Dungeons and Bullshit

Eon Altar swings hard at establishing a next generation of digital RPGs; by putting your character sheet and controls on your smartphone, Jackbox-style, it could deliver on a true multiplayer approach to CRPGs like Baldur's Gate. Unfortunately, it strikes out due to numerous implementation issues.

First: There are five characters to select from, but you can only have up to four players. What up with that?

Second: The phone app isn't all that well-made. A party member of mine accidentally paused the game (for everyone) because he switched to another app while we were playing. The UI is a mess, failing utterly at attempting to simplify a D&D players' manual; the number of menus you have to navigate just to use a potion is prohibitively inconvenient. And the movement controls just aren't polished enough to be comfortable to use ("free" movement is tied to a very small margin of touchscreen space).

Third: Performance isn't adequate, or at least, not universally. I played Eon Altar once with a full party, running on my Macbook; and later by myself, on a Windows PC. My full-party attempt had noticeable input delays -- not a huge deal for turn-based combat, but very annoying when we were just trying to run to the next quest marker.

(My solo adventure didn't have these delays, but I can't speak for whether this suggests a problem in the Mac application or with the number of players. I will say that the Mac version appears to have dramatically worse rendering quality, not just in terms of e.g. texture resolution, but in terms of 3D math correctness.)

Fourth: The overhead camera does a poor job of zooming out to allow independent control of disparate characters. You guys -- this is a pretty basic thing, for co-op games. If a party member falls out of the viewport because they weren't moving fast enough, that's a problem.

Fifth: The game just isn't all that interesting. Underneath all the menu complexity, and despite a handful of ingenious features (like asking players to speak their character's dialog out loud), Eon Altar takes place in a rote-sounding fantasy world and leans on well-traveled tropes for its character classes and abilities.

If it had been a flawless execution of a scripted, multiplayer fantasy campaign, that would be fine. Or if it had been a flawed, but innovative approach to grimdark or cyberpunk or some other genre. But Eon Altar, clever as it is at times, just isn't clever enough to deliver a memorably fun experience.

Progress: Almost none.