Eschalon: Book 1 - Book II Production Starts & CD Update

Time to catch up on some Basilisk updates.  First, Thomas Riegsecker announced a week ago that the studio was holding a two-day meeting to kick off production on Book II:

Just a quick note to all our fans that Book II development is underway as of today. The designers of Book I are gathered in the studio for the next 2 days and we are hammering out changes/updates for the next game.

This is not an official announcement for Book II...we will unveil details of the game sometime next summer. We are estimating a 12-18 month production cycle.

Don't bother to ask questions because I don't have any answers (yet ). It's still too early to say this or that is going to be in Book II. We are mostly looking over the posts made to this forum and we are going to see just how many of your suggestions can make it into the game. We also have another game (not in the Eschalon series) that we will unveil at a later date which is getting blueprinted today as well.

As always, thanks for your support!

A little before that, Thomas revealed that Book II will remain a solo game:

Well, we are waaaay too early to talk much about Book II as we are continuing to promote Book I and monitor sales, but I wanted to let everyone know what has been decided upon so that speculation does not drive everyone to the point of insanity! The following is pretty much set in stone as far as what to expect for the next game game...

- Book II is going to use a modified version of the Book I engine running at 1024x768. We are using 80% new tiles, so you are not going to get a visual re-hash of Book I.

- Based on the poll results, we are going to stay solo (no party) for Book II. Don't worry, all you party people- we've got other things in the works.

- You will be able to select male or female. We are working with the storyline now to see the best way to add additional races other than human. If we decide not to add racial selection do to storyline limitations, we will further tweak the Origin attribute to supplement the variety of your male/female Human character.

- It is going to be a "Basilisk Games" type of game. What does that mean? We are staying old-school. Book II is going to be even more stat-heavy than the first game. Although there have been a lot of awesome suggestions given to us and we will implement many of them, when it's all finished we still need to be able to say that Book II is an "old-school RPG". We are not going to change our design philosophy or style; there are too many game companies who have tried to give everything to everyone and they destroyed their game(s) in the process. We would rather keep 95% of you happy than try to satisfy the 5% who claim Book I sucks do to some design choice we made.

That's it for now. As with Book I, we won't reveal much about the game's storyline until it is released. The release date is "when it's done", which means sometime between next week and two years from now. However, I personally don't think Book II's development will take as long as Book I, due to the fact that many of the assets we have now we had to buy/make during Book I's development.

As for the "other thing in the works", Thomas has hinted at an Eye of the Beholder styled game a couple of times, such as this post on engines:

We could [...] take the engine in a radical new direction: an engine that we have been developing that would be similar to Wizardry 8, with hints of Dungeon Master / Eye of the Beholder.

Finally, Basilisk has announced new purchases of the CD version will be multi-platform (PC/Mac/Linux):

We ran out of Windows and Mac CDs this past weekend, so instead of reordering a new batch of each, we've decided just to put  all three versions on one CD and that sell that instead!! You've read correctly: buy  Eschalon: Book I on CD for any platform, and the CD you receive will have the  Windows, Macintosh  and  Linux versions on the disc. Linux fans, here's your chance to finally get the game on CD! You may notice the price of this CD is a couple dollars more than the previous CDs, which is due to the slight increase in duplication costs for the multi-license disc and new packaging.