Hello, is this the place where dirty casuals (playthroughs<7) shit on AoD? Ok, I'm gonna write down some of that before I forget everything. Gonna be a tl;dr post, I might have some fringe opinions that aren't among the common criticisms.
I absolutely loved the demo I tried. It showed a very solid and promising foundation for an RPG with no modern game design hindrances. But in hindsight, combat in the full game was a bit disappointing because the combat system wasn't developed much further. The gameplay part of your character's development was lacking, since you essentially had the same set of active combat abilities from start to end. Stat growth and different enemies changed how they're best used, yes, but being limited to the same moveset through the entire game does not keep combat interesting for long, even if said movesets are well designed as was the case in AoD. (I didn't fully try all of them, though.) Then there were also combat consumables, expanding your options from the basic attack sets. But, well, it was quite clean-cut and obvious what to use and when, so they didn't actually add that many options. And with the numbers of fights and available consumables, a knowledgeable player could pre-plan consumable use for his next playthrough, probably down to every single instance of it - some might like that sort of thing, but to me it is indicative of too tightly controlled item economy and/or lack of content.
I'm sure most codex grognards, myself included, enjoyed how tightly balanced the combat system was. Good difficulty with small tolerances due to carefully controlled number of skillpoints & items and equally tightly defined combat encounters. All this shows hard work and dedication, which is respectable, but in hindsight I wouldn't say any of those are intrinsic values of good singleplayer CRPG combat design. Better suited for competitive multiplayer games. And by that I don't mean AoD's combat system is good for multiplayer, but its focus on balancing befits competitive MP. (Back in the heyday of MMORPGs I would have loved to play one with PvP balanced by AoD's team - balance in those games was always shit in the areas that AoD handles extremely well.) Maybe it's just me, but I imagine that developing the combat system further to make the mechanical side of character development more satisfying that slightly tweaking hit chances would've resulted in a better game, even if that was done at the cost of less difficulty/balance polishing. I also don't remember the AI ever doing anything that left a positive impression (no negatives either), but that was more or less expected with the combat actions available and the focus on man to man melee fights.
Skimming through this thread I noticed a shitposter who mentioned control-freak devs. I'm gonna say he's got a good and often overlooked point. I can't give concrete examples of what makes it so, but one major difference between AoD and more enjoyable RPGs is player freedom. Everything from story to combat felt very tightly choreographed and calculated with very little - if any - room for emergent gameplay. One way to put it to words would be this:
There are many choices, but none of them are yours. They're Iron Tower's choices. Don't remember where I heard that, but it wasn't codex. In a weird juxtaposition AoD had the most branching story ever, yet it felt very.. uhm, railroaded? Linear? Welp, that doesn't adequately convey what I mean, but I hope the idea came through somewhat intact.
Can't have a post like this without a paragraph on the infamous dialog teleports, so: The game world lacked cohesion. Dialog teleports were but a small part of the problem. What's realistically doable is always limited, but there has to be
something between distant major locations other than a click on a map/dialog node. Something to convey (preferably through gameplay, let players experience it through their actions) that the world is more than a handful of disconnected areas. On the world scale of AoD, an overworld map a la Fallout is probably the best way to implement this without creating ridiculous amount of (often superfluous) content. Even if exploration wasn't a design focus, there are limits to how completely it can be ignored in an RPG. Out of all things, I'm going to point at the lack of world cohesion as the main reason why people disparagingly call AoD a CYOA book. There's some good worldbuilding, but the physical world space is just isn't there.
All in all AoD didn't turn out to be a personal favorite. It's good for what it is. Played it a few times when it came out before interest declined, a couple runs short of the magical meme seven times. I got into AoD for its no-dumbed-down-crap attitude and promising combat, but the most enjoyable part of the game ended up being discovering the underlying mysteries of its very well done setting and seeing some of the story events unfold from many different perspectives. The crazy amount of branching was unique, but AoD is also a good example of why no other game ever did that. Everything else suffers if too much development focus is put into it.
Lastly, few notes on the less important stuff. Assets: 2D art was absolutely gorgeous (potraits, icons, UI), 3D ranged from serviceable to shit (both meshes and textures, mostly meshes), animations were good, music was fitting. Don't remember a single thing about sounds, so they were unintrusive and unremarkable. Crafting was the bad kind of crafting: tacked-on addition instead of a well developed core system. However, that didn't bother me since the game was already extremely barebones outside combat and dialog. Ditching the crafting systems wouldn't have been a bad thing in the sense that everything they did could've been integrated into the game through other means, but that would have diminished character development choices and made the gameplay even more barebones.
In conclusion, it was like a combat system was perfected in excel and tons of dialog writing/scripting was done, but somehow the game underneath them was forgotten. Forgive the vagueness of this retrospect, it's been years since I touched the game.
My professional background is sales & management. The former gave me a good perspective on realistic conversations as essentially I talked for a living, the latter gave me a first-hand experience with corporate politics, scheming, plotting, backstabbing, and power grabs. All the fun of decadence.
Ha, that certainly explains why the world of AoD is full of unlikable assholes. Hopefully that contemporary corporate cunt culture is better thematical fit for a colony ship.
