AoD recieves undue praise and favouritism from the Codex

[Deleted Member 22431]

I'm assuming you rated my post fake news because I was positive about the game but mentioned that skillpoint hoarding is a thing if you want to succeed with most factions. The game doesn't provide any feedback or information that is going to tell you which skills are going to be important and going with a general character concept easily leads to having the wrong allocation. The likeliness of just guessing right is very low. Anyone who tells you they succeeded the first time they tried to finish the Thieve's Guild questline without reloading is full of shit, just to mention the most egregious example..

You have no idea what you are talking about. Hoarding skill points are only necessary if you want specific achievements and secret locations that are side quests. The main quests are easy. Thieve's Guild questline is the most open and accommodating of the factions. The questline in Teron is the freshest without a doubt.

Still a great game, I don't know why you have to go full fanboy and destroy your credibility by trying to portray it as perfect.

I don’t want to portrait anything. The game is not perfect. Far from it. What pisses me of is not that some people don’t like the game. It is that they rationalize and make unsound criticisms based on laziness and egocentrism. You don’t like gated content? That’s fine. But people will not say this because it would seem that they are being popamole and indulgent. Instead, they will say something like “You can finish the main quests without hoarding SPs”, which is a complete fabrication. Or if you don’t like text-adventures, just say that. Don’t say it is not a real choice because that’s an insult to my intelligence. There are also the players who want to come across as though guys but are butthurt that their favorite characters are destroyed by the hostile game world. You can tell by their reactions that they feel so insulted by this, but will not say it because they will look stupid. So they rely on red herrings such as “This game doesn’t allow me trying different things”, which is simply false. The truth of the matter is that I like debating certain design topics, and this is one of my favorites. The fact that involves AoD is just a coincidence. I could easily spend the same amount of time debating PoE* and I hate the game.

* No, this is not a PoE thread yet.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

The truth is that people will need to agree to disagree, because in most cases, when we talk about linearity, people are using different definitions for the same word. That's why any debate on the subject gets nowhere.

Or maybe you are irrational and you want to treat this topic as a mere semantic dispute so that you don’t have to justify your lack of arguments and dogmatism. The truth is that people like you are not transparent. You should be upfront about your preferences instead of disguising them as something else in a vain attempt to make them look more respectable.

 

[Drowed]

Or maybe you are irrational and you want to treat this topic as a mere semantic dispute so that you don’t have to justify your lack of arguments and dogmatism.

(Oh, and God doesn't exist. There are no messiahs in the world, not even Chris Avellone.)

 

[Jason Liang]

But... there's nothing AoD did well. It has some cool innovations but doesn't manage to use them to craft a great gaming experience. It's a lot of wasted potential.

The only thing it did ok was world building but even that's kind of baroque.

And the atrocious skill system just leaves a bad taste to the entire experience, because it literally taints everything. Politician only deflects but doesn't address the issues with the skill system.

Since the skill system is cancer, it is only fair to judge AoD without it - by playing it completely without using skill points at all. Which is what I did.

Then it is easy to see that it is a railroaded CYOA with a couple of points to change tracks, sporadically interrupted by flawed tactical combat.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

But... there's nothing AoD did well.

Still a great game, I don't know why you have to go full fanboy and destroy your credibility by trying to portray it as perfect.

See the post above Saudj? The criticism is not "I don't like this feature or this thing pissed me of". It is "these developers are imbeciles and they don't know their job". This coming from a player who enjoys all kinds of shitty games. It is pure butthurt and egotistical drivel.

 

[FeelTheRads]

You are jumping to weird conclusions that a game with traditional RPG gameplay also has to have filler content.

Mostly he's just parroting VD, whose best defense to the claims that AoD lacks exploration, and really pretty much anything else besides what was scripted in, was "LOOOOOOOL U JUST WANT TO DIG THROUGH TRASHCANS".
See, every RPG with exploration is wrong, AoD is right.

 

[Manny]

I don't understand why many claim that, to win AoD, you have to metagame and save a lot of skill points. I have played it once as an assassin and, truthfully, beyond certain points where I could not advance at the moment and, therefore, I had to do other things before continuing along that path, I didn’t have a problem, and I was placing my skill points where I thought it was better for my character without metagaming. Now I am playing UnderRail for the first time, and the same thing has happened to me, only that, unlike AoD, that these impasses happen both in combat parts and in parts of dialogues, in UnderRail it only happens in combat.

It's factually false that the game does not give you options beyond the creation of your character. On several occasions I was able to choose to go one way or the other, and also solve a quest one way or the other. That is a fact. I did have to get used to accept that my character would not be able to advance on certain routes though, and that seemed to me one of the best aspects of the game. But I always found other paths available.

I liked AoD a lot (the same is happening to me with UnderRail) and, if I have something to criticize it, is that its way of presenting skill checks in situations outside of combat, shows how passive this type of gameplay can be. I think that is its main limitation. Looking forward to Colony Ship to see the IT design improvements. .

 

[Butter]

The thing is that people coming from a game like Fallout are used to spreading their skill points all over the place without much negative consequence. Worst case scenario if you get stuck is you farm some random encounters to get another level-up. AoD allows you to spread yourself way too thin and reach a point where forward progress is impossible (obviously there aren't infinite random encounters to farm, even if your character is good at fighting). The hoarding and save-scumming approach was inevitable given the hard skill thresholds for non-combat characters and the way character progression works.

 

[Tigranes]

The thing is, most RPGs are built with very large margins in multiple levels - to accommodate different playstyles as well as player failure / bad decisions. You get no time limits so you can grind or get lost or go back and forth. You get to retry skill checks. You get so much money you can always reverse bad decisions about spending. You get enough XP and skill points that you can win challenges without really understanding what's going on.

And then AOD squeezes many of those margins to the bare minimum. You suddenly fail hard at shit if you don't have the skills. You can hybrid but whether you hybrid or specialisae you have to really plan your build right. So suddenly, people who have always played this way (or like playing this way, or accept it's a different ball game, etc) learn to appreciate the rich rewards - but others find it literally unplayable.

Hyperbolic example: some dude plays Arcanum and likes getting to Tarant and getting 18 balanced swords before doing anything else, and ends the game at level 80. Dude then turns to AOD/DR and is like what the fuck is this, I'm playing some emasculated charaacter who can't do most of the shit I want to do and I feel like some existential pauper.

Another exaggerated example to make the point: some people enjoy just becoming the head of the thieves' guild, and really hate how some games let you have it both ways and be head of every faction, or satisfy both parties, whtaever. Some players love eking out every drop of rewards from every faction, they like being head of thieves guild AND fighters guild. They come to AOD and it feels like now they have to play it 6 times in tightly prescribed ways to do what they usually do in 1 play.

AOD does have real flaws, and these are often the game's limitations in how well it communicates & delivers those thin margins of consequence. For example, AOD is just as uninformative as other RPGs about what each skill really means in-game, how much of what skill is 'good' for what stage of the game, and what skills tend to be used in tandem. In most RPGs with wide margins, it's fine - you figure it out along the way, you waste some points, you respec. In AOD, your dude sucks ass.

 

[Butter]

It should be noted that the problem of SP hoarding appears to be gone in CSG, as they're using a learn-by-doing + level-ups system. There's less potential for degenerate behaviors with that kind of system.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Since the skill system is cancer, it is only fair to judge AoD without it - by playing it completely without using skill points at all. Which is what I did.

nice.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It should be noted that the problem of SP hoarding appears to be gone in CSG, as they're using a learn-by-doing + level-ups system. There's less potential for degenerate behaviors with that kind of system.

Skill point hoarding is pants on head retarded in any RPG. Why bother building my character when I can just sit on skillpoints forever until there's anything I need and then spend them?

 

[Butter]

It should be noted that the problem of SP hoarding appears to be gone in CSG, as they're using a learn-by-doing + level-ups system. There's less potential for degenerate behaviors with that kind of system.

Skill point hoarding is pants on head retarded in any RPG. Why bother building my character when I can just sit on skillpoints forever until there's anything I need and then spend them?

I think it's human nature when you don't know how many skill points are coming down the line. I remember doing it on my first Bloodlines playthrough, which is convenient because you can do most of Santa Monica without upgrading anything. Part of why I prefer a level-up system is it gives the player a better sense of how far along they are and how much stronger they can expect to get by the end of the game.

 

[Drowed]

Good Stuff.

Although I agree with literally everything you said, Tigranes, and what you described relates well to the experience of many players, that's not exactly the issue I personally find most interesting.

You're looking at AOD from the "difficulty" perspective: aka, someone arguing that "the game seems/feels linear because everything I want to do I fail, because the margin of success is very small when compared to other RPGs, so I need to follow a predetermined path." And yeah, I see that in some comments. But what makes AOD seem more stiff than other RPGs to me is not its difficulty, but the lack of interaction between systems. Or in a way, perhaps the complete absence of systems, since they are all integrated within the game's dialogue system.

It's worth saying that here I'm using the word "system" as a specific set of mechanics that a game presents that allows you to interact with the game environment in a direct way with a specific goal.

For example, in Fallout we have several systems. There is a turn-based combat system. There is a dialogue system. There is a system of characters and attributes. There is a skill system (which is subdivided into some others, in particular stealth and theft). These systems interact with each other, obviously, but an important feature of every system is that it is something global - essentially, it is present in the whole game, even if it is not useful or used in the whole game. It makes itself organically present in the design of every aspect of the game.

For example, Fallout has a dialog system, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to dialog with any object in the map, or convince a rat not to attack you. But it does mean that the game does not place arbitrary limits on where the system will be used. You can try to start a dialogue with any NPC, even if some don't answer anything but a sentence. It's the same with the skills system, you can activate stealth in any scenario of the game, even if there are no entities around you that can react to it. You can place traps, even if there's no one around. The main point here is to realize that when the game offers a systemic approach, all the objects in the game are programmed with these systems in mind.

And this is where the big difference in AOD comes in. Here, most skills do not exist as a separate system, they are integrated directly into combat and dialogue systems. (Crafting/alchemy being the exceptions.) That means you don't have the freedom to use the skill you want, wherever you want (even if uselessly, without result). The basic example is that you can have the steal skill, but you can't steal from any NPC in the game world, only the specific NPCs within the dialog system where VD decided that this skill could be used. The same with traps, you cannot produce and put traps in the environment where you want trying to, for example, attract an enemy to it. You only "use" your traps skill within the dialog system where the game has determined that traps exist. Same with stealth, and so on.

So the problem is not the difficulty itself. You could pick Fallout, increase the difficulty by 300% and up the requirement of all the checks in the game, forcing the player to create an extremely specific build to be able to meet the conditions of certain quests or certain goals - and still, Fallout would still essentially be a very different game from AOD by the way its systems interact with the game world. It's not a difference in the difficulty of the game, it's a difference in design. Which doesn't mean there isn't a difference in difficulty either, obviously. In a way, one is a consequence of the other in this particular case, but one does not imply the other.

You may have an extremely difficult game with an approach that uses several systems to interact with the game world, or an extremely easy game but with limited scope. Even if you divide by 2 the difficulty of all the AOD checks, it still remains "linear" game in that way. To make it clear, I think the approach VD used in AOD was smart, taking into consideration the team he had. This obviously allowed him to have a greater focus and to explore a lot of the choices and consequences and branching paths which was, and still is, his focus. In that sense, he has really succeeded, and offers with AOD something that few other games (if any) can offer. On the other hand, to achieve this, he decided to "sacrifice" the existence of more systems within the game, which causes this claustrophobic effect for some people.

Maybe if he had a team of 15 or 20 talented people, who knows? It is what it is. I don't think it's very productive to complain about the game for something it's not and never set out to be, but I think it's important to understand and acknowledge the difference. To sum it all up as a matter of "git gud" is to fail to see that.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

or convince a rat not to attack you.

Are you implying there is no rat diplomacy?

 

[Drowed]

Are you implying there is no rat diplomacy?

Only from the Stallonean school.

 

[Black Angel]

Anyone who tells you they succeeded the first time they tried to finish the Thieve's Guild questline without reloading is full of shit,

It's just my words against yours, but I literally did this and didn't reload much. The only time I reload during my virgin thief guild run is when I died in combat, or when attempting to do shit my thief can't do (very few instance if you know where to look based on what your thief specialize in), or when my curiosity gets the better of me and prompted me to reload to see what does the other options do instead of the one I chose (obviously not the fault of the system but mine). And like Politician said, it's because Thief's Guild questline is one of the most open out there in the game.
And as another note, I NEVER hoard SPs in any RPGs. Including AoD, of course.

 

[Jason Liang]

The truth is there are many failed and forgotten crpgs from the mid to late 90's. AoD is no better than any of those and suffers from many of the same playability issues. I have a problem with the shills who rate it in the top 20 rpgs of all time and pushed it into the top 20 of the codex rpg poll.

If you think AoD is a top 10, top 20 rpg of all time, please tell why. What does AoD do that is actually great? What does AoD do that is actually fun?

 

[Haba]

The thing is, most RPGs are built with very large margins in multiple levels - to accommodate different playstyles as well as player failure / bad decisions. You get no time limits so you can grind or get lost or go back and forth. You get to retry skill checks. You get so much money you can always reverse bad decisions about spending. You get enough XP and skill points that you can win challenges without really understanding what's going on.

And then AOD squeezes many of those margins to the bare minimum. You suddenly fail hard at shit if you don't have the skills. You can hybrid but whether you hybrid or specialisae you have to really plan your build right. So suddenly, people who have always played this way (or like playing this way, or accept it's a different ball game, etc) learn to appreciate the rich rewards - but others find it literally unplayable.

[--]

AOD does have real flaws, and these are often the game's limitations in how well it communicates & delivers those thin margins of consequence. For example, AOD is just as uninformative as other RPGs about what each skill really means in-game, how much of what skill is 'good' for what stage of the game, and what skills tend to be used in tandem. In most RPGs with wide margins, it's fine - you figure it out along the way, you waste some points, you respec. In AOD, your dude sucks ass.

There is a fundamental designer flaw with AoD.

A current example with Colon Shipping coombat demo thread.

Some player is complaining that hammers feel under powered and claims that he is doing much better with a blade. VD then goes in to prove that he and his testers can do just fine with hammers. Good for them.

The feelz are important, even in hardcore games. That's what draws the line in between some sadistic early 90's French cuntgame and a timeless classic that you want to pick up again decade after decade.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

he truth is that people will need to agree to disagree, because in most cases, when we talk about linearity, people are using different definitions for the same word.

Yes, and when we are talking about "choices" we also have different opinion.

Politician seems to think that consciously choosing failure is a choice. I don't think it is. Jumping into a speeding train is not a choice. Shoot yourself in the foot is not a choice.

Politician seems to think that being shoehorned into min-max build is the hallmark of good CRPG. I don't. AoD is a game designed to shoehorned you to min-max. If anything VD made the game to reward min-max with literally no downside. The game is mostly linear withing that little space VD forces the player into. I would agree that muh character build matter if, say there is a downside at all to min-max ing. But there is not. Because VD wants you to play the game like that.

In the end of the day it is fundamental difference on seeing things.

 

[Black_Willow]

Some say that playing a cRPG should emulate playing a tabletop RPG. AoD does exactly this - but it throws a bad, mean-spirited GM into the mix.
This guy does't let the PC go where the player wants it to go, but instead says "your character is here, what will he do now?", and gives a very limited list of possible options. And when the player suggests something from beyond this list, because his character has skills that may be used elswere, the GM just tells the player that he doesn't have the resources to come up with too many options so there's not going around the list. So the player picks an option which is sub-optimal for his character, the character dies and the GM gloats obout player being bad.

 

[mushaden]

He literally didn't have the resources to come up with too many options. And again, the game isn't that hard. It's only when you want to min-max and metagame that you start doing it.

What are some games where there are downsides to min-maxing? I'm not saying there aren't, just curious as an aside. I mean, obviously in Fallout you want to be able to talk, but otherwise... it's metagaming, isn't it? There are plenty of checks that are mid-range stat checks in AoD. Sure, skill checks just go up linearly, but there's room to spread around a couple.

Thank you for the diplomatic post, Drowed. Seems to have steered the thread away from ...somewhat, for the time being. And, I agree with everything you said.

 

[Tigranes]

The thing is, most RPGs are built with very large margins in multiple levels - to accommodate different playstyles as well as player failure / bad decisions. You get no time limits so you can grind or get lost or go back and forth. You get to retry skill checks. You get so much money you can always reverse bad decisions about spending. You get enough XP and skill points that you can win challenges without really understanding what's going on.

And then AOD squeezes many of those margins to the bare minimum. You suddenly fail hard at shit if you don't have the skills. You can hybrid but whether you hybrid or specialisae you have to really plan your build right. So suddenly, people who have always played this way (or like playing this way, or accept it's a different ball game, etc) learn to appreciate the rich rewards - but others find it literally unplayable.

[--]

AOD does have real flaws, and these are often the game's limitations in how well it communicates & delivers those thin margins of consequence. For example, AOD is just as uninformative as other RPGs about what each skill really means in-game, how much of what skill is 'good' for what stage of the game, and what skills tend to be used in tandem. In most RPGs with wide margins, it's fine - you figure it out along the way, you waste some points, you respec. In AOD, your dude sucks ass.

There is a fundamental designer flaw with AoD.

A current example with Colon Shipping coombat demo thread.

Some player is complaining that hammers feel under powered and claims that he is doing much better with a blade. VD then goes in to prove that he and his testers can do just fine with hammers. Good for them.

The feelz are important, even in hardcore games. That's what draws the line in between some sadistic early 90's French cuntgame and a timeless classic that you want to pick up again decade after decade.

I agree with the wider point that 'the feelz are important', but right now you're pattern matching that with a bit of a strange example. The combat beta was full of clamouring that hammers feel more tangible while blade suffers not only from number-crunched disadvantages but a lack of a clear tangible impact. VD & team made changes to blade each update to the point that, with the public demo, plenty of Codexers' initial feeling is that blade feels good.

I think the examples from AOD show clearly that the issue is more about trying to stay true to a really specific vision, and then not having quite enough resources / experience / cleverness to mitigate its downsides. I don't know if you're implying if it's rather a matter of arrogance or some bookworm's dismissal of the feelz, but if you are, I'm not really sure that's at the root.

 

[AwesomeButton]

What AoD accentuates on is "The Stakes Are Real".

But muh larping freedom is more important. LOL

I don't mind larp-centreic RPGs either, the thing is to set your horizon of expectations right. Decades of playing games should have developed that ability to appreciate whether the developer achieved what he was going for, and not look for things that he never meant to pursue.

 

[Haba]

I agree with the wider point that 'the feelz are important', but right now you're pattern matching that with a bit of a strange example. The combat beta was full of clamouring that hammers feel more tangible while blade suffers not only from number-crunched disadvantages but a lack of a clear tangible impact. VD & team made changes to blade each update to the point that, with the public demo, plenty of Codexers' initial feeling is that blade feels good.

I think the examples from AOD show clearly that the issue is more about trying to stay true to a really specific vision, and then not having quite enough resources / experience / cleverness to mitigate its downsides. I don't know if you're implying if it's rather a matter of arrogance or some bookworm's dismissal of the feelz, but if you are, I'm not really sure that's at the root.

I had a longer, more coherent reply that I was writing but I got bored interrupted by work halfway through.

The point I was chasing was that many times AoD's criticisms are countered with "it is technically possible, here is the proof" rather than trying to actually take the time to understand why it feels that way to the player. And neglecting this has lead into into gameplay that isn't frankly much fun (for a lot of people) - winning hard combat encounters through repeated reloading, hoarding skill points so that you can spend them to pass a skill check, etc.

I can understand why this happens and I've been guilty of the same in my professional endeavors as well. Vince & co. are trying to accomplish a herculean task with this kind of approach.

But a part of this pain is self-caused. Like you said, by squeezing the margins they are creating this situation where the players are complaining as their characters cannot fit into the predefined paths. To make it feel more fair for the players, you'd have to provide a lot more feedback, which once again is adding to the scope.