Be honest - do you cheat, and how?

[azraelck]

I reloaded saves when killed, both times. I had to check on the forum for one minor puzzle, and after I beat the game and started trying to clear everything I did need to come back to find an easter egg.

I never found a reason to save-scum, and to be quite frank, if I'd been a little smarter, the two times I died wouldn't have happened at all. Even the easter egg, I had walked past where you needed to go, and forgot to go back and explore. So the only thing I got stumped on was a single puzzle.


To the guy who can't play anything without cheating; I suggest looking a bit more objectively at things. You are a VERY small minority of gamer. In playing Call of Duty: UO, people who log online just to cheat get banned quickly on the servers I frequent. Most forums, going in and starting this same argument would get you roasted to a much crispier temperature.

I can point at one very successful series of games which is renown for it's difficulty (built around DIAS design, no less.) Mega Man. There have been 15 classic series games, 10 X series games, 4 Zero series games, and currently 2 ZX series. As a whole, the name has been applied to over 50 games total. These are just the ones which closely follow the original formula. I think it's pushing the silver anniversary now. Definitely over 20 years old.

You need pin-point control over the blue Bomber in all areas of the game, in systems that never remotely offered it. Insta-kill traps abound, and most of the time you get 2 save points; 1 mid way and 1 right before the boss. Sometimes, you don't get that.

If a Mega Man 10 was released today, it would be a success. Primarily DUE to the difficulty level; the challenge involved. And yes, I own these games (nearly all of them in fact) and have beaten them, repeatedly. Mega Man Zero 1 is noted often times as among the hardest in the series, and among the hardest games ever. I beat it on S rank (best you could pull, which practically required being not hit a single time). It took playing through it nearly a dozen times back to back, but I did it.

Another series you might investigate is Bard's Tale. The original; the new one is a cake-walk. Specifically, try Bard's Tale 2. I beat that when I was 6 years old. I've seen it listed as one of the hardest RPGs ever made on at least one forum. The demand was great enough for a 4, that a group of fans started to build their own, which evolved into Devil Whiskey; which is very similar but far, far, far easier.

To end this rant, prior to buying Eschalon, I asked the folks over at the RPGWatch forums what I should buy, and listed several indie and GoG.com games. Over 20 people universally said "Eschalon". A side order specifically told me to avoid Ishar, because it's French. Don't ask me, never played them.

Eschalon Book 1 is a bit easy to me. However, it was fun. I played in two sittings, broken apart only by work. It delayed work on my own project considerably. I can count on one hand the number of times that has happened in the last decade. So for all your ranting about how it was "impossible", I doubt it will be much more than a single sale lost.

[PKodon]

Okay, first off, let me say that I normally do some cheating in RPGs, as I'm more into the adventure (exploration, finding things, figuring out puzzles, enjoying the scenery, etc.) than mindlessly running around battling things for long periods of time for no reason.

That said, apart from the save/restore cheat that nearly everyone does (especially in the case of opening containers and having as many of the thugs that attack you drop loot as I can), I did do one more ambitious cheat -

Before I tell you what I did, let me tell you why I did this cheat. The game manual states that "LIGHT ARMOR" includes "Chainmail and Alloy Plate Armor", however, while attempting to play the game the first time through, I began to notice that most chainmail was HEAVY ARMOR, and some Steel armor pieces were LIGHT ARMOR.

To make the game more consistent, and because I wanted to play a character who's only armor training was in light armor, I took a HEX Editor to the game executable and looked for Armor. After going through the whole file once and determining what kinds of armor to expect, I went through again, making all Leather (except Splint), Chainmail and Mithril armor require the LIGHT armor skill; while all Iron, Steel, and Adamantium armor (including bracers) I set to require HEAVY armor skill.

Of course, I did this on a copy of the executable, to make sure I had a backup of the program in case it didn't work.

I didn't edit anything else, the file length stayed the same (HEAVY and LIGHT are the same number of letters), and then I started a new game and looked for a piece of chainmail to try on.

As for other things I do in the game, I don't know if you'd call these cheats or not, but here are a few tactics I've used:

1. I made sure I had the Hide in Shadows and Silence skills. These make it easier to do the following:

A. I've had a guard or someone else nearby, gotten near a locked/trapped chest or door, and even in broad daylight, as long as I'm hidden in shadows AND silent (at night, and the person is close by) I've gotten away with picking a lock or disabling a trapped chest. In daylight, if I hit the spacebar and am at least silent, and the person is obscured, he won't hear me pick a lock.

B. Night fighting to conserve health. This works best if you have at least the Cat's Eyes spell cast and you're both hiding in shadows and silent. You might have to do some coaxing by coming out of the shadows, then running back in, but once they are near, you can attack from the shadows and they don't even know what hit them. Yes, sometimes they do discover you and start hitting back, but if you leave yourself a way to move one space back into the shadows, they give up. I've taken out quite a few rather tough characters with this method. Having Predator Vision can help too (you don't have to hit TAB to see where your enemies are, unless they're behind a wall).

One thing I haven't been able to do is make a named enemy (like the named thug that shows up in the "shortcut" where you go to find the wedding ring) drop a bag of loot (no matter how many times I restored the game, having saved it when the enemy had only a few health points left).

2. Using the save/restore with containers/bodies to get needed books/scrolls, and barring that, taking the most expensive things I can get from a container/body to sell for cash to use for training.

Now, apart from the HEX editing to bring the game into accord with the game manual, do these really count as "cheating", if they are built into the game? Well, I consider them at least playing dirty, from the standpoint of the NPCs I'm beating on or stealing from.

3. When a shopkeeper is out of cash and I have more stuff to sell, going off-map and coming back to find he's run to the bank while I was gone. (I had tried to take every torch I could lay my hands on, every time I found one, then I discovered how much weight they were and that I couldn't drop them).

4. Oh yeah, had to look on the forum to see if there was a way to recharge an empty lantern, and I'm now assuming that imbuing an armor or weapon uses the same method (I didn't know you could put the lantern in the "mixing" window as a container, instead of an empty flask).

And no, I haven't finished the game, I've only gone so far as Bordertown, but now I can play it through with the armor I want to use without having to train in heavy armor.

BTW, I'm playing a Paladin that knows both schools of magic and has thieving skills.

If I think of anything else, I'll just edit this post.

Thanks, bye.