So i just finished AoD

[Deleted Member 22431]

This game just jerks itself off to an unbearable level about how hardcore and cruel it is. After the second or third, extremely creative "subversion" of RPG themes it gets extremely tiring.
The death messages try to be helpful (?) but I don't think you can actually follow their advice.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

There's Invisible Inc. if you don't mind procedurally generated levels.
But I'm not sure what your hesitation about Shadowrun is, they're decent to good games, especially Dragonfall.

I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps I'm not exactly in the mood at the time when I first try it. Also, I distinctly remember how the game felt slow and sluggish. The camera felt sluggish, the characters move rather slowly, maybe I didn't fiddle enough with the game's setting or maybe my rig wasn't good enough to run it smoothly.

They are awful iphone games with no cRPG "meat" in them. Stay away.

 

[toro]

... when Politician makes cocksucking a sad affair.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

... when Politician makes cocksucking a sad affair.

You have a mental problem and you need to be checked, toro. This obsession with me, Goral and Age of Decadence is not healthy. If I could bother to open a psychology textbook I’m certain I would find your condition somewhere. It’s that obvious. Me? I could give a fuck how many people are playing Underrail and who post what on those dead threads. You, on the other hand, just can’t live with the fact that people are actively playing and discussing Age of Decadence to this day, years after the release. I have bad news for you, toro. This is just the beginning. The enthusiasm for this game will only increase as time passes and there is not a single thing you can do about it. You are powerless. This is game over for you, toro. You lose.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Judging by this review our new friend KMJ couldn't figure out the secret combination of skills needed to beat the game. Looks like he played a smooth-talking fighter. I'm guessing he got stuck either at the mountain pass or in Caer-Tor.

Do you do this "research" every time someone leaves a negative comment about the game?

Dude, in the old days people used to pay money to get this kind of help from the Nintendo tip line. “I posted a bad review because the game had too many swears and left a couple of comments on RPG Codex; now the actual developer is trying to help me win. What an asshole!”

Honestly, considering the nature of this forum, people here have been very gentle with you.

I haven't finished AoD yet - but I don't like how the game explicitly encourages you to make a combat-focused character and to join the Guards... whose questline ends each town with a difficult fight... which you can skip by putting a few points in civic skills... thus turning your character into the combat/dialogue hybrid the developers told you was a worse choice. Maybe I'm just too thick for the combat system.

Heavy armor and weapons also look more like a hindrance than an aid even for "warrior" characters.

If you were a regular poster, you would’ve gotten so much shit for this. Here’s the thing: if you want to play as a combat oriented character, you need to engage in combat. You get extra combat skill points every time you win in a fight. This is the closest AoD comes to letting you grind out EXP. If you want to play a hybrid character, the optional fights are even more important. Between the optional fights in Teron and Maadoran, you can make yourself a lot stronger by the time you get to the pass.

In Teron, you should clear out the band of thugs on the west side, follow the girl who picks your pocket back to her base to kill the three scumbags she works for, kill the guys who ambush you for Miltiades and talk to Dellar, the guy outside of the Daratan Palace, to get two side quests that offer a lot of SP. He’ll give you a chance to kill a gang of bandits and take down an Aurelian outpost. Once you get to Maadoran, there are a bunch of fights in the slums, and you can murder your way through the whole arena. This will give you a lot more SP as well as some great gear.

Based on your achievements, I doubt you tried these fights. Given that you only died four times, I suspect you avoided combat like the plague. Which is fine, that’s a totally legitimate way to play Age of Decadence, but it’s a stupid way to play Age of Decadence as a combat character or a hybrid fighter/talker. If you don’t want to fight, play as a merchant or a persuasive praetor, thief or loremaster. You can beat the game using those backgrounds without ever engaging in combat.

It sounds like you found the combat too hard, so you tried to shift to a hybrid playstyle on the fly rather than learning how to win fights or starting over with a new character that has a better build. Of course you’re frustrated—what you’re doing is not fun!

Then there’s this:

Heavy armor and weapons also look more like a hindrance than an aid even for "warrior" characters.

Please, for the love of god, just play the combat tutorial.

Spoiler

There are two kinds of defense in AoD, your dodge/block chance and your damage reduction (like Fallout’s damage threshold). Heavy armor caps your action points and lowers your dodge/block chance, but it raises your DR. Even though you get hit more often, those hits do a lot less damage.

For most of my imperial guard playthrough, I wore lamellar Ordu armor, which has 7 DR when it’s bronze and caps your AP at 9. If you invest in crafting, you can make lightened armor, which raises the AP cap by 1 at lower levels (so you can have 8 dexterity and take no AP penalty with this particular armor). It made me much less effective at blocking attacks, but 7DR meant that I took very little damage from most attacks that got through (throw in a shield and you also apply the shield’s DR on a blocked attack). 7DR means that any attack less than 8 damage will do 0 damage. If I get hit for 10 points, I only take 3 points (and if I successfully block with my cavalry shield, I add 6DR to my defense and take 0 damage).

Because of the way damage reduction and blocking work, many players like to wear heavier armor as blockers and lighter armor as dodgers. If you’re wearing weak armor with 1DR, a successful dodge means you’re untouched, but a successful block just adds your shield’s DR to your armor’s pathetic 1DR. With a cavalry shield that’s merely 7DR total, which means you could still take quite a bit of damage. If you tried to do a block + light armor build, this may be why you had so much trouble with combat.

Damage reduction is why heavy weapons are useful, too. If your opponent has 7DR armor, you may be able to attack frequently with a fast one handed weapon, but you won’t do much damage. A 4AP normal attack from a bronze Hasta does 5-8 damage—worthless against a well armored opponent. A normal attack from a bronze trident costs 6AP, but it does 9-12 damage. So while the Hasta effectively does 0-1 damage per attack against 7DR, a trident is doing 2-5 damage. In damage threshold based systems, a small increase in base damage can lead to a very large increase in actual damage dealt.

There are other ways around armor: you can use swords that have a chance to make the opponent bleed (3 damage per turn) even when your attacks do minimal damage. Bleeding stacks. You could apply poison to your weapons for a similar effect. You could use a hammer, which has the passive effect of removing the enemy’s damage resistance. You could craft a hardened weapon of your choice—any weapon with high hardness also has a chance to reduce the enemy’s DR. You could make a targeted attack at the enemy’s torso, which ignores part of their DR. Or a targeted attack on their head, which uses the helmet’s DR (often lower than the armor’s DR). Or an arterial strike to cause bleeding.

There are lots of ways to kill people in AoD, but it’s hard to take advantage of them if you don’t really know what the numbers mean. If you find yourself investing in persuasion not because you want to be a talker, but because the fights are too hard for your pure combat build, you probably just need to rethink your approach to those fights. Failing that, if your character can’t do what you think your character was designed to do, you may want to bone up on the rules and restart with a better build.

And, again, nets, bolas and bombs can turn even the toughest fights into a cakewalk.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Underrail

Hey now, UR and AoD are different sides to the cRPG :INCLINE: coin, without these two all hope would be long lost.

 

[infidel]

So, I've just completed AoD for the first time. Here's a wall of text for ya. TLDR: It was somewhat disappointing, I expected more.

I've played as an assassin/dodge/dagger. I've killed the first guy and decided to reload combat save to check out how to do it properly and I got stuck. There's a bug where you can't leave the room after that unless you save-load. Well, that was troubling. I'm 15 minutes into the game and it breaks already.

At first I tried to sneak a lot (us sneakfags are spoiled by Thief and DX, expecting sneak to actually matter) and it worked so-so up until Maadoran. But then I was stuck on the Antidas Hoard assassin quest which requires talker skills to get through and since my CHA was 5, I couldn't do it. I had problems with the first two bandits since you remove your armor to try to get into the Thieves guild (at this point I was doing it wrong, my armor penalty got in the way of dodging) and there's no sneak option. So I thought fuck it and just went to Ganezzar and chatted with the quest guy who marks Hellgate on your map. I went to Hellgate and... got into another problem. Inside the Hellgate nothing was working. I could run around but lasers didn't do damage, constructs didn't attack and I couldn't use the elevator. The game was broken.

I reloaded back to Maadoran and started grinding arena. Got stuck on third combatant or so and here's where I've started to read the numbers carefully. I got what my problem was with the armor penalty, dressed better and started going all combat in my SP investments. At dodge 8 and dagger 8 the combat becomes quite comfortable, esp with that blue something manica armor. Even before I got the power armor, it was easy but with 2 batteries slotted I was facerolling everything except 2 or 3 fights I think (Agathoth without weakening, couldn't kill him, optional Ganezzar arena last fight, 4 people, had to use bombs and stuff, and the reward is not worth it - a useless sword and a pittance of SP and the Zamedi demon - got him later on). At this point I started hoarding SP to get to the special events/endings and got some of them. Couldn't get into the Arch (not enough free batteries to power the hand), couldn't finish Saross (can't do it with INT 5), therefore couldn't get the God Ending (more INT checks). Also couldn't get into the Abyss because it becomes auto-locked after you go to Ganezzar (devs said because scripts have problems) and it's INT-gated anyways.

So why am I somewhat disappointed? Inconsistency in the dialogue options. I won't suggest that you should be able to solve every scene with every build but you should at least have to be able to get good benefits from what's natural for your class in class-specific quests, like investing into sneak and critical strike in the assassin storyline. For example, crit is used in the dialogues a lot and you get a feeling that this is the assassin thing - you chat with someone, and then, swoosh, with a well practiced blur of a motion your dagger goes through their carotid with a fountain of blood spraying everywhere. Except you can't use it in Antidas Hoard and Lorenza. Lorenza is esp egregious. You stand in front of her and her 4 bitches and there are no skill options in the dialogue at all to mitigate the following combat, except siding with her, I guess. In the end pretty much any investment in non-combat skills is unreliable reward- and progress-wise.

Heavy reliance on combat. The only thing that is 95% reliable in the game is you combat and defence skills because no matter how any dialogue ends, you will have combat at worst and it's easy most of the time after investing in it (maybe it wasn't for other combat builds, I haven't checked). Weapons-wise I've got the named dagger in Maadoran and that was enough to get me through the rest of the game.

Stat-gating. I get it, you have to be smart and craft/loremeister to become a god but still. Extremely rare temporary stat buff potions would not break anything but would make it possible to see much more in the same playthrough for the persistent and careful player. Later on we also have an accessible plot machine that can give you +1 STR/CON/DEX. Why not add INT there, too?

Now on to the technical side. Camera resets after each dialogue is extremely annoying. Coupled with dialogue teleports, no compass and no marking of your location on the map it's confusing as hell. Tab key does not highlight people you can talk to. The location 3D art is all drab and generic, so you have a hard time distinguishing one building from another and remembering where the hell was that guy that you needed to talk to. Sometimes I missed building entrances and I even missed the Slums entrance in Maadoran because my camera was turned north. Combat-specific acronyms are just bad IMO. All these THCs and ADCs are not very readable unless you have a notebook open or learn them by heart. I think full text would work much better. Some of the combat/item tooltips text is not correctly formatted in 125% font size adding to the confusion. Considering that a 4K monitor is nothing special these days, 125% is both not enough and badly implemented.

If all that made you think I'm a hater, not at all. I loved the atmosphere of a dying low-magic world post-Empire collapse. The music is great, the text and lore is awesome and contrary to OP's year-old opinion I liked how most of the characters are assholes focused on self-preservation and exploitation of the fellow human. It's very proper for the setting, you see, assholes and crazies everywhere, choose who YOU want to be. The combat is interesting and unusual when you're not heavily invested in it. The skill/stat gating dialogue system is kinda meh but does it's job of presenting not-completely-linear scenes fleshing out the game world. And, of course, the amount of handcrafted narrative branches is a delight. I'll be sure to leave a positive review on Steam, the recent reviews are mixed currently.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Heavy reliance on combat. The only thing that is 95% reliable in the game is you combat and defence skills because no matter how any dialogue ends, you will have combat at worst and it's easy most of the time after investing in it (maybe it wasn't for other combat builds, I haven't checked). Weapons-wise I've got the named dagger in Maadoran and that was enough to get me through the rest of the game.

You should try playing as a merchant, praetor or loremaster built as a talker, not a fighter. You’ll have a totally different experience. IIRC even a slightly smarter assassin would’ve had many more options on your run.

 

[infidel]

Heavy reliance on combat. The only thing that is 95% reliable in the game is you combat and defence skills because no matter how any dialogue ends, you will have combat at worst and it's easy most of the time after investing in it (maybe it wasn't for other combat builds, I haven't checked). Weapons-wise I've got the named dagger in Maadoran and that was enough to get me through the rest of the game.

You should try playing as a merchant, praetor or loremaster built as a talker, not a fighter. You’ll have a totally different experience. IIRC even a slightly smarter assassin would’ve had many more options on your run.

Yeah, I got the feeling that good talker skills are p useful. Would be interesting to see how much combat I can avoid with that. I also want to check out thief storyline. You mean smarter as in streetwise etc or having more INT? I can only remember CHA checks from what I've played.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

It was somewhat disappointing, I expected more.

There is more. A lot more.

 

[Ranarama]

It's very telling that the game that hides the information on skill checks (and some are hidden, so watching for failures and reloading is no guarantee, despite that being a method the developers fucking suggest) then requires multiple play throughs or referencing a wiki to fix that design mistake.

The only C&C is hidden behind the RPG.

 

[Üstad]

I think what makes the AOD characters lose part of what would make them interesting is the fact that they are all assholes.

Well it represents a realistic world, especially a post apocalyptic one. Due to sheer amount of fantasy RPGs which fills the world with "let's defeat the evil m'lady" type of NPCs peoples expectance change according to it.

I think this is how RPG devs should write characters like that. I like having have to think about to offers in the game because they sound too good. Just like in real life, atleast that's how my country works

 

[turkishronin]

Well it represents a realistic world

And that's why the theme is banal/shit/boring

 

[Üstad]

Well it represents a realistic world

And that's why the theme is banal/shit/boring

Maybe your life is like that, but regardless majority of the people ready to fuck with you the world is full of opportunities and interesting things to see. So it's just you having a sad life friend.

 

[Drowed]

Well it represents a realistic world, especially a post apocalyptic one. Due to sheer amount of fantasy RPGs which fills the world with "let's defeat the evil m'lady" type of NPCs peoples expectance change according to it.

I don't disagree, but reality isn't always interesting. An extremely realistic survival game sounds like something extremely boring - imagine having to wait 8 hours to continue playing when your char go to sleep, or realistically having to deal with your own feces? I mean, I'm not saying there's no one who would be interested in these things, I get chills when I see reviews of people who have played Train Simulator 2019 for over 5,000 hours. To each his own. But my point is that realism is not necessarily a quality in itself.

But I've already expanded this point by answering VD himself previously in this topic:

(...) It's less the motive that leads these characters to act as they do (idealism, security, values, state of society) and more simply the fact that's what they do. It's not the lack of justification but what they end up doing in the end. We can create believable stories where most characters have any other trait - let's say, for example, they are all insane and depressing. You can justify in a perfectly rational and reasonable way why each of them is like that... But it doesn't change that, in the end, most of them are like that. This isn't a criticism of the coherence of the characters, or of their ideology, or of their consistency in the story or anything of the sort. It's a critique of the author's choice to create a narrative where most characters share that same trait, for whatever reason.

You, as an author, could have created events in the story where you could develop a great and profound friendship (among other things) with one, or even several characters, throughout the game (just as you might have chosen to make AOD a game with a party). Or any other kind of interaction between the characters beyond a "pawn to be used." But you've decided not to do this, and surely you have your reasons and I am not questioning them. It's your vision. I'm just saying that as a viewer/player, this has created an effect on the narrative that makes most of the characters feel the same, even though they have their particular differences. I found the game's setting extremely interesting and the story is well developed, without a doubt. But I can barely remember any of the characters beyond their name and a vague idea of what they talked to me. They weren't badly written in any way, they just have not been really remarkable, I guess.

 

[Maggot]

AoD's setting is one of its greatest strengths and the Black Company quote at the start sets it up perfectly. We need more AoDs and Gothics and less Skyrims where the game constantly fellates you.

 

[turkishronin]

And Black Company is awful...

 

[Maggot]

And you're a faggot...

 

[turkishronin]

And you're a faggot...

No you

 

[Üstad]

Spoiler

Well it represents a realistic world, especially a post apocalyptic one. Due to sheer amount of fantasy RPGs which fills the world with "let's defeat the evil m'lady" type of NPCs peoples expectance change according to it.

I don't disagree, but reality isn't always interesting. An extremely realistic survival game sounds like something extremely boring - imagine having to wait 8 hours to continue playing when your char go to sleep, or realistically having to deal with your own feces? I mean, I'm not saying there's no one who would be interested in these things, I get chills when I see reviews of people who have played Train Simulator 2019 for over 5,000 hours. To each his own. But my point is that realism is not necessarily a quality in itself.

But I've already expanded this point by answering VD himself previously in this topic:

(...) It's less the motive that leads these characters to act as they do (idealism, security, values, state of society) and more simply the fact that's what they do. It's not the lack of justification but what they end up doing in the end. We can create believable stories where most characters have any other trait - let's say, for example, they are all insane and depressing. You can justify in a perfectly rational and reasonable way why each of them is like that... But it doesn't change that, in the end, most of them are like that. This isn't a criticism of the coherence of the characters, or of their ideology, or of their consistency in the story or anything of the sort. It's a critique of the author's choice to create a narrative where most characters share that same trait, for whatever reason.

You, as an author, could have created events in the story where you could develop a great and profound friendship (among other things) with one, or even several characters, throughout the game (just as you might have chosen to make AOD a game with a party). Or any other kind of interaction between the characters beyond a "pawn to be used." But you've decided not to do this, and surely you have your reasons and I am not questioning them. It's your vision. I'm just saying that as a viewer/player, this has created an effect on the narrative that makes most of the characters feel the same, even though they have their particular differences. I found the game's setting extremely interesting and the story is well developed, without a doubt. But I can barely remember any of the characters beyond their name and a vague idea of what they talked to me. They weren't badly written in any way, they just have not been really remarkable, I guess.

But this is an RPG not a survival game. If it was a survival game it had to balance things out to be playable but it's not nor such mechanics has been implemented.

It's less the motive that leads these characters to act as they do (idealism, security, values, state of society) and more simply the fact that's what they do.

So it's just like in real life? People in real life don't say "the evil in here must be wiped out" they use their wits and power and try their best to make the realm more secure altough majority in a corrupted way and some are more balanced. The characters are in AoD are characters with actual personalities, they are not simplistic represantations of D&D personality alignments. This is the thing that stands out in the game, finally we have a realistic game (no having hentai gods doesnt cancel out what I say) instead of romantic one. Think it like Pushkin's romantic novels is being replaced (not exactly correct wording I know) by Tolstoy's realistic novels. Despite the majority doesn't care about the change that Vince has brought I do care about it.

As for whole companionship thing I remember in somewhere Vince said he should have implemented companions that travel with us. I also recognize this as one of the flaws of the game. Both by gameplay and storywise. Assuming you don't mean seek "world is fucked but lets be buddy buddy with each other" if this is the case, it would destroy the ambience of the world in the game.

But I can barely remember any of the characters beyond their name

I'm really assuming the guy has skipped the dialog just because there wasn't zoomer epic witty xD jokes in the game. I think the dialog could be more extensive, but there are people asides from bethetards don't want the game filled with script blocks, surely he could place more info about NPCs in the game, but again people wouldnt be bothered to read it. I can say AoD is good enough to push me towards to cRPG genre. Normal casual RPGs don't have fleshed out characters, certainly they are worse when it comes to this aspect despite they have the voiceover advantage.

 

[turkishronin]

Think it like Pushkin's romantic novels is being replaced (not exactly correct wording I know) by Tolstoy's realistic novels

That's what I was saying.
Pushkin is superior to the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Tell me how different Militades is from Saemon Havarian in "generic D&D writing" of BG2

 

[Tigranes]

A RPG full of assholes who want to screw me overv so much that it feels like they have a communist daily quota of people to screw - maybe it's a bit over the top, but I can live with it & certainly supports great gameplay.

What we usually get, is an RPG full of 'I am nice because I wear blue clothes and work for Nice Guys' and 'I am EVIL because I wear blood black and work for bad guys' and 'Oh wait I'm gonna change clothes and become EVIL'.

 

[the mole]

Subjective?

Well, yeah. Maybe as subjective as a debate between "I prefer romance" and "I prefer science fiction," I guess. It's a target-audience issue. You've created a game for a specific audience, and just as you seem to have a particular liking for documentaries and/or historical books, it's not unlikely that many of the people who end up playing your game will share that taste. Your results will naturally be filtered by the kind of person who have an interest in playing the game more than 20 minutes and still decide to say something about it in the end.

This type of question may sound like a minority response by the kind of audience you end up attracting to the game - it's the minority of your current audience but not the possible audience. Case in point, there are scientific studies that show a greater preference of the general public for stories that involve romances. (It seems that Bioware really read the same research years ago.) I'm not saying that you should put romances in your game, dear god no, and neither that you need to broaden your audience. I'm just saying that your view of the audience is tapered by the very product you made. We call this niche-funnel effect - at least in my language, I don't know if there are any researches with the same term in english.

But here I am the one who ended up talking about an irrelevant point.

The point is: addressing a little of other aspects of human nature is, by definition, what gives the characters depth. Human beings are not shallow precisely because their interests and their lives go beyond a single area. We aren't just our work, or our hobbies, or our relationships. We are all these things, and I think you approach these issues even if superficially it can add a lot to your narrative. The point isn't to fill the game (or book) with irrelevant details about the characters with several personal mini-quests where you collect objects to give to each one to fill an arbitrary bar of friendship/love. This is a scarecrow. The point is that it's not by chance that most books considered as the best works ever written have explored different aspects of human nature.

But hey, like I said, you do you. You certainly already have a very specific vision of how to write your stories and attracted an audience that is interested in them. The truth is that you have already decided what you will do regardless of any external comment, but since we are on a topic talking about AOD, it's interesting to talk about the construction of the narrative of the game and why it ends up being different from others.

Go play the sims dorkicus