.

And in the end, when the mystery is solved and the hive is saved, your brood returns to the depths and has the honor of having their brains eaten by the queen herself while next generation’s larvae devour your remains.

There, perfectly playable fantasy setting with genuinely inhuman PCs.

Actually, screw it. After finals are done I’m going to try to make this game myself. What’s the fastest engine for making cRPGs these days? Gamemaker? I only intend for this to be a linear RPG so a final-fantasy-esque engine would be sufficient, though something that I could put a better combat system into wouldn’t hurt.

I am not a programmer at all, save for some Apple Basic I learned back in grade school. If you’re a decent programmer and want to collaborate on this idea, I’m game.

By fall? Maybe I should just turn this idea into a short story or something.

“The best fantasy works of the past one hundred years or so have been centred around human or human-esque protagonists, and feature predominantly human characters and enemies”

Vernor Vinge has done some interesting work in developing non-human characters so they aren’t just people with extra arms, but are instead fundamentally alien in some way.

I must have been spoiled by that Gold Box “Unlimited Adventures” back in the day and figured the web would be filthy with easy-to-use RPG engines these days.

Oh, and there’s also Legendary Tales, if you’re more into writing
http://www.legendarytales.com/ (check downloads)
But I have some doubts about engine’s flexibility…