- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
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- 97,589
Vault Dweller A bit of heresy in Shoutbox today brought up something I should have asked about a long time ago. For you see, what every RPG player yearns for is that moment in a skill-based RPG when he doesn't need to think about his skills anymore:
Darth Roxor: spoiler
Night Goat: good night men
Darth Roxor: aod will suck
Excommunicator: night ng
Smashing Axe: Na, it has what I want. CYOA RPG stuff, which doesn't necessarily make it a good game.
Smashing Axe: Making a combat character who can assault the Aurelian Outpost and win was fun.
Excommunicator: i wish i could enjoy it more, it's definitely an earnest effort
Darth Roxor: or
Darth Roxor: IS
Darth Roxor: IT
Excommunicator: well yeah, i dont think you can deny that, no matter how much you disagree with the standpoint towards rpgs behind it
Darth Roxor: i can and i will just to be contrarian
Black_Willow: aod will be a fine video novel
Black_Willow: not an RPG, sadly
Infinitron: I don't know if AoD will be a "good RPG" and I've piled on it before myself, but one thing I'd be wary of doing is judging it by the Teron demo, if you haven't played since 2012-2013
Infinitron: Because it seems like the kind of game that could change in the late game as your skills go up and your options open up
Excommunicator: i dont see that as a possibility
Infinitron: giving you some space to, well, role play
Smashing Axe: The prices for higher tier skills are faily restrictive, though, from what I remember, you still get checks for skills of a mediocre level.
Smashing Axe: In late game
Excommunicator: unless there's some kind of multiclass system later then its a foregone conclusion
Black_Willow: Well, I played early combat demo and liked it very much, then I played the "proper" demo and it was a slideshow with an occasional choice or combat encounter
Black_Willow: A video novel basicaly
Smashing Axe: Just play through the Imperial Guards and focus entirely on combat skills and attributes, Black_Willow.
Excommunicator: maybe he doesn't want to do that though
Excommunicator: and thats the problem
Infinitron: Think of those really early game periods in Fallout where you're actually still struggling to raise up your skills to open most chests you find, use most terminals, etc
Excommunicator: its A or B and nothing in between. it's depth with no breadth of choice
Smashing Axe: Gestalt characters are possible, but definitely very hard to get working.
Infinitron: That goes down smoother than what AoD does, but it's similar
Black_Willow: Well, in early fallout I wasn't limited by a teleporting machine implanted in my body which limited my movement
Smashing Axe: Maadoran also has a bunch of optional fights unrelated to what faction you're working for. So do some of the dungeon areas.
Excommunicator: it's not satisfying the way its done. the rigidity of how the game is made means that there's not even an illusion of choice its very upfront about not providing alternatives to the one you have in front of you
Smashing Axe: The teleporting has been toned down, most conversations options will give you the option to exit now.
Black_Willow: All I'm saying is that VD made a "here is a C&C, here is a combat, here's another C&C" game
Excommunicator: thats my experience at least
Excommunicator: and i put that largely down to him wanting the game to be punishing
Smashing Axe: What version did you last play Ex?
Black_Willow: Also the "you made a bad choice, LOL u die" choices without any "soft" fail states
Smashing Axe: yeah, I agree more of those would be better.
Excommunicator: soft fail states and soft skill checks would solve most of its issues
Infinitron: Nah, people are focusing on symptoms rather than the cause
Excommunicator: i dont know smashing axe but i believe it had the first city
Black_Willow: Should we focus on VD?
Infinitron: There's just not a great deal of content in that part of the game
Infinitron: Or maybe in all of the game, I'll tell you after I've played it
Infinitron: People are like "If I could run around and do stuff and not be teleported it'd be different" but really, there's not much for you to do. Not at that point
Smashing Axe: Pure social character can finish the first two cities in 30 minutes or so, depending how long it takes them to read.
Excommunicator: well obviously not, because the game was made without exploration in mind
Excommunicator: but if teleportation wasnt seen as a "solution" then he would have been open to scattered content
Black_Willow: I think the problem is VD's uncontrolled love for text adventures
Black_Willow: Don't get me wrong, I also love them
Infinitron: VD definitely has an uncontrolled hate for "scattered content"
Jaedar: Text adventures are fine, what brings it down is that its completely impossible to tell ahead of time if you'll get pulled into an impossible fight or what dialogue skills you'll need
Black_Willow: But if you make too many of text adventures the game turns into a CYOA book
Excommunicator: which is bizarre imo. because that's one of the fundamentals of a good rpg
Jaedar: I have no idea how you're supposed to have enough points to do some text adventure and still be decent enough to do some combat
Excommunicator: you cant jaedar, like i said its A (you fight everything) or B (you do the text adventures)
Infinitron: Jeadar: You're probably not, again, perhaps until the mid or late game
Black_Willow: Darklands were great because of a good balance of text adventures - everything else
Infinitron: This is a game that's very risky to judge based on early game
Excommunicator: anything in between and youll just frustrate yourself
Infinitron: All skill-based RPGs are, it's just that this one is far less forgiving
Jaedar: Except sometimes even on a text adventure path, like commercium in first city, you get pulled into combat
Jaedar: And presumably on combat paths you get pulled into super hard combats if you have no dialogue skills
Excommunicator: the substance is in HOW those skill checks are made, not whether or not the game has them
Excommunicator: yeah but thats basically a failure to pick the right social skills
Excommunicator: because a social character absolutely cannot hope to win in a fight
Jaedar: Except the only way to know which are the right is to save and reload constantly
Excommunicator: yep
Excommunicator: its twisted
Jaedar: Ooops, you need sneak(3) to not die here! I assume you saw that coming given there was aboslutely no use for sneak in this path before, or any hint and to be fair, you were also allowed all of 0 seconds to prepare
Jaedar: seriously, the bandit ambush at the end of commercium path in the first city completely baffles me. It's so incredibly shitty design
Infinitron: OK, but let's say you've gotten through that. You're in the mid-game, late-game. You've reached that plateau where all your skills arre "where they should be"
Infinitron: Like in Fallout: New Vegas where you stop sweating all those Medium and Hard-locked chests, you've plateued, you can get pretty much everything you want now, solve quests the way you want
Infinitron: Seems to me that this is not a foreign experience, it's just that AoD is more brootal about it
Excommunicator: again, its how that lack of subtlety takes it into a realm that people cant tolerate
Excommunicator: other games do it but people can tolerate it at lower levels
Jaedar: Except I don't think this happens 'tron, because presumably the requirements just keep going up and up
Infinitron: well, Smashing Axe said they don't I think
Excommunicator: if he wasn't so caught up in the whole "this game is not for newbs, its hardcore" the game would probably accommodate more choice, albeit at the cost of difficulty
Infinitron: but we'll see
Jaedar: AoD made me see the value of "all players are decent at combat" design. Means you can always use combat as a default solution and dialogue can add others
Jaedar: It's more fun that random game overs that you cannot predict
Excommunicator: yeah it is
Black_Willow: Arcanum let you have a char that's shit in combat but has a lot o followers
Excommunicator: id enjoy it more if all the characters were hybridised a little
Hobo Elf: to me it seems like AoD plays out like this: you make your character and then you run into walls until you find the correct pathway that you are able to go through
Hobo Elf: I can't make choices during the game, all the choices were made for me during chargen
Infinitron: How much of it have you played Hobo Elf
Excommunicator: but id enjoy it even more if strict pathways were possible, just not as rigid
Hobo Elf: Not much.
Excommunicator: strict pathways=pure archetypes
Hobo Elf: Combat didn't feel good to me so I lost interest
Excommunicator: the solutions to fix the game are very straightforward, just time consuming to implement
Black_Willow: I liked the combat but VD doesn't know how crossbows work
Hobo Elf: I hope AoD finds its niche, though
Hobo Elf: I'm sure there's a group of people who will be interested in the kind of game AoD is
Hobo Elf: I have so many other games to play so it's okay when some game doesn't appeal to me
Excommunicator: yeah, its a very small group though
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