Age of Decadence - Demo Preview @ RPG Codex

The Codex has impressions of the upcoming Age of Decadence demo, with thoughts from three different authors:

In fact, I finished the whole playthrough as a merchant without a single fight. The game felt almost like a choose-your-own-adventure with a great number of various choices, lots of stat-checks, and plenty of content available for specific characters only. I loved every minute of it. As I said, much action is conducted via dialogue screens. And you cannot save during the dialogue. This is a wise choice because it prevents you from almost automatically reloading after a failed stat-check. That check might have happened after a long sequence of dialogue screens, perhaps also filled with stat-checks, which you'd have to repeat. The game's big advantage, which had to be difficult to achieve, is that you really prefer not to reload your game after something goes wrong (excluding being killed in combat, of course). At least in my case, I wanted to stick with the consequences the game provided for me – they were fair and reasonable. And hey, some of my other characters would succeed in that particular task, right? This brings me to the main point: replayability. Judging from the demo, Age of Decadence will be immensely replayable. And at three levels, at that: after finishing the demo as a merchant I immediately wanted to play the game as a member of a different faction, to get a different take on the situation, but also to play as a merchant with a different skill and stat distribution, to check out options unavailable for my original build; but also, which in other games would be ridiculous, to play exactly the same build and simply make different choices! My merchant ended up being a sort of a power behind the throne, facilitating a shift in the power distribution in the region, purely by use of persuasion, disguise, and, of course, money, insulting more than one person on his way but gaining powerful friends, too. But there were both diplomatic and combat-oriented options I steered clear of, leaving them for future playthroughs.

Thanks, Elwro and Lemonhead!
More information.

I was starting to lose interest in AoD due to how long it's taking, but I'm looking forward to trying the demo after reading that.

It should come later this month, I hope it will be at least 10 hours of playtime.

Playtimes really vary wildly (though no playthrough will take 10 hours) depending on what paths you take through the demo. Though if you replay the game and try out different paths and options, it should last you quite a while. Especially for a demo.

that's exaclty what I was wondering, how long did it took him to finish the demo
I think that has much to do with the players keeping interest and wanting another go.

Sounds awesome! I loved text based adventures back in the day, and combining that with a turn based RPG is definitely interesting.

Daniel.

Looking great to me, cannot wait to try the demo. We need more games like these, imo!!


-Carn

Sounds pretty good, though the game looks extremely…. Brown from those shots.

Originally Posted by DArtagnan
Sounds pretty good, though the game looks extremely…. Brown from those shots.

That complaint was made in the codex wasteland and the response had something to do with temporary interface graphics being replaced soon.

Doesn't matter much how long the demo playthough takes considering each character build has such an effect. Demo play time should be counted as the sum of all the builds to be fair, and that is surely a whole lot!

To clarify a bit, the demo ends when you leave Teron for what would be the next "big" location in the full game. In the demo, you get ending slides detailing what you've done in Teron and what effects it had.
In the full game, quests that you have not done while in Teron will auto-resolve once you move on to this next big location, I guess to simulate that the wheels of fate are turning even when the player is not around to solve everything.

This is definitely a game that is made for the people who love developing a character concept and sticking with that, even if it turns out not to be the "optimal way" (whatever that is) to play the game. Then start up another wildly different character and see what happens this time around. Experimenting with characters is a lot of fun and where a lot of the meat of this game is (judging from the demo anyways).

This all sounds very encouraging. Think I read there were four different skills relating.to dialogue. That is awesome. Sign me up. Day 1 purchase. If i could pre-order, I would.

This sounds great so far. I love a game that will give me many options to accomplish a task, with differing consequences for the choices I make. It also may be a game where I get stuck on the character creation, because I find I'm as addicted to that aspect as I am the actual gameplay. This happened with games like Arcanum where I would make a multitude of characters just to see how they would fare. Anyway, I'm pretty excited about this one and it appears that the time spent on development has been worthwhile.

Looks great, but by the time it comes out, I'll (hopefully) have started working and won't have anytime left for gaming as well as other RL stuff, such as family, friends,…

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
This all sounds very encouraging. Think I read there were four different skills relating.to dialogue. That is awesome. Sign me up. Day 1 purchase. If i could pre-order, I would.

Just wait a few weeks

I just hope the full game won't take 5 more years to be released.

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
This all sounds very encouraging. Think I read there were four different skills relating.to dialogue. That is awesome. Sign me up. Day 1 purchase. If i could pre-order, I would.

My favorite skill checks in dialogues are the ones using Critical Hit. Allows you to insta-kill certain people in the text-adventures/dialogues.

The February update is out: The demo will go 'public beta' in two weeks. Check out the nice new main interface.

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum…ic,2453.0.html

Can't wait to play. Is it going to be a limited public beta, or will anyone be able to get it?

Pretty sure it'll be completely open.

Originally Posted by Starwars
Pretty sure it'll be completely open.

That is my understanding as well. Basically they release the demo, but they will keep fixing bugs people encounter.