Game News Age of Decadence Preorders Begin

[Grunker]

Elhoim: Why can't the vignette-shop be seperate from the story? I mean, a character can have the starting gear from his earlier days. The point here is gameplay, in my mind

 

[Elhoim]

It was never our goal to make the starting gear/gold balanced (the same as reputation, for example). While we want it to be "more or less" in the same range, the characters have what makes sense according to their background.

 

[Grunker]

Yeah yeah, I get the point, we just disagree. For me player option weighs higher.

 

[Elhoim]

Elhoim: Why can't the vignette-shop be seperate from the story? I mean, a character can have the starting gear from his earlier days. The point here is gameplay, in my mind

The point is how we introduce the shop. Right now we can't link the trade screen right after the character creation (and then continue with the normal scripts), and starting in a lone room with a merchant would break the flow of the introduction. Try the new mode in the version, and then we'll see if we'll add a character creation shop.

 

[Silellak]

Fuck yeah. Change list sounds awesome, Elhoim. I am now even happier with my decision to pre-order. You guys rock.

 

[Grunker]

Elhoim: Why can't the vignette-shop be seperate from the story? I mean, a character can have the starting gear from his earlier days. The point here is gameplay, in my mind

The point is how we introduce the shop. Right now we can't link the trade screen right after the character creation (and then continue with the normal scripts), and starting in a lone room with a merchant would break the flow of the introduction. Try the new mode in the version, and then we'll see if we'll add a character creation shop.

Just so we understand each other: It's not super-important to me, it's just something I'd like.

I've pre-ordered anyway and I like Sillelak said; you guys rock either way.

I just hate having gear forced on me.

 

[Pope Amole II]

Here is the list of the CURRENT implemented changes. There are still several more to go. Suggestions and comments are appreciated.

No offense or trolling intended, guys, but you're so fucking awful at balancing the game rules. I dunno, what are the reasons of this, is this the fault of bad testers (like it is in Vogel's games, for example) or is it designers overreacting to criticism or some other horrible cause, but those planned changes look like an epic fail in understanding of what's actually wrong with the game. Now, I'm talking about balance issues mostly - questfixes are fine, although some of the stuff there is missing too. But let me explain what am I talking about.

- Strength now give a % increase instead of a fixed bonus.

First big one. While I don't know the exact % as you're not naming it, this change is wrong on multiple levels. For the starters, it murders dagger users - yeah, just slaughters them. While the combination of 10 str + 10 dex + crafted manica & dagger may have looked broken, in reality, it was just fine, because not only you have made your character extremely one sided for the sake of dealing damage, but also you weren't dealing that much damage at all, especially against armour - the armour piercing ability of the dagger was not kicking as often as one would like it to so while you were doing 6 fast attacks with jambia per turn, against serious opponents most of them went like "3 damage, 3 damage, 3 damage..." Well, maybe it's just my shitty luck, but even with a "10 str, 10 dex, 8 pe" build I was dropping, like , one usual guy per 1.5 turn which was definitely not enough to make the fight either safe or easy. And with 10 STR, 10 DEX, 8 per, I'm sure I could've done as well with either 2h sword or axe - after all, they have better passive abilities (or, rather, their passive abilities are actually bonuses and not something that's just reqired for the weapon to work at all) and care less about heavy armour (that is prevalent in tough fights). Note, however, that I used dodge, not block, since block was badly balanced etc., while dodge, in my opinion, is balanced just right enough.

And that is, BTW, where the problem of "strength is useless" comes from - obviously, when you're nigh-invincible with your 80 block points (which, from what I could tell from your forum, nearly all of your home testers went for), you absolutely don't care about how fast you are dropping your enemies. Sure, if you have dozens of turns to popamole your enemies, you can it even with 1 or 2 s4 attacks per turn. Once this invincibility is not the factor, you quickly understand that, outside the spear factor, having 4 str really sucks.

As for the "high str being useless with 2-handed weapons" - this is also not that true. Well, I lie a bit, it is true, but not as disastrous as people write about it - as I have mentioned, you get "purer" damage with it (since 2h are good versus heavy armour), you get better (up to the point of being devastating) counterattacks and insane critical hits, so 10 str + 2-handed axe or sword is definitely not weak. It's different with spears, but since spears function on the entirely different level than "common" weapons it's not that unreasonable, I think. Maybe 1.5x multiplier would do them some good, but it is certainly not required to finish all battles in the game (not to mention that, as far as I understand, this changes will also affect enemies in the same way and, since your designers just love to give s 9 & 10 to some random old bums, it can possibly make some fights punishingly harsh).

Finally, even if you want to buff strength (although, I'll repeat, the problem lies with the block and not strength) there are couple of factors to notice. First, for everyone other than thief, money are nearly useless in demo. And in AoD, your wealth is directly tied to your carrying capacity, since, unlike most other RPGs, you can't return to the field of battle to scrounge what didn't fit in your backpack in the previous time, no sir, you have only one attempt so with low strength you're usually leaving hundreds of gold lying on the ground. If there was only a way for warrior to profit from this excessive wealth, like, you know, making the thief shop accessible for any class, just for a hefty bribe, or whatever... Monetizing your strength would be nice.

Second, strength is rarely used in quests which also a bogus. Oh, sure, they say it helps you intimidate people, only with str 10 you don't want to intimidate people - you want (and you're able) to fucking slaughter them where they stand. Compared to PE (which brings you lots of nifty things and bonus SPs), strength is really bleak.

Third, people say that PE is better than STR because PE governs all passive weapon abilities. I'll talk about PE lower, but what could help strenght is some sharing of that - like, it's fine if PE helps you to crit people or to find weak spots in their armour, or to catch them as they approach, but why should it help in, say, splitting shields in half? What, shields have some very unobvious and hidden weak spots? I'm no cold weapon expert, but I'm sure that huge strenght would help better in this task. And same can be said for a knockdown ability - well, that is a bit arguable since it is more about catching people in vulnerable position and less about just throwing them with the force of the impact, but since the knockdowns in AoD are already unrealistic as hell, it wouldn't be strange to see STR governing the chance of them.

- Perception THC bonus reduced, increases 4 points per stat point.

Yeah, thanks for making those aimed strikes even more save scum reliable. It's not a huge nerf, but I've already explained that people take PER over STR due to the quests and weapon profiency issues - I mean, really, with 8 PE 50 spear skill give me 32% of interception, with 10 PE - 45%. Considering how much a spear user relies on interception to survive, it's not a surprise that he'll take 10 PE without a smallest doubt. Same goes for the other weapons too. Another part of this problem is that weapon skills are, at the moment, extremely weak - like, pumping them to 50+ costs a ton of points yet gives you ridiculously low bonuses to TH chance and passive ability chance - like, my aforementioned spearman tried to bump his spears up to 65, but, after seeing his intercept chance jumping to the majestic 47%, he immediately reloaded.

Another benefit here is that high PER makes the combat more tactical. Like, with low PER, you're really confined to the weapon that you're invested with - you just won't hit with anything else. It also is hard (read - not really possible) to use those fancy aimed and power attacks, so another thing that makes str 10 dex 10 dagger using assassin horrible is that he is an ultimate popamole character - you just stand there and spam fast attacks and flurries. High per character, on the other hand, can take much more approach to the battle, he remains effective when switching weapons so he can adapt to nearly any situation and that is cool, in the gameplay terms. So yeah, the problem here also lies in weapon skills being so uneffective (probably due to block skill being broken) and synergies (a great idea, by the way) also being not as strong as they should've been. Outside of that, PER shouldn't really be nerfed.

- THC bonus from weapons reduced from 10 to 8 and from 5 to 4.

Once again, it's not small weapons that are broken - it is shields that are broken. Outside of shields, small weapons are not that good.

- Buckler has an attack penalty of 5.

That hardly fixes the block, y'know, and probably makes cavalry shield somewhat OP.

- Intelligence bonus SP now it's only applied on quest rewards, as you get them.

Another extremely retarded change. I know that there is a crowd that whines "oh, INT is too good on the fighter", but first, that stems from the very same "pump block to 80 and become GODLIKE" issue, and second, you're ruining the game for the best kind of characters here. I mean, it is obvious, that for pure talkers this change does not matter - after all, combat is auto-death for them. It also doesn't hurt the pure fighter character - honestly, even IG storyline is manageable with 4 int character, you just have to bring enough nets to the final battle. No, the ones who are really gimped are the hybryd characters - due to the really high skill requirements, they are already extremely skill point starved and totally exploit and metagaming reliant, so by depriving them even further you're just making things even worse. I mean, they're the best kind of characters in the game - it gets kinda boring if all you do is fighting or just clicking on the dialogue option, but even now it's extremely hard to make an assassin who, say, is able to take care of himself in combat and haves at least some points in sneak and disguise, and after that change... Yeah, thank you for limiting my fun even further.

- Dodge characters get a bonus to avoid AoO attacks, allowing characters focused on dodge to move around the battlefield more.

That's a good change for the archers, but it can make spear wielders and 2-handed weapon users in manica a bit OP - spear wielders are already fine, even when dodge is presumably useless, so after this change...

- Free defenses are based on dexterity and AP limit set by armor. Low dexterity and heavy armor characters get tired faster and get a penalty to defense when defending a lot within a turn. High dex, lowly armored character keep their full defense for longer.

Same as before - can easily make dex 10 dodger in manica broken when, at the moment, they're fine - combat for them is somewhat hard, sure, but, as far as I get the point, that's how you want to roll it.


Oh, and two nitpicks for the quest fixes.

First, noncombat characters really need a way of earning some cash through the noncombat quests - honestly, quest rewards are usually unreasonably low (like, you can disable a fucking aurellian encampment and get what? meager 100 gold - well, that's when you steal the thingamajig, IIRC, it gets higher when you terminate them, but still, in the comparison of what they are paying the raiders to do the exact job... and raiders don't even finish the fucking miners, lazy bastards) and all the money come from spoils of victory. So if you're a trader and if you forgot to invest into disguise (because who would've though that a trader would need it?) and if you spent some gold on some crap for any reason imaginable you can have a really nasty problem with that 1000 gold bribe. I mean, if I'm either a grifter or a merchant, I really expect some opportunities to earn money and there are hardly any.

Second, assassins questline needs to be more reactive. Like, AG2 - you kill three spies, you return to guildmaster, he looks at your bandages and says "you need to learn to kill enemies faster'. So, out of curiousity, i finished the quest without loosing a single HP, only he still looks at my bandages and says that I should be faster. Yeah, right. Or, erm, is it Agalai? I mean, the guy in the guild who says that you need to kill 27 men to be an experienced assassin - what if I already killed that much? I understand that that is not the point of that conversation, but it would be nice to say something different if you had a bigger bodycount than that.

 

[Jaesun]

Joined: Feb 29, 2012

 

[Roguey]

Joined: Feb 29, 2012

Saying this in response to a long, detailed post just makes you look like an upset fanboy.

 

[Jaesun]

And reading his post is teh hard.

 

[BLOBERT]

I THINK THE ABOVE BRO HAS SOME INTELLIGENT POINTS BUT I DISAGREE A LITTLE

BRO HIGH INT DOESNT JUST MEAN 80 BLOCK FOR ME I HAD 60 BLOCK 60 WEAPON AND 50 CRAFTING WHICH GETS YOU A KICK ASS WEAPON AND THEN I COULD GO FOR HIGH CRITICAL

ONLY DOWNSIDE WAS THAT I ALWAYS SKIPPED KILLING THE ASSASSIN

 

[BLOBERT]

ALSO FOR ME I WAS NEVER INVINCIBLE TACTICS WERE KILLING THE RIGHT ENEMIES FIRST AND HELPING TEAMATES SURVIVE

 

[Marsal]

A lot of text.

Pope makes some good points. I don't know who is in charge of balancing the game, but these changes are not addressing the real problems with combat and character creation in general. You need to stop listening to people whose feedback shaped the first version of Beta. Combat was neither good, nor balanced. It was hard and challenging, but not in a way most players would appreciate. You're just making things worse (the intelligence "fix" is just plainly stupid).

Joined: Feb 29, 2012

Don't be gay, bro.

 

[Melcar]

I'm indifferent.

 

[Jaesun]

Oh ok hon.

 

[Elhoim]

There are some good points in his post, others that are taken out of context of the changes, like the changes to SP, or lack of information on other changes.

I won't go over all the points, but I'll touch the issue of SP and hybrid characters. The new SP is awarded immediately, instead of a bunch every 20 points, so they will get to play with them faster. Second, the % is higher. Third, most SP comes from quests. Fourth, we give more SP at character creation. So we give more SP now, but in a more "controlled" way. Hybrids characters are a lot more viable now with the synergy between checks, effect of stats and reputation on the checks, and intermediate results other than "success/failure".

As for the other points, there are still other changes that are being worked on and that complement these ones. Let's have this discussion again once we release the new version, and the changes are done and ready to test.

 

[circ]

Oh ok hon.

Keep those mentally challenging ripostes coming bro.

 

[empi]

Joined: Feb 29, 2012

Gj fanboy, you really added to the sensible posts pope made, srsly.

 

[Gord]

- Strength now give a % increase instead of a fixed bonus.

First big one. While I don't know the exact % as you're not naming it, this change is wrong on multiple levels. For the starters, it murders dagger users - yeah, just slaughters them.

I don't think it's so bad, actually, but you need to counter-balance it right.
Rather than make dagger's efficiency depend on strength, I'd make it depend on criticals or aimed attacks.
Let's face it, daggers shouldn't be brute-force weapons wielded by Conan the Barbarian-esque bodybuilders, but weapons of finesse wielded by the sly, wiry guys.
Therefore, give them either high crit-chance or a bonus on aimed attacks and make them deal damage by exploiting this feature, rather than just keep a high-strength bonus, that doesn't fit the weapon type.

"Blocking is broken"

You do get this nice synergy between high DR and high blocking probability. Even if you are hit, you high DR will anyway prevent most of the damage. That's not working with dodging.
So dodging could be made to work more often, or give additional advantages, as they seem to have done with those changes.
The problem I see, is that those changes may take the system too far towards the complicated side.
At the same time, blocking probability should maybe be adjusted a bit - then again, combat can already be very hard, especially before you get good DR and high-enough blocking, so nerfing it too much would probably mean much more difficult early game.

- Perception THC bonus reduced, increases 4 points per stat point.
- THC bonus from weapons reduced from 10 to 8 and from 5 to 4.

Can't say much about this, definitely need to see how it works out before making a statement.

- Buckler has an attack penalty of 5.

That hardly fixes the block, y'know, and probably makes cavalry shield somewhat OP.

Well, it does give some incentive not to use a shield, but I'm not sure if I like it, either.
I'm afraid it will mostly just lead to slightly longer fights, but admittedly, you have to balance them somehow and an attack malus is probably the only one shield-users will "feel".

I'd maybe enable blocking with weapons, but at lower efficiency - which would help two-handed builds as well.
Shields could let you block at full efficiency (and against arrows) but should be balanced - so again attack malus?

- Intelligence bonus SP now it's only applied on quest rewards, as you get them.

Another extremely retarded change.

I doubt it will have such a negative impact as you think here.

- Dodge characters get a bonus to avoid AoO attacks, allowing characters focused on dodge to move around the battlefield more.

That's a good change for the archers, but it can make spear wielders and 2-handed weapon users in manica a bit OP - spear wielders are already fine, even when dodge is presumably useless, so after this change...

- Free defenses are based on dexterity and AP limit set by armor. Low dexterity and heavy armor characters get tired faster and get a penalty to defense when defending a lot within a turn. High dex, lowly armored character keep their full defense for longer.

Same as before - can easily make dex 10 dodger in manica broken when, at the moment, they're fine - combat for them is somewhat hard, sure, but, as far as I get the point, that's how you want to roll it.

Again, in both cases I'd like to see how it turns out before I start bitching.
But as I said, I think the free defense-thing is a bit too complicated. We'll see.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Will I get invitation to betas if I preorder?

No. We aren't offering any rewards to make people pay more.

Probably because you can start the game and walk to the shop without facing any fight or quest that need store itens.

Pretty much.

 

[Vault Dweller]

No offense or trolling intended, guys, but you're so fucking awful at balancing the game rules. I dunno, what are the reasons of this, is this the fault of bad testers (like it is in Vogel's games, for example) or is it designers overreacting to criticism or some other horrible cause, but those planned changes look like an epic fail in understanding of what's actually wrong with the game.

Oy, what isn't wrong with the game? The list is endless:

- It's not a game I wanted to play
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- What is this shit?
- The game needs party/magic/monsters NOW!
- I don't like the game's rules
- Swords are useless
- Ranged combat is useless
- You must have 10 in all physical stats to have a chance
- The physical stats are dump stats
- THE GAME SUCKS!!!

What I should have typed is "AoD sucks, and Vault Dweller is an arrogant idiot surrounded by fanbois who accuse any critics of trolling him due to jealousy. Film at 11." Only fair since that is the response every time, argumentation and dismissal, and no real changes ever get made just shift numbers around like that'll fix anything.

In my arrogance, I've foolishly decided to listen to people who enjoy the game and understand why we designed it this way, instead of listening to such intellectual titans and design experts as Pope Amole 2 (I can only assume that Pope Amole 1's posts were too deep for the unwashed masses and he was promptly banned - such a loss), Knotanalt, and Skyway.

 

[Infinitron]

- It's not a game I wanted to play
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- What is this shit?
- The game needs party/magic/monsters NOW!
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- I don't like the game's rules
- Swords are useless
- Ranged combat is useless
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- You must have 10 in all physical stats to have a chance
- The physical stats are dump stats
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- Wait, it's not Fallout clone?
- THE GAME SUCKS!!!

Fixed

 

[Mrowak]

- The game needs party NOW!

To be fair, I do think the combat system in AoD would fare much better in a party-based game. One of the most basic faults in combat is that it doesn't allow the room for any errors. That wouldn't be a problem if the errors could only stem from player's incompetence. Unfortunately with all those % chances it does happen that having e.g. 77% chance to hit you miss three times in a turn, and your opponent scores 2 critical hits for some reason.

That wouldn't be a big deal in a party-based game, when if one of combatants fail, you can quickly come up with contingency plan, and make up for the fucked rolls with other characters. As it is now, when you fail a roll or two, it all too often turns out that your character is turned into mincemeat.

The implementation of this would be relatively easy considering the combat system in AoD encourages tactical-spatial thinking and experimenting with a variety of weapons. You can easily imagine scenario when 3-4 bros are faced with 7-9 foes and must cooperate closely together to stand a chance of defeating opponents.

Again, I think tactical combat is something you could consider for AoD2. I can't imagine any way it could hurt the gameplay.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I like party-based combat as much as the next guy here. The reason AoD is a single-character game is because it fits the game better.

As you can see we do have the group fighting mechanics in place, so all we need is a proper interface. I can promise you that if AoD sells enough, you'll get a tactical, party-based dungeon crawler very quickly (since we have pretty much everything - the engine, the combat system, animations and assets, etc).

 

[Vault Dweller]

As for the changes:

- Strength now give a % increase instead of a fixed bonus.

First big one. While I don't know the exact % as you're not naming it, this change is wrong on multiple levels. For the starters, it murders dagger users - yeah, just slaughters them. While the combination of 10 str + 10 dex + crafted manica & dagger may have looked broken, in reality, it was just fine, because not only you have made your character extremely one sided for the sake of dealing damage...

And that is, BTW, where the problem of "strength is useless" comes from - obviously, when you're nigh-invincible with your 80 block points (which, from what I could tell from your forum, nearly all of your home testers went for), you absolutely don't care about how fast you are dropping your enemies.

As for the "high str being useless with 2-handed weapons" - this is also not that true. Well, I lie a bit, it is true, but not as disastrous as people write about it ...

First, your opinion isn't a fact, yet you present it as such. Neither is mine, of course, but mine is based on feedback of a lot of people. We went through hundreds of posts, good and bad, and took notes. While, originally we went with fixed STR numbers for simplicity, it really didn't work in the end, because in the end daggers were overpowered (and they were never meant to be played as "little swords" with a lot of damage) and two-handed didn't benefit much from a few extra points.

Second, I do agree that the focus on defense was too much and you were nigh-invisible with 80 block, but that's the first thing we looked at and changed.

Second, strength is rarely used in quests which also a bogus.

Because the town quests don't really require strength, unless you're murdering your way through. It's much more useful in the ruins (think dungeons).

Yeah, thanks for making those aimed strikes even more save scum reliable. It's not a huge nerf, but I've already explained that people take PER over STR due to the quests and weapon profiency issues...

You think?

Basically, 5 stats give bonuses to fighters. The problem is that most people prefer INT, PER, and DEX bonuses and are willing to sacrifice everything else. For most fighters 2 extra points of damage or extra 5 HP aren't as important as more SP, THC bonus, and AP. That's what we're changing.

It also is hard (read - not really possible) to use those fancy aimed and power attacks...

At first. A beginner shouldn't use these attacks. Once your skill is high enough, you'll start fighting more skilfully.

... so another thing that makes str 10 dex 10 dagger using assassin horrible is that he is an ultimate popamole character - you just stand there and spam fast attacks and flurries.

...which is probably the worst way to fight, but what do I know?

- THC bonus from weapons reduced from 10 to 8 and from 5 to 4.

Once again, it's not small weapons that are broken - it is shields that are broken. Outside of shields, small weapons are not that good.

Neither small weapons nor shields are broken. They can use some tweaking though. It was easy to get high THC with small weapons and high PER and very little skill (the actual skill, I mean). It had to be changed.

- Intelligence bonus SP now it's only applied on quest rewards, as you get them.

Another extremely retarded change.

Constructive criticism detected.

The SP bonus was too much, which is a problem because it creates wildly different skill ranges, especially if one starts farming SP and trying to kill as many people as possible (sometimes even your own allies). Limiting it to quests only makes sense and removes an exploit.

I know that there is a crowd that whines "oh, INT is too good on the fighter", but first, that stems from the very same "pump block to 80 and become GODLIKE" issue, and second, you're ruining the game for the best kind of characters here. I mean, it is obvious, that for pure talkers this change does not matter - after all, combat is auto-death for them. It also doesn't hurt the pure fighter character - honestly, even IG storyline is manageable with 4 int character, you just have to bring enough nets to the final battle. No, the ones who are really gimped are the hybryd characters - due to the really high skill requirements, they are already extremely skill point starved and totally exploit and metagaming reliant, so by depriving them even further you're just making things even worse. I mean, they're the best kind of characters in the game - it gets kinda boring if all you do is fighting or just clicking on the dialogue option, but even now it's extremely hard to make an assassin who, say, is able to take care of himself in combat and haves at least some points in sneak and disguise, and after that change... Yeah, thank you for limiting my fun even further.

We are not removing the bonus or reducing the %. So, a fighter with high INT will still get a bonus on quests but not on the kills.

First, noncombat characters really need a way of earning some cash through the noncombat quests - honestly, quest rewards are usually unreasonably low (like, you can disable a fucking aurellian encampment and get what? meager 100 gold - well, that's when you steal the thingamajig, IIRC, it gets higher when you terminate them, but still, in the comparison of what they are paying the raiders to do the exact job...

They are paying the raiders the ransom and trying to get more bang for their buck.