The Age of Decadence (now that it has been released)

[Philippe]

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.

[Jarhead0331]

Thanks for the write-up. Have had my eye on this one.

[Steelgrave]

Outstanding info, Philippe!!! I'm downloading the demo....now!

[Philippe]

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.

[Tpek]

This game has received many patches since its release few weeks ago.

[Nefaro]

Age Of Decadence is 40% off today on Steam.


http://store.steampowered.com/app/230070/


Drops it below the Magic $20 price point.

[Philippe]

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.

[Nefaro]

I've played a handful of hours.  Been interesting but haven't gorged on it yet.

[Philippe]

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.

[Philippe]

Apprentice loremaster Macrobius visits Gracius the trader at the inn.

[Philippe]

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).

[Philippe]

[Philippe]

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. 

[Philippe]

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.

[FarAway Sooner]

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...