Age of Decadence Reviews

Another example of awesome writing in this game. I enter Ganezzar and I don't like the thing that's going on there. So, I walk around, killing some fanatics and telling others to go fuck themselves. I rescue Elias, start Nobless Oblige quest. Next goal - to go check on trader and help him with his problems. I expect another trash-fight, but encounter goes on differently. Enters Claudia - and her description is example of very decent writing, with lines like "she looks like someone who never had it easy in her life". Dialogue starts: she's not pleading, she's not trying to convince you - her people are starving, counting on her and she had a thing to do. You got to kill her or just walk away. I need to kill her, so I could work with good man Mitiades once again. Again, I expect short trash-fight, but she doesn't resist - she stands still and accepts her death while other guy drops his pointy stick and runs away.
Yes, it's small and completely optional quest, easy to miss (I missed it the first time). But this encounter really makes you feel like your character is a real cold-blooded murderer. I kinda felt bad after killing her, and I can't remember too much similar situations in other RPGs. Despite having few lines of introduction and few lines of dialogue Claudia feels like a fleshed-out character, with her own agenda. And it's not that you can pick up the safe side in this quest. Most games have clean distinction between good and bad guys: like the first quest in Arcanum, where you can side up with priest or bandits - choice is obvious, depending on who you want to play, bastard or noble person. Here sides are muddy: traders have their rights, but they greedy and don't care about impoverished people. Fanatics had people to provide too, but their methods are quite unsound. So many games tried to implement such gray morale and failed miserable, while AoD has it even in such small quests.

 

Ain't that the truth. Some of these guys are frothing at the mouth as if AoD gave them rabies. Not even going to bother responding to them.

Again, the argument was that AoD is a game that requires no metagaming whatsoever. It's been twisted over the last 3 pages because retards going to retard, but it seems that we are roughly in agreement - the separation is in the details. And I'm fine with that since pleasure/enjoyment is a subjective thing. The only main separation of opinion is whether AoD requires metagaming or not, and I guess we will never agree there. You seem to think that having to restart, possibly multiple times, doesn't mean metagaming is needed, whereas I would argue that that certainly means metagaming is necessary.

 

Just finished my second playthrough. While I missed all pre-war locations on my first run, on second I was able to visit and explore them all, except for Abyss and Saross (this two are gated by the statchecks). Basically, requirement is to invest in lore and crafting, and have all artefacts on you all the time. This became evident to me during my first playthrough, without ten restarts.

So, it's rather easy to create a character that will be proficient enough in killing (my second killcount - 216) and will be able to visit most of the game locations and quests. To do so I rolled as merc with advised stats, tagged lore and crafting. Fights were very easy, aside from couple of challenging encounters. Was able to kill Agathoth just by flailing axe at his arms. I can't call this "heavy metagaming prone": merc' stats are advised to you by the devs, and lore/crafting requirement takes one playthrough to figure out.

 

But you had no way of knowing that except for playing the game multiple times. So yes, meta-gaming needed.

AGAIN, because so many of you fucking retards are clueless:

whether a game requires metagaming or not is not a GOOD or BAD thing. It's all about development design.

 

I can't remember how I killed Agathoth, but I think it involved lots of save scumming.