Разработчик: Iron Tower Studio
Описание
What Kind of Game Is It?
It’s a very different game than anything you’ve ever played. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the RPG genre hasn’t really been explored yet and most RPGs follow the formula that didn’t change in 20 years. While there were always games that strayed off the beaten path – Darklands, Planescape: Torment, King of Dragon Pass – such games were the exceptions that only reinforced the rule.
The Age of Decadence is an experiment, an attempt to explore a different direction, taking you back to the PnP roots of the genre. It doesn’t mean that the game is awesome. In fact, there is a good chance that you won’t like it, precisely because we took too many liberties with the established design.
So What Sets The Age of Decadence Apart From Other Games?
1. The Setup
Traditionally, many fantasy RPGs are about killing things, clearing up dungeons, and being a hero. There is nothing wrong with mindless fun and wish fulfillment, but we want to offer you something different. To quote Tom Chick (Quarter to Three's game critic):
"But Age of Decadence wants nothing to do with kobolds, just as it wants nothing to do with Doo-dads of Unimaginable Power. The overarching idea is a crumbling society divided among three noble Houses, each fumbling around in its own version of darkness to comprehend what destroyed the world. That’s the central mystery. It plays out like noir in that you are the detective, piecing together what really happened from differing accounts, all vividly written with clear voices and efficient prose. And like a detective in a noir yarn, you can’t help but become part of the central mystery, effecting an outcome you might not have intended."
The Age of Decadence is not a game about killing monsters or exploring mystical lands, but rather, surviving amid the greed and brutality of your fellow humans and carving out a name for yourself. Good and bad are purely relative. It’s a world of scheming and backstabbing in which your words and actions have the potential to forge alliances and sow discord, and your path is never certain.
You get to play with seven different factions: three Noble Houses and four 'professional' guilds: merchants, assassins, thieves, and the army, all fighting for power or influence; over 100 named characters, over 750 ‘generic’ characters with unique IDs taking part in violent take-overs, assassinations, and power grabs, and over 600,000 words of dialogue: a well-developed and thought through world, believable characters, realistic motivations, but no elves, dwarves, magic, and wizards in fashionable, pointy hats.
2. Combat difficulty
Another design aspect worth mentioning is combat difficulty. It’s a hard game.
Combat difficulty is integrated into the setting. You can’t say that the world is harsh and unforgiving and then let the player kill everyone who looks at him or her funny. The game has to be hard, dying should be easy, and you should have reasons to pick your fights.
You aren’t a powerful hero who can defeat anyone and save the world and it is the difficulty that reinforces this notion. Make the game easier and we’re back to the powerful hero setup. So unless you’re a natural born killer, watch what you say and think before you act or you’ll end up dead before you can blink.
3. Choices & Consequences
Choices are what the game is all about - crafting your own narrative via a variety of choices that alter the story, playing field, and your options down the road. From multiple quest solutions to branching questlines you'll have plenty decisions to make and consequences of said decisions to deal with, which is what makes the game incredibly replayable.
Starting the game as a mercenary and joining the Imperial Guards will give a completely different experience, different quests, different content and points of view than, say, playing the game as a merchant (less buying low and selling high, more scheming and plotting to gain advantages for the guild), a praetor serving a Noble House, or an assassin.
The questlines are interwoven, forming a large, overarching story, so playing the game only once will be like witnessing events from a single perspective, which is limited by default. You will have to play the game several times to better understand what’s going on, piece everything together, and see the full effect of the choices you make.
The Big Question: Should You Buy The Game?
Try before you buy. Even if everything I said sounds exactly like your kind of game, try the demo first. That’s what it’s there for. It gives you access to the first Chapter, consisting of 3 locations and about 30 quests split between mutually exclusive questlines and decisions.
Поддерживаемые языки: english, russian, spanish - spain, french, polish
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7/Windows 8/Windows 10
- Processor: 2 GHz Processor or better
- Memory: 3 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTS 250 / Radeon HD 4770 (1Gb) or better
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 1900 MB available space
- OS *: Windows 7/Windows 8/Windows 10
- Processor: 2.5 GHz Processor or better
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce GTS 450 / Radeon HD 4870 (1Gb) or better
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 1900 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
Into the story, writing, etc. but the gameplay is a slog. I've been running console commands to try and get through so I can see the story and even then I'm still dying constantly + every fight takes forever. If you have the time to fight the game design enough to see the content it's pretty interesting, but tbh I would just recommend the Warlockracy vid on Youtube for a fun breakdown. Respect for this fossil for what it's worth.
This a hardcore RPG with a very high degree of replayability. No handholding, you are thrusted in an alternative timeline akin to ancient Rome, you are (hopefully) a resourceful man caught in the war between the remaining houses that are at each others throats. Who and how you serve is completely up to you, which is the best selling point for this game - deceit, bribing, stealth, manipulation.. or the good old kill em all fashion. Combat is unforgiving and sometimes hard to avoid, but you can tip the odds in your favor via various skills, like alchemy, crafting etc. if you are not a full-on combat character. These skills can again come in handy when you are solving some problems and quests that might require such knowledge. Highly recommended if you want a traditional Turn based RPG with absolutely no hand-holding.
fun
Is a little jank, combat will be hard if you don't use everything at your disposal, and crafting is the best skill. RIP to my time spent on reloading the Mac, Belgutai, and Ordu Horde fights.
The Age Of Kino
Reasonably good story but poorly balanced. You might enjoy if you don't mind trial and error or constant save scumming. I had some fun but I don't think I can recommend it.
Worth the price -- even for one playthrough. Fun combat, great writing!
Another one yearning for the neutral review. I want to point out that the review is not made in expectation that I'd see everything on one go. But still in expectation that even on first go a single player game would be satisfying to play.
For the core appeal of the game for me (avoiding combat), the game plays both great and... not great. So before we go into spoiler territory, let's do the good / bad thing and talk about the game itself.
Good:
- Writing
- Music
- Atmosphere
- It's a child's first Disco Elysium, meaning you can do a LOT in conversations and it's fun to build your character around it. However...
Bad:
- ... More on the failures on my certain build later in the spoilers.
- Controls sometimes feel clunky, not awful by any means, just... clunky.
- While the graphics are fine and sometimes convey scale etcetera well, the game world feels empty.
NOW TO THE SPOILERS:
Bear in mind this review is about my build and the fact I'd need to redo the game (which I dislike doing to "play proper", it feels too meta for me) and playing counter intuitively to get the ending I kinda was going for. Commercium and how you follow it's questline as a Loremaster/Merchant/Speechcraft boi leads you through doing one good deed for commercium and two bad deeds (this depends on how you deal with maadoran situation). So you end up dissolving the Commercium when you work for Commercium and complete quests. The best thing to happen to commercium, which I tried to work for, was the first quest giver. But there's no ending associated with him as far as I can tell. So everything falls flat, you follow the main "questline" it seems you lock yourself into either killing Meru or making the world a religious weirdo land. Even if you blow up the "god".
So I'm actually disappointed, game promised so much but I guess I savescummed and backtracked through saves too little to understand I'm locking myself into a certain set of ending slides, when doing the quests organically. Disco Elysium / Morrowind / New Vegas / Fallout (1/2) levels of player agency this game does not have.
(and before someone comments, yes, I know it's supposed to be a brutal world, but even brutal world should let you affect the endings in a different manner, or warn you AGAINST doing the three cities quests)
Gameplay, idea, world 7/10
End result with _MY CERTAIN BUILD_ 4/10
Couldn't get this to run on my comp without Lines everywhere. First game i've had trouble running. For that reason i can't recommend. I tried to refund but it sat in my library for a while before i played it.
the game has stats/skills which i wanted but i was expecting to be able to run around freely outside cities, there are only instances.
the game has an issue where the whole screen flickers constantly strobing, you can fix it by changing some settings but will randomly start again and have to keep changing settings back an fourth.
i also lost a whole play through several hours worth as if you enter the mountain pass you cant leave until you win there which was impossible and the quicksaves replaced all my previous saves from before entering the zone so i have to start over from scratch im also not sure on how acurate the % for hit an such are as i had 91%cth the target and was dodged 3 out 4 swings
Amazing dialogue, interesting setting, remarkable story, and the freedom to actually play the way that you want to play. Some of my favorite reasons to play any rpg and this game accomplishes that in spades. It is not for the faint of heart as the gameplay and role-playing elements are as harsh as the setting, but if you want an rpg that really lets sucks you in this is the one.
I don't like it.
i recommend this to my RPG nerd friends
i could see some people being turned away from the fact you have to build in specific ways in order to progress in some paths
but rest assured that's the replay-ability of the game
Hooked right from the start, literally, the Black Company quote was more than enough to ensure a good review. The great gameplay, story, art, and music was nice as well lol
That was wicked fun. The story is deceptively deep imo. There's a lot of reading towards the end but it was awesome. Very impressed they did the multiple endings... Ima go play their space game now.
You will die a lot trying to play the way you play casual games, and the death is fun in this game. Died trying to be a tough guy vs 4 thugs? Yes, that was bad decision, don't try it in real life either :)
Pacifist Playthrough - Teron Done
If you want something like Disco Elysium and Planescape Torment, Go buy this!
A very tedious experience akin to playing DND with a dungeon master who hates his players and loves his setting a little too much
Game's stupid-hard and wicked-janky.
But it's SO fun once you're in the flow of it.
Appearances alone can push one off of Age of Decadence, but I think fans of older CRPGs such as Fallout, Planescape, Arcanum, and VTM:B will find at least 2 dozen hours of joy.
An incredibly well-crafted world, unique characters and plot lines, and a shocking amount of storylines to go through for each class. One thing that stands out as a red flag is the combat, as even on its easiest difficulty and with a combat-spec character, can come across as messy and unfair. Otherwise, the game gives plenty of opportunities to avoid combat , and I find that still unique in modern RPGs.
It took me several years to play this game, and when I did I almost bounced off it - it's a game filled with hard skillchecks, and zero respeccing. Which means there are things you simply can't do in a given playthrough, and you are going to have to improvise and explore a bit to work around obstacles that seem to have a single solution.
If you're OK with that, this is an atmospheric gem with an incredible world - there are always things in it that will destroy you in a glance, even in the endgame. You will never become a steamroller with maxed stats and infinite resources. In my roughly ~15 hour playthrough as a Loremaster, I had maybe 2 combat encounters total. If you do not build a combat-focused character, you will lose combats, and your best bet is to avoid all of them because you're playing a character which is simply not built for it (which you can do!)
It does the Fallout 1 thing better than any other imitator I've seen, but in a world that is its own, and nearly as interesting in its own way as Fallout's was - it's a hard world, and nobody in it loves you.
Lovely Mark Morgan-esque OST as well, which really worked for me.
Save often, save before spending skill points, and bank skill points until you hit a hard check you want to pass. Do not waste points on non-focus skills for your character. Jack of all trades characters are possible to play but much harder IMO, especially if you aren't intimately familiar with the game already.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Iron Tower Studio |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 17.11.2024 |
| Metacritic | 81 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 79% положительных (2170) |