Eschalon Book III Released, Website Launch Pains Resolved

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 19, 2014

Thomas Riegsecker of Basilisk Games has been living through one of my own personal nightmares, it seems.

The long-anticipated Eschalon: Book III, the final chapter of the series that began with the first game’s release in 2007, launched on Valentine’s Day. This is a Good Thing. I’ve not played it yet, but I mean to rectify that as soon as I find myself with time to breathe (probably at the beginning of March). A big congratulations are in order, and I’m super-excited to finish playing the series!

Unfortunately, owing in part to the success of the series so far, the website fell down and went boom. For three days, it was dead, and efforts to migrate the server ran into further complications (maybe the three-day weekend played into that?).  Having one’s website die when you launch your game is pretty much Murphy’s Law with grenade launcher and a personal grudge. I was watching Thomas’s tweets and facebook posts feeling some incredible sympathy pains.

Fortunately, it was also available on Steam and GOG.com. So it’s not as bad a disaster as the old days where the launch was primarily direct sales from the developer’s website. But still, as it is the place to go for game information, for direct sales (for those of us who still prefer to buy direct), forums, bug reporting, etc., it’s a suck.

And at least now things are working again, after several days of frustration. So there’s that. I hope this means that the game is selling like hotcakes. Assuming hotcakes really do sell extremely well, though if they did I might want to go into the hotcake selling business. It seems to do okay for IHOP. But look at me, I digress. Anyway – I wish Basilisk Games tons of success with this game, as with the other two. The first game came out while there was a dearth of western-style, turn-based, single-player RPGs. Things have improved significantly since then, for which we old-school fans have been extremely grateful. But I hope this series ends on a high note.

It sounds like, from a gameplay perspective, it’s certainly aimed in that direction. Eschalon Book III offers more interesting combat and enemy abilities, new spells, new items, graphical updates, and still holds to the old “pen-and-paper” RPG feel that has driven the series from the beginning. If you haven’t played the first two, I recommend them, but Thomas says that you will not need to have played (or completed) either game to fully enjoy Book III.

Eschalon: Book III from Basilisk Games

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