Oh hey everyone, I’m here on day 18 of my backlogblogtober series ready to crack into all of those hot old games I’ve been wanting to catch up to! Oh… what? I’m still playing the same handful of games I was at the start of this month? Weird. It’s almost like juggling the longest Fire Emblem game and another 50+ hour King’s Bounty game (with just a hint of Destiny on the side) doesn’t leave room for me to try to make my way through my pile of shame. I’ll probably get Fire Emblem and King’s Bounty out of the way soon, just in time for something like Fallout 4 or Divinity Original Sin Enhanced Edition to show up and be another 50+ hour RPG monstrosity. However, I did not call you here today (or rather, you didn’t start reading this blog) to talk about things I thought about doing but didn’t. Instead I’d like to share my thoughts on a curious little game I picked up this last week.

The Age of Decadence

You’d be excused for not knowing anything about The Age of Decadence, a long-in-development RPG from indie team Iron Tower Studios. Unlike some other classical CRPG revivals, this one is not the product of a multi-million dollar kickstarter project staffed with dudes who made “those sorts of games” back in the day, but a small team that started working on it almost a decade ago. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic, low-magic fantasy setting inspired by the fall of the Roman Empire (There are legionaries and city states, but also “ancient technologies”). Gameplay-wise, it’s clearly in the spirit of games like Fallout and Arcanum, which is to say focused on a single character who can be built in any number of ways in order to solve different quests, rather than a party-focused approach. You can be a dude who fights! A dude who talks! A dude who sneaks! Possibly a combination of any of them! It all does this in a fairly streamlined framework. Most of your non-combat interactions with the game itself are in static text boxes. You don’t pick a skill from a list to use on an object, you pick one of the dialogue options that best reflects your character’s strengths and then it either passes or fails if the number is high enough. That simplified structure alludes to how The Age of Decadence presents itself; rather than being a game of interlocking systems and mechanics it’s almost more similar to a choose-your-own-adventure book with skill checks or a more straightforward Pen and Paper ruleset than an intricate series of systems and mechanics. The combat is a little bit more of that, but the combat is entirely optional. It’s one of those.

That’s how it is on paper, at least. I will give The Age of Decadence credit, it swings for the fences with its ambitions. It might just be one of the most successful attempts at the concept of “Two different character builds will have very different gameplay experiences” I’ve ever seen in an RPG. I played as a non-combat merchant/con-man type character and got through almost the entire thing without killing anyone, then messed around with a different background/character build (Assassin) and had a markedly different experience in the first town area. I’ve always felt the need to qualify my opinion of this game with “I could see a specific audience loving this” because it’s a mesmerizing concept that puts these computer RPGs that much closer to their Pen and Paper equivalents. It works especially well for AoD because of its streamlined approach to skill checks and contained scope. But… it doesn’t quite work for me. I say as both praise and criticism that I feel like I missed half of the game in my playthrough of Age of Decadence (which took somewhere around a dozen hours, but I’m also a fast reader and no doubt missed a lot of side stuff). It’s clearly meant to be replayed, but somewhere along my character’s quest to be the awesomest member of the Merchant’s Guild he could be (and it turns out that merchants are basically the persuasive puppetmasters of this world) I felt like I was playing this “Urban Intrigue Simulator” on autopilot. What do I mean? The way the game works essentially demands you min-max a small handful of skills pertaining to your character type. Skill checks are based on static numbers (often containing more than one stat or skill) and not dice rolls, so being a jack-of-all-trades just means you’ll fail at everything and a certain amount of save-scumming is inevitably required to make sure you aren’t accidentally locked out of whatever faction questline you choose to pursue (if you want to go full non-combat as I did, you’re going to need to heavily invest in Persuade and Streetwise, possibly Etiquette and Lore, on top of a high Charisma score). Obviously I can’t speak to the breadth of viable builds, but what I’ve read on Iron Tower’s forums suggests that while a little bit of hybridization is okay, the needle you have to thread for some character types is tighter than others (with sneaky thieves getting the short end of the stick.) For all its claims of openness and nonlinearity, The Age of Decadence railroaded me into a specific style of play from character creation onward.

For my part, I found myself right up to the end of the game before I ran into the proverbial brick wall of not knowing how to proceed with my smooth-talking merchant. Not every character can do every quest, obviously, but I guess I never found the developer-intended solution on how to proceed in that case, which is to say… I cheated. I opened the console, gave myself enough skillpoints to solve the quest in a different way and only felt slightly guilty for doing so. Turns out I was only 30 minutes away from a handful of endings. I’m sure there was a solution or two that I just missed, but I can’t help but feel like that breaking of the experience is why these sorts of RPGs are hard to make, even when they play by their own ruleset as much as The Age of Decadence does. You don’t want to hand the player everything on a silver dice roll, but you don’t want to make them feel like they have to find an inane, multi-part adventure game solution to every problem (and based on what I’ve read, there are at least a handful of those). Even Fallout 1 and 2 are hardly perfect in that regard; you’re going to get around a lot easier with guns and speech than you are with unarmed and repair. But I think the way The Age of Decadence hyperfocuses on these elements makes it stick out more to me when they break. I get it, it's supposed to be "Hardcore", but when the OCD nightmare of a few misplaced skillpoints actually does spell the difference between success and failure, it feels more like a guessing game than a carefully crafted experience. When it works, it works surprisingly well, but when it doesn't work it doesn't have anything to fall back on.

I feel like I’ve been talking in very high concept terms about The Age of Decadence without really talking details. That’s because the game itself is more interested in those ideas than its “meat and potatoes” mechanics, which are rather straightforward and clearly not the focus. I applaud the developers’ very utilitarian approach to RPG design, but it doesn’t leave much to talk about. You can only interact with objects and NPCs who are in some way important, the three cities have instantaneous fast travel between landmarks and merchants will only sell you stuff that you can use, be it combat or utility-based. The combat is the weird exception to all of this and in some ways feels like it came out of a different game, made even more weird because of how much effort was put into a set of mechanics you can almost entirely skip. For what it is, it's interesting. You have a lot of tools at your disposal (assuming you put a bunch of points into combat skills and can hit the broadside of a barn), but it boils down to "Fast attacks for lightly armored foes, slow attacks for heavily armored foes, maybe you should cripple them so they can't hit you as well". I'll admit I didn't get into the deep end of the combat so maybe it's more exciting than I'm giving it credit for, but I've never been the biggest fan of tactical combat systems in RPGs where you only control one character. As for the writing, it's... okay? I'm not really sure where I can elaborate on that. I can name a few NPCs off the top of my head as being "somewhat memorable", but it's all very workmanlike. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Obsidian and seemingly every RPG in recent memory having Chris Avellone as a contributing writer.

I think "somewhat memorable" is how I'm going to file away The Age of Decadence. Some folks have been proclaiming this as the newest, hottest, pure CRPG cocaine and I don't think it's that. Is it worth taking a look at? Maybe. I'm pretty sure there's a demo out there. That'd probably not be a bad place to look.

Thanks for the write up man.

I have been looking at this one for a while (I am drawn to low fantasy and historical settings, this has the combo of both basically). Sounds like it is really focused on different builds but I'm not sure how interesting that is when, like you say, it ultimately ends up kind of being pretty limiting when it comes skill check time at the end game. And if the characters and narrative doesn't really deliver I'm not sure if it is really for me.

I appreciate freedom a lot but at some point it needs to be rewarding (and hell, this doesn't sound as free as it first appears).

Interesting to see how mechanics can shape RPGs ultimately. That's why I like this kind of write up over a traditional review that will gloss over most of that. They are becoming more and more useless with RPGs I think.

EDIT: So forgot to ask, is there really a main quest here? Or is it like a main goal with a lot of different ways to reach it?

@artisanbreads: I'm glad you liked the write-up! There is something resembling a main quest in this game, but it takes a backseat to pretty much everything else. The end of the Commercium (merchant guild) questline, for example, is basically just "finish the game". I bet that someone could speedrun this game in under an hour, no problem, just by ignoring all of that and merely getting enough skill points to be able to pass the checks to reach one of the endings.

Huh. That sounds like a fascinating game. Not sure if it'd be up my alley or not, but maybe I'll give it a go if I see a sale on it. Great blog, Arbitrary.

A dozen hours you say? I might have to try this.

Always did like the conceit of having your choices impact your play experience like that, even if it's not perfectly done

Great write-up, Arbitrary. I always find stuff like this fascinating to read from an outsider's perspective - as someone with next to no experience in the field of CRPGs, it's interesting to read about what design decisions tick which boxes for experienced players in the genre. I do find the 'railroading' of these sorts of games incredibly daunting and very limiting, as I'm exactly the kind of player who'll opt to go the 'jack of all trades, master of none' route for fear of missing content. It's probably why I've had problems getting into the original Fallout thus far, as I think I tried to spread my character a little too thin for fear of missing something, and ended up struggling to do anything effectively. That's why something party-based like Baldur's Gate holds more appeal for me mechanically, since I can build a rounded party and cover for the obvious weaknesses of my own character with another, even though on balance I think I prefer Fallout's more unique setting and aesthetic. Age of Decadence sounds fascinating from a design perspective, but it also sounds like something I would have no fun whatsoever playing, especially if I hit a dead end from deviating from the rails it sounds like it tries to keep the player on. It's good to know you got something out of it, though.

As a side-note, I am surprised that so many folks even entertained the idea of jumping on the Backlog/October train with me. In retrospect, I realise it's not the best time of the gaming calendar year to embark on such a quest (them new releases be everywhere, yo). Nonetheless, thanks for at least giving the idea some thought.

Glad to see other people talking about this game I really enjoyed the write-up! I'd love to see Austin and the guys do a quick look as well, just to see this game in action.

@dankempster: I've always been more of a Baldur's Gate guy than a Fallout guy, which extends to a preference for party-based stuff over solo-character stuff in general. That said, those games have their own demons that the player must contend with, like say... the needlessly confusing and arcane ruleset that is Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.

The funny thing is that Fallout 1 is not actually all that balanced, in that there is very much an optimal way to play through the game if you want to see everything without much hassle because a lot of the skills in that game are not very useful. Fallout 2 is a lot better in that sense, though I have my own issues with that game that don't extend to the first. It's glacially paced and has some really embarrassing "nerd culture" references that come off as super dated and hokey now.

@arbitrarywater: On the other hand have you tried playing Fallout 1 recently, holy shit that game is short. Like really fucking short. That is a tiny ass RPG.

Anyway back to the main topic at hand. Man iuf I was kind of on the fence on this one before after reading your blog/review/description I am even more on the fence. There are some games on my plate atm anyway, but this will probably get to be that: "omfg there is like nothing to play, lets start digging through my Steam maybe category" type of game.

I haven't played it recently, but I totally remember Fallout 1 being like 15 hours long when I played it back in 2008 (to prepare for Fallout 3, obviously). I remember liking it then but being incredibly surprised that a RPG from that era would be so short. You'd think that I'd be more excited about shorter, contained experiences since the rest of the genre consists of 50+ hour monstrosities, but....no, not really.

Just out of interest, are you talking just main quest stuff, or including side stuff? My memory is pretty hazy, and although I don't remember there being a huge amount of side quests, I also feel like everything I remember about the main quest is probably about 10 hours?

@thomasnash: Including doing all the side stuff yes. So yep Fallout 1 is about 10 -15 hours tops.

@tennmuerti: @arbitrarywater: Yeah I came to it late and was surprised as well. I get the appeal for its time, being so free. I bet to the developers it was almost a proof of concept thing and they couldn't bite off a huge RPG in that style.

I also get bugged by short RPGs. Hard to even start them sometimes. That's my big issue with the recent Shadowrun games, which I otherwise quite like.