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Indie Athereon: Advent I; documenting some obscure indie

vitellus

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Athereon_CoverArt_Advent_I.png


i do deep digs into the shovelware sections of steam, it’s filled with overpriced rpgmaker shit and forgettable unity projects with overly grand ambitions that probably shouldn’t have even made itch.io and most of it’s priced ~$5-$10 in freedom funds with the occasional outlier at $30 where our subject Athereon: Advent I lies. i dug up this game and when i found it, had 31 followers and 2 players at its all-time peak.

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after jerking off on my face for about a week, i wiped the goo off and bought this ugly bastard and now you're going to live vicariously through me, my terrible documentation, and my shitty screenshots.

whenever i encounter a new game and a new rule system i typically roll fighter since it's some basic shit and it's hard to fuck up a fighter in most games nowadays.
the graphics are super basic unity stuff that you'll forget ten minutes after you stop playing.
no stat alteration options at character gen, so you're gonna get what you're given

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classes are fighters, mages, psionite, scouts

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this was the first load in, then tabbed out to begin this post, returned to visual bug that results from alt-tabbing. wonderful. bonertastic.

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start a new game again, load in, and having played the demo, i knew there was some foggy weather elements.

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also, i windowed it so i don't get that alt-tab bug, and this is the overworld with the fog.

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quick shot of the overworld without the fog with bonus 'skills needed for scanning'

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the city ahead of me in the overworld typically look like this

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trying to suss some fucking information from some stupid bitch who don't know anything

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about to be the star in an amateur gay porn

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the masterful design of the 'castle town' with hidden second floor

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typical midnight without torch lit

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for the last image for this op, a fight i escaped from but all battles start this far out so far, but look at that size difference!

70 minutes in and i have no fucking clue what is going on, what to do, where to go, nothing other than a vague mission of "seeking enlightenment" a la Ultima IV.

It is definitely something for sure. Maybe it'll get better? :roll:

before anyone should suggest me to rtfm, this is the fucking manual provided

:3/5:
 

vitellus

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a video i made that shows movement in a village, the overworld, and into dungeon. me zerging some traps and killing my longest range damage dealer just to find something to fight and escaping the impossible battle to showcase the combat speed or lack thereof
 

vitellus

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Combat is initiated by wandering mobs on the overworld that beeline so quickly to your pc token that I thought was a cloud since my first random encounter was at dusk and was almost hard to see anything already. Combat is slow and cumbersome, each token is dictated my movement points, one per square and this is where half the problem lies with combat. 50X50 battlefields sound awesome, but so far they are devoid of environmental obstacles and the only changing thing is the tile you’re standing on, and your party generally starts in the middle of this massive battlefield with your targets usually spread equidistant at the four corners. Fucking what? The choice of arena seems to be geared for massive battles with gigantic creatures. I’ve already wiped to massive mobs that are occupying a 5x5 area and tick off insta-kills at 940+hp per hit and toughest party member, my Axeman (levels and classes are weird), whose character level is 13 but class level is 1 has 150hp. One part member I recruited in a tavern in Stirrusphere, a one building screen about 20x20 tiles, has a movement of 1 so watching her crawl to the enemy is goddamned painful. Combats can drag on so long, I tend to forget what it was I was doing before the battle.



In speaking with the dev on the discord for the game, movement points are increased via stacking of items (armor/rings/neck/etc), the dude seems nice enough, but at this low level of sales and low number of engagements (I am the only person posting in the disco at this time since Nov ‘22) that dude I feel should be a little more informal since I gave him money (be my friend I paid you!).



The game definitely has a certain je ne sais quoi about it, like an alien got a hold of the unity engine and decided to make Ultima after only having read about someone telling them what playing the game was like, and I can't help but just be sorta charmed by it.

I'll take the time to capture a real battle and edit the video so you don't have to sit through some ponderous mobs trudging towards a distant target.
 

vitellus

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Lord have mercy.

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We're about to get shit (shat?) on by a troll.

I can honestly say that I am enjoying this game. There’s no help so I’m scouring the countryside hitting all the towns and taking all the notes with relevant screenies and noting what each little token npc says since, again, there’s no journal. There’s barely a map provided so I’ve gone on what the dev said in discord about there being pirates at sea. There is a shipwright (in a building labeled Architecture) in one of the riverside/seaside towns that sells a boat for something like 25,000-30,000 stars (unit of currency) so there’s a way to visit all the towns that I can see that I cannot reach since rivers bar my way.

So there are four classes, and they each have four tiers and each of these tiers are unlockable after reaching certain levels in a previous tier.




I said I'd get some footage of combat and edit it down, so here you are, there are a lot of level imbalances and i am still learning some of the basics on like who can weild what as money is precious because they only come from fights. Fights are slow slow slow, the two minutes or so of footage below was captured after almost ten minutes of hitting "Hold" while waiting for the mobs to come to me. When you have mobs that are occupying a 4x4 or even 6x6 space, they can move from the edge of these aforementioned 50x50 combat fields in three to two turns. Once the mobs get into action range, then it gets a bit more fun as i tend to enjoy turn-based bullshit quite a bit and you run the chance of someone dying as everything hits hard as fuck and I have yet to figure out how to resurrect. More to come at some point in the near future.

 
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vitellus

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So, I make the rounds around the starting area, get my guy up a notch on the fighter tier to become a 'swordsman' and i'll need to master both lancer and bludgeoner as well to level 16 to advance to tier 3 and become a Warrior. The levels for the tiers come relatively quickly it seems. Eight levels for tier 1 and that was three or four successful battles, tier 2 is sixteen so I have to do that three fucking times goddammit. Also, you can't change these classes on these tiers on the fly gods no, you gotta be at a temple to do so. You can only change the top three guys' levels as NPCs are locked, so unsure if Olennia is ever going to be more than a 10 hp, one square moving slug that is nothing more than added time in battle to wait for animations to cycle. You can change the tiers on all the NPC's, (Swordsman, Axeman, Bludgeoner), you can change only your class group (i.e. fighter, mage, psionite, scout).

See me move up in the world!

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Fighter / Swordsman

Also, I bought a boat since the game is more or less directing you to purchase one and it quickly gets into your price range for a three man skiff.
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So I do and I go and get wrecked for doing so



It should be noted that usually the common randomly spawning mobs have been the occasional parties of roving bandits and orcs. sometimes though, the game throws some random high level massive mob at you that can haul ass across the field and fuck your shit up like the video above. You can only save in towns and you can't see the mobs until they spawn and they spawn far enough away that you can avoid them by darting into a nearby transition screen albeit town/castle/dungeon but the enemy npc tokens move very fast and cannot be outrun in a straight line. The fog and the rain are fucking annoying and I have to camp through the fog and the dark since the dark reminds me of Ultima 6 and the inability to see to wipe your own ass. More later.
 
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udm

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Athereon is a parallel universe, with the Advent series immersed in an epic fantasy open world strategy-tactical party-based RPG.

■ The Advent series takes place on planet Atherdora, civilization demarcated to 8 federations (8 stand-alone video games)


:what:

I'm a sucker for janky stuff though, so I'll give the demo a shot one of these days.
 

whydoibother

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I've unironically produced more complete Unity projects, that I've gotten bored of and deleted, than this actually published and for-sale game.
 

vitellus

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Dawn breaks over Atheredora and yes those are boundaries for the game.

Let’s be honest here, it’s not a very good game, but it is a game nonetheless. At twenty hours, yes twenty hours, I still haven’t discerned what quest there is other than some random shitstain asking me to go save the poor fucker they abandoned back in the mines. What’s been accomplished? I bought a bigger ship and bought some gear to help with movement points so now the battles have gone from an agonizingly slow process of trudging across the battlefield three squares a turn (or turtling up and awaiting the inevitable march of mobs to me), I can now dart at seven or eight squares a time, get to the mobs and eliminate them pretty quickly. Fifteen minutes is now about seven, minor improvements. I also made a map of the currently explorable area.

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Almost every single equipment shop sells bolts and arrows, but I still have yet to neither instrument to fire this ammunition. I have no fucking idea why I am still beating my head against this wall. As of this time, I haven’t found a way to resurrect dead fucks, so I asked the dev and there are like, four healers in the game and only one of them can rez and that dude is, as per the dev, on an island in the middle of the sea.

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Asking the dev for some relatively pertinent information

Did I mention the pirates that trawl the waters and coasts? There are pirates and they indeed fuck your shit up with long range attacks that can insta-kill lower leveled party members.

The key take away is grinding until you can move far enough and fast enough to not get pelted by missiles until death and bank enough hit points on useless party members so they can soak up some damage while your more useful people can cross the gangway and rape some pirates.

This is going into my signature for sure as this is from the dev:

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...

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something something hubris

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map in question:

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vitellus

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Athereon is a parallel universe, with the Advent series immersed in an epic fantasy open world strategy-tactical party-based RPG.

■ The Advent series takes place on planet Atherdora, civilization demarcated to 8 federations (8 stand-alone video games)


:what:

I'm a sucker for janky stuff though, so I'll give the demo a shot one of these days.

my currently installed backlog i could be working on and enjoying, yet here i am the fucking dumbass i am playing this goddamned game I woke up thinking about. fuck.
l3QQHlI.png
 

vitellus

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This ass rape took place in the same spot i was fighting easy kill orcs and bandits. crazy imbalance, to say the least.



I'll return much later with more info on this...uh is fool's gold considered a gem?

I sadly am actually liking it.
 

vitellus

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This is what you see 1/3 of the time in the overworld

I'm just some retard who bought a totally obscure game for the shits and the giggles, so keep that in mind as I give you my review. I've played a lot of bullshit, stuff you complete (or mostly don't in my case) and then forget about until you run across years down the line in a codex post on obscure rpgs, and this one ranks up there as absolutely something that indeed exists and can be bought with money earned in one fashion or another.

In any investment in a video game, regardless if it's XCOM UFO Defense or Deliverance: Kingdom Come, I absolutely must get my expenditure for a game to under $1 for every hour spent. If it's a great game, that number is usually <$0.25 per hour.

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This fucking thing will sit at $1.13 per hour.

Forever.

I have spent money on stupider things, and actually had more fun making that map and taking screenshits and sharing this misadventure with all y'all than actually playing it. I never picked up a main quest other than getting a shard of humility and something else of humility to become "Enlightened" which is leading me to believe it's some sort of Ultima IV set of quests.

Leveling is fast and equally pointless. The magic support class didn't get a single spell until about the twentieth hour of playtime. You see a bump in health and you can multihit per round as a fighter, but the battles were too long and too slow on a battlefield that was as big and as boring as the entirety of the overworld. The first chunk of play is going round to grind up some gold and xp to barely make a dent in a quest that I am told by the dev (a polite ESL dude who happily answered a few direct questions ["how does i rez?"] but kept, I felt, trying to sell me on a game I'd already bought. After the time I spent playing it, I can see why as it's padded and more fun trying to figure out than it is playing it. It feels totally unfinished, it looks like assets from basic bargains, and the game could be saved by less fucking fog, less fucking darkness, and for the fuck of all, speed the combat up.

You can have cool set piece battles and they could feel epic, but it's lame and boring instead. Hard pass y'all.
:0.5/5:

If someone is retarded enough to buy this game at some point before it's removed from Steam for being shovelware or whatever, post here so I can mock you.
 

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