While curry is trolling, a reputation that factors in whether there were survivors/the whole thing was a secret stealth assassination/etc would be nice.
Here is what we have:
You kill someone, your bodycount rep stat goes up no matter what. To some degree it's for you to keep track of your killing sprees, but we check it in dialogues to give fighting men a "persuasion" option:
[body count] “I take it you don’t know who I am.”
[body count] “I’ve been very busy the last few days, killing people who got in my way. I don’t mind killing a few more, but it’s getting tiresome.”
[body count] “Killing folks has always been easy for me. It’s not a talent that many people admire, but every now and then comes a time when you want someone dead. A <man/woman> of my skills might come in handy.”</text>
[body count] “Miltiades may have made a fool out of you, but I’ll make a fucking corpse out of you, unless you put a leash on your apes and get the fuck out of here.”
[body count] You step closer to Cassius and let him see you for what you are – a remorseless killer. You look at him until you can feel his fear, until Cassius understands how close he came to dying. Then you start talking. “If I let you go, you’ll probably do something stupid. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking there's some way around this. That if you can get away, get to your people, they can protect you. Everyone thinks that. Right up to the end, when they're looking up at me, choking on their own blood, they still think someone's going to come and save them. But no one does. And no one will save you, if you cross me, do you understand?” “I do,” says Cassius quietly, “I understand. I’ll leave, I promise.”
Etc.
Then we have combat rep, which tracks your participation in "suicide" missions, and then we have faction reps, which will have some consequences:
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, <charname>! After all you’ve done, I didn’t think I’d see your face anytime soon. Kill the <son a bitch/bitch>.”
Now, RPGs aren't real life sims. They offer you abstract concepts that shouldn't be taken literally. RPG towns usually have less population than a small village, so it's very easy to kill people "without anyone noticing", simply because developers avoid placing a shitload of people on the screen. So, when you kill some guy when nobody's around, you are not a fucking stealth ninja who walks unseen.
There are some cases (mentioned in Elwro's impressions, I believe) when the game lets you kill people without anyone knowing, but they don't come often (only when such an option can fit the design).
Have you let any non-oldschool-RPG-nerds play the demo?
Yes. We posted a lot of impressions on our forums:
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2419.msg78715.html#msg78715
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,2419.msg78174.html#msg78174
And how much do you care about the game actually selling decently vs making an RPG the way you think an RPG should be?
While it would be nice to make RPGs for a living, we didn't try to make a game that sells. I mean, we all know that on the list of things that sell well, TB games with text adventure elements are probably at the very bottom (if they are on the list at all).
I wouldn't say that AoD is what I think RPG should be like either. It's a game we wanted to make. If people buy it, we'll make more. If people don't buy it, well, I'll know that we did do something (and I'll never bitch about other RPGs again).
