About Age of Decadence: it's a good game that experimented into a certain direction and succeeded at doing what it wanted to do. But is this the direction RPGs should involve into? Or, on a more subjective level, is it the direction I would like RPGs to develop into, or the direction I would have developed the Fallout/Arcanum style of RPG into if I had been in VD's place? No, it's not. Which just goes to show that there are so many different potential avenues for the classic RPG to develop into, and AoD is just one of those avenues.
It’s somewhat reductive to fit Age of Decadence in the box a spiritual sucessor to FO, don’t you thinK? The game obviously drink in too many pots (the FOs, Arcanum, Darklands, RoA2, PS:T, Prelude to Darkness) to have a personality of its own. You need to ask Vince how many games influence him in regard to combat system. I would bet that he would probably mention JA2 and all the well-known strategy games.
In its essence, it can be put into the same tradition as Fallout 1, 2, and Arcanum. Sure, it's inspired by more than just those games, and has plenty of ideas of its own, but even its interface is copied from Fallout and Vince has always held up Fallout as his #1 inspiration, so it's fair to say the game is a Fallout/Arcanum style RPG since that is the line of tradition that AoD follows the most. I didn't claim it was a spiritual successor to Fallout, in fact all I did was call it a "FO/Arcanum style of RPG", which definitely applies to it. I have a nice little design document for my own idea of a "perfect RPG", and while it incorporates several ideas from different sources of inspiration, including Morrowind, Gothic, Prelude to Darkness, and P&P systems such as GURPS, I would still say that Arcanum is my #1 source of inspiration and the one RPG that I like the most. For Vince and AoD, this game would be Fallout.
While AoD serves up a massive amount of choice and consequence for the player, it also feels like it's railroading the player to a certain extent, and focuses more on providing the player with a couple of distinct paths than it focuses on providing the player with an open playing field filled with role playing opportunities.
Because your choices are meaningful and impact the game world, which on its turn reacts to your decisions with further action, whereas in most cRPGs the gameworld is a mere punching bag that stands passive while the might player in shinning armour walks all over it. You have been spoiled by ego-pandering focused gameplay for decades and now you face meaningful choices and the only thing you can see is a noose around your neck. What you call good gameplay I call the ability to do make non-narrative choices that have no meaningful impact the gameworld, is the freedom to press switches to see doors opening.
What exactly do you define as non-narrative choices without meaningful impact? Would you count the decision of how to tackle a level in Deus Ex as such? Because Deus Ex offers you a couple of levels where the way you approach it doesn't really change the story, but provides a different gameplay experience and a different form of challenge. Like the choice between stealthy approach and going Rambo, or the choice between climbing up a ladder and infiltrating the house from the rooftop, or unlocking a backdoor that leads to the basement. These are meaningful gameplay choices, even though they have no effect on the narrative whatsoever,
and, just like the dialog skillchecks in AoD, they cater to different types of characters. A char with lockpicking and sneaking as the most developed skills will go for a stealthy approach, a char with weapon skills will go for combat, etc etc. It's meaningful because it has a direct impact on how you play the game.
In this way, as inspired as it may be by Fallout and Arcanum, it deviates rather significantly from those two games. In Fallout, you're released upon the world and can go anywhere and do anything right from the start. Go to Junktown, help either Gizmo or Kilian, or neither of them, just ignore it, don't even have to visit the place. Same with every other place. The game presents you with locations and quest opportunities, and some quests are mutually exclusive, and some offer choices that affiliate you with a certain faction, but you can also just ignore everything and head straight for the water chip and then the Master if you have previous game-knowledge and know where to find them. Similar with Arcanum: while this one has a more linear main quest with more steps in-betweeen (go to BMC, go to Wheel Clan, go to Qintarra, find Min Gorad etc etc), every location in the game offers you several quests, sometimes with conflicting sides to choose, and you can do whatever you want. You're never railroaded into anything and often get the opportunity to double-cross your employers, too.
In Age of Decadence you can also jump entire segments to reach certain locations earlier if you know how to do it, but strangely enough this stuff is promptly ignored as railroading or whatever. The double standards always pop up in this discussions. It is perfectly okay to praise text-adventure options in Darklands, but in Age of Decadence the same thing is railroading or CYOA. The hypocrisy is appalling.
The fact about AoD is that most choices will lock you into a certain path, which some people perceive as being railroaded. The way AoD loves to teleport the player straight to a location rather than letting him walk there himself also contributes to that feeling. While Vince had a good reason for the frequent teleports - he wanted to cut out the boring parts where you walk from A to B - they make the game feel more like a CYOA to many people, because they often take away some amount of player agency. There's often no option to say "No, fuck you, I'm not going to follow you out of town now I'm going to stay a while and dick around a bit more", instead you get told "Well after your actions here the guards are out to get you so you better leave the city ASAP" and are teleported out, with no say in the matter. Even a choice like saying "So? Let the guards come, I'm not afraid." and then throwing an unwinnable fight at the player would make the player feel more in control. It's not a double standard, because no other RPG teleports you out of a location as frequently as AoD does.
This is great quest design with choice and consequence that doesn't force the player into a railroad. … AoD's structure is more of a tree-like structure with several branches, which all have branches of their own. So you have the legion branch, the assassins branch, the merchants branch, the thieves branch. Within each of these you have at least two branches, too. But once you're within a branch, you can't hop over to another. Like, if you joined the assassins you can't betray them for the thieves and join them instead later on. You can only make choices that are applicaple within the assassin branch: there's no "I'll betray my faction to the leader of another faction" kind of thing.
You can betray every faction in the game. You can literally walk from the building of your faction and make propositions to other sides. If you betray any faction in the game, you have more quests, and problems down the road and different events in other areas of the map. You can fail inside a quest and this will lead to a different path. If you don’t know that, you didn’t do your homework, you ae attacking a straw man. But the reason for your sloppy homework is that all this talk about quest design is a smoke screen for another thing, namely, the fact that your options are gated by stats and skills. That’s what eating you. If in all those games I could kill things for the lulz and see different outcomes, how come I can’t do the same thing in Age of Decadence? The answer is simple: you can’t because the game takes character building seriously. You just don’t get to choose to kill whoever you want when you feel like it, even if this look cool and feel awesum! That’s what you really wanted to say, but can’t say openly because it will make you sound like a idiot. That’s usual in this discussions. You want to criticise the game for its design logic, but can’t do that without looking like a idiot so you resort to euphemisms and red herrings (railroald design, etc.) that express your feelings but can’t really address what’s eating you. It doesn’t seem like you provide any new criticism besides the ones that have been repeated over and over in other threads in the past years, issues that have been discussed to death.
You're quite wrong there. I freely admit that I occasionally use Cheat Engine to raise my stats and skills, even wrote so in my original post at some point, so the gating never bothered me. Heck, even in my first playthrough without cheating up my stats, it didn't bother me. So your assessment that "your options are gated by stats and skills, that's what's eating you" is completely and entirely wrong, since I have absolutely zero issue with that and even approve of that kind of thing. It's an RPG, after all, where your character build should determine what you're able to do and what you aren't able to do. And I've played it often enough to know there are plenty of different paths within each branch of the story. First time I played was as an assassin, I was able to either stay loyal to that assassin leader chick or betray her at some point, and that was a cool decision. I made a savegame and tried both options. And the fact that the game offers you so many paths is something I like about it, you keep claiming I'm bashing AoD but I'm not. I'm merely criticizing its relatively rigid structure. Yes, you can betray every faction in the game - but you can't do so freely at every point in the game. You can't just walk up to the leader of the Commercium and say "Hey boyo, I'm part of the assassin guild but I decided I don't like these cunts anymore, you wanna have me instead?" Now, realistically, he'd tell you to fuck off because he doesn't just hire any random defector that comes onto him, but the thing is that you can't even make the offer. At least in my experience, one you make a faction choice you only get chances of betraying your faction
during the actual faction quests and can't just walk up to some other dude and tell him you'd rather work for his group.
The overall result is that the game's structure feels rather rigid, more like a CYOA that leads you from one choice event to the next, instead of a more traditional RPG where you explore on your own and occasionally get to make a choice when you encounter one. Again, since you seem to think I'm bashing the game, I enjoyed AoD and played through it more than once, and will play through it again because I haven't seen every path the game has to offer yet, but I still feel like the game's structure is relatively rigid and feels CYAO-like in many aspects. It opens up in its later half, around when you leave Ganezzar and get to explore several ruins on your own, but up to that point I often got the feeling of being forced into certain roads by the game even though realistically, I could have chosen differently.
Lockpicking, for example, is only used in the thieves questline. When I played an assassin, I was surprised how the thieving skills were essentially useless and the only real viable character builds were critical strike guy and combat guy. Same with the merchant, you essentially have to play a talky guy and stealth skills, for example, are useless. Even though it would have been cool to approach a merchant's guild quest with stealth by breaking into the mansion of a guild rival, stealing some blackmail material, then using that against him instead of your speech skills.
We are discussed this topic in other threads. I guess you weren’t following it. There are two reasons for that. First, the gameworld can only be compelling if some skills are more useful than others. That restriction is imposed for obvious reasons. You can’t expect a lock in every quest or piece of the map to justify your investment in the skill. The alternative to that is underwhelming, e.g., something like W2, with toasters, alarms, mines and all kinds of nonsensical shit spread in the map to justify each player investment. What is worse, because you can’t invest in every skill, you will be punished constantly to compensate the fact that the developer is trying to justify the existence of a certain skill. You didn’t invest in explosives? Well, good luck with that. Now you will have your ass blown up because of that, because there are mines everywhere. Second, every single cRPG out there have some skills that are less useful than others. This happens not only because of the restrictions imposed by the gameworld, but also because of the lac of game development resources. It’s complete hypocrisy to single out Age of Decadence to make this kind of criticism. Third, lockpick has plenty uses of key points in the game that have nothing to do with each faction. In fact, to analyse the skills as if their existence was justified and need to be completed used in every single faction is an absurd standard that ignores their use in other parts of the gameworld and in quests that are not faction related. Bur hey, since it’s Vault Dweller game let’s criticise him for not doing the impossible in the most uncharitable manner and pretend the other games were perfect. It’s “I can’t believe that my neighbour won the Nobel Prize” syndrome. People criticise this game too much.
I'm not suggesting to fill every level of the game with junk that you can use your skills on just to make the skills "useful". Having a dozen locked chests and damaged toasters on each map just so you can use your skills on insignificant objects isn't a meaningful application of character skills, anyway. And putting a minefield into a mandatory main quest area just to make the disarm skill useful is shit design, unless you're putting the mines in front of an optional area that contains side quest material, because that would be the same kind of gating that AoD uses: content you can only access with a certain character build. Nothing wrong with that. But that's not what I was talking about here, that's actually very far away from what I was talking about.
No, what I'm talking about is multiple approaches and opportunities for using skills that make sense within the context of a quest. To me, the ideal quest is one where the designer has put some thought into designing an area - be it a dungeon or something similar - and the goals the player might want to reach in that area in a way that allows for every possible realistic approach - within the constraints of the game's mechanics - to be attempted either successfully or unsuccessfully.
I know why I shouldn't do this, but I'm just going to take a quest I'm currently designing for Realms Beyond to illustrate what I mean. We're not revealing quests yet and it's not even the final, fully worked-out version yet, but it serves to illustrate what I strive for in quest design. A pissed off customer who got screwed over by a crooked merchant who sells fake jewelry that's actually just cheap glass, and fake magic items that don't do anything, hires you to either teach the crooked merchant a lesson or dig up some dirt on him so the authorities are compelled to jail him despite the bribes he regularly pays them. The goal of this quest is rather open: find blackmail material and/or scare the merchant into ceasing his crooked ways.
Of course, a quest like this should offer multiple approaches, some of which have a higher chance for success than others. You can just approach the merchant's front door in broad daylight, but then the guards will tell you to fuck off. If you try to push through anyway, they'll try to stop you and call for the city guards, who will promptly try to subdue and arrest you. Because, you know, trying to break into a man's home is illegal. Brute force approach won't work, at least not this way. You can also wait till nightfall, then try to get in through a window or the back door used by servants. Which one do you take? Depends on whether you're good at climbing or at lockpicking. So you made it in, what now? Best try to stay stealthy, if the guards see you it'll come to a fight and you'll either have to run away or leave a trail of bodies, which isn't the best way to solve this quest (remember, you wanna scare the guy, not make it look like a burglary). Therefore this quest naturally favors stealthy characters. Now, there's several rooms to explore and several things to do. You might go into his bedroom and just drop a letter on his nightstand, along with a dagger, to offer a warning: stop being a crook or face the consequences. We're watching you. You might search his office and if you have a high perception, you might find a secret compartment containing files that connect him to the criminal underworld. Nice blackmail material! Or you might find his wife wandering about, and decide to beat her up or even kill her if you're a combatfag who wants to solve everything with violence.
Now, that's skillchecks for climbing, lockpicking, stealth, search, and combat all in one quest, and you don't need to be good at all of these - it's perfectly fine if you're only good at stealth (sneak in, put the letter on the nightstand to intimidate the guy, sneak out) or if you're only good at combat (climb in through the window, kill the guard, then punch the merchant's wife to unconsciousness to leave him a message). But not all of these solutions are equally good. The first choice, whether to climb in through a window or pick the lock on the back door, merely determines where in the house you start, which is a minor but potentially significant gameplay choice gated behind one simple skillcheck (if you're good at lockpicking but suck at climbing, the window approach is closed to you) since one path might be more heavily guarded than the other, one might be closer to the rooms that are of interest than the other, etc. Then, the way you solve the quest is also of significance. Got detected by the guard and beat him into unconsciousness? He has a rough description of your face, and he can tell his boss that someone broke in. Got detected by the guard and killed him? Leaving a trail of bodies is unelegant, isn't it? Your employer will pay you a higher reward if you aren't detected by the guard at all and leave him alive, because you did a clean job. So your actions have a direct consequence of the quest resolution. When you meet the merchant's wife, you can tie her up, then beat her up or even kill her - or interrogate her in an attempt to find out where he might hide his shit. She might drop a hint that you should look in his office if you want anything, if you're good enough at intimidating. Nice, another skillcheck! Oh, and beating her up to leave a message will also be judged as "inelegant" by your employer, and outright killing her will botch the quest because he hired you to leave a message, NOT to commit murder. The ideal quest solution is to sneak inside, don't be detected by anyone, leave an intimidating letter, and find the blackmail materials by yourself, then get out without leaving a trace.
As you can see, this is one single quest offering wildly different skill checks, and none of these skill checks are absolutely essential for progressing the game. You can finish the quest even if the guard detects you, but it will result in a lowered quest reward for being "inelegant" during the job. You can outright fail the quest by being overzealous in your intimidation attempt and murdering the merchant's wife, which isn't what your employer wanted at all. To find the blackmail materials, you have to pass a perception check, and if you managed to successfully interrogate the merchant's wife with your intimidation skill, the perception check will be lowered since you have a rough idea where to look (but she doesn't know where exactly he hides his shit so you still need to pass a perception check). You can return to your employer without the blackmail material, OR with only the blackmail material but no message left on the nightstand.
This means that the quest offers different degrees of success and failure. There's no hard "if you don't have this skill, you will absolutely fail this quest completely and entirely", instead there are degrees of failure that can potentially lower your quest reward and might even have consequences further into the game, as well as degrees of success that similarly raise your quest reward and might have consequences further into the game.
This is the kind of quest design I'm talking about. You're given a quest with the goal "I want you to do X for me." So you set out to do X, but there are multiple ways of achieving this goal X. And which of these ways you take depends on your character build as well as your own creativity, since the game doesn't just give you a handful of options to choose from in a dialogue screen, CYOA style. Instead, you have to sneak through a place and explore each room by yourself.
tl;dr: the best approach to quest design is to come up with a goal for the player, then design the location that goal is set in while thinking about the different ways a player might realistically be able to tackle that goal, and take every possible skill the player's character might have into consideration. Of course, in the quest I described above the player's throwing skill or music skill wouldn't play any role at all, but this kind of quest design doesn't mean that every quest has to have a solution for every single character, and every single skill. Instead, every quest should offer the player
realistic approaches and let the player use those skills that would realistically be useful in the given scenario. Which is... pretty much what you want in RPG quests too, isn't it?
This is quite different to a more goal-oriented and open quest design as we can see it in, for example, the first quest in Gothic 2: get into the city. There are multiple ways to get into the city, but the game never puts the choice before you and says: "Now you have these three methods to choose from: become a farmer so they let you in as a citizen, pay them a bribe so they let you in, or sneak around the wall and find a back entrance." Instead, you have to figure out these options by yourself and then choose the one that seems best to you. This is the kind of quest design that just puts a goal in front of you, then lets you tackle that goal with all the tools the game provides you.
The immediate downsides of this approach: (1) the gameworld is not realistic as it could be; (2) the player don’t have the same impact on the gameworld as he could.
How does this quest design approach lead to the gameworld not being as realistic as it could be? Just because the player has to figure out things by himself, or has multiple approaches to any given situation? What? How does that quest from Gothic 2 that I mentioned here make the gameworld any less realistic or believable? It's even a quest that VD explicitly praised in some forum posts, if I remember correctly, because it's a great example for player choice done right.
As to your second point, I guess here we just differ in what we consider more important. This quest from Gothic 2 is rife with gameplay choices, but narratively the result of each of these choices is the same: you get into the city. So while there isn't any narrative consequence for your approach, there certainly is a gameplay consequence. And gameplay consequences are just as, if not even more imporant than narrative consequences.
And that's the direction I would take the classic RPG into: an open quest design where you're confronted with goal-oriented quests (get X, find out X, kill X etc) and then you can tackle these quests in any way you want, depending on the skillset of your character. Stealth, combat, diplomacy, all are valid approaches.
What if the quest can only be solve by a specific combinations of skills you don’t have? What about the combination of skills and stats? What about the difference of design between side quests and main quests? What if the quests involves a immensely difficult task that nobody ever did before? Or maybe you can just assume that whatever choice of investment in skills should be enough a priori? That’s what I don’t get it. You want to pretend that you care about the player’s choices and character building, but the only way to implement both is by sacrificing the logic of the gameworld and the consistency of the character building. Does it even make any sense to assume that the player can’t have an unforeseen problem that leads to failure and requires reloading? You think that the gameworld should be like they always are in most cRPGs: an amusement park so that the player can do whatever he wants given his previous allocations of SPs. Anything that goes against that is labelled as railroading or bad design. What a bunch of hooey.
I brought an example of what I understand by this idea of "goal-oriented quest design" above, by describing a quest I am currently designing myself for Realms Beyond. If you consider that kind of quest, which offers you multiple skill checks and varying degrees of success and failure, as "an amusement park so that the player can do whatever he wants" I guess your opinion is just plain wrong. Because having open, goal-oriented quest design doesn't necessarily mean the game lets every player accomplish every quest perfectly. Instead, it means that every quest offers a realistic variety of approaches for different character builds, and each approach has its own challenges and varying degrees of success and failure, rather than just a hard "either you pass or you don't" hard skillcheck.
In AoD, there is often only one approach that is truly valid, and that approach depends on which faction questline you are in. Going through the merchant questline as a pure fighter or pure stealth guy is impossible, or at least will end up giving you terrible results because you suck at all the options the quest presents to you, while the quests never allow you to make use of those skills you actually possess.
As it should. In the real world your affiliations matter, and you need the proper skills to solve the problems the world throws at you. If you don’t have the proper skills you fail. The idea that you shouldn’t fail given your previous investment in skills is pure egocentrism because that’s not how things work in practice. Maybe you are right, but in this case we should acknowledge that cRPGs can’t have consistent character building or gameworld.
Again, I never claimed that every character should be able to overcome every challenge. But there should be some alternative ways of tackling quests and situations rather than just one rigid approach that lets you win, and that's it. Many of AoD's questlines feel like there's really just one optimal character build that you need to succeed in this questline, and there are no other approaches. Sometimes, it feels like a puzzle game where you have to figure out how exactly to distribute your skillpoints, rather than an RPG where you try to get along as best as you can with the skillset you have. And that is my main criticism of AoD - a game I like and enjoy - its structure just feels too rigid in some places, too set in stone. Too many cases where the game says, "Be this exact character build or fail". Again, I don't want every quest to offer an easy way out to every single character build, but there should still be multiple approaches and unorthodox ways to approach certain quests and situations. The fact is that if you play through the merchant questline, you will NEVER encounter a situation where a lockpick skill might be useful. Why not? It would be a cool little thing to have in there, something for a third or a fourth playthrough where you experiment with a talker-thief hybrid character. But this kind of thing just doesn't exist, and that drags AoD down a little.
