Game News Eschalon's beta test report

[thesheeep]

Agreed.

That not very RPG-ish...
That's just like a dumb Orc having an intellectual debate with a Grey Elf...

 

[Deacdo]

Eschalon looks very promising, but I don't like this little bit of information from their forum:

A question: Will the dialogues have stat-cheks (Intelligence for example to decide if you can find out a new Intelligent answer that would otherwise not show up)

No, we don't go so far as to say "if you are this smart then this clever response becomes available to you". We don't run any stats checks when interacting...we leave that completely up to the player to decide how their character should respond when chatting with an NPC.

That's unfortunate...but far more worrying is it makes it sound like no stats have any impact on dialog at all (not referring to how many options there are).

Anyway, overall this game looks to be shaping up pretty well. I'd like to see a gameplay movie to get an idea of how the animations are going to look.

 

[Noceur]

Actually...

Basilisk Wrangler wrote:

Sorry...I had a big, long response to this but then realized I misunderstood what you asked.

In a few cases, a Wisdom or Intelligence check is made in response to your dialogue selection to see how a NPC will react. So to sum it up:

- We don't do any checks as to what responses you are allowed to give an NPC (this is what I was saying in my post above).

- We don't run a stat check on every dialogue choice you make, but, there are a few situations in the game that when you give a response to an NPC, their response back is based on how good of a liar/persuader you are (Int/Wis respectively). Also, in a couple situations if you have committed criminal acts, you are given some additional dialogue options with certain NPCs (this is a remnant of our reputation system).

 

[sheek]

Wow. I just read this and forgot all about the Twitcher and Biosock.

Thank you VD for raising my indie awareness! (I don't trust indies after I paid for Jeff Vogel's... 'games', but I have high hopes for this title!)

Fag.

 

[Micmu]

Hey, the Twitcher is not actually the Twitcher as it turned out.

 

[Nedrah]

No stats checks in dialogue don't have to be a bad thing, especially for an indy game.
If it's not done properly, you can easily end up with a system where a high int/cha character is the only way to go if you want the most out of the story. Actually that was one of PS:Torment's aspects that I didn't like quite so much, and I can live without it. Obviously this doesn't apply if the game manages to make playing a dumb/unwise char just as interesting as the wizard archetype.