AoD: This game feels very on the rails. Am i playing it right?

[Jedi Master Radek]

If the next game is filled with optimism, would you assume I've started taking drugs?

But it isn't filled with optimism, right?

 

[Forest Dweller]

Wow, this conversation is actively draining intelligence.

 

[Absinthe]

Yeah this is what this game basically is. You get a lot of choices but they're all pretty railroaded in a CYOA style. Rather than plotting things yourself, collecting tools and evidence, making your move when you think it's right, interacting with characters when you think it's right, etc, you get funneled into CYOA sequences in which you get a limited amount of choices that's given to you by those who run the show. This structure is why the game feels railroaded despite being very non-linear.

There have been many complaints about this shit and I don't think VD ever understood the point of these complaints. The upshot is that at least AoD is high on replay value and low on time-wasting, and the writing's not shabby either (although I still find the "ancient evil" thing fucking dumb), but as a game and as an example of choice & consequence based design it's pretty fucking lousy methodology since players do not actually get to exercise personal initiative in decisionmaking; instead your decisions are directly handed to you and predetermined in accordance with the paths VD wants. It's why for instance you can never help Antidas win, help Lorenza win, kick out Darista from AG without betraying them, get rid of Strabos as a Merchant, etc. It's also why there's Benny in Hellgate - VD decided to provide a talker route through Hellgate even though it's dumb as hell. It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

I wouldn't say that AoD is non-linear either. I think AoD would be best described as multi-linear. It has branching paths and you can jump from one quest-line to another, but it's blatantly obvious that you are on specific quest lines at all times. Strictly speaking you can avoid joining any faction altogether, which doesn't actually help you in the slightest and just leaves you with a major lack of skillpoints and less content. All you're left with is the generic quest to find the temple and no actual reason to do it, but then again many of the faction endings have no real reason to send you on the wild goose chase for the temple in the end either.

Actually the best "get all the lore route" is the House Aurelian one, and it can also be done without combat, you don't get to visit Darius' tomb or Al Akia in Commercium route I think.

True patrician of course go for Commercium -> Imperial Guard -> House Aurelian -> House Crassus for lowest Loyalty stat possible

Start as a Praetor and you can get -1 loyalty just for siding with Feng (this is funnily enough actually desirable since it prevents you from being locked out of Word of Honor checks) and then you can betray Antidas to Imperial Guards.

 

[ItsChon]

Still haven't got around to playing through AoD. The engine and graphics are a little much for me to overcome. It doesn't feel smooth and enjoyable to play, and despite the fact that I'll likely look past that once I get into the meat of the game, it doesn't stop me from wishing it was better optimized and 2D. 3D graphics and a rotatable camera just hurt my soul.

 

[Gnidrologist]

It doesn't matter if you travel from point A to point B in straight line or zigzag.

Going by that logic it doesn't matter whether you will end up in Necropolis via Shady Sands -> Junktown -> BOS or Shady Sands -> Junktown - The Hub or if you will stumble upon one of the best locations there are, i.e. The Glow because in the end you end up in the same place doing the same thing. Retarded reasoning.

In Age of Decadence you

Look man, i i was only talking about stupid spaghetti analogy. Haven't played AoE and Fallout surely doesn't apply to this. I was looking to find the funny schematics someone draw years ago on how various crpg archetypes (TES game, Fallout, Bioware game) differ in terms of linearity/open endedness and curved spaghetti applies well to Bioware game that makes a lot of cosmetic illusion of non-linearity, but in reality is almost 100% on rails.

 

[Commissar Draco]

Still haven't got around to playing through AoD. The engine and graphics are a little much for me to overcome. It doesn't feel smooth and enjoyable to play, and despite the fact that I'll likely look past that once I get into the meat of the game, it doesn't stop me from wishing it was better optimized and 2D. 3D graphics and a rotatable camera just hurt my soul.

The game would be much better with static painted pictures or 2D maps instead POE like instead it looks like shit cause its old and moreover runs like shit too. Would suffer the engine and look and run it anyways if I were you as its good role playing game though Comrade.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Still haven't got around to playing through AoD. The engine and graphics are a little much for me to overcome. It doesn't feel smooth and enjoyable to play, and despite the fact that I'll likely look past that once I get into the meat of the game, it doesn't stop me from wishing it was better optimized and 2D. 3D graphics and a rotatable camera just hurt my soul.

The game would be much better with static painted pictures or 2D maps instead POE like instead it looks like shit cause its old and moreover runs like shit too. Would suffer the engine and look and run it anyways if I were you as its good role playing game though Comrade.

Graphic whores. The whole lot of you.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

There have been many complaints about this shit and I don't think VD ever understood the point of these complaints.

Can you blame him? The complainers did a shitty job explaining the supposed design flaws with real arguments. That’s probably because they don’t have any meaningful criticisms either. They state their own preferences as objective truths and keep repeating them forever, wilfully dodging the replies and clarifications. Supposed criticism: “There is too much gated content!” Real criticism: “I don’t want to fail in skill-checks and I don’t care about the character system”. Supposed criticism: “I don’t have choices because I feel railroaded CYOA style”. Real criticism: “I don’t like choices that have a narrative impact if they are followed by interactive scenes or ripple effects that are out of my control”. Supposed criticism: “The game is linear”. Real criticism: “The game doesn’t allow me to goof around doing emergent, but silly and meaningless gameplay, like killing non-hostile NPCs and taking their stuff”. The list goes on and on. The point is still the same: their supposed criticism is a red herring for their actual complaints, which are silly and impossible to defend when they are stated clearly.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

I guess we can look at how interactive-fiction/CYOAs and see how they would go about what was done in AoD.
This article is applicable and it sounds like VD's already planned to do something along the lines of one approach in here for Colony Ship.
https://emshort.blog/2016/02/15/set-check-or-gate-a-problem-in-personality-stats/

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The problem with listing "You can betray everybody!" as good C&C in AoD is the fact that it require meta knowledge on what skills each faction corresponds to and try to build your character around that very betrayal. Or maybe intentionally joining a faction you are bad at to later betray them to faction with your actual build.

It is like saying choosing to cross the road with eyes open is reactive because you can always cross the road with your eyes closed. Or having totally good legs just to choose to use a wheelchair and later say "Hey I can choose to walk after all!"

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

but as a game and as an example of choice & consequence based design it's pretty fucking lousy methodology since players do not actually get to exercise personal initiative in decisionmaking; instead your decisions are directly handed to you and predetermined in accordance with the paths VD wants.

This type of comment shows how childish and spoiled you are. You get to make decisions in the same way you make in every cRPG. They are scripted events predetermined by the developers. The only difference is that in Age of Decadence there are tons of text-adventures and interactive scenes. Some players will feel like that is reading a book, but that’s is just silly. Or maybe is the fact that you can actually fail in Age of Decadence. That may give the sensation that the game is too restrictive. It isn’t. The game is just punishing you for making mistakes in an unforgiving world. People are more usually affected by the negative things that happen to them (negativity bias). Considering that they have being pandered since eternity for every lazy cRPG developer out there, the reactions to Age of Decadence are more than natural, even though they are still biased and unjustified.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

It's why for instance you can never help Antidas win, help Lorenza win, kick out Darista from AG without betraying them, get rid of Strabos as a Merchant, etc. It's also why there's Benny in Hellgate - VD decided to provide a talker route through Hellgate even though it's dumb as hell. It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

It is not enough to provide you with more choices than all the other cRPGs combined. No. They need to account for every single preference that you may come out with, otherwise, your game is linear. Being a cRPG developer is an ungrateful task. You need to pander the egos of man-children who have no concept of scarcity of resources.

I wouldn't say that AoD is non-linear either. I think AoD would be best described as multi-linear. It has branching paths and you can jump from one quest-line to another, but it's blatantly obvious that you are on specific quest lines at all times.

You think the paths are linear because you don’t want the characters to have a life of their own. Instead, you want them to be cartoonish silly things that you can toy with and feel in charge. In other words, you are criticizing the game for allowing you to interact with a meaningful world. That’s real freedom. It takes responsibility and your choices can bite you on your ass. That you don’t like. You prefer the silly things with easy-peasy skill checks because you want the pretense of making choices when what you actually want is an ego pandering playground. You are criticizing the game for having meaningful C&C while pretending to do the opposite thing.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

Yeah, the assassin plotline is a good example of AoD's "linearity within non-linearity". The term multi-linear which you used describes it quite well. Yes, the game tells you that assassins are more like thugs for hire than Agent 47 style hitmen, which VD always uses as an argument to defend the lack of stealth checks during the assassin path, but I think it's a good display of AoD's main "problem", or better said difference to most other approaches to RPG design. Basically, the reason many people feel that AoD is constraining and linear despite not actually being linear.

Let's make some comparisons of AoD's approach with other games. Let's look at Fallout, first. Goral has used the radscorpion cave as an example in a post earlier in this thread, and it actually illustrates the difference between AoD and other RPGs pretty well

In Fallout, you can get rid of the radscorpions by going into the cave and killing them all, or putting a bomb at the cave entrance to collapse it. You can come to the conclusion that the bombing is a possible solution by examining the rubble near the entrance, giving you the message that the structure of the cave wall isn't very stable. "Ah-hah," thinks the player, "maybe I can make it collapse by placing a bomb there." You then manually select a bomb from your inventory, set the timer, place it there, and wait for it to blow up. Boom. The cave entrance collapses. Quest solved.

If this same quest were in AoD, it would be presented to you differently. You approach the cave entrance. A dialogue window pops up, asking you what to do:
You see a cave entrance in front of you. There are radscorpions inside. They haven't seen you yet.
1. [Perception] Investigate the cave wall.
2. [Stealth] Try to sneak past them.
3. Attack them.

1 -> You examine the cave wall and notice it has a low structural integrity. Maybe you could collapse it if you have the right tools.
1. Place a bomb there.
2. Leave.

This is how AoD presents its choices, which is in stark contrast to Fallout's more hands-off approach of giving you several tools and the opportunity to use them. You can place bombs anywhere. You can always open the skilldex and apply any skill to any object in the game. You can use science or repair on computers and see what happens, you can use doctor on wounded NPCs, etc. Yes, those skills only actually result in something in a handful of cases throughout the game, it's not like every skill actually works on every thing. But you can attempt to use every skill on every thing, and in those cases where doing so has a result, it is up to the player to figure that out. You don't just enter a dialogue window where every possible choice is clearly spelled out for you. Figuring out which choices are viable is part of the choice-making process in Fallout. There's an experimentality and openness to it that AoD is lacking. AoD prioritizes the choices to such an extent that the process of figuring out which choices even exist is left out. There's no "gee, I wonder if I could...." No. Everything you could do is presented to you, and there are no other options than those that are presented to you.

This leads to the different paths in the game feeling narrow and somewhat restrictive. You can only do the things that the dev explicitly offers you as a choice, because AoD exlusively uses tailored choice rather than systemic choices.

Now, I'm not a hater of AoD. I enjoyed it, and I played through it at least 5 times to see several different faction paths. I played some legit characters, and some where I used Cheat Engine to up their stats and skills just to open up a larger amount of valid choices for them. And it is during these Cheat Engine runs that I realized how narrow AoD actually is by design. There may be several different factions to join, but in truth, there are only one or two valid factions for each character. The character you build determines which faction is the right one for you. You joined the Commercium? You better be good at diplomacy. You joined the Boatmen? Better be good at intimidate, critical strike, and combat. Every faction is made for a specific kind of character, and when I played a master of all trades jacked up with Cheat Engine, I often wondered if I could try unconventional approaches. Like, maybe at some point in the Commercium or the Boatmen playthrough, sneaking will become useful. But it didn't. There wasn't a single instance where the game would have allowed me to use a skill completely unrelated to my profession, during that faction's main quest. And that's what makes AoD feel constricting. It's more of a "guess which character type is the right one to play through this faction questline" than a "use your character's specific skills creatively to overcome individual challenges".

But does it really make sense that each faction is tailored towards a very specific character type? Wouldn't the Boatmen, even though they're assassins who prefer the direct approach of stabbing someone in the gut, happily take on a seductive woman who is good with poison? Wouldn't it be logical that such a character could try to seduce the target of her assassination, and then give him poisoned wine to drink, instead of going with the assault plan the game ultimately runs with? And wouldn't the Commercium be interested in a stealthy spy who's good at sneaking and lockpicking, who could easily give them access to information that will further their business interests? But no, those aren't character paths that exist in AoD, because the factions are more narrow, focused on providing content and skillchecks for a very specific type of character, rather than allowing different types of characters to tackle their jobs in different ways.

Let's compare AoD to another Fallout-inspired RPG that was released in the same year: Underrail. Regarding its story and questlines, Underrail is much more linear than AoD. It does offer some quests with C&C but that's not as big a focus as it is in AoD. And yet the game offers a lot of choices and environmental interactivity, and lets the player approach things his own way. It has a lot of systemic C&C, and some of its most interesting quests are built on the principle of letting the player discover his choices on his own.

Underrail has one of the best stealth systems in an RPG ever, even on par with some stealth games. The level design usually allows for different approaches to a problem: go stealth and sneak past the enemies, open up the ventilation shafts and crawl through them, go for combat, put mines into enemy patrol paths, use hacking to hack the security systems, etc. And all of these options are systemic rather than specific, so they work in the majority of the game's dungeons. The optimal path through a level also has to be figured out by the player, as there never appears any dialogue popup that tells you "You stand before X. You have the following options now:" Instead, NPCs might tell you that the central security computer is in the basement and the bandits might be killed by activating the turrets with the security computer. So you find your own way down into the basement, using stealth and bypassing patrols through the ventilation shafts, activate the computer by clicking on it, and use your hacking skill to activate the turrets.

It's a much more open, free-form approach to C&C. Some quests require you to be attentive and make the decision to use your skills at the right time on your own initiative if you want to get the best solution for that quest.

Fallout and Arcanum, the two main inspirations of AoD, also follow that approach. It's the approach of giving the player a situation, giving him a bunch of tools, then letting him figure out how to best use those tools to overcome the situation.
Arcanum has the quest where you have to find out who the mysterious ring you were given belonged to, and for that, you need to go visit the jewelers P. Schuyler and Sons. There's a dwarf in front of the building who also wants to talk to them, and you can add him to your party. If you do so, the confrontation with P. Schulyer and Sons will change, as the dwarf will have his own opinion on their business practices and become hostile towards them. See, they're using undead dwarves as laborers, and your pal Magnus doesn't like that at all. So if you have him in the party, he will push for a violent solution to the quest. If you don't have him along, you can also use persuasion. If you end up fighting and killing the business owners, you can loot their filing cabinets to find an old document that gives you a hint who the ring may have belonged to. Or you can use a necromancy spell to conjure the spirit of the business owner, and interrogate him about it. The game never explicitly tells you that this is an option. You have to come up with the idea of using the spell on the corpse yourself.
Arcanum doesn't just give you a dialogue window with:
The Schuyler family is dead, felled for the travesty they committed against the dwarves. But you still need the information.
1. [Lockpicking] Try to open their filing cabinets to search for documents.
2. [Perception] Search their bodies for a key to the filing cabinets.
3. [Necromancy] Conjure the spirit of their father to interrogate him.

It's up to you, the player, to come up with these solutions. The game doesn't present them to you on a silver platter. AoD does.

And this is why some people are disappointed by AoD and can't get into it. VD has often said that his main inspirations are Fallout and Arcanum, and also the obscure and buggy indie RPG Prelude to Darkness, which also has some quests of that same style. So a player who has played these games, reads up on AoD, and knows that it's focused on choices and consequences, will probably expect a game that handles C&C the same way Fallout and Arcanum did. But AoD doesn't handle them the same way. It cuts out the process of discovery and focuses entirely on the process of making the decision.

Fallout, Arcanum, and games inspired by them - like Underrail or Prelude to Darkness - have a process of C&C that starts with presenting an obstacle to the player, then allowing the player to use whatever tools he has (the skills he raised on his character, the knowledge he gathered elsewhere, items he has in his inventory) to overcome the obstacle. Finding out which possible solutions there are is part of the C&C process. The game doesn't tell you "you can blow up the entrance", you have to examine the entrance and conclude that placing a bomb there will collapse it. The game doesn't tell you "you can try to convince the guy", you have to approach the guy and talk to him first (in AoD, the game would funnel you towards approaching him, making the conversation a thing that automatically happens rather than a thing you actively choose to do). The game doesn't tell you "you can sneak here", it allows you to use the sneak, lockpick and pickpocket skills whenever and wherever you want.

This is the main difference between AoD and other C&C heavy CRPGs. AoD focuses so much on the actual C&C that it cuts out the decision making process that comes before it. It never asks the player to figure things out on his own but readily presents the available options, making it a game about investing into the right skills and then choosing the right options when they become available.

Fallout and Arcanum never did that. They always allowed the player to figure out the solution on his own.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Yeah this is what this game basically is. You get a lot of choices but they're all pretty railroaded in a CYOA style. Rather than plotting things yourself, collecting tools and evidence, making your move when you think it's right, interacting with characters when you think it's right, etc, you get funneled into CYOA sequences in which you get a limited amount of choices that's given to you by those who run the show. This structure is why the game feels railroaded despite being very non-linear.

There have been many complaints about this shit and I don't think VD ever understood the point of these complaints....

What's not to understand?

It's why for instance you can never help Antidas win, help Lorenza win, kick out Darista from AG without betraying them, get rid of Strabos as a Merchant, etc.

You're asking for sandbox-like freedom in a story-driven game where the story/setting dictates what can and can't be done. Antidas can't win because he's a weak leader, poor general, and doesn't have the resources. His best option is to become a vassal to a powerful lord. You can't get rid of Strabos for the same reason a new employee can't get rid of a powerful CEO, etc.

It's also why there's Benny in Hellgate - VD decided to provide a talker route through Hellgate even though it's dumb as hell.

Benny is there to reinforce the notion that you aren't the only person exploring or looting old ruins. That's why you run into a prospector at the library, zealots around Zamedi, raiders attacking the monastery, etc.

It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

They are thugs for hire, not ninjas.

I wouldn't say that AoD is non-linear either. I think AoD would be best described as multi-linear. It has branching paths and you can jump from one quest-line to another...

You can do a lot more than that.

 

[JarlFrank]

Allow me to illustrate with a shitty MS Paint diagram:

To the left we have AoD. It has plenty of branching paths that are interconnected at some places. But you always follow a certain line. You can jump from point A to point B to point C and then to point F or G, but not point H. Once you hop onto one of the branching lines, you're locked into it, and can only go into the branches connected to that particular line. There are many of these lines, but they are all lines. Being a Boatsman means you can't defect to the Thieves Guild ever, even if at some point you think "Huh the leader of that guild might pay me well if I paid him a visit and offered him to sell out my guild." No, you can't even talk to the leaders of other guilds once you decided to lock yourself into one. These options are simply hard locked out.

Each of these lines has specific challenges custom-built for specific character types. Boatsmen quests are tailored towards combat + critical strike + intimidate characters. Commercium quests are tailored towards diplomacy + streetwise + lore characters. Thieves Guild quests are tailored towards sneak + lockpick + streetwise characters. Etc.

To the left, there's the model of a quest as we can usually find it in Fallout, Arcanum, Underrail, etc.
Your character is presented with a problem. This quest is available to all kinds of different characters because the game doesn't funnel the player into specific questlines that are tailored towards one specific character type, therefore most characters have the ability to solve it in some way.
Some ways of solving it are easier than others. Some ways of solving it give you a better resolution than others. So it's not like the choices here don't matter because every character can solve the quest. It's as much about how to solve it as it is about whether or not you can solve it at all.

Let's say the player's questgiver wants the player to get valuable information from a certain nobleman. The player then has several different options, depending on the character he's playing:
- if the player has good contacts with the thieves guild, ask them if they know anything about the noble's mansion; they provide him with a floorplan that shows there's a back entrance; the player can then use his lockpicking and stealth skills to infiltrate the manor through the back door
- if the player's character is female, ask the madam of the town's luxury brothel if the nobleman ever comes there; for a bribe she will tell the player that the nobleman has specific fetishes, the satisfaction of which he often visits a certain prostitute for; this knowledge makes seduction attempts easier; male characters don't have that option, of course
- if the player has explored a dungeon earlier and found a certain artifact, he can gain entry to the manor by telling the guards he wants to sell this artifact, since the nobleman is a well-known collector of artifacts from that time period; once inside the manor, the player can then either use stealth to sneak to places he's not supposed to go to (guards will become hostile if they spot the player in areas he was not cleared to enter; Underrail does this a lot), or use bribery or persuasion to convince the nobleman to give him the information if he has good enough diplomatic skills; the item alone won't help the player much if he lacks the diplomatic skills to sell it for the information he needs
- the player can also just assault the manor, kill the guards, and grab the information, but that will cause an incident and the questgiver will chide the player for causing a ruckus the fallout of which he now has to deal with; it is a possible quest solution, but it's the worst possible solution that will lead to a bad outcome and a low reward

All of these options first depend on the player figuring out that they even exist. And that's one thing that's missing from AoD.

 

[Vault Dweller]

It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

Yeah, the assassin plotline is a good example of AoD's "linearity within non-linearity"...

Is it? You can betray the guild twice in Teron (escort the spy to Maadoran instead of killing him and kill your partner to side with Carrinas). In Maadoran you can kill Lorenza or accept her offer and kill Darista instead; if made a deal with Levir and decide to honor it, you can kill Gaelius in his palace. If that's your definition of linearity, I'd like to see what non-linearity looks like.

There's no "gee, I wonder if I could...." No. Everything you could do is presented to you, and there are no other options than those that are presented to you.

There are plenty of options and quest solutions that are not presented to you. For example, you can kill or disable the construct at Hellgate with conveniently presented solutions or you can return to Ganezzar and talk a zealot into killing it for you.

 

[Egosphere]

JarlFrank's post is good, but it makes AoD look 100% constrained. You can still show initiative, like poisoning the mine guards for example, which the game doesn't present to you as an 'option' directly. You have to find the right person first.

Arcanum has the quest where you have to find out who the mysterious ring you were given belonged to, and for that, you need to go visit the jewelers P. Schuyler and Sons. There's a dwarf in front of the building who also wants to talk to them, and you can add him to your party. If you do so, the confrontation with P. Schulyer and Sons will change, as the dwarf will have his own opinion on their business practices and become hostile towards them. See, they're using undead dwarves as laborers, and your pal Magnus doesn't like that at all. So if you have him in the party, he will push for a violent solution to the quest. If you don't have him along, you can also use persuasion.

There's even more c&c if you take Magnus into your party, but then leave him out just before you meet the Schuylers. If you try to talk to him after cutting a deal with the necromancers, he'll call out your connivance and refuse to join you again.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's even the reason why the Assassin's Guild questline has you engage in so much direct combat instead of actually quietly assassinating people.

Yeah, the assassin plotline is a good example of AoD's "linearity within non-linearity"...

Is it? You can betray the guild twice in Teron (escort the spy to Maadoran instead of killing him and kill your partner to side with Carrinas). In Maadoran you can kill Lorenza or accept her offer and kill Darista instead; if made a deal with Levir and decide to honor it, you can kill Gaelius in his palace. If that's your definition of linearity, I'd like to see what non-linearity looks like.

There's no "gee, I wonder if I could...." No. Everything you could do is presented to you, and there are no other options than those that are presented to you.

There are plenty of options and quest solutions that are not presented to you. For example, you can kill or disable the construct at Hellgate with conveniently presented solutions or you can return to Ganezzar and talk a zealot into killing it for you.

I'm not even saying that the entirety of AoD is like that, just the majority - and its most prominent parts. My favorite part of AoD is actually when the game opens up and allows me to explore a bit more freely and make choices at my own pace, rather than being funneled from faction quest to faction quest.

And I'm not saying that AoD is linear, just that it feels like it due to the way most choices are presented to the player: the CYOA way of selecting from a list, then being teleported to the next place in the quest. This is the main difference between Fallout/Arcanum and AoD, and what makes people who expected a Fallout/Arcanum style game disappointed since it differs from their expectations.

It's not the amount and variety of choices, but their presentation.

 

[Vault Dweller]

I'm not even saying that the entirety of AoD is like that, just the majority - and its most prominent parts. My favorite part of AoD is actually when the game opens up and allows me to explore a bit more freely and make choices at my own pace, rather than being funneled from faction quest to faction quest.

No arguing here.

 

[V_K]

And I'm not saying that AoD is linear, just that it feels like it due to the way most choices are presented to the player: the CYOA way of selecting from a list, then being teleported to the next place in the quest.

It's not just that, it's also that the majority of choices you have at any given moment are dead ends because you don't have the skills to pass the required checks, while some options are even hidden because you relevant skills aren't high enough. In practice, in any given situation, you rarely have more than one choice that'd work for your build and lead to a favorable outcome.

 

[JarlFrank]

I'm not even saying that the entirety of AoD is like that, just the majority - and its most prominent parts. My favorite part of AoD is actually when the game opens up and allows me to explore a bit more freely and make choices at my own pace, rather than being funneled from faction quest to faction quest.

No arguing here.

Personally, I enjoyed AoD and thought it was an interesting experiment in RPG structure. The gods know that the genre needs some more experimentation there. But I also see the flaws in this structure, and understand why many people don't like it. In the end, it comes down to personal preference and expectations. A big problem is that many people enter AoD with the expectation of playing another Fallout/Arcanum, which despite the obvious influence, it is not.

I understand why you cut down on a lot of the things you considered superfluous:
1. Cutting out the process of walking from A to B, as it is just a waste of time - Underrail has a lot of backtracking in some parts of the game and walking from A to B can get very annoying, for example. Walking from A to B is usually just waiting time that isn't filled with anything exciting. Might as well just skip it. And AoD skips it by teleporting the player after each relevant choice that leads to the next quest stage.
2. Making points of interest open up a dialogue window on their own instead of having to be manually selected by the player. When you approach the preacher in Teron, for example, you will automatically enter the dialogue window of him telling his tale and you being able to answer, without the player having to click on the guy to initiate conversation. It makes sense in this case as the guy isn't waiting for the player to click on him, he's just telling his story to whatever audience he has.
3. Distilling the process of making choices down to a handful of well-written dialogue choices, rather than having the player stumble around trying to find the solutions on his own. This prevents players from missing options their character might have because they missed a certain object due to it being small and pixel-hunty or something. It essentially removes the "I would have done that had I known this was an option" problem.

But this has gone so far that some players feel like the game is taking away all their agency. Yes, things like walking from A to B or pixel-hunting for that one interactive spot may feel like they're superfluous and the game would be better off without them, but if you remove them completely and the game just opens text boxes and teleports you to the next location automatically, it will make players feel like they're being funneled, that the game is taking over their character too much.

It's a delicate balancing act, and AoD errs in favor of removing too much of it. Underrail is actually a good counterexample for a game that leaves in too much of it, as the backtracking can become very tedious later on in the game, and you wish there'd be more ways of fast travel than the ones that already exist.

 

[hell bovine]

But you can attempt to use every skill on every thing, and in those cases where doing so has a result, it is up to the player to figure that out. You don't just enter a dialogue window where every possible choice is clearly spelled out for you. Figuring out which choices are viable is part of the choice-making process in Fallout.

Yep, and as someone who spent a lot of time in FO wondering why this thing did nothing when used on that thing, it was probably what I liked the best about the game. Even if it sometimes resulted in a nuclear explosion.

 

[Saduj]

Every rpg is “railroaded” in the sense that you are limited to options that the developer put in the game. Some of the criticisms of AOD seem to be based on the game not having an AI DM that can dynamically react to player choices. No game has had that ever.

If you don’t like choices presented via text and prefer a graphic interface where you have to “figure out” that leaving a bomb at the mouth of a cave will collapse it, that is fair. But you’re still limited to x number of quest solutions the developer put in the game, just like AOD.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

Regarding its story and questlines, AoD is much more linear than AoD.

 

[JarlFrank]

Whoops I meant Underrail