Originally Posted by wolfen (Post 1061135931)

The no magic aspect kinda ruins it since most fantasy games are based on the fact that you the player are gifted. In AOD you are a mortal man with nothing over the next man.

Originally Posted by wolfen (Post 1061135931)

a man can be gifted.

Originally Posted by Igor (Post 1061135935)

Well maybe no magic but being mentioned the mysterious place called Abyss where you can collect items at the price of your life, I assume those artefacts will contain in them some kind of magical power, also the ring was mentioned that can give the user magical power, maybe magic is obtained and used from artefacts, interesting game but what I don't like so far is the loading time.

Originally Posted by DeepO (Post 1061136043)

I, for one, definitely appreciate this. It´s very refreshing and it goes with the game´s post apoc survival aspect well.

You still have power word: reload :).

I´m pretty sure all that´s mentioned as magical in-game is mentioned as such only because in-game characters take it as such (or it´s just a plain lie as in the case of the ring, iirc), while in fact it´s all just forgotten technology the characters don´t understand.


Anyway, over the weekend I´ve finished the demo with three non-combat chars (loremaster, grifter, thief) and a combat-heavy assassin and I think the game has a lot of potential.
It´s nice to see some of the more common concerns being addressed this fast, seems like pretty much all of my major quibbles made it in some form on the list.

I like the artwork + music, to-the-point writing, setting, general difficulty level and crapload of C&C.
I´ve found combat and character systems to be quite problematic in practice, but conceptually I think they´re both great. I really like the granular reputation in particular. It seems that the update is already set up to deliver a lot of needed polish/rebalancing and I´m looking forward to trying it.

In general, I think the most difficult issue to address is the gameplay for non-combat characters.
Combat characters get to tinker with equipment and employ variety of tactics in combat (positioning, weapon choice, prioritizing targets, nets, etc.) and these aspects alone allow for some creative play. Moreover, they still get to engage in text adventures and can sometimes succeed in skill challenges (via primary attributes, combat skills like critical strike or block, or reputation values like body count or word of honour). Weapon skill synergies allow for concentrating on one defensive and one offensive skill without relegating the other weapon skills to uselessness and that in turn later allows for increasing few chosen non-combat skills too (crafting seems like an obvious first choice to branch out into).
Failed skill challenges often result in combat and while some of the scenarios were fairly difficult, none presented a dead end for my assassin.

On the other hand, for non-combat characters text adventures are pretty much all there is for them to engage in. Since these lack the granularity of combat/equipment and all available solutions are presented right away, there isn´t much space for player´s creativity this side of metagaming.
For combat characters, not having a lot of points in daggers isn´t an issue if they have a lot of points in spears, but non-combat characters can be sometimes royally screwed if they, say, have a lot of points in persuasion, but not in streetwise (hopefully, making joint checks based on sum of required skills and including more "intermediate" results will solve this particular problem, personally I think allowing for non-combat skill synergies á la weapon synergies also wouldn´t be out of place).
Still, without dramatic increase in dialogue choices, even with all those non-combat skills the gameplay might end up feeling a bit too passive. Oblivion´s persuasion system was terrible, but I think with its amount of non-combat skills AoD might actually benefit of some more sensible iteration of such minigame (basically combat using dialogue skills), but implementing something like that probably isn´t viable by now and creatively it would be likely a risky endeavour anyway.
Another solution/improvement would be allowing for more usage of skills directly in the gameworld and the update seems to be adding some of this, which is good.

To sum the above up, my impression is that, as of now, the combat heavy characters provide richer and more diverse experience than the non-combat ones.
Thankfully, the upcoming changes seem to be on the right track to at least partially alleviate this.


As for the update itself, all changes seem to be for the better to me, except for removing the tags, but that´s hard to judge without actually playing the game.
I doubt dialogue can always convey what skills are in use sufficiently (like charisma vs. persuasion, etc.) and I´m not sure if potential lack of feedback will contribute positively to what is probably the biggest issue with the text adventures currently (pushing players to "retroactive" roleplaying, aka hoard skill points, do a quest "recon", reload, profit!!).
Maybe it will mesh well with the other changes.

All in all, already a must buy for me. It´s a unique and fresh take on the genre and developers certainly weren´t exaggerating when using replayability as one of game´s major selling points, since the demo was really a C&C-fest :).