Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind - King of Dragon Pass spiritual successor

[Nutria]

I imagine they found some programmers who could do it reliably but the way they knew how to do it was using Win10. That's understandable. As my mother used to tell me, "I'm not angry, just disappointed."

 

[Tigranes]

I mean, it's quite obviously a small mom and pop operation that just wanted to get it on PC whatever way they could, only now they realise that for whatever reason they themselves don't fully understand their game has a weird technical limitation that nobody else does, but hell there ain't the wherewithal to get it sorted out. I'll likely pick it up for laptop, but it's a pity.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Waiting... waiting... waiting...

What time today is the GOG version going to be released?

 

[LESS T_T]

Out now on Steam:



Looks like Steam forum people recently realized this is Windows 10 only: https://steamcommunity.com/app/881420/discussions/0/1607148447811157101/

 

[Infinitron]

What happened to the game's GOG page? Looks like it just disappeared.

 

[LESS T_T]

What happened to the game's GOG page? Looks like it just disappeared.

Looks like an error or something:

 

[Shaewaroz]

Downloading the GOG version.

EDIT: GOG version works fine with Win 10.

 

[Hellion]

It plays like "King of Dragon Pass +2", for all intents and purposes. And that's awesome.

 

[Infinitron]

Yep it's up now: https://af.gog.com/game/six_ages_ride_like_the_wind?as=1649904300

 

[Kev Inkline]

System requirements: Windows 10.

Wtf? No love for win 7?

 

[Dodo1610]

Pc Gamers Review

https://www.pcgamer.com/six-ages-ride-like-the-wind-review/

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind review
An update of a cult classic for the modern world.

The council of clan elders look at one another gravely. This year's harvest has been poor and our people need food to make it through the winter. The warmaster, a young fire mage called Yakatan, pipes up: "Perhaps we could raid a nearby clan, and steal their cows?" Trader Targarung counters: "What if instead we took some of our jewellery, and traded it for cows?" Priestess Ailara instead suggests: "We should pray to the goddess of the fields to bless our barley, and make it last longer."

Finally Shaman Kimka makes her suggestion: "How about if we get one of our farmers to put on a mask and prance around pretending to be the cow goddess, until they get transported to a mystical otherworld, commune with the gods, and ask them to beam down 100 cows directly into our fields?" The council rumbles. All these suggestions are very sensible, but in the end I think we're going to go with the mask thing.


Welcome to Six Ages. It's a belated follow up to the 1999 cult oddity King of Dragon Pass, and works the same way: you manage a small clan in an iron age fantasy world, and try to help them prosper by making a series of decisions, largely involving praying to gods and acquiring more and more livestock. It's a sort of hybrid of visual novel and town management game, with large parts played out via little choose-your-own-adventure vignettes, plus town management-esque decisions on various menu screens. Imagine Crusader Kings 2 without the real time strategy overmap, but with even more weird events.

That's probably the best comparison for modern gamers, not just because of the vignettes, but also the emphasis on personality and characters. One of Six Ages' best features is the Clan Circle: an advisory council of characters who chime in on every decision you make. They're all randomly generated, but each one has their own little personality: this one hates elves, this one always wants to stick to tradition. My priestess, Ailara, was an old woman whose comments always amounted to some variation on "ugh, men". Most of the time when you perform an action—such as sending a trade caravan to a neighbouring clan, exploring the nearby mountains, or performing a ritual—one of these characters will be the public face of it. You inevitably get really attached to each character, only to see them catch a stray arrow in battle, disappear while exploring, or just grow old and die.

Let's talk about that ritual at the beginning. This is one of the more unusual aspects of Six Ages—it's set in the world of Glorantha, a board game and RPG setting created by Greg Stafford over 40 years ago in which myth and reality are tightly intertwined. The farmer is both invoking the legend in a muddy field and transported to a mystical otherworld, and a significant part of the game is learning the secrets to these myths so that you can re-enact them correctly. Alternatively, you can go off book, put your own spin on the tale, and possibly create a new interpretation.


If you're familiar with Glorantha—a setting so dense it recently received a two volume encyclopedia detailing the background lore—or Stafford's other RPG work, you'll know it's often concerned with asking the players to embody the ideals of a certain culture or time, and Six Ages is no exception. The game doesn't particularly care if you make 'good' or 'bad' decisions, so long as they are the kinds of decisions that you clan approves of. For example, during clan creation you are asked if your people welcome outsiders or cast them out. In-game you are expected to stick to that decision, whatever it was, or your ancestors will be unhappy. It's an approach that creates a world that is at once alien in its strange moral codes, yet intimate in how fully you submerge yourself within its fictional cultures.

The biggest example of this kind of subjective morality only becomes clear if you've played the game's predecessor, King of Dragon Pass. In Six Ages, you play the Riders, who appear in Dragon Pass as the 'Horse Spawn', barbaric raiders who keep stealing your cows. And in Dragon Pass you play as the Orlanthi, who appear in Six Ages as Rams, barbaric raiders who keep stealing your cows. Each sees the other as a hated enemy—the two games even retell the same creation myth, but from opposite perspectives, with the heroic/murderous Orlanth slaying the benevolent/tyrannical Yelm. Despite this, both clans worship many of the same gods. Which version of history is true? Both really—that's how Six Ages works.


A quick word on ports: Six Ages was originally released on IOS, and the PC version is basic but functional. No, there aren't a lot of graphics options, but then the game consists entirely of still screens, so it hardly needs them. What's important is that, unlike the 2015 Steam re-release of Dragon Pass, it feels like it has been designed to be used with a mouse instead of a touch screen. During play I only ever encounter one major bug, where my trade caravans seem to visit with a different clan than I intend, which is annoying but not game breaking.

In an alternate universe where King of Dragon Pass created a thriving genre (Clan Management Sim? Passlike? Turn Based Cow Raider?) Six Ages would probably be considered an unoriginal and derivative follow up. It does play in almost exactly the same way, just with new fiction and a thick layer of polish (the tooltips in particular are a godsend considering how obtuse the original game could be). I hope to one day live in that world, but in the current one there is no experience quite like Six Ages, and I'm just glad to be back in Glorantha again.

The Verdict
88

Six Ages
This charming sequel doesn't need flashy new innovations to craft an engrossing adventure.

 

[Shaewaroz]

My first impressions as a long time KoDP player:

+ Competently done PC port. No issues with UI - everything works perfectly.
+ Everyone who has played KoDP will feel right at home. Very similar user interface and gameplay loop.
+ Events seem to be well-designed.
+ Normal difficulty seem a bit more forgiving than in KoDP, where the difficulty was sometimes rather brutal. Multiple different difficulty options available.
+ All the essential elements of KoDP are still there in a more accessible form.
+ I like the change in cultural context - from viking-esque Orlanthis to a more Mongol-esque nomadic culture. I have to familiarize myself a bit more with the new context though - I never experienced this cultural context while playing Runequest, where the focus was often in areas surrounding Dragon Pass.
+ The music complements the new cultural context nicely.
+ There are some new features that can potentially make the gameplay even more varied and interesting than KoDP.
+ Combat is more in-depth than in KoDP, with multiple stages and a lot more information about how the battle is proceeding. Huge improvement.

- New deities have largely the same blessings as the ones in KoDP. Feels like a copy/paste job.
- Much of the micromanagement of KoDP has been removed. No more patrols guarding your borders, no more allocation of different crop types, no more sheep or pigs, no more slaughtering of livestock, no more allocating portions of land for pastures and hunting grounds etc. This will definitely make the learning curve less steep, but reduces the depth and immersion of the gameplay experience.
- The art style looks a bit more uneven than in KoDP. This is probably due to multiple different artists contributing to the game.
- I'm rather surprised that some of the issues that plagued KoDP still haven't been fixed. Like the fact that during an event you still cannot bring up the world map and make sure which clans the event is dealing with. Fortunately this time around you can check your clan's relationship with the clans in question, but you still can't know whether you have established trade routes with the clans in question or how far their tula is from yours. As a result you often have to make important decisions with limited information. This was infuriating in KoDP and it's almost as infuriating here. This issue shouldn't be difficult to fix and I'm puzzled it hasn't been done already.


There are still a lot of things I'm yet to try, like Heroquests. These are just my initial impressions based on 3-4 hours of gameplay.

The game is definitely worth buying, that much I can already tell.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Merlkir
The assholes at A Sharp are greedy souless sellouts.

Even if your lot were sub 70 IQ incompetent niggers can release some shit for multiple platforms including windows 7 with literally a few clicks.

My bet is you lot had a deal with the devils at Microsoft / Kitfox Games to make it win10 exclusive for some jewgold.

No wonder the port from Hipster Phone to "windows" took so long. All the jewery negotiations were going on for so long it seems.

Really disappointed and angry with this dick move. And it hurts so much precisely because I used to love KoDP as a kid.

EDIT: Merlkir seems like some snowflake who has more people on ignore than SCO.

Remember goys, you cannot play KoDP spiritual successor on Windows 7 cause of A-Sharp's sick and twisted agenda.

 

[Shaewaroz]

I'm sure Merlkir was the one responsible, being a freelance artist and all.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

I'm sure Merlkir was the one responsible, being a freelance artist and all.

Well who are the devs from A sharp? I will tag them in my post.

 

[LESS T_T]

I highly doubt this Windows 10 only thing is something to do with Microsoft. Six Ages is not even on Windows Store, Game Pass, or Xbox. And the games actually paid by MS (with Game Pass deal) support Windows 7, even Mac and Linux. (Also to be honest MS probably is not interested in this niche games.) Hell, even their own Halo game is coming to Windows 7.

Misstep yeah, but it's likely more of a technical (and probably production) misstep than business reasons.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

The game uses some piece of middleware that's not (any longer?) very well supported and doesn't play nice with W7. And working around that would require a not-so-trivial engineering effort.

Would be my guess. Something like that.

 

[Nutria]

The "lol dae le jews" shit on this site is really boring and tiresome. Get another gimmick, please.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Get another gimmick, please.

Yeah you're right. Okay. How's this for a different gimmick?

Release your fucking game on PC on time (not years later) and without retarded limitations such as requiring a specific OS to play.

That'd be a cool developer gimmick.

 

[Shaewaroz]

Don't you guys have cellphones???

Spoiler

 

[Hellion]

Update your Windows, plebs.

 

[Maggot]

I look forward to the next cycle where everyone will whine about having to switch from Windows 10.

 

[Chaosdwarft]

My first impressions as a long time KoDP player:

+ Competently done PC port. No issues with UI - everything works perfectly.
+ Everyone who has played KoDP will feel right at home. Very similar user interface and gameplay loop.
+ Events seem to be well-designed.
+ Normal difficulty seem a bit more forgiving than in KoDP, where the difficulty was sometimes rather brutal. Multiple different difficulty options available.
+ All the essential elements of KoDP are still there in a more accessible form.
+ I like the change in cultural context - from viking-esque Orlanthis to a more Mongol-esque nomadic culture. I have to familiarize myself a bit more with the new context though - I never experienced this cultural context while playing Runequest, where the focus was often in areas surrounding Dragon Pass.
+ The music complements the new cultural context nicely.
+ There are some new features that can potentially make the gameplay even more varied and interesting than KoDP.
+ Combat is more in-depth than in KoDP, with multiple stages and a lot more information about how the battle is proceeding. Huge improvement.

- New deities have largely the same blessings as the ones in KoDP. Feels like a copy/paste job.
- Much of the micromanagement of KoDP has been removed. No more patrols guarding your borders, no more allocation of different crop types, no more sheep or pigs, no more slaughtering of livestock, no more allocating portions of land for pastures and hunting grounds etc. This will definitely make the learning curve less steep, but reduces the depth and immersion of the gameplay experience.
- The art style looks a bit more uneven than in KoDP. This is probably due to multiple different artists contributing to the game.
- I'm rather surprised that some of the issues that plagued KoDP still haven't been fixed. Like the fact that during an event you still cannot bring up the world map and make sure which clans the event is dealing with. Fortunately this time around you can check your clan's relationship with the clans in question, but you still can't know whether you have established trade routes with the clans in question or how far their tula is from yours. As a result you often have to make important decisions with limited information. This was infuriating in KoDP and it's almost as infuriating here. This issue shouldn't be difficult to fix and I'm puzzled it hasn't been done already.


There are still a lot of things I'm yet to try, like Heroquests. These are just my initial impressions based on 3-4 hours of gameplay.

The game is definitely worth buying, that much I can already tell.

I will agree that is a good purchase. Sure some content feels copy and pasted from KODP, but overall I am enjoying it.

Regarding micromanagement, I feel like we are losing a bit of flexibility in creating "specialized" clan economy.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/10/22/six-ages-ride-like-the-wind-review/

Wot I Think - Six Ages: Ride Like The Wind

The war chief is dead. Aminai, our wisest herder, took her place but was struck with a deadly illness. Crop after crop failed as the world became darker and colder. Our herds are pitiful, barely half of our people have a horse. Our neighbours, once toasting our clan, raid us without mercy, burning defences and stealing precious cattle. Storm worshippers from the south sense weakness and attack, crowing that their gods are ascendant. Our magic dwindles, our rituals and offerings fail. The gods are at war, say the spinners. It didn’t fully dawn on me how transformative this would be for the whole valley until a dead god fell from the sky.

Part of me was pleased. King Of Dragon Pass is back. And Six Ages has improved on it in every way.

It was all going so well. My clan, the Purple Bees, were famed for our wise leaders, our busy diplomats, and our precious beer. We were popular and prosperous, and our suggestion that we form a kingdom with the other clans was starting to gain traction. But things change. That’s something core to Rider culture, and probably key to why things got so bad.

So what’s a Rider? Unlike the Rams, and the Wheels with their chariots, we’re the people who can ride horses. That’s our thing. Six Ages (which unfortunately, and owing to what I’m assured is a complicated story, currently only runs on Windows 10), you see, is set in a fantasy world where humans are roughly in what we’d call a bronze age. Their cultures are complex, nuanced, and heavily intertwined with their various mythologies and interpretations of the weird and dangerous world they live in. They all have their own ideas about who the right gods are, how things should be done, and who the enemy is. Like King Of Dragon Pass before it, you’re responsible for leading a newly founded village to prosperity and prestige within the region. You choose seven nobles from among your few hundred people, including a chief, to form the clan ring, which will decide on all important matters.

Like its predecessor, it’s all about the decisions, big and small. Your neighbours taunt you – do you raid them, ignore them, or taunt them back? A new form of worship arises. Do you endorse it? Elders are complaining about the noise from a warrior who’s entertaining the clan’s children by skiing. You might suffer a monster attack one day, and be judging a cooking contest the next, and sometimes the best thing is to not get involved at all. You don’t really exist in the world, but are more of an unacknowledged guiding spirit who represents whatever the ring decides to do. You don’t have to roleplay it. You absolutely should, though.

Spoiler

Why? Because characters are more than numbers. Clicking on a noble brings up their advice or opinion on a current situation, or often simply some rambling anecdote or snarky remark about another clan or culture. They’re fallible, nuanced, situational, and sometimes weird. The war chief I mentioned earlier, Derenei, was a talented fighter and leader, but she won my heart when a priestess visited from a distant, unfamiliar clan, offering to bless our horses as a prophetic dream had told her to. The question before my ring of nobles was how to respond to this. Derenei’s response, word for word, was “Ooh! Ooh! Let me sing her a song!”.

The priestess was delighted, and shyly remarked that she couldn’t sing, so she “and her mount” enjoyed the song very much. In gratitude, she entertained us with stories of her homeland, cheering the whole clan up. Sometimes it’s genuinely heartwarming. At other times it’s hilarious. And any time an opportunity for singing came up, Derenei was there. And of course I indulged her every time.

A group of disgruntled people once complained to my ring that one of our number, Tolya, was hassling them with lots of frivolous lawsuits. The ring convened without her to form a response. Some of them wanted to change the law allowing this, but another insisted that restricting the people’s rights because of one person abusing them would upset them. Derenei’s advice? Resolve this crisis by publicly roasting Tolva in song.

I lost it. Imagine showing up at work to dispense wisdom from on high, and then your boss goes full Rebecca Bunch on you. And then a few seasons later, Derenei bit off too much in a fight and some absolute bastards gouged out her eyes.

That’s why Six Ages is special. The same people cleaving people in twain are also the ones who love foraging, or who obsessively blame the Wheel people for everything, or just really love goats. Both individuals and cultures are brimming with character, and you get to direct and feel like an active part of it. It’s brutally violent, it’s tragic, intelligent, and weird. Sure you have your fantasy monsters (although even those are much more interesting and less anthropocentric than just about any other fantasy setting – elves, for one, are freakish walking plants instead of pretentious Aryan dickheads), but much of the weirdness is cultural – the people in this land are as odd and self-contradictory as all human cultures.

One event has three families arguing over who should adopt a magical baby they found in a river. One of the options is “Put the baby back in the river”. It’s absurd, but it makes a sort of sense in this society. All this makes relations with neighbours more complex too – Riders are not the only settlers in the valley.

Much as I loved King Of Dragon Pass, it was too opaque for its own good at times, and its successor has made huge improvements. In particular, the effects of your actions on clan mood and relations are shown as they happen, and diplomacy in particular is both much better presented, and more interesting. Of all things, Alpha Centauri came to mind, as alliances and friendship are much more active and useful – neighbouring clans can like you but still have little respect for you, or hate but also fear you. Both will affect their behaviour – a clan may not like you, but might deliver something you ask for because they’re afraid of you. A friendly clan might gladly trade, but refuse to ally or take you seriously in battle… until someone holds a riding contest and your warriors trounce the whole valley, or your explorers find a powerful secret of a god you both worship, or a third clan takes your opinion seriously enough to replace their chieftain.

Diplomacy in general is a huge highlight. I was very aware of who was who, and invested in specific relationships, to the point where my clan became noted for sending out many diplomats. Battle is more involved, with multiple stages and tactics, and more feedback on how a fight is going. There are even options to parley, and talk or buy off attackers, and several times I was engaged in a fight only for a third clan to show up and join in.

Managing food and population is simpler too – raiding rivals during planting or harvesting season is nigh impossible because your farmers will refuse to risk the food supply, but there’s no need to manage labour or crop ratios. There is, however, soil erosion, which is countereacted by clan-wide “ventures” taking about a year each, in the background, which can also be used to forage, hunt, craft luxuries, or lay groundwork for future plans. This ties in with the main plot, which I’m hesitant to spoil details of. Your ancestors fled encroaching ice that crushed their city, and over time it becomes clear that this area too is not safe. The gods are warring, cutting you off from much of their magic, and the soil is producing less and less food. It’s a much more interesting situation than it sounds like, and RPS contributor Edwin Evans-Thirlwell went into some detail about how well it’s integrated into the setting.

It’s also key to why the Purple Bees fell from glory. As the world changed, neighbours who admired us became targets for our last-resort raids. Trade caravans became more desperate. More foragers and hunters were sent, and often died, costing us talented nobles. As magic dwindled, our forays into the gods’ realm to seek their aid became more dangerous. Cattle were slaughtered for food, making us poorer and even more reliant on raiding, which in turn made us an easier target through injuries and malnutrition. The failure spiral is rough, but we started to turn it around. We struggled on for a few more years, but I made one too many poor decisions. It was all over, and my people were lost to history.

I loved every minute of it.

 

[Binky]

I've beaten it twice. Once on normal, once on harsh. There's just so much more you can do in Six Ages than in Dragon Pass: search for spirits, bargain with spirits for blessings, tame wild horses, forage for food, year-long ventures like train soldiers, perform ceremonies, defend herds. You can spread a new cult (or fight against it). There are three sorts of clans: Riders, Wheels, Rams - each with their own practices and beliefs. You play as a Rider clan. An egalitarian, shamanistic type of horse culture that reminds me a lot of the Scythians. The Orlanthi from KODP are the Rams. They're very hostile to you, so expect them to raid you a lot. Wheels are patriarchal chariot riders with some things in common with the Riders.

On harsh, a goddamn conga line of enemies lined up to raid me: Trolls, Dwarves, Alkothi demon men, Elves, raiders from kingdoms (there are 4 southern Ram kingdoms and one north Wheel one), neighbors. When you raid one clan constantly, they'll petition the gods for help and get a "monster" that causes a lot of damage in subsequent battles and is very hard to kill. I love this. AND they may petition an allied clan for aid - resulting in potentially two enemy clans instead of one. So if you're a bully, you can get royally fucked real quick if you're careless. Losing people hurts much more in this game, since you can't replace them as easily as in KODP.

Rituals (think heroquests from KODP) rely on the skills of your character rather than doing the same choices as in the myth. This gives you much more flexibility. You can pick a "peaceful" ritual where the recommended skills are leadership and bargaining, and just fight everyone instead. Rewards also vary based on your choices.

The map is large and there's a lot to find. Music is great. I prefer the art of KODP, but SA's one ain't too shabby, either. It's a shorter game. In KODP, you beat it in around 50-70 years. You beat this one in about 30 years, which is one of my few gripes. I really wanted more time to explore and putter around.

Fans of KODP won't be disappointed. Highly recommended.

PS. There are two more games coming after Six Ages according to the menu: Lights Going Out and The World Reborn. My cup runneth the fuck over.

Edit. PPS. Another thing I really like is how easily you can lose treasures. In KODP, you could obtain a mountain of treasures and have a ton of blessings from them. In SA, besides buying, finding, getting them from rituals, you can also obtain treasures in raids sometimes - either by winning the battle or a special event during the battle where you snag it from the enemy. Thing is, if someone raids you and you lose, they can steal what you stole obtained fair and square. Beaten by Trolls? Say goodbye to the Rattle of Asskicking. You're never going to see it again.