Eschalon is meant to be an "old school RPG", and, I guess, it kind of is- but in all the bad ways (frustrating, unfair design decisions, unclear short-term objectives, aimlessness) rather than the good ways (memorable fictional worlds and characters, the excitement of exploration, a fair challenge). An example of a bad design decision, that cuts right to the heart of the game, is the combat system. In D&D-based combat systems, and systems derived from them, attacks usually have a 95% to-hit chance (unless they always hit), as a result of the 20-sided die used in D&D, with 1 being a critical miss. Things affecting the hit chance are then applied to the base 95% chance, so against a particularly fast enemy, you might only have a 70% hit chance, and so on. In Eschalon's combat, for whatever reason, the default hit chance is 50%, with the modifiers applied to that- so against a fast enemy, you might have a hit chance of 25%. As a result, combat generally consists of a long series of misses, both by the player and the enemy, and who wins comes down to who gets lucky enough to get several hits in a row. It is incredibly frustrating, and it's bizarre that the developers thought this was okay- it's bizarre that they didn't realize this was a bad idea, and it's bizarre that they didn't catch it in testing, and it's bizarre that they apparently didn't compare their ruleset to other games'. Another bizarre decision in Eschalon is that the automap is dependent on your character's mapping skill. At low levels of the skill, you only get to see walls; on higher levels, you eventually get to see water, grass, roads, etc. The problem with this is that you have to spend valuable skill points on the mapping skill just to be able to tell where you are on a map- and even the most cruel of old RPGs either gave you the automap free or expected you to map a series of semi-discrete locations on paper, neither of which interfere with your other skills. In all, a very bad game.
