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

[Elhoim]

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.

It's more of a mix of design and technical constrains/decisions. Cutting the process of walking was also made to have a better control of player actions so not to break the scripting, especially since we have lots of different questlines in the same locations. We definitely went overboard in the first iterations, and opened it up a bit later, but we decided to sacrifice a bit of that freedom and use our time to script new content than fixing possible issues that would arise from players doing something unexpected. Also was the matter of it being our first game and we learned as we went, so we expect to do much better job in CSG. Design-wise, we definitely liked adding the OPTION of going directly, and the town map fast travel. In many cases the "automatic" events were made so that the world is not a static park ride that's waiting for the player to activate them. Others were done for the same scripting reasons as above.

Games are also a result of their development history as well. For many, many years, the only tool we had at our disposal was the dialogue editor. We were working part time, and also had to spend a lot of programming time fixing T3D bugs and combat tweaks. So that's why we used it so much. We didn't have time to implement sneaking systems, and only in the last part of development we started doing interactive objects. So we went back and tweaked many scenes, like for example entering Feng's house or the blacksmiths. In the final version, entering Feng's house is very freeform. You have to hover over the vines, climb, then you can click to lockpick the hatch door, and when you get inside you move around in sneak mode (with harder checks closer to Feng's door) and you can examine different objects that have skill checks. Sure, there's no "select skill -> use", and in general it's a single skill you can check, but it's what we could do with what we had.

We wanted to have a proper turn based sneak system, different ways of handling doors (using acid, etc), but at some point you have to call it a day. Also a constrain we placed on ourselves was to have too many factions, so we couldn't "deepen" them a bit more. And the game ended up having a much different structure than Fallout to accommodate a deeper narrative. Design-wise, Fallout (1) is a series of quest hubs with not much relationship with each other, in which you have a "main" quest, and a bunch of unrelated sidequests. At one point AoD was a bit like that, but the factions storylines started gaining prominence and became the bulk of the game. Having so many of them, we finally settled on 3 quests per faction per town, which meant around 15-18 quests in each hub, and to keep the workload low, tailored around 2 or 3 archetypes. Maybe the game would have worked better with a "class" system with limited skills per class, to better manage the expectation of what you can really do.

All in all, I think we did a nice job, and we hope to continue improving and refining our design style.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Either you like the nihilistic and specifically determined style of VD design, or you don't. That's all there is to it.

This is pretty much the perfect summary of it.

I personally really enjoyed AoD and found it to be a refreshing game in a genre which indulges so hard on making you feel awesome. Sometimes it's nice to have a game that makes no bones about making you feel like an easily disposed of piece of trash. I've made an RPG Codex career based on this very concept.

 

[biggestboss]

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.

It's more of a mix of design and technical constrains/decisions. Cutting the process of walking was also made to have a better control of player actions so not to break the scripting, especially since we have lots of different questlines in the same locations. We definitely went overboard in the first iterations, and opened it up a bit later, but we decided to sacrifice a bit of that freedom and use our time to script new content than fixing possible issues that would arise from players doing something unexpected. Also was the matter of it being our first game and we learned as we went, so we expect to do much better job in CSG. Design-wise, we definitely liked adding the OPTION of going directly, and the town map fast travel. In many cases the "automatic" events were made so that the world is not a static park ride that's waiting for the player to activate them. Others were done for the same scripting reasons as above.

Games are also a result of their development history as well. For many, many years, the only tool we had at our disposal was the dialogue editor. We were working part time, and also had to spend a lot of programming time fixing T3D bugs and combat tweaks. So that's why we used it so much. We didn't have time to implement sneaking systems, and only in the last part of development we started doing interactive objects. So we went back and tweaked many scenes, like for example entering Feng's house or the blacksmiths. In the final version, entering Feng's house is very freeform. You have to hover over the vines, climb, then you can click to lockpick the hatch door, and when you get inside you move around in sneak mode (with harder checks closer to Feng's door) and you can examine different objects that have skill checks. Sure, there's no "select skill -> use", and in general it's a single skill you can check, but it's what we could do with what we had.

We wanted to have a proper turn based sneak system, different ways of handling doors (using acid, etc), but at some point you have to call it a day. Also a constrain we placed on ourselves was to have too many factions, so we couldn't "deepen" them a bit more. And the game ended up having a much different structure than Fallout to accommodate a deeper narrative. Design-wise, Fallout (1) is a series of quest hubs with not much relationship with each other, in which you have a "main" quest, and a bunch of unrelated sidequests. At one point AoD was a bit like that, but the factions storylines started gaining prominence and became the bulk of the game. Having so many of them, we finally settled on 3 quests per faction per town, which meant around 15-18 quests in each hub, and to keep the workload low, tailored around 2 or 3 archetypes. Maybe the game would have worked better with a "class" system with limited skills per class, to better manage the expectation of what you can really do.

All in all, I think we did a nice job, and we hope to continue improving and refining our design style.

As someone who agrees with a lot of the railroading criticisms, I still enjoyed AoD and am waiting for Colony Ship with bated breath.

 

[Shadenuat]

Allow me to illustrate with a shitty MS Paint diagram:

Looks good but in practice it means that most characters would have same objectives and what you play is just different kinds of flavour.

Let's take Arcanum for example - glorious game, and its objective of leaving Shrouded Hills. You can go past the gate in multiple ways, but in the end you still go through the same characters and same gate.

What's AoD first city objective?

There isn't really set one, except from arbitrary "move forward in the plot". Every objective is different and reasons why you progress further are very different. Which is why AoD feels like actual roleplaying game to me - you play completely different roles in the events of the game. In that respect, Arcanum-like freedom might not be the best design for this goal, it can even be detrimental one, since by definition if you play different roles not everyone should be able to achieve the same objective.

Now AoD formula certainly needs to progress in its systemic content, but absolute freedom (like ability to kill everyone Fallout-style) and giving all players tools everywhere is something which just doesn't suit the realistic take on what role can do what. Options should be sensible, player should get their asses handed to them when needed and overdoing this can also be a mistake.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

All in all, I think we did a nice job, and we hope to continue improving and refining our design style.

Is Colony Ship following a similar formula to its C&C or is it more like traditional RPGs ala Fallout and Arcanum as expertly illustrated by JarlFrank? It would be good to know these things beforehand so we don't get into your game with false-expectations and end up hating the product when it's not even trying to be something we think it s.

 

[Thal]

I think large part of AoD's criticism stems from the fact that what it does, it does so well that people are unhappy it wouldn't go all the way to accommodate their playstyles. Vince's blunt responses to criticism probably don't help either. We have to remember though that only a handful of people worked on the game, their first project. How thorough can you be then? What is there was already the main draw, where all bets were hedged. Fallout and AoD handle skill checks differently true, but it's not that the AoD style doesn't have its merits. CYOA sequences are imo some of the most atmospheric and best parts of the game. You feel great accomplishment for pulling off something like breaking into Antidas' palace. You could handle that fallout style perhaps, but the experience wouldn't be as detailed.

I think (correct me if I'm wrong) Vince once said that AoD was at some point intended to be a bit like a story based roguelike, where you create characters and see how far you can get with them. Evidently, this isn't the type of game people are looking for. In fact, I believe most people respond to AoD's tough skill checks by hoarding skill points and spending them only when needed, paranoid that wrongly developed characters become dead ends. Also I think most of us want to unlock max content still, and therefore spend skills strategically instead of organically. This leads to very degenerate gameplay, and also makes the game seem more punishing than it is. On the contrary, the game is actually quite well tested and balanced. Hybrid characters are very possible, and don't require overt minmaxing. It's been a while since my last playthrough, but I recall having shit ton of skill points to spare in the end. What if I had spent those when I earned them? Maybe the only reloads would have been because of combat. I'm not saying the criticism isn't valid. On first playthrough you don't have meta knowledge and so are likely to create bad characters, like boosting a skill to 8 mid game, neglecting another at 4 when the game required 6/6 to pass. This is a major design flaw, and I wish there was a way to solve this problem without making skill checks trivially easy (like in Tyranny, which I recently completed). Chance based with some hard limits is the usual option, but that would encourage reloading even more. I hope ITS has got some ideas for Colony Ship, we'll see. In the mean time, I can only suggest trying Vince's roguelike approach and see how far you can get. Maybe you'll rage quit after getting shanked by Miltiades' thugs be pleasantly surprised.

Finally I should also add that while the commercium character has no use for stealth, there are thieving opportunities in every city. You can still be a thief, you just can't solve some faction quests with those skills. The question shouldn't really be, can I complete this faction with thief skills, but can I complete the game if I have thief skills and go Commercium?

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

In fact, I believe most people respond to AoD's tough skill checks by hoarding skill points and spending them only when needed, paranoid that wrongly develop characters become dead ends. Also I think most of us want to unlock max content still, and therefore spend skills strategically instead of organically. This leads to very degenerate gameplay, and also makes the game seem more punishing than it is. On the contrary, the game is actually quite well tested and balanced. Hybrid characters are very possible, and don't require overt minmaxing. It's been a while since my last playthrough, but I recall having shit ton of skill points to spare in the end.

The game rewards trying new things. The worst thing a player could do after failure is to become a coward and start hoarding SPs. There are plenty of situations that will never pop up unless you make very specific choices that can only happen by accident. It feels immersive playing blind, but it feels shitty playing safe. This max-content per playthrough thing is a Skyrim-related disease that should be eradicated. Age of Decadence is not the problem. cRPG illiteracy is.

 

[ScrotumBroth]

I once made a character in Fallout 2 specifically to be a pacifist, smooth talker and ladies man.

Well ho and behold, after gluing the eyes of Mrs Bishop and impregnating Miss Bishop, I couldn't get out past Mr Bishop because it required a yuge sneak check.
The game fucking teleported me to a different location from a conversation screen and put me in a situation my build wasn't compliant with...

I had to restart half way through and create a character specifically for the purpose of spreading my crème fraîche on two NPCs.


One time I've decided to play Fallout 1 at last and see what's all the kerfuffle.

Well ho and behold, I finally reach the last boss, I'm cracking knuckles in anticipation of ripping him a new one while banging forehead on the keyboard for the wall of text to go away, and when it finally did, fucker offed himself...
I wanted to feel his dying spasms on my skin. I wanted to do it, but the game took it away...With a text dialogue!

Fucking shit sucks. I played those games thinking it's going to be like New Vegas/Worms hybrid in Commandos engine, the whole thing turned out to be a scam.

 

[Skdursh]

Vault Dweller: here you go guys, 7 factions, each with its own branching main quest line, and you can switch sides too if you want.

Codex:

What game is that screenshot from? I laughed really hard at this.

 

[Egosphere]

Vault Dweller: here you go guys, 7 factions, each with its own branching main quest line, and you can switch sides too if you want.

Codex:

What game is that screenshot from? I laughed really hard at this.

Dragon Age 2, I think

 

[Skdursh]

Vault Dweller: here you go guys, 7 factions, each with its own branching main quest line, and you can switch sides too if you want.

Codex:

What game is that screenshot from? I laughed really hard at this.

Dragon Age 2, I think

Is the whole game this shitty? If it is I might kind of really want to play it for the lulz.

 

[Elhoim]

Is Colony Ship following a similar formula to its C&C or is it more like traditional RPGs ala Fallout and Arcanum as expertly illustrated by JarlFrank? It would be good to know these things beforehand so we don't get into your game with false-expectations and end up hating the product when it's not even trying to be something we think it s.

For starters, the gameworld structure is a bit more similar to Fallout than AoD. The faction conflicts are more local, except for the 3 big ones, but you don't interact with them until you arrive to the Habitat in the second chapter. For example, you start in the pit, and there you have a questline which ends up resolving who ends up a leader of that area. Think of it a bit like Killian and Gizmo, but with bigger consequences down the line. When I played Fallout back in the day I was a bit annoyed that after killing Gizmo the townpeople still talked like if he was still alive and the casino empty. The only effect the choice has is a slide at the end of the game. Here, you will deal with the Pit in the future, and whoever is charge will open different options and affect your standing with the 3 main factions. The same goes with the other factions in different areas.

The game is less gated than AoD (Teron and 3 locations, leave and probably never return). Here, you will travel back and forth different areas, return to old ones, the quests are not as self contained as in AoD. There will be plot points in which "time will move forward" and big narrative quests if not solved will get an outcome or situations in areas change, similar to what happened in AoD when you leave Teron or Maadoran, but you will have more exploration freedom between them. For example, if you never bothered to work on the pit conflict, it will resolve itself after a certain main quest plot point. Regarding the way to solve the quests, the narrative ones (like the pit conflict) will be more or less similar to AoD. If there's an event going on, you'll arrive and it will start. In general we'll try to support 3 paths (talker, combat, stealth/hacker), but not always you will have all 3 in a quest. You won't be able to randomly start combat in town, but there will be sneaking opportunities similar to AoD Inns and such.

Exploration will be more open ended and freeform, using skills on things like computers, doors, implant extraction from dead bodies, sneaking, hacking, etc, and we'll also have sequences similar to the Hangar door in AoD, in which you will use several combinations of skills to achieve a goal. We plan to have a turn based sneak system with silent takedowns, and better interaction with objects. So if we were to do something like the palace infiltration or the outpost it won't be fully text based, but with your character sneaking around, using skills on objects, trying to get behind enemies to kill them, etc.

Regarding our general design ideas, we dislike forcing solutions that make no sense in the context the game presents, or that completely break the believability of the setting. The NPCs in power won't be your puppets, and sometimes you will have to deal with the consequences you are served.

To summarize, it will be a bit more traditional compared to AoD, but don't expect sneaking around everywhere placing dynamite in people's pockets.

 

[Carrion]

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.

Yeah, this pretty much sums it up. The limiting thing about AoD is that, aside from combat, none of it is systemic. There's only a finite amount (often just a couple) of possible ways any given part of the game can play out, as every possible action and outcome has to be hand-crafted. Trying to plan ahead often boils down to making educated guesses about what you'll be facing (i.e. trying to read the developers' minds), as the game doesn't provide the systemic framework that would allow you interact with the gameworld in consistent and predictable ways. AoD pretty much takes the skill check-based approach of FO and a bunch of other games to its logical extreme, exposing all of its glaring weaknesses in the process.

Of course, AoD is still tons of fun and an impressive game in its own right. I'm a total sucker for the CYOA stuff and enjoy every bit of it, and the pacing's tighter than a nun's arsehole. I just tend to prefer games where you have a goal and a set of tools and where you can use those tools in whatever way you can think of within the rules of the game. AoD does a great job with what it tries to do, but it feels more like an anomaly than an example on how things "should" be done (which it obviously never intended to be). Colony Ship being more freeform definitely sounds good to me.

 

[Corvinus]

I still think that AoD's greatest flaw is that you never narrated it. "No man - no problem." Your accent fits the setting perfectly!

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Exploration will be more open ended and freeform, using skills on things like computers, doors, implant extraction from dead bodies, sneaking, hacking, etc, and we'll also have sequences similar to the Hangar door in AoD, in which you will use several combinations of skills to achieve a goal. We plan to have a turn based sneak system with silent takedowns, and better interaction with objects. So if we were to do something like the palace infiltration or the outpost it won't be fully text based, but with your character sneaking around, using skills on objects, trying to get behind enemies to kill them, etc.

Do you intend to present these choices in the sneaking activity in a text-adventure style?

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Vault Dweller: here you go guys, 7 factions, each with its own branching main quest line, and you can switch sides too if you want.

Codex:

What game is that screenshot from? I laughed really hard at this.

Dragon Age 2, I think

Is the whole game this shitty? If it is I might kind of really want to play it for the lulz.

The minute to minute gameplay is excruciating and not in a funny, easy to mock way. I'd skip it.

 

[Elhoim]

I still think that AoD's greatest flaw is that you never narrated it. "No man - no problem." Your accent fits the setting perfectly!

Jesus, forgot about that, it's almost embarrassing jajajaja

Do you intend to present these choices in the sneaking activity in a text-adventure style?

Generally, no, but would depend on the complexity of the task. Think of like the infiltration in Feng's house or the TG quest in Ganezzar's Castle Basement, but that at some point you might come across a door like in the Hangar with a complex text adventure.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Exploration will be more open ended and freeform, using skills on things like computers, doors, implant extraction from dead bodies, sneaking, hacking, etc

We plan to have a turn based sneak system with silent takedowns, and better interaction with objects. So if we were to do something like the palace infiltration or the outpost it won't be fully text based, but with your character sneaking around, using skills on objects, trying to get behind enemies to kill them, etc.

To summarize, it will be a bit more traditional compared to AoD, but don't expect sneaking around everywhere placing dynamite in people's pockets.

Welp. You are sending mixed messages like a politician with something to hide. I guess i'll just wait for the final product and shit on your design choices down the line in true codex fashion.

 

[Tigranes]

Wow, that's a pretty desperate effort from you

They kind of have a 10 year track record of being extremely open and blunt about what they're doing.... such that they regularly piss their customers off by telling them the game will not please them and they will not cater to X Y and Z

 

[Absinthe]

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.

No you fucking idiot. "There is too much gated content!" is not a demand that you be granted success no matter what. It's a demand that you be allowed to fall off the beaten path and still progress in your own way. Instead, your build determines your path and your path determines your build and if you have other skills they are liable to be a severe waste of SP. The lack of freedom this creates is the major problem. Consequences for failure is fine. "I don't have choices because I feel railroaded CYOA style" isn't an actual complaint. The complaint is that while you get choices they are all Vince's choices, handed to you on a silver-platter with skill checks, and as such problem-solving is mostly a question of interacting with your character sheet rather than interacting with the world. Vince argued for the dominance of character skill over player skill and this is the result. "This game is linear" does not fucking mean "I want to dick around doing whatever retarded shit I want" it means that you are funneled very explicitly from point A to point B the entire fucking time and you can't even do shit at your own pace. VD can't give you multiple main quests and let you solve them in the order you feel like by telling you "go do shit and figure out the fine details of how on your own", he has to move you through one main quest at a time in his preferred order handing you all the options at predetermined points in specific ways. World interaction and mechanical design is at a minimum as CYOA design crowds out everything and quest linearity becomes a negative constraint against freedom of activity. Even switching towns is tightly controlled by the narrative restraints VD imposes. Technically you can leave town early, but we all know it is fucking penalizing to do so.

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.

That's just fucking retarded. First off, saying that I would rather have to puzzle out solutions for myself than be handed them on a silver platter is the opposite of spoiled you fucking AoD apologist. Second off, the issue isn't that failure can occur, but rather that "thinking outside the box" is not a viable means of problem-solving. You almost always operate inside the box VD hands you and it's not worth your time to try to think of anything else because if there would've been another option VD would've told you. On the subject of failure though, sometimes failures are handled too excessively. If you get thrown out of the Merchants' Guild for instance, you're now free to work for anyone else in Teron, and yet you can't do that because it would interfere with VD's prearranged questlines. And failure in AoD is often just code for "go reload and reassign your skill points for success this time." More often one is punished for their lack of foresight than their lack of skilled play. And the game does an inadequate job of pressing a player to accept failure and keep going. Save-reload design is a problem in general and in AoD it too easily becomes a massive crutch, especially for newbies.

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.

Maybe I didn't explain this well. Sure, it's a laborious demand to ask that developers create new paths for every type of content desired, but there are serious problems for instance with playing as a Praetor (whose entire job is to look out for the interests of House Daratan) and yet being denied any road to success in this capacity. It's an issue that you can be a Kingmaker as Imperial Guard and yet have it go absolutely fucking nowhere because VD decided that Antidas is too incompetent to actually become king, even if he has competent men (protagonist, Dellar, possibly Carrinas) helping him succeed. Similar concerns exist in being unable to remain as an assassin while trying to depose Darista who is blatantly turning the AG into Lord Gaelius's personal retinue. You're allowed to persuade Hamza as a Merchant and yet you're not allowed to persuade him as an Assassin (wtf). Your only choice is to backstab the guild.

But let's go over some smaller circumstances where your only choices are to handle things VD's way and how this gets stupid. In AoD, it is a rather popular solution to your problems to just put bodies into the ground, but you are never allowed to hire others to do this work for you, unless it is a main quest pre-packaged solution. You're not allowed to hire the Assassins' Guild, even though this sort of work is their bread and butter. You can't pay the AG to kill the outpost or the bandits for you. You can't even buy poison for the outpost either, unless you're Assassins' Guild, then suddenly Coltan's services are available free of charge. And in the AG questline it's clear that Coltan does in fact sell poisons for murder. These solutions are denied to you because Vince does not want you to have them as a non-assassin. In Maadoran you can't hire mercs or try to hire assassins for anything either. Nevermind being turned down, you're not even provided an opportunity to fucking ask. If you're playing Thieves' Guild as a grifter and you redirect the gold shipment, you have to steal the gold yourself even if there are two guys next to you who are much better at stealing shit than you are because VD wants you to do the steal checks. If you don't redirect the shipment, the game doesn't care if you're a pure sneak-thief; you're still obligated to play the role of the thug even though you are woefully incompetent at this task and thus not the sort of person who should be taken along on the job. That's not good C&C.

Choice and consequence as a concept is about the player exercising freedom and having the world react accordingly. In AoD choice and consequence means you get an itemized list of VD-approved choices and you can pick which road you like best (a road which is usually predetermined by your skills anyway).

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.

No you fucking moron. I am not criticizing the game for letting characters have a life of their own or letting you interact with a meaningful world. I am criticizing the game for doing the exact opposite. That it does not allow you to exercise initiative in interacting with the world. It only allows you to interact the world when VD fucking pleases. You can't persuade Hamza to depose Darista as AG but you can do it if you're MG. You can't cut a deal with the Imperial Guards to declare Antidas emperor while remaining Praetor, but you can make the deal if you defect to Imperial Guards (and be completely stuck as an IG stooge in the process). That's the problem with VD's CYOA-based design. Give Antidas or IG the steel smelter and you won't ever see their men clad in steel or blue steel as a result. They don't fucking do anything with it. You speak of characters having their own lives but the world is always on pause as you do your shit. Also, while main quest might react to the stuff you've done, the consequences hardly ripple out to the sidequests, and many times the particulars of how you progressed within a specific quest are forgotten about shortly thereafter. It's not like if you kill the 2 IGs during the MG->IG defection you end up with a few IGs going "That was my friend you fucking asshole." No, nobody cares. You just continue the defection same as every other MG->IG defection. Rarely do characters even care or take note of who you are and what you've done unless it's major quest shit. Your hype about characters having lives of their own is some overblown shit.

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.

And that doesn't make sense when the weak leader has a tendency to delegate the shit he is bad at to more competent men. He has Dellar (and the protagonist) to keep house in order. He could have Carrinas or Mercato leading his army. He could have a blue steel refinery to arm his men. He could have a loremaster who knows his way around blue steel (Cassius). Maybe Antidas himself isn't a great leader, but that doesn't mean he can't become a vehicle for great men to achieve their own ambitions under him by supporting his rise to power. In fact that's the exact pitch that's given to Carrinas - make Antidas emperor and we can rebuild the empire and you will still be running the army and restoring law and order without it becoming a shitty coup and naked power grab. Instead we're just left with Antidas losing everything and Carrinas failing to push to restore the empire. It's also a pitch that should exist for the protagonist - if you support Antidas's rise to power and help clear out the troubles on the way, your fortunes should rise with his and you can become one of the most important and powerful figures in the empire. But no matter what, Antidas is not permitted to gather a proper army or political support from other factions. The sellsword legion, the IG legion, the blue steel armaments (which disappear from the story altogether), etc. all somehow fail to have any impact. At best you can settle for peace.

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.

That may be the purpose of having Benny there but it's still bad writing. His presence is jarring bordering on the absurd and he feels like a ridiculous convenience placed there to give speech checks a chance where sensibly there should be no option for you to talk your way through. It would be one thing to hire a loremaster to come with you who would then help you get through this mess, but another to conveniently find one in the middle of nowhere past some highly lethal machinery who just so happens to have survived long enough for you to show up and he can even help you progress deeper despite having been stuck there. There have already been raiders and the weirdos who named it hellgate who've gone through the place if you just wanted to make the point that the protagonist is no one special for finding this spot, although I do feel that you take the whole "the protagonist is no one special" theme to an extreme if these are the lengths you go to in order to establish that everywhere he's gone others have seen it first.

You can't get rid of Strabos for the same reason a new employee can't get rid of a powerful CEO, etc.

This is the age of decadence though, not the present-day legally inclined society. And your boss is recruiting your help in causing a coup against the local ruler. Surely there are ways to get him killed/deposed and position yourself to profit from it. MG is all about coming out ahead by being a scheming bastard.

They are thugs for hire, not ninjas

You say that a lot but assassination is more about scoring quiet kills when you catch your target off-guard than walking in through the front door with a sword in hand. It's one thing to get forced into combat because your mark is smart enough to anticipate assassination attempts and you have to do shit the hard way. Hell you can even make a case for AG needing guys who can do shit the hard way when necessary. But assassins as a rule should not be in the habit of giving their marks a fair fight. They should be in the habit of not giving the mark a fight at all. That doesn't require magic ninjutsu powers. I feel like you have a contempt for the assassin's trade while writing an assassin questline if you complain that assassins can't be ninjas as a justification for why they should just be frontal combatants. Assassins don't need magical invisiblity powers but there's nothing wrong with an assassin being quick, quiet, and deadly or finding ways to deceive marks into imbibing poison or taking a wrong turn somewhere that they can be offed without fuss or getting a guard to be unavailable when he should be so you have free access through a target's defenses and so forth. But actual assassination quest routes are rare in the AG line, and that's a valid complaint you should come to terms with.

You can do a lot more than that.

We're speaking of the faction questlines frankly, and we all acknowledge them as faction questlines. Yes, you can pick your path to a point, derail off of the current route into another one, but you are always on a pre-planned, linearly progressing path. That's why we tend to name quests with the convention of AG4, TG1, MG7, etc because all these quests are progressed linearly and everyone can figure out which quest something like HD2 means. That's why I call it multi-linear: You do have choices, but all the choices take you down discrete questlines with decisions directly handed to you by the questlines and events occurring at the pace of the questline. The exception to this is if you skip town, blow up Maadoran, or make your way to the Temple early.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

They kind of have a 10 year track record of being extremely open and blunt about what they're doing

Yet they sold a CYOA VN as an RPG. You are either sheeple or a paid lobbyist in Iron Tower's political machine.

 

[Tigranes]

yawn, try again

maybe they have paid me off with promises of gender free toilets in my village, sir

 

[mushaden]

My RPG Playlist: https://pastebin.com/kNTg7SBq

/thread

 

[RNGsus]

My RPG Playlist: https://pastebin.com/kNTg7SBq

/thread

He replayed Elex.

 

[Zanzoken]

I think (correct me if I'm wrong) Vince once said that AoD was at some point intended to be a bit like a story based roguelike, where you create characters and see how far you can get with them.

I don't know if VD said this either but it's spot on. AoD makes a lot more sense if you approach it with the understanding that failure is both expected and necessary, and acquiring meta knowledge is an essential part of the gameplay.

The criticisms of the game's structure are mostly accurate but to me it doesn't take away from the experience. You have to poke and prod at it but the C&C is there in spades, with a ton of culture, history, and secrets to discover.

And if nothing else, at least play it for the combat. The encounter design is seriously great.