Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

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ShadowDragon8685
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Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

I'll preface this by saying that I came into this game with no intention of playing 'fair'. I do this with pretty much every non-multiplayer RPG (or indeed, any game) I play.

There's lots of ways to cheat in a game like this - the most obvious being save-scumming, or simply saving before anything where random chance or decision-making is likely to play a factor, and reloading the save if you get an undesirable result.

I was forced to resort to savescumming a few times early-on, when I was being stymied and frustrated beyond belief by the fact that, despite having optimized my character in every way imaginable, and having cheated to do so, for being a rogue in the style of Garret from the Thief series (to the point I named my character Garret), I found myself out of lockpicks on the very first door I tried to open.

By the time I'd slogged through the first dungeon, to get the mithril bar (and I really wanted to kill gunther for building a gigantic death-trap maze behind his wine cellar,) it was clear to me that I wasn't going to enjoy Eschalon without injecting in massive amounts of cheat. So I did.


Personally, when I cheat, I find it simplest and easiest to use a nifty program called ArtMoney SE to find important locations in memory - such as experience points, gold, skill points or attribute points - and edit them to higher values. By having high enough stats and skill points to succeed more or less at everything, I never wound up frustrated.


Some might yell at me for 'taking the challenge out of it'. I'll preempt that by addressing this concern now:

It is my experience, and opinion, that in a good game, the player should never be likely to experience defeat if they are giving an honest attempt at it. The illusion of risk should be the benchmark the game shoots for, not actual risk.

Think about it this way; if you have a game, and you've done everything 'right', and you still have a chance greater than two thirds of failure in the task, then what you're doing is not called playing, it's called gambling.

I don't like gambling. I don't see much of a purpose to it.

So, in my experience, the best games are the one wherein you feel just enough tension that you might fail to make victory sweet, but without enough actual likelyhood of failure to make it anything but a truely freak occurance, such as the random number god giving you a prolonged string of hatred, and your smiling upon your enemies. Hence, why I use ArtMoney SE to make sure that any failure would be a ridiculously freak occurance.


What about you guys? Do you cheat, and how?
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by Elveronion »

I can honestly say I never cheated once and I played through 4 times (well 3.5 times lol). book 1 is fun and challenging with no cheats, if you cheat then teh challenge is gone.

Most gamers today are so use to thinking they are 'good at gaming' but modern games make sure not even a retard can lose. I prefer games where the challenge is real and if i win i know i earned it.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by BasiliskWrangler »

I have to agree with Elveron in one regard: we don't scale the game to anyone's skill level (like Oblivion does). This makes the game overly challenging to some, overly easy to others.

The biggest problem now is that we are difficulty adjusting Book II, but with so many people finishing Book I proclaiming "I kicked the game's ass @ level 14 with no problem!" but without mentioning how much they cheated, well that is just skewing Book II to be much more difficult with fewer exploits to rely on. :(
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by Unclever title »

Personally I never did anything beyond save/reload-spamming and the more times I play the game the less often I find myself doing this. I still save like crazy, but I don't reload quite so often anymore.

Usually when I play a game it's honestly/psuedo-honestly the first run through then I look for cheats or something similar to make the game more enjoyable, however this game has cheats that only affect stats or your inventory and it is a pretty nonlinear game to begin with so there's not that much to exploit in terms of entertainment.

The most fun moment I had was finding out (during that ambush on the way to Darkford) that I could run into a path, cut it off with demon oil, and then pick off the bandits one by one with arrows finishing them off with the sword. This was my first run through at that point and I was too weak to face all four at once, heck I still wouldn't have survived if I hadn't leveled up in the middle of the fight. It's the old fashioned exploitation methods that I enjoy really.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by narf03 »

lol, lets stop discussing, and report how you cheat

1) Discovered the unlimited easy xp by invis, element armor and room spell at gold statue
2) Adjust graphic card gamma setting so, i dont need any light source, extremely useful compare to with light source, cause you able to see further and no time limit, and. .. its free
3) Save / Load too damn often
4) Lure enemy to another type of enemy, when they are close to each other, save and load again, they will fight each other, in a desert I lure every single enemy together, then only I save, load, and see them fight, and usually I will give the final blow for xp
5) Use portal to get to safe area to camp, then portal back when I need to rest.
6) In some area, purposely camp for very long waiting for ambush, then lead them to fight another group, basically same to point 4, but I generate the enemy
7) I visit this forum.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by IJBall »

Unclever title wrote:Personally I never did anything beyond save/reload-spamming and the more times I play the game the less often I find myself doing this. I still save like crazy, but I don't reload quite so often anymore.

Usually when I play a game it's honestly/psuedo-honestly the first run through then I look for cheats or something similar to make the game more enjoyable...
I went the opposite way.

As you say, the first (few) times through, I played Book I totally straight and did not employ the save/reload/loot farming technique.

But, in later playthroughs, I did start to become frustrated, especially with locked and/or booby-trapped chests giving really substandard results (sorry, but if I have to get through a trap and a lock, I'm just not going to take it if the result is 6 Gold Pieces and a (latern) Oil! - I really am praying that BW & co. have gotten the treasure rebalancing all worked out for Book II!).

As to narf03's question, these are the cheats/exploits I've employed at various times:

1) Save/Load/Loot Refarming.
2) Rerolling to pick locks, disarm traps, and avoid diseases from corpses (esp. the latter! I think I started doing that fairly early on, because diseases are hard nuts to crack with a low level character).
3) Used this forum to find the location of the last two(? at least the last one) Easter eggs, and then used them in every subsequent game for the 'free' level up.
4) Poltergeist farming in the Ossuary (I did this in many later playthroughs because not only do you get Ectoplasm out of the deal, but you also get nearly 200 XPs a pop! which is enough to assist 'leveling up' even higher level characters! :twisted: )
5) I used the goblin statue only in a limited fashion, mostly to do more treasure farming. :roll:
6) I used the char file copy 'cheat' to duplicate the Purest Water (i.e. so I could complete the water quest and drink it for the two extra Skill points at my next 'level up'). I also duplicated the 3 Easter eggs the same way though I haven't (as yet) actually used the eggs twice beyond once testing that you could use the Easter eggs more than once.
7) Finally, I used the 'diagonal' runaway technique (often!) to put distance between my character and enemies (esp. Tauraxes), so I'd have more opportunities for 'ranged' attacks. (I know some people want this 'exploit' eliminated for Book II, but I don't! - I consider it more of a "feature" than an "exploit"! :wink: )

Beyond that, I used this forum early on to determine that well-rounded characters don't work and that Book I rewards "narrow focus" on Attributes and Skills, but I don't really consider that a "cheat".
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by CrazyBernie »

I can be accused of re-rolling chests, traps, locks, and vendors. And looking up alchemy recipes, I suppose... I usually end up selling the books. Oh, and I looked up one of the items that was supposed to go into a chest for that puzzle thingy.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by The Noid »

CrazyBernie wrote:I can be accused of re-rolling chests, traps, locks, and vendors. And looking up alchemy recipes, I suppose... I usually end up selling the books. Oh, and I looked up one of the items that was supposed to go into a chest for that puzzle thingy.
Same here :)
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Elveron wrote:I can honestly say I never cheated once and I played through 4 times (well 3.5 times lol). book 1 is fun and challenging with no cheats, if you cheat then teh challenge is gone.

Most gamers today are so use to thinking they are 'good at gaming' but modern games make sure not even a retard can lose. I prefer games where the challenge is real and if i win i know i earned it.
You may, but do you actually represent the majority of the target audience?


BasiliskWrangler wrote:I have to agree with Elveron in one regard: we don't scale the game to anyone's skill level (like Oblivion does). This makes the game overly challenging to some, overly easy to others.
Oblivion cocked that up; it didn't scale to anyone's skill level, it scaled by presuming you were a straight powergaming fighter, to the point that leveling up was seen as a punishment. That wasn't scaling difficulty, that was being a dick.
The biggest problem now is that we are difficulty adjusting Book II, but with so many people finishing Book I proclaiming "I kicked the game's ass @ level 14 with no problem!" but without mentioning how much they cheated, well that is just skewing Book II to be much more difficult with fewer exploits to rely on. :(
Which is a bad skew. Fall NOT into the Inverse Law of Cheat Availability trap. (The Inverse Law of Cheat Availability states that the harder a game is; and thus, the more likely you are to need to cheat in order to continue on and have fun, the less available cheats are, and the less likely those cheats are to do anything useful, as opposed to giving you a comically large head.)

I doubt you have time this late in the dev cycle to pull out a full-blown game difficulty option selection, but here are some (simple) ways you can modify the maths behind the game to give more variation.

1: Add a multiplier to rolls by the player. For example, in a hypothetical easy mode, you could multiply the player's to-hit rolls by 1.25 and his damage rolls by the same. In a Hard mode, you could multiply them by 0.80, respectively. (Be sure to add some "round up to the nearest whole number" code, or the time when you need easy mode to make a difference the most - at low levels - it won't.)

2: Forbid or lessen the impact of various extra-destructive ways the player can get hurt. Such as making critical hits against the player a little less than critical (1.5x damage or 1.25x damage instead of 2.x), stretching the interval between poison damage out to be twice as long - or if that's too difficult to implement, simply start the player out with 30% all resistances as a freebie.

3: Boost the rate of experience gain the player recieves, and/or the rate of attribute points and skill points they recieve.


These won't give you a truely 'easy' mode in this sort of game - they'll just help to stack things a little bit less in the AI's favor. Even if you implement all of these things, it would still be ludicrously simple for a player to get himself in a situation where his advantages won't help. In an Easy mode, the game would warn him off - such as the slamming portculli in the Goblin citadel, it might stop him before the pressure plate and say "There is a pressure plate under the portcullis. This does not look safe." (Of course, I think a high level of Spot Hidden should have done that anyway...)

One other thing you might want to do is hand out a couple of essentially 'free' levels. I was still level 1 when I tried going underground to get that guy's darn bar of mithril the first time. I probably should have been like, level 3 or 4 before that happened. The easiest way to do this is to give out more and easier sidequests, and to award plot XP faster and furiouser in the game's opening exploration area.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by BasiliskWrangler »

There are difficulty adjustments in Book II already- they are optional, as are many of the exploit corrections. The more "legitimately" you play the game, the higher your end ranking will be.

Also, regarding the overall difficulty of Book II- our two in-house testers (three of you include myself) would fall into the hard-core old-skool RPG crowd and we will ensure that the game is challenging yet completable without cheats. Yes, that means it may be extremely difficult for the casual RPGer, but it won't be impossible.

Book I was difficulty-adjusted this way and I can assure everyone who struggles with it: you can complete the game, with essentially any combination of character build, without cheating at all. We've done it at least 30 times during testing. We would not have released a game that we ourselves could not finish without cheating.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Crapdamnit, I had a long post written, and was going to write more. Then I accidently closed the window. Oh well, I'll try again.

BasiliskWrangler wrote:There are difficulty adjustments in Book II already- they are optional, as are many of the exploit corrections. The more "legitimately" you play the game, the higher your end ranking will be.

There's two problems I see facing you. The first is old, and it is done; You have released Eschalon: Book I. It's name is now in the jaws of gamers, and they will be the final arbitors of whether it is Good or not.

And honestly, I don't see you getting a very Good overall score. Eschalon is very, very hard, even if you do cheat but not cheat for god-mode. The best thing you could have done, you've done, and put the game on Steam for large access. But, now that the game's on Steam, you may find it's a double-edged sword: a lot more people will have played it, and will say "That game kicked my ass, it's not very fun."

See... The analogy I use last time, is what if you go to a movie, and the soundtrack consists of someone screeching fingernails on a chalkboard whilst some gonzo bangs a sledgehammer on industrial steel tanks with the microphone on the inside. It's going to hurt, and chances are you're going to leave before the second act is over. There's almost no way in hell you're going to pay money to sit down and repeat the abuse for the sequal.

There's nothing to do about that. Eschalon: Book II, will never, ever, be judged alone. It will always be judged by it's predecessor, and that will only end badly: Either it will be shackled by the reputation of Book I as being a merciless time sink requiring you to bind quicksave and quickload to Mouse 1 and Mouse 2 in the eyes of the not-so-hardcore gamers, or the hardcore gamers will complain that Book II was watered down weaksauce compared to the ass-kicking they got in Book I.


The second problem I see is that you've fallen into the trap of rewarding players for making the game harder on themselves. This is a bad trap, it's telling players who are not skilled enough to handle such hardcore challenges "You suck, I hate you personally, and I'm not going to let you have the fun stuff to play with, you damn newb."

Which frankly, means that if I buy Eschalon Book II (Still working out whether I want more or not), what I'm going to do is check off "food and water", "equipment deteriorates", "no save/load", and "random functions".

Then I'm just going to use ArtMoney SE to ensure I never lack for food or water to survive, always have enough gold to repair (or the repair skill* myself), never need to save or reload because my character is essentially invunerable to damage short of being caught in a portcullis, and will never actually face the results of failure at lockpicking, or trap disarming.



All to get that item generation quality boost as high as it will go.


What you've done, is you've defeated the purpose of difficulty settings, by falling into the ancient trap of "I'll let you play, but I won't let you have fun until you do it my way," just like all those old 90s games which say "Congratulations, you beat the game! Now do it again on Hard, because I'm not going to show you the ending until you do!"

Only you've done it with something even more sacred than the game's ending - you've done it with the inherant reward of playing these sorts of games - accumulating the good swag!



*There will be one, right? (That, and/or spells to repair your stuff, right?)



Also, regarding the overall difficulty of Book II- our two in-house testers (three of you include myself) would fall into the hard-core old-skool RPG crowd and we will ensure that the game is challenging yet completable without cheats. Yes, that means it may be extremely difficult for the casual RPGer, but it won't be impossible.
Please hire someone who is not old-school hardcore. Pick up a volunteer, even. If you build the game without dissenting opinion, without other points of view, all you're doing is driving yourself further into a niche.

Do you like Top Gear? I don't know if you do, or whether you like cars or not, but if you do like cars then no amount of time could be 'wasted' by watching Top Gear. Even if you don't like cars, you'd probably still find it hilarious and worth a watch. And you'll notice something; the three hosts (not counting the Stig, since he never talks or voices opinions) are quite different in their tastes.

Jeremy Clarkson is a middle-aged old fart who used to be a hellraising driver back in the day. He can still pull it off, as evidenced by the fact that he frequently drives Ferraris, Lambos, and worse, 'round their test track, but his driving style has become more sedate as he has aged.

Richard Hammond is The Plucky Brit. He's the balls-to-the-walls, rear-wheel-drive drag-race-to-settle-any-dispute guy.

James May is a coward. He looks, first and foremost, for how comfortable the ride any given car offers, how luxurious the car feels, and how good it looks.

For having the wildly differing opinions, the viewer of Top Gear gets a more well-rounded review of the cars. If you only let Clarkson and May review a Bentley, you'd promptly conclude that it's a pile of overpriced rubbish which is prone to losing it's tires and having it's wheels shred under G-forces... Which is entirely true. It is, however, one of the most comfortable, luxurious rides you can buy, and this will be obvious in the hands of a reviewer who is not treating it as though it were an Ariel Atom racecar.


It's the same with games. You really should pick up someone to playtest who is not a hardcore old-schooler who likes to get his ass kicked. I'm not saying do everything he says, but if he starts complaining that something is just too darn hard, listen to him, because he may well be onto something at a point where those intimately familar with the game are having no trouble simply because they are familar with it, but where every new player will get his arse handed to him.

Book I was difficulty-adjusted this way and I can assure everyone who struggles with it: you can complete the game, with essentially any combination of character build, without cheating at all. We've done it at least 30 times during testing. We would not have released a game that we ourselves could not finish without cheating.
What do you consider cheating? Is reloading if you get killed by a trap chest cheating? What if you don't get killed, only poisoned and doomed to a slow death? What if you don't get killed, or doomed by poison, but your hit points are so low you won't be able to make it back out alive? Is it cheating to repeatedly sleep in the wilderness to farm monster XP? To steal everything in the game-world in order to sell it back and get money for equipment which by design you should'nt have access to yet?

Here's an example for you: I don't know if you've played Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (but I refuse to recognize your claim to the title of old-school RPGer if you havn't), but I'm going to assume you have.

In the first town you come to, Shrouded Hills, you have a number of possible ways to make money and/or advance the storyline's main quest. Many of these ways will involve arsefecking much-later-down-the-road sidequests that make completing the ending of the main quest easier, since you won't be able to trade important things for big quest rewards. However, the casual gamer may easily become frustrated at the early areas feeling all but impossible due to the fact they have no money, made a character who's twinked out to use guns, cannot afford ammunition, and told the opening 'gimmie' NPC, Virgil, to feck off and die in a fire.

Yes, I speak from experience here.

Anyway, I discovered the means to getting anything I wanted was dirt-simple. NPC shopkeepers keep their inventory in the game world in chests or lockers or whatever, usually in their bedroom. This is to prevent gamers from asking "I just killed the shopkeeper, why can't I take his inventory" - because they CAN.

Now, those doors are locked, yes, and NPCs will generally notice you picking a lock unless you're also good at stealth. But they won't give a crap if you use a legitimate key - and the NPC in question needs a key to get into his own bedroom. So I steal the key to Ristezze's bedroom, the easiest one to get in since you need info on a ring and he has it, and you might need to get it if you kill him. I simply sell him everything I own, including quest items, until he's broke or I'm out of stuff to hock, then I walk into his bedroom, loot his shop inventory and take it back - along with anything else.

Then, smile-on-face, I walk back to him, sell him his own stuff again, ad nauseum, until he is broke, take the stuff, sleep/wait for a while until his gold has replenished, and do it again, until I'm basically pushing my encumbrance limit on ammo, grenades and guns.

Is that cheating? It's certainly exploitative and gamebreaking (especially if you do it to later shopkeeps), but it can be done without savescumming at all (simply garuntee you will steal the key by using a Destiny Point for "automatic critical pickpocket success"). But is it cheating?


If you balance the game against the expectation that players are going to do anything and everything in their power to gain more power for their character, then you're going to smash the heads of those who do not - or who haven't learned how to do so yet - into the solid wall of a difficulty cliff.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by Kreador Freeaxe »

Shadowdragon8685,

For some reason you sound like you're set to "I hate everything." For a perspective, you sound like you're saying that Eschalon Book I is impossible without cheats for any but the hardest of hardcore gamers. I'm a long way from hardcore. This is only the second CRPG I've played in a decade. My first time through, I knew nothing of cheats or any of that, and I managed two of the three possible endings anyway. I found all the side-quest objects. And I enjoyed the game so much that I have played it over and over (sometimes with re-roll cheating just to see what I can get, sometimes straight).

I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you. You have your opinion, and it's valid for you. I just disagree. I think Thomas and his crew did a great job balancing a game for the casual gamer, and I'm looking forward to a lot more fun with Book II.

Also, as an aside about your "cheat" about stealing a shopkeeper's stuff and selling it back to him, I don't think that would be a cheat. It's the point of being a good thief. It would be interesting if there were a chance the shopkeeper recognized that you were selling him his own inventory, though. :)
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by Zeno »

Jedi_Learner wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:And honestly, I don't see you getting a very Good overall score. Eschalon is very, very hard...
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:...now that the game's on Steam, you may find it's a double-edged sword: a lot more people will have played it, and will say "That game kicked my ass, it's not very fun."
And this, ladies and gentlemen is the reason mainstream games are getting easier, simpler and dumber. Thank you ShadowDragon8685 for contributing.

If I see one more FPS game that gives the player regenerative health and practically holds your hand (coughcallofdutycough) I will punch the nearest person in the face. I understand that some people aren't "hardcore" gamers, but it annoys me to no end that being made by a popular developer now means a game must be able to be beaten by a 5-year-old.

On topic, I admit that I've used save-reload a few times, mostly to avoid looting a diseased corpse. (How was I supposed to know that there's actually a reason not to loot everything in the game!) However, I think I still could've done fine. In my personal opinion, this game is balanced near-perfectly. I never feel as though I've been sent to an unavoidable death; poor choices (i.e. wandering into groups of bandits) have killed me on more than one occasion, but I then learn to avoid that place. I'm hoping that Book II doesn't ramp up the difficulty insanely, but I know I'll buy it regardless. You just need to learn the ins-and-outs of the game.
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Which frankly, means that if I buy Eschalon Book II (Still working out whether I want more or not), what I'm going to do is check off "food and water", "equipment deteriorates", "no save/load", and "random functions".

Then I'm just going to use ArtMoney SE to ensure I never lack for food or water to survive, always have enough gold to repair (or the repair skill* myself), never need to save or reload because my character is essentially invunerable to damage short of being caught in a portcullis, and will never actually face the results of failure at lockpicking, or trap disarming.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long while. If you're just going to cheat out of those requirements, TURN THEM OFF. Or, even better, DON'T PLAY THE GAME. No one is forcing you to. Unless you find cheating to be more fun than playing the game, find a different game. This one may not be for you.
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by ShadowDragon8685 »

Kreador Freeaxe wrote:Shadowdragon8685,

For some reason you sound like you're set to "I hate everything." For a perspective, you sound like you're saying that Eschalon Book I is impossible without cheats for any but the hardest of hardcore gamers. I'm a long way from hardcore. This is only the second CRPG I've played in a decade. My first time through, I knew nothing of cheats or any of that, and I managed two of the three possible endings anyway. I found all the side-quest objects. And I enjoyed the game so much that I have played it over and over (sometimes with re-roll cheating just to see what I can get, sometimes straight).
If you see value in something, you should be as critical of it as possible. I expect nothing less from the guys who read my writings, and I will give nothing less to the developers of games I see potential in. I wouldn't waste my breath talking about a non-Half-Life shooter.

As for "impossible", by definition it's not. If absolutely nessessary, you can save/load every round until every hit you make is critical, and you've acomplished the statistically impossible simply by employing enough metaphorical typing monkies.

The point is, for the casual gamer, will they have fun? That's what a game is, ultimately, about, and is a point that is all-too-often missed by the hardcore gamer who does have fun by having his ass handed to him; will someone have fun the whole game, or not?

I, for one, was not having fun when I had twinked my character - cheated, in fact - my character for Thief-style theft, and found myself out of lockpicks on the very first lock I encountered. You wouldn't think it was very much fun if you were playing a swordsman, had pushed every stat and skill available to you as regards swordsmen to the max, and found you had less than a one out of three chance to hit the very first Fanged Salamander you came across, would you?


I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with you. You have your opinion, and it's valid for you. I just disagree. I think Thomas and his crew did a great job balancing a game for the casual gamer, and I'm looking forward to a lot more fun with Book II.
I think you'll find it's less about whether my opinion is valid for you, than that it is or is not valid for the vast majority of potentially-paying customers.
Also, as an aside about your "cheat" about stealing a shopkeeper's stuff and selling it back to him, I don't think that would be a cheat. It's the point of being a good thief. It would be interesting if there were a chance the shopkeeper recognized that you were selling him his own inventory, though. :)
Personally, I'd think he'd be more upset by the fact that I'm entering his bedroom using a key of which he knows there is only one in the whole wide world.

But my point about that was, whether a cheat or not, it's exploitive of game mechanics and breaking of immersion (no D&D shopkeep would let you remotely get away with it unless the DM was lampooning CRPG mechanics), and gamebreaking in that the player will have literally unlimited gold, given unlimited patience.

If a game is balenced against the expectation that the player will never want for gold because of nefarious cheating like this, and by extension, the implicit assumption that the player will be able to buy the very best from any shop, ever, then those who do not play like that - whether out of a (misguided, since it's accepted for and balanced against) desire for 'game purity', or simply due to not thinking of it, will get royally shafted.



Jedi_Learner wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:And honestly, I don't see you getting a very Good overall score. Eschalon is very, very hard...
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:...now that the game's on Steam, you may find it's a double-edged sword: a lot more people will have played it, and will say "That game kicked my ass, it's not very fun."
And this, ladies and gentlemen is the reason mainstream games are getting easier, simpler and dumber. Thank you ShadowDragon8685 for contributing.
Wow.

So you think that game developers should make games hard and needlessly complicated, thus greatly reducing the fun inherant in playing them for the vast majority of players and producing a clunky, frustrating pile of goo...

Simply to avoid accusations of "easy, simpler and dumber"?


Wow, thank you for contributing something utterly unhelpful and in fact, anathema to the goal of making games which you hope to sell to make money.


Let's put it here straight-up.

The goal of playing any game is to have fun. If we can agree with that, then we have a starting point.

Now, the first few hours of playing any game are crucial to that. If these hours are poisoned for the player, they will always remember them, even if later on, they're whirling through enemies like a Jedi Master through battle droids, opening every door and lock without trying, and generally getting on with things as though they're the hero they're supposed to be.

If a player finds that they can fail utterly spectacularly at the very first example they come across of the sort of thing they built their character specifically to be good at - to wit, my Thief getting stonewalled by the very first lock I attempted to pick - then chances are, they're not going to have a lot of fun.

If they find themselves constantly beleagered by being unable to do the sort of thing they hoped to do - sneak around and assassinate creatures - by a combination of being unable to hide unless it's pitch black, and being unable to see a monster to kill it when it is pitchblack - then they won't be having a lot of fun.

And if they're not having fun, what was the point of the excercize? They've given money to someone - money they cannot get back - in exchange for something which is frustrating them and making them feel bad, which is the opposite of feeling good - the purpose of buying a game and hoping to have fun playing it.

So, frankly, they feel robbed - in good faith, they've given money way, implicitly trusting that in exchange for their money, they will recieve a game that will be fun to play with, and make them feel happier and more contented than having the twenty in their bank account would have. And in return, what they have is something that makes them frustrated and angry, discontent and upset - and they're out the twenty, which in hindsight, they could have spent on something more satisfying, like a trip to the movies, something from the chinese restaraunt down the street, or a handie on the corner.

So naturally, they're going to advise anyone they hear musing about buying this game - the thing they paid money for and which only made them feel worse than when they started, not better - about their experiences playing that game, which is that it will make you feel bad and not good, and will be like giving someone your money and having him punch you in the junk in return.


Word of mouth can make or break a product. No amount of fancy glitz advertising - which BasiliskWrangler certainly doesn't have the money for - can make a bad game sell well. And to be frank, VALVe hardly even bothers to advertise their releases even on their own site, since they have such a massive power of recognition and trust that they know that people will throw their money at them no matter what. They just have to keep making the next one good, so that people will buy the one after that.

Whereas, despite all the huge advertising glitz that surrounded it, all three Halos combined barely begin to match the exposure of Half-Life 2 and it's Episodes, to say nothing of the Source engine family (Half-Life 2, Ep1&2, Portal, Counter-Strike Source,) which blows Halo out of the water.

And hell, they even went to the trouble of building a live-action "museum" set and having old men walk through, pretending to get teared up about war memories that never happened and showing off fictional weapons.

As for me... Eh, I'm kind of divided. I would advise my friends to buy Eschalon: Book I (and Book II), but only if they're comfortable with cheating their asses off via memory editor or whatever means they see fit.



Zeno wrote:
Jedi_Learner wrote:
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:And honestly, I don't see you getting a very Good overall score. Eschalon is very, very hard...
ShadowDragon8685 wrote:...now that the game's on Steam, you may find it's a double-edged sword: a lot more people will have played it, and will say "That game kicked my ass, it's not very fun."
And this, ladies and gentlemen is the reason mainstream games are getting easier, simpler and dumber. Thank you ShadowDragon8685 for contributing.

If I see one more FPS game that gives the player regenerative health and practically holds your hand (coughcallofdutycough) I will punch the nearest person in the face. I understand that some people aren't "hardcore" gamers, but it annoys me to no end that being made by a popular developer now means a game must be able to be beaten by a 5-year-old.
I really hope that person is me, so I can have you locked up for assault.

The point of a game is to have fun. Regenerative health is a fun mechanic, and frankly it beats the tar out of "magical band-aids, canteens and food scattered all over everywhere." Regenerative health means that, no matter what, if the player can make it through one challenge, you can expect them to meet the next one head-on, at full health, as they will have had the time to regenerate.

And, you know, last I heard, Call of Duty had difficulty settings to cater to you. So take your sanctimoniousness and cram it. Game developers keep catering to you at the expense of those of us who would like to enjoy a game, and they quickly go out of business - for good reason. Catering to the niche hardcore gamer crowd is economic suicide.


On topic, I admit that I've used save-reload a few times, mostly to avoid looting a diseased corpse. (How was I supposed to know that there's actually a reason not to loot everything in the game!) However, I think I still could've done fine. In my personal opinion, this game is balanced near-perfectly. I never feel as though I've been sent to an unavoidable death; poor choices (i.e. wandering into groups of bandits) have killed me on more than one occasion, but I then learn to avoid that place. I'm hoping that Book II doesn't ramp up the difficulty insanely, but I know I'll buy it regardless. You just need to learn the ins-and-outs of the game.
So, you admit that the only way to learn how to play is by trial and error?

That is a very poor way to teach the player how to play the game. If there's no obvious way to know "this place is too hard and will kill me by sneezing at me", and I blunder in, I'm going to be angry. I'm going to be very angry if this means I lose a large portion of play, or worse, if it means that save slot is fucked because I saved whilst in over my head.

ShadowDragon8685 wrote:Which frankly, means that if I buy Eschalon Book II (Still working out whether I want more or not), what I'm going to do is check off "food and water", "equipment deteriorates", "no save/load", and "random functions".

Then I'm just going to use ArtMoney SE to ensure I never lack for food or water to survive, always have enough gold to repair (or the repair skill* myself), never need to save or reload because my character is essentially invunerable to damage short of being caught in a portcullis, and will never actually face the results of failure at lockpicking, or trap disarming.
That's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long while. If you're just going to cheat out of those requirements, TURN THEM OFF. Or, even better, DON'T PLAY THE GAME. No one is forcing you to. Unless you find cheating to be more fun than playing the game, find a different game. This one may not be for you.
I explained why. I'm going to cheat out of those requirements so I can get the loot table boost.


Never offer a player an 'easy' option that then goes on to screw them. Never offer a salient, game-altering reward for playing 'harder', because that really means "cheating the ones who don't like playing it hard".

Oh, and ProTip? Don't yell at people because they play different than you. I've cheated my arse off at every CRPG I've ever played that I had the ability to cheat at. KotOR and KotOR2, you bet. Final Fantasy Tactics? Absolutely. I have nothing but contempt for a game where cheating is unnessessarily difficult or impossible. Frankly, I'd rather see the endgame stuff and kick ass like a hero, than spend my time scumming about the dirt like every other Chosen One who frankly isn't very special at all, given that every random mook is better equipped and stronger than he is.
Randomizer
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Re: Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

Post by Randomizer »

I use the save and reload cheat for locking pick (only one lock pick needed in the game) and for traps to maximize experience and this gives about 2 levels early in the game. Also for poison and disease since I hate having to cure them or walk them off.

I've tried to get away from loot farming reloads to make money early in the game or get better equipment.

Also a few times I've been too lazy to camp so I get wiped out when my mage was low on mana because I wanted to keep going to explore.

Now game exploits are different since they are legitamate things left in the game by the designer. Like Hide in Shadows almost guarantees that monsters will walk around in circles except for poltergeists and dimensional eyes. I miss seeing lots of things wandering around in the dark and have to return with a torch or daylight to loot, but not getting hit more than makes up for the inconvience.

BW will hopefully fix these in Book II, but for now they aren't cheats.
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