Age of Decadence Reviews

[Infinitron]

Spotted this while digging through old issues of PC Gamer:



4 pages, pretty sweet.

 

[hilfazer]

A very quick "review" by Pope Amole II in his Overfall LP video.
He covers C&C and a focus of the game.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

The PC Gamer piece is pretty awesome.

 

[valcik]

Last three sentences are hilarious, too bad he didn't realize that there's merchant selling nets and bolas right in front of the inn!

 

[PlanHex]

Nah, what he really needed was a helmet. Cassius shouldn't break through imperial armor. He must have been taking damage from headshots.

edit:
Odd that he doesn't mention it though. "I got stabbed repeatedly in the face" would be a nice note to end the review on. I guess if you're just skimming the combat text, you don't notice the difference between "your helmet absorbs 0" or "your armor absorbs y".

 

[Vault Dweller]

http://www.gamingrebellion.com/2016...of-decadence-part-1-my-journey-to-immorality/

thought about restarting again but whatever part of my brain had encouraged me to break the mold and live out my furthest flung fantasies in a video game world had imploded after two disappointing starts. So I decided to just accept my fate and play AoD exactly as the developers had intended me to. This meant being a massive asshole all the time, using trickery first, violence second, and only some other method besides those two if I was in a dream sequence. It meant reducing any complex emotions I had to the pettiest lust for power and wealth imaginable. It meant being constantly on the lookout for an opportunity to betray everyone around me, especially if they had any sort of emotional significance to me.

Thus Age of Decadence became my Petyr Baelish simulator.

 

[HoboForEternity]

So instead of heroically financing businesses to produce goods and services to revitalize the world economy to bring back the collapsed empire from ravenous squalor, the first quest had me hiring an assassin to kill a fellow merchant on orders from my Commercium boss. The soon-dead merchant’s heinous crime had been to open up a stall in the city for a second time without succumbing to the Commercium’s extortion getting the Commercium’s lawfully sanctioned permission. Ughhh

ahahaha sweet, sweet, naive summer child.
great review/write up about the game, it is a pretty enjoyable read

 

[Lurker King]

http://www.gamingrebellion.com/2016...of-decadence-part-1-my-journey-to-immorality/

This art is not from AoD.

 

[PlanHex]

I love that picture of Tony Soprano as he's talking about the Commercium basically being the Mafia.

Spoiler

Look forward to Part 2.

 

[Mozg]

I was always like John Goodman is kind of a jerk in this

 

[Vault Dweller]

http://www.gamingrebellion.com/2016...-of-decadence-part-2-petyr-baelish-simulator/

Also:

 

[Lurker King]

I Look forward to Part 2.

I enjoyed the review too and the photos, it’s super funny. What I didn’t like is the AoD logo with that ugly art behind, especially regarding a game that has so much beautiful art.

Vault Dweller, do you still plan to do the five armies ending?

I’m sure it varies by character class, but my merchant-turned-diplomatic envoy almost never used “etiquette” despite meeting three kings, numerous faction leaders, and an alien (which would present a true challenge of etiquette). I only used “impersonate” once to pretend to be a military messenger and I failed. And even “trading” was a surprisingly rare option despite literally being a trader (as well as a chronic traitor). It turned out that “streetwise” and “lore” ended up being the most useful stats, with “persuasion” at a close third.

That’s true. I don’t know about impersonate, but etiquette is mostly useless and trading is only useful in Teron. Although I can be ignoring some hiden skill checks because my skill requirements were too low.

 

[PlanHex]

Hah, he keeps calling it DoA. Think he's got volleyball on his mind.

And yeah, it's very odd that they're using either old screenshots like the arena one or the non-AoD art in header.

 

[Lurker King]

"DoA" for "Dead or Alive". It's a joke.

 

[Mustawd]

"DoA" for "Dead or Alive". It's a joke.

Thanks for clearing that up. I felt like he was doing it intentionally but wasn't getting the reference.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Vault Dweller, do you still plan to do the five armies ending?

On hold at the moment. There will be a fairly big content update later on this year but it won't include this battle.

I’m sure it varies by character class, but my merchant-turned-diplomatic envoy almost never used “etiquette” despite meeting three kings, numerous faction leaders, and an alien (which would present a true challenge of etiquette). I only used “impersonate” once to pretend to be a military messenger and I failed. And even “trading” was a surprisingly rare option despite literally being a trader (as well as a chronic traitor). It turned out that “streetwise” and “lore” ended up being the most useful stats, with “persuasion” at a close third.

That’s true. I don’t know about impersonate, but etiquette is mostly useless and trading is only useful in Teron. Although I can be ignoring some hiden skill checks because my skill requirements were too low.

Sadly, Etiquette is a weak, underused skill, but Trading is checked quite often.

 

[Goral]

I've just noticed that Age of Decadence after a long time has reached the mark of 85% positive reviews on Steam (and recent reviews are positive in 90%) again. Too bad that 1 negative review will bring it down to 84% again (even though it will be 84.9% so rounding should give us 85).

 

[Jaedar]

Sadly, Etiquette is a weak, underused skill, but Trading is checked quite often.

In merchant questline maybe. Everyone else can easily do without and not really miss anything.

Talking is 90% streetwise and persuasion, 10% charisma.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's not a mandatory skill but it makes a lot of things easier. There are over 80 (82, I think) trading checks in the game.

 

[Elhoim]

I've just noticed that Age of Decadence after a long time has reached the mark of 85% positive reviews on Steam (and recent reviews are positive in 90%) again. Too bad that 1 negative review will bring it down to 84% again (even though it will be 84.9% so rounding should give us 85).

Steam doesn't round up.

 

[Eyestabber]

I've just noticed that Age of Decadence after a long time has reached the mark of 85% positive reviews on Steam (and recent reviews are positive in 90%) again. Too bad that 1 negative review will bring it down to 84% again (even though it will be 84.9% so rounding should give us 85).

Steam doesn't round up.

Well, I gotta keep on shitposting the negative reviews, then. Wish me luck!

 

[MRY]

It is remarkable how many positive reviews are necessary to balance out one unhappy customer.

 

[Goral]

Another shitty review, this time published on some weaboo site: http://imgur.com/a/tQLXL

Some fragments:

(...) You will also have many cases where options that are displayed will be ineffective and fail because of your stats. This is a bad thing because it leads us right into one of the biggest problem areas. The game has many dialog options that can lead to your immediate demise, and I’m not talking about a situation where you chose to enter a fight with a character that you set up as a primarily non-fighter character, either. There are dialog options in The Age of Decadence that can lead to your instant death. Of course, such options are fine as long as they aren’t everywhere and the player has an idea that the option is a poor choice, but this is not always the case. (...)

the game does have a training option when you start a new game. However, this tutorial mode is extremely short and only teaches you the bare bones basics.

The campaign itself is relatively short and requires numerous attempts to complete. You also have to play with many types of characters to eventually see everything in the game and discover the full story. So the gameplay becomes a repetitive task of spending large amounts of time doing more sessions with new characters to find out what works. This leaves you feeling like the game is a bit more puzzle oriented as you seemingly have to figure out just how the developers wanted you to set up your character and what they wanted you to do in order to succeed. Some players resort to reloading previous saves to try to advance or retry something repeatedly, or using commands in the console to cheat. This is another one of the areas where the game falls flat on its face, because it requires absurd amounts of time to get even decent at the game because death is waiting everywhere in the game world around every corner. (...) The gameplay becomes annoying fairly quickly because the game is extremely unforgiving and cheap at times.

I won't even bother to link to this crappy site, the author is visible, if you want to read it there just google this "programmer, game developer and veteran gamer", lol. If you decide to go there be advised that they advertise girl's panties and hentai games.

tl;dr;
The game is too hard and not fun and there are no animu girls to fap to, give me my money back.

 

[Darth Roxor]

"Michael is a veteran gamer in my early 30's"

 

[Infinitron]

This is a bad thing because it leads us right into one of the biggest problem areas.

"This is bad because it leads to badness."

He's certainly not a veteran writer.