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AoD: This game feels very on the rails. Am i playing it right?

Vault Dweller

Commissar, Red Star Studio
Developer
Joined
Jan 7, 2003
Messages
28,024
VD has a life experience where apparently everyone is pessimistic...
The setting does not reflect my life experience or personal thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. If the next game is filled with optimism, would you assume I've started taking drugs?

... where those at the foot of the social pyramid will always continue or there...
If that's a reference to the player character's social and professional standing, I think that in most cases he/she advances significantly (few exceptions and crucifixions aside) but you won't become a guildmaster in a few months as that's just silly.

... and where working relationships are always strictly and solely the only relationship that people have when interacting with each other.
Preference was given to expanding multiple solutions and adding extra branches. If I could, I would have gladly added more non-business conversations and dialogue options reflecting different personalities.
 

Butter

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 1, 2018
Messages
7,523
I think AoD could have been improved if there were fewer starts, but with more branches and quest solutions for each start (especially solutions that don't depend on character build). 8 different starting options is really cool, but if that had been pared down to 5-6, it would still be really cool.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
and linear.
in same way as spaghetti?
Ahhh what kind of spaghetti you have???? They are normally long straight lines....like this:
14941420-raw-spaghetti-on-kitchen-table.jpg



Soooo yeah,like spaghetti.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
I think "Everybody hates you and you can never succeed in anything and everyone is doomed in AOD" schtick is way overblown, really. It's certainly a good way to contrast it to other games, and it's grounded in truth, but this leads to nonsensical hyperbole like "only depressed people enjoy AOD" or whatever.

Games are of course about power fantasies but it's a question of how plausible, how challenging, and how well-earned you want your power fantasies to be. Codex often understands the value of this when it talks about other games - how power fantasies are actually not very fun if you get everything handed to you with improbable rationale. People were crying out for games that didn't treat you as a chosen one for over a decade.

Some of this does have to be with the cycle of fashionable ideas - darker stories and non-chosen one stories did become far more common around DA:O & afterwards, even if they were often done in bad ways (e.g. dark = edgy). So that maybe sours people who say I'd rather just go back to a nice simple fantasy romp.

Anyway, I don't know, I didn't necessarily feel like I was just getting everyone else laid without my getting any in AOD. I did often feel like everybody's plans would go wrong and shit would go down, not just for me but NPCs too.
 

Drowed

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2011
Messages
1,676
Location
Core City
The setting does not reflect my life experience or personal thoughts on life, the universe, and everything. If the next game is filled with optimism, would you assume I've started taking drugs?

No, but I can't ever see you making a game like that in 1000 years. But hey, I would find it quite curious to be proven wrong one day, who knows.

Preference was given to expanding multiple solutions and adding extra branches. If I could, I would have gladly added more non-business conversations and dialogue options reflecting different personalities.

Yeah, I know that there's a limit on how much a small team is able to expand the world, setting/environment and choices. I even commented on that in my post. I imagine what it would be like to play a game made by you where you got a team four or five times bigger, but with the same level of competence. Sadly, we'll never know. But no doubt I will buy Colony Ship and I know that, at the very least, it will be an interesting, fun and different game. It's more than I can say about 90% of the games released in recent years, so there's that.
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
and linear.
in same way as spaghetti?
Ahhh what kind of spaghetti you have???? They are normally long straight lines....like this:
14941420-raw-spaghetti-on-kitchen-table.jpg



Soooo yeah,like spaghetti.
It's customary in the non-bulgarian part of the world to cook your pasta before consuming.
:deathclaw:
But then it becomes pasta....

Also even cooked they are still linear,the don't become with 20 branches once cooked.
 

Gnidrologist

CONDUCTOR
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
20,856
Location
is cold
It doesn't matter if you travel from point A to point B in straight line or zigzag. The difference is inconsequential. Your curved macaroni is non-linear the same way Bioware game is.
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,760
The Commercium storyline is pretty terrible tbh, you'd be better off trying a praetor maybe or a loremaster.
A Loremaster start joining the Commercium is the best path for a non-combat playthrough, allowing the player to experience the large majority of non-faction content and most endings, if the player has the benefit of knowledge from one or more prior playthroughs to know what skills to advance and where to obtain critical items. +M
 

Gnidrologist

CONDUCTOR
Joined
Aug 30, 2005
Messages
20,856
Location
is cold
If it's on rails it's on rails and for passenger makes no difference how straight the route is. Curves are flavor that non-linearity make not.
 

skaraher

Cipher
Joined
Nov 19, 2012
Messages
796
Location
People's republic of Frankistan
The Commercium storyline is pretty terrible tbh, you'd be better off trying a praetor maybe or a loremaster.
A Loremaster start joining the Commercium is the best path for a non-combat playthrough, allowing the player to experience the large majority of non-faction content and most endings, if the player has the benefit of knowledge from one or more prior playthroughs to know what skills to advance and where to obtain critical items. +M

Actually the best "get all the lore route" is the House Aurelian one, and it can also be done without combat, you don't get to visit Darius' tomb or Al Akia in Commercium route I think.

True patrician of course go for Commercium -> Imperial Guard -> House Aurelian -> House Crassus for lowest Loyalty stat possible +M
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Last edited:

Goral

Arcane
Patron
The Real Fanboy
Joined
May 4, 2008
Messages
3,552
Location
Poland
It doesn't matter if you travel from point A to point B in straight line or zigzag.
Going by that logic it doesn't matter whether you will end up in Necropolis via Shady Sands -> Junktown -> BOS or Shady Sands -> Junktown - The Hub or if you will stumble upon one of the best locations there are, i.e. The Glow because in the end you end up in the same place doing the same thing. Retarded reasoning.

In Age of Decadence you have various ways of achieving goals, you meet various people along which give different results but ultimately you end up in the same cities and face similar problems because the ultimate goal is the same for all characters. Which is how it's like in Fallout but without any filler so no "pointless" walking through the wastes or random encounters (I'm using quotation marks because in case of F1 they're not pointless and add to the flavour but it's often not the case, e.g. in FNV where it's just a waste of time). It's not necessarily a worse approach (unless you're a Skyrim fan) because it gets you condensed action without any sham content and without grinding. If you prefer that (filler) kind of approach fine, but pretending that other RPGs don't have such constraints is naive at best.

What's more, even though Age of Decadence doesn't have this "flavour" it compensates by giving us WAY MORE choices and ways to achieve our goal. Compare getting rid of radscorpions in Shady Sands by wiping them out or just closing the entrance with explosives (which is still way above 99% of contemporary RPGs where you don't even have the alternative) with getting rid of "Aurelians" and taking over the outpost. Night and day. We also get the unique "see how the same situation would look like from the different perspective" where at one playthrough you're the assassin and in the other you need to repel the attack of the assassin. IMO that's just superb and it totally makes up for not being able to wonder off to have a false sense of another dimension to it.

Then again Fallout had the unique "Tell me about" system which was and is highly underappreciated feature but what do you know, it's not being used any more because people are too stupid to appreciate it and they prefer bloat over quality and unique content. So yeah, instead of adding things like that (tell me about which creates a very convincing illusion of real conversation or having the option to see the same situation from a totally different perspective) they just make everything bigger and add more content diluting the experience along the way. This is one of the reasons why Fallout > Fallout 2 by a significant margin.
 

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