Game News Age of Decadence Released on Steam Early Access

[a bear named spigot]

Keep fighting the good fight, Vince. Your inexhaustible politeness and patience on the Steam forum is inspiring.

 

[Lhynn]

tl;dr: put a tutorial in the game

Why didnt i think of that?

 

[Infinitron]

Who the FUCK is that manueloteromoreira guy?

be respectful and I will be respectful but when i guy who i dont know criticizes me....
YOU DONT HAVE THE RIGHT you have to earn the right.

Show me with logic why im wrong. and Them if you are righ i say ok you are right and im wrong.
sorrry.

But you only insulted me. Thats rude and unfair.
if your are in spain and your know me for the first time you say that to my face?
No I do not think you do that.
So if you dont disassemble my opinion with logic. STAY AWAY FROM ME.
DONT SAY NOTHING FROM ME.

 

[Irenaeus]

Links to thread!

 

[Vault Dweller]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/230070/discussions/0/666826250927901929/

 

[Irenaeus]

 

[Whisky]

Holy shit. This man truly has the blood of El Cid flowing in his veins.

Invite him here!

 

[tuluse]

I will allow one point to the steam users. The local/world map is not very clear, and it took me several minutes to figure it out in an older demo.

 

[Rahdulan]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/230070/discussions/0/666826250927901929/

That Gubmint fellow seems absolutely devastated. Someone should cheer him up.

 

[hiver]

Im just about to kill everyone at the outpost.
ill put up a video so you can post it there to make them cry even more. Use my Militades fight videos too.
Poor assholes.

Im not really sure what is the point of explaining things to those morons .. but i guess its nice PR thing to see a dev trying, even for such scum.

I would say cut them loose and worry about players who like it and those in between.

 

[RedScum]

Random steamtard - Answer: the devs are arrogant pricks. they got our money, so we are the fools. return to your normally scheduled life.

VD - Where is the arrogance? We've offered a public demo so that you can try and see for yourself, we're here to answer questions and help people who are struggling.

I regret that you didn't like the game. I really am. Unfortunately, I can't really do much about it, other than trying to offer you some advice about your in-game problems. Your post wasn't specific enough, so I don't really know what went wrong there.

Random steamtard - The arrogance is making the second ♥♥♥♥ing quest impossible

Burst out laughing.

EDIT:

I told him. His men died. He told me to ♥♥♥♥ off.

Ohh he got you there, the game said "Fuck off" to him!

 

[UnknownBro]

Deep tactical turn based combat 'Roll a dice and hope for the best' v 0.8.8.0015

 

[Bubbles]

"A dice", eh?

 

[AstroZombie]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/230070/discussions/0/666826250927901929/

 

[Fryjar]

http://steamcommunity.com/app/230070/discussions/0/666826250927901929/

While there are certainly a lot of overly emotional statements in there, it also pretty much confirms what others and me have mentioned in this thread before:
A lot of people don't get some of the core design concepts of the game that differ from what they are used to in other rpgs. Would it really hurt, to communicate these design decisions to them?

Consider that only the most vocal people actually care enough to make a forum post. Many others will simply fail, think that something is wrong with the game, and never touch it again. If you are expecting them to stick with the game long enough to figure out your design philosophies that's fair enough, but many simply won't bother, even if they are mentally capable of recognizing the patterns if they were to play a bit longer.

Again, in the linked thread nearly all the people that complained there mentioned that they have spread their points too thinly. I talked in my previous post about this before in more detail, but would it really hurt you that much, to provide a recommended build for each class + a popup that mentions during char generation that a jack of all trades is NOT viable and one has to focus at the beginning on a few core skills to be successful?
The same holds true for fights, that many people are not expected to win. This is a completely foreign concept to rpg players, even experienced ones, so why not simply tell them this before the first tough fight? This way, they realize that it is by design that they struggle/ are not expected to win the fight and not because the game system is inherently flawed.

Why does it make sense to communicate this to the players? Think about Dark Souls and their design philosophy that dying/ struggling is part of the gameplay. I can imagine that the rage would have been tremendous if people were to blindly buy the game without having read anything about it. Now Dark Souls had the tremendous advantage, that every single review out there mentioned this design philosophy, and players therefore knew what they were getting into. And they either appreciated it or simply saw that the design approach was not for them. But at the very least players didn't consider the game system as inherently flawed for misunderstanding what the designers intended.
AoD doesn't have that advantage, so you either can do something yourself to educate the players or put up with lots of unwarranted criticism from players (and a large silent minority that simply drops the game), that fault the game for the wrong reasons.

 

[latexmonkeys]

I dunno...
The apparent butthurt over the game's difficulty could be enough to generate a buzz resulting in more sales not less.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Demon's souls wasn't marketed by From Software as a hardcore die-all-the-time experience. It got that reputation from word of mouth starting on large gaming forums, the same way AoD is doing now. Corny ass lines like "Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition" didn't show up until a couple years after everyone knew what the Souls series was all about.

The solution to people not "getting" AoD is to throw the dedicated, hardcore fans just enough bones that they can learn the game inside and out, then let forums and youtube do the rest of the work. This is a slow process that won't result in tremendous day 1 sales + reviews, but it gives a game long legs. Open betas and early access are quite a nice head start to have.

Trying to beat the popamole masses over the head with in game hints is a futile exercise for a game like this, because there's too much you'd need to teach.

 

[Whisky]

Clearly what needs to be done is produce a Youtube video of various player characters in AoD dying horribly in different situations while "THIS IS THE NEW SHIT" plays over it.

Add some cheap video filters and effects for maximum kool.

 

[stony3k]

Clearly what needs to be done is produce a Youtube video of various player characters in AoD dying horribly in different situations while "THIS IS THE NEW SHIT" plays over it.

Add some cheap video filters and effects for maximum kool.

Don't we already have the Incline video that does basically this?

 

[Johannes]

The real problem to me is the fact that jack of all trades are not viable enough (unless you know exactly what you are doing through metagaming). For most people (including me) a jack of all trades of some extent will be much more interesting character concept than an all-out fighter, or all-out talker or thief. And there's nothing particularly realistic or intuitive about a singleminded character design being superior, overall. So the problem is the combination of there not being enough skill points to make a well rounded character, and also that when you do make a well rounded character, you won't know how soon or how often a skill will actually be used.

It's not so much that effective starting builds cannot be made, but they tend to be either boring or based on metagaming.

So I think an ideal solution would be to add more skillpoints on chargen, but also more options to gain from different skills very early, for all backgrounds. Or get more maluses than you get now, for not having some non-essential skill. There's no way for a new player to know how early on a specific skill will present an opportunity for use, ie. if it's a worthwhile or useless investment upon starting out for a given background. By adding more early skill checks you're bridging this gap. Later on it isn't as crucial how often any skill will be used, since it's been of at least some use already.

And if you did simply give some more points upon startup, what would that change? First time players would still mostly die before getting the hang of it, but for a shorter length of time. And experienced players could stretch their points a bit thinner across various skills early on, late game those initial skillpoints wouldn't be a big difference either way. As far as getting to do everything with a single character? Not gonna happen even if you'd have 10's in everything.

 

[Irenaeus]

[Lore]: By playing the game tons of times such knowledge is acquired.

 

[Whisky]

Has a jack of all trades really been good in any game? I mean, aside from ones where you get enough points to invest in every skill to a powerful level (Fallout, for example, gives you more than enough points to be a master of diplomacy and combat.).

Usually it seems like you're always better off specializing.

Though I do agree with your points.

 

[Jim the Dinosaur]

The same holds true for fights, that many people are not expected to win. This is a completely foreign concept to rpg players, even experienced ones, so why not simply tell them this before the first tough fight? This way, they realize that it is by design that they struggle/ are not expected to win the fight and not because the game system is inherently flawed.

Maybe he shouldn't just explain that you shouldn't expect to be able to win every fight, which he already does quite consistently, but also what the consequences are. As far as I can tell a relatively big amount of the events that net you xp or whatever are one-offs that you can't go back to at a later point. You'd expect people to think that this'd lead them into a spiral once they've passed on fights because they were too hard, didn't get the extra skill points, then got left with even harder fights that they're even less prepared to deal with, and so on.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

DONT SAY NOTHING FROM ME

 

[Western]

Just make the awesome character more awesomer Vince