I've been playing this since release and rather like it.
I had noticed that it was in development for a really long time and was sure it was vaporware. I was wrong. Age of Decadence has a really small development team that was too obsessed with the game not to finish it.
I was a bit put off when I first got the demo (yes, the game has a demo), because it is not about what I thought it was going to be about.
Now that Steam has come out with their new refund policy it may seem a bit superfluous for a game to have a demo, but this one needs it. The game takes a while to grow on you, and you might be well past the Steam refund cut-off before the game clicks in your mind.
Just to be clear, the game has nothing to do with the fall of the Roman Empire. That's what I was looking forward to, and it took me a while to get over that. Age of Decadence is a science fiction game about a living in the aftermath of the collapse of a technologically highly advanced civilization several hundred years after things fall apart in a cataclysmic war. The trappings of Roman civilization are used as the conceptual and visual vocabulary for invoking the higher civilization, and like the world of classical antiquity, the world you run around in in the game is most definitely pre-industrial. But civilization "before the Great War" was considerably more advanced than what we have in the 21rst century. The problem is that so many centuries have passed since "the Great War" that reality has been surrounded in a mythological haze. So you'll run around in a world that has iron age technology, and periodically stumble on something that seems out of place, like a gas mask whose real function has been long forgotten.
I am not really a fan of science fiction, but I know enough to be aware that these themes are not unfamiliar to the genre. Think Fallout, for example. Only in this game, if you were to happen to find a ray gun, your character wouldn't know how to use it because he (or she) would probably think it was a candlestick. Part of the fun is that some items have two descriptions, one for what you think it is, and one for what it really is, and although as a player you may be technologically advanced, you'll have a hard time figuring out what that incense burner really is, even when you have the benefit of a fairly good illustration.
The graphics are old school, probably because the game was something like ten years in development and built on a shoe string. The combat is difficult, unforgiving, and a bit wonky. This is a turn-based RPG, and you only play a single character. The two games that come to mind as points of comparison for combat are the low tech combat parts of Fallout 2, and the non-magic combat parts of Blackguards 1 and 2. AoD combat is more interesting than Fallout 2 combat, and much trickier. Blackguards combat is more polished (but a bit weird in its own right if you don't understand the system), but the Blackguards system is designed for team combat, while AoD is supposed to hold your interest (or at least not lose it) when you manage one character. Keeping single-player combat engaging is easy enough (or at least it should be) in a game where the combat isn't turn-based like Age of Pirates 2 or Mount & Blade. It's more difficult in a turn-based game, but I can't say that I'm thrilled with the mechanic of clicking on different attacks one after another until you run out of action points. Granted that certain levels of weapon skill allow you (or an opponent) to counter-attack automatically in the middle of your turn, I keep wondering how the designers of Banner Saga would have handled it.
But what I rather like about the AoD is that even if you are as close as the game lets you get to being a killing machine, if you pick a fight with four heavily armed thugs they'll probably surround and kill you in short order. What that means is that you spend a lot of time thinking about what kind of situations you get yourself into before they happen, and if you stumble into something potentially ugly (or if something ugly stumbles unexpectedly into you), your first thoughts often revolve around finding an exit. The game tries to make you react to things in a realistic manner rather than just giving you the unrealistic ability to slaughter everything in your path. And that tends to turn the game into an exercise in problem solving.
What sets this game apart is the writing. There are a few things in the writing that I take issue with for stylistic reasons, and there is the infrequent odd glitch here and there, but there is an amazing amount of writing in this game, and what I've seen of it is mostly good, sometimes very good, and occasionally spectacular. There are about eight (not sure if that's the right number) types of character who are different mixes of talker or fighter. The different types of character have different career paths with different ways of experiencing the same events, depending on what skills they've developed. I haven't explored that many of the career types, but apparently each of these careers are fully fleshed out. An interesting mechanic in the game is that invisible skill checks are going on constantly in the background, and the results of those skill checks determine which dialogue options you even know about. So what is going on under the hood is that there is a huge tree of plot and dialogue options, and one single character will only see a fraction of it. I love the early Fallout games, but by comparison with AoD the Fallout games are totally transparent. In AoD, unless you've already played that career path with the exact same stats before, your choices will often be different even when confronted with the same situation. And because access to an option often involves a random element, there's always a chance that a savescum replay will present you with slightly different or fewer options.
There are two general ways of approaching AoD: talker or fighter. Because the game does not really have a rigid class system (even though it invites that terminology) most of your characters run the risk of becoming hybrids. One of the principles behind the game's plot architecture is that no character should be able to accomplish all of the quests. Many of the quests have different kinds of solutions, but fighters won't be very good at (or even likely to know about) the talking solutions, and talkers will end up on the rubbish heap if they make the mistake of trying to fight. So playing a hybrid character is the hardest way to approach the game, because there never seems to be enough experience to build up the skills that you need. And unlike a lot of other games your basic attributes (which are constantly checked in invisible plot and dialogue tests) never change throughout the course of the game. So the first few times out of the gate you should stick to stereotypes until you're sure you know what is going on. Even then, the only person who will ever really find out what is going on is a loremaster, but he'll probably be squashed like a bug the minute he sets foot out of his library (or maybe not, because loremasters tend to be charlatans). One place where the writing of the game really shines is in its death screens. There are a lot of them, and you end up looking forward to them because they tend to be different and many of them are exercises in black humor.
One of my big regrets when I started playing AoD was the travel. I'm a big fan of Realms of Arcania and loved the way a party travelled across a map in Blade of Destiny and Star Trail. In AoD you go to a location simply by clicking on it on the map. If you happen to fail an encounter check you're whisked to a combat map, but usually you just arrive at your destination more or less instantly. When I had just played the demo I was dissapointed that the game handled travel this way. But then I happened to read a thread on the developer's website (Iron Tower) and discovered to my astonishment that he was a big fan of Star Trail. Now that I'm much further into the game than the demo I understand: because the game is something of a puzzle, there's a lot of moving around, especially when you get stuck with the plot. Realms of Arkania style travel would be entirely too painful and cumbersome. Though it might have been nice if there were a few more generic travel cut screens to give a better sense of spacial displacement (the game's writers are probably well past the prolonged burn-out point to consider something like this).
One of the nice features of AoD is that there's a demo. If you can't stand the way the game looks and the way combat feels, you'll find out soon enough. My advice is not to attempt playing the game until you manage to win all the training fights: you can't carry over the skills, but you can't be sure that you understand the system until you've managed to win a couple of two-on-one fights. The demo gives you the first city, and you probably won't understand what's really going on in with the game until you're about halfway through it. At first everything seems quite simple: go here, do that, figure out how to make something happen or make something stop. But every time you do something there are consequences and a few loose ends. And after a while the loose ends start accumulating and interacting in odd ways. This is no mere hack and slasher: there's a lot of political maneuvering in this game, and deciding who to suck up to and who to avoid can mean the difference between success or ending up on the trash heap (and reading another one of those death screens).
The game is currently being actively supported and there is at least one patch in the works. Given the developer's commitment to the project I suspect that they will support the game for several years to come. However, I also suspect that given the game's history of slow development that patches will tend to come out slowly. What I've seen so far has a few minor bugs: less than you would expect from a normal release, and about what you would expect (or maybe even less) for something that's been so long in the hopper. But this isn't a Paradox game. What I've seen that needs fixing isn't terribly disconcerting and certainly not game-breaking, and could be characterized as issues of polish. The game seems perfectly playable now, and I would buy it now and support the developer rather than wait six months to a year for patches to iron out something you'll never see or notice anyway.
Thanks for the write-up. Have had my eye on this one.
Outstanding info, Philippe!!! I'm downloading the demo....now!
Just thought I'd add that despite what I said earlier in my original post, the developers have just put out their second update.
So the rate of patching is (so far) not reflecting the slow rate of development.
This game has received many patches since its release few weeks ago.
Age Of Decadence is 40% off today on Steam.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/230070/
Drops it below the Magic $20 price point.
The sale is over and the game has a slightly bigger footprint (including a few trolls).
Here are the opening screens from the Loremaster storyline. Each profession has a different storyline, and you can only experience the entire chain of events by playing several of them.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F0CNW6Ts.jpg&hash=14add5c49531d67052d26dc9a5fcb1077a1a6c7a)
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I've played a handful of hours. Been interesting but haven't gorged on it yet.
Age of Decadence will not be to everyone's taste. It's almost a cross between a computer RPG and a graphic novel. With lots of possible outcomes (and a thousand ways to die).
Here's the next five screens.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FbGvteAX.jpg&hash=85c841fb7797347cd192d07412129ce9caa5648e)
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Apprentice loremaster Macrobius visits Gracius the trader at the inn.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FGlp2rbC.jpg&hash=809c61a32c99cee3c9ef2c75be7d6c67da872776)
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(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fb4oWD69.jpg&hash=1aed7ceca70372e2f6b2b0ced46188058798143c)
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And now the fun begins.
Each profession has its own storyline that tells different parts of a larger story from different perspectives.
If you play a muscle bound thug, you'll get to meet Gracius the trader when your boss tells you to spend the night being his bodyguard.
If you're very perceptive, you might see some of the objects mentioned in the loremaster's conversation with Gracius, but you won't have a clue as to what they are for (not that the loremaster really knows either).
If you're a feeble brainiac, like Macrobius the loremaster, you can see and understand what is going on around you within the limits of your current knowledge and education, but won't be able to do much about it without getting yourself killed.
One of the things I love about the game is the frequency of encounters with objects that you may be familiar with as a player on the other side of the fourth wall, but which draw a total blank for the character in the game. When that happens you usually get a detailed description of the object from such a peculiar point of view that you probably won't guess what the thing really is until your character gets educated about it later on (at which point the in-game description changes).
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FihIWrLc.jpg&hash=6866be64ab0705324899a84e9f7f36463dc0b169)
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FpUKy6k1.jpg&hash=27618d07c7aa909fc66af7df8f0c57d989d5d4ad)
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FXM2dBLg.jpg&hash=006e5e30d7026466887595ae52c512d979abe0c5)
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FhbaU4DU.jpg&hash=2409f86b315153b6da585f1e1cc55f048be18833)
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2F1fmf2CQ.jpg&hash=6ec325abec232e30f5be3405b01988c2e8879b76)
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(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FqJAsPlJ.jpg&hash=400aa25e4f49320c1d1894e7092dda3f49002441)
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The game is built around absolute skill and attribute checks, rather than probability. So if you try to convince someone of something and you have a persuasion skill level of 2 and you don't succeed, if you were to try the same conversation with a persuasion skill level of 3 you might get a different result. And if you were to try it with a persuasion skill of 9 or 10, you might get a wildly different result. The only problem is that most conversations can't really be repeated, as in real life.
(https://www.grogheads.com/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FG2jbzfN.jpg&hash=72adcab81ebb115be2c32da2942797685425fd55)
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After this Macrobius starts wandering around the town of Teron while trying to decide if he wants to attempt to murder Cassius or not. He visits shops and taverns, talks to merchants and scoundrels, and probably gets himself into more trouble than he knows how to handle.
And that concludes the opening scenes of the loremaster runthrough. I skipped the part where Macrobius rummages around in Feng's study, but other than that these are screens you will probably see if you play a loremaster.
After reading this, you should be able to tell if you want more or want to stay well away from this game. If you still aren't sure, there's a demo on Steam which lets you play the entire first chapter as you would encounter it in the full game.
It does build the suspense nicely. I enjoy some of the more story-based games I've played, but they do seem to be in short supply.
Any idea whether the resolution scenes are as satisfying as the set-up scenes? It seems easier to begin a gripping adventure than to conclude one...
I've played a bit less than half a story line on one type of character, and played a little bit of the story line on several others to get a feel for the difference.
I've also been to all of the other towns in the game, and if I had to actually live in one of them, it wouldn't be Teron, which is a bit of a backwater.
I've also seen several of the mysterious/secret locations that you need to visit to advance the plot and solved their mysteries.
When there are visuals during a dialog sequence what you usually get is a very nice high resolution portrait of whoever is talking in the upper left-hand corner if he's a major character, and a slice of a screenshot (that moves a bit) to the right of the dialog box. The slice shows your character and whoever he is talking with in situ.
The guys who made this game didn't have the time or money to dump into big budget scene illustration, so for the most part they rely on sections of screenshots from where the action is taking place.
In these first screens that I've posted there's not much to look at, because the action is taking place inside of small dingy rooms.
Because the graphics aren't bleeding edge first world, that can make things look a little on the drab side, even when the decor is more elaborate and interesting.
And the scenery can get very interesting, because of the well-studied use that gets made of Greco-Roman art (some of my favorite frescoes from Boscoreale are hanging on the walls in peoples' rooms in the ritzier surroundings).
You end up encountering some pretty wild stuff as it gradually begins to dawn on you what you are really dealing with. I would say that the graphics are really there to provide a framework and prod your imagination, not to do all the work for you.
Don't expect visuals like Fallout 4, because it ain't gonna happen.
But if you liked playing Fallout 1 or 2, you're going to be in for a treat.
As for the dramatic resolution of suspense, I've never been dissapointed. And they do such a good job with the build-up that people don't mind playing different kinds of early characters over and over again, just to see what kind of character build will get you through a particular impasse. The designer of the game often makes himself available on the Steam website to suggest builds that might work a little better for different types of characters.
I've gotten stuck a few times, but never too badly. But when that [censored] comes to life halfway through the second chapter, it feels a bit like that moment in Foucault's Pendulum when the protagonist breaks into his friend's computer by answering 'no' when the computer asks him if he knows the password.
You don't spend all of the game in the dialog screens. You're probably there about a tenth of the time. Most of what you're looking at and wandering around in looks like that very early screenshot where Feng is yelling 'Apprentice, come here'. Combat, when it takes place, is also resolved in that same space rather than in the dialog screens.
I should mention that combat in Age of Decadence is extremely brutal and unforgiving. So unforgiving that they give you a tutorial that you can keep going back to that lets you figure out how to fight multiple opponents with just about any combination of weapon and armor that you're likely to encounter in the game. When you eventually master the tutorial and have dispatched all five opponents, what you'll have really learned is that if you're in a bad part of town and turn a corner and see four thugs loitering around at the end of a dark alley, don't go there, even if you're Jarhead. Unless, of course, you enjoy reading varied and somewhat amusing descriptions of your death scene (it's so easy to get killed in so many different ways that a lot of effort was put into making the descriptions of your demise entertaining).
Did you finish it or are you still playing, Philippe?
I bought the game from GOG during their summer sale but I'm having troubles getting it to run. I can play the tutorial but the game freezes when I start the main campaign unless I run the 32 bit version. From what I've read, this is an issue with some AMD video cards. I've started the refund process through GOG and now I've got to decide whether I want to return it or keep it.
The Age of Decadence is on sale at GOG.com (https://www.gog.com/game/the_age_of_decadence) for 50% off.
I can't really speak to the issues you're having getting the game to run. I play it on Steam, don't have an AMD, and haven't had any problems with it. Vince hangs out pretty regularly on the Steam forum, so you might try asking him about it there.
There are eight different character paths that give different experiences depending on which path you choose.
The key question is whether the experiences are to your taste or not.
On Steam you can figure that out by playing the demo, which is similar to the full game but is restricted to a few of the character classes and you only get the first town.
I've played a bit more than half on one of the character paths (a non-fighter) and have really liked it. I intend to finish that path and play several of the more violent types: the combat is entertaining once you figure out what you can do without getting killed in two seconds flat.
I often go back to the training portion of the game, not to learn how to get one character to kill five opponents (which I know how to do), but to figure out what tactics work with each weapon. There are a lot of them, and it almost seems like you have to play differently with each one.
What I find impressive about the game is how many different branches there are on each path, so if you play the same kind of character slightly differently, the story will start to develop in a different direction. That's why I haven't finished one of the character paths yet, because I'm having trouble deciding exactly how I want the story to develop: I keep trying to figure out a way to see it all, and that probably isn't possible on one playthrough with a single type of character.
Thanks. I ended up taking the refund as I was unable to get the game to run in 64-bit mode.
Great recommendation Philippe. I'll add this to my wishlist. O0
I loved the Map travel feature, if you want to go to the main gate just choose it from the map and your there, same for the other locations, but the good thing is if you want to walk there you can, it take all the boring bits of travelling out.
I loved the combat being so hard, in real life you would not take on 3 thieves with knives alone when you have no weapons etc.. the real life rather than Hero gameplay is what hooked me into buying it, and the combat is turn-based so well worth mastering.
Ive not played lots but what Ive seen I love
They're reportedly in the process of finishing a dungeon crawler RPG with the same combat.
Quote from: Nefaro on June 12, 2016, 09:39:43 PM
They're reportedly in the process of finishing a dungeon crawler RPG with the same combat.
that would be good .
This is 50% off on Steam today.. Worth getting?
Quote from: Tuna on September 16, 2016, 01:52:02 PM
This is 50% off on Steam today.. Worth getting?
I didn't put a ton of time into it. Like the deadly & dastardly feel of it. But I also get the impression that there are few branching paths available and it's not very open.
Strict story branching, guess I would say. You can approach things different ways, depending on your character's skillset, but I'd imagine you'll learn the plot branches after a couple play throughs. Maybe not a big deal if a game takes you 40 or 50 hours to get through (such as KOTOR) but I think this one is estimated to be around 15, maybe 20. So if you enjoy it, you will end up having to run through it anew more often than others.
The engine is also pretty archaic. It looks like hell, but that doesn't bother me so much as long as it works and the UI is decent.
My opinion was split. It's nice to be able to have a more balanced spread of options, along with combat so deadly it makes your decisions matter so much more than usual. But the rest was kinda Meh. I bought it on a decent sale, though, so it wasn't a regret at around 12-15 dollars. Not sure I'd do it again, though, with so many options out there.
Thanks.. the Combat looks tempting, but not a fan of heavy dialog. Looking at YouTube it seems to lean that way. Who knows I may break.
Quote from: Tuna on September 16, 2016, 06:43:05 PM
not a fan of heavy dialog. Looking at YouTube it seems to lean that way.
Very heavy..It's like reading a book... ::)
I dig that when the stories are good. Pillars of Eternity, Skyrim, the old Bard's Tale game, etc...