[PC RPG] Age of Decadence, Fallout mixed with medieval setting it seems

[Damian79]

From Iron Tower Studio

Movie of combat system
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/video/Spearman_Fight.avi

A big faq is here
http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,124.msg2345.html#msg2345

Features•7 distinctive gameplay styles: from knight, serving a Noble House to grifter, preying on greed and gullibility
•23 skills, ranging from Dagger and Critical Strike to Disguise and Persuasion to Crafting and Lore
•Action Point-based combat system, featuring a flexible set of standard attacks, special attacks such as whirlwind and impale, and aimed attacks at different body parts
•8 weapon types: daggers, swords, axes, hammers, spears, bows, crossbows, throwing weapons, each with individual traits
•Non-combat quests resolutions and a well-developed diplomatic path (The best weapon against an enemy is another enemy)
•Over 100 quests, taking you to 22 locations: towns, outposts, archeological digs, sealed places of Power, underground facilities, and temples
•Each situation has multiple ways of handling it, based on your skills, reputation, and connections. Each way has consequences that will affect someone or something
•Extensive dialogues trees, written with role-playing in mind. You can use many skills in dialogues, take actions like stealing or sneak-attacking, and play your character with personality as you see fit
•An interesting world with rich history and unclear future that your actions can shape into seven very different game endings
•Detailed crafting and alchemy systems: melt items and create new ones, balance your sword, play with Greek fire, increase your poison's potency, use corrosive acid on locks, and experiment with black powder.
•Hundreds of items, ranging from weapons & armor to scrolls, tools, flasks, and pre-war relics
•3D world created with Torque Game Engine, featuring detailed locations and almost 200 unique animations


Is anyone able to dig up dirt on actual developerss of this game, what their past experience is?  I would be even more interested in thsi game if they were former Troika employees.  I'm trying to find out if they were.

[Joe Molotov]

Well, I approve of the title at least.

[Damian79]

Yeah I sucked at making topics in the past, and still apparently do.  Case in point.  I asked if former devs of troika was making this game.  It turns out that a FAN of Troika's games is making it.  Here is an interview from him i found using google and searching "age of decadence" and "troika".

Iron Tower Studio’s lead developer Vince D. Weller was kind enough to answer some questions about his upcoming tradition-minded RPG “Age of Decadence” in an email interview.

He talks about his own game, the importance of choice and story, and how his studio’s approach to storytelling contrasts with that of big name developers like Bethesda and Oblivion.

Down the Wall: First, could you introduce yourself and your team?

Vince: 5-people team: designer, programmer, artist, modeler, animator. My name is Vince, I’m the designer.

DtW: “Age of Decadence” has a very interesting setting. How did you decide on that?

Vince: We wanted to make something different. High and generic “medieval” fantasy has been done to death and then some. We also wanted to go with a “fall of an empire” scenario for storytelling reasons and the Roman Empire is an obvious choice there, both as an inspiration and as a reference. The rest was influenced by some Michael Moorcock’s works (city of Quarzhasaat) and Lovecraft’s stories.

DtW: What games exemplify the non-linear story that you are going for with “Age of Decadence”? What’s your inspiration?

Vince: Prelude to Darkness, a great indie RPG that nobody’s heard of, and Arcanum, a Troika RPG masterpiece.

DtW: How does “Age of Decadence” tell its story differently than modern RPGs like those of Bethesda and BioWare?

Vince: Bethesda specializes in “do whatever you want” sandbox RPGs. The story is the weakest aspect there by definition, and Bethesda’s belief that “you’ve got to accept that the whole of your writing - characters, narrative, everything - is simply not as important as the gameplay” doesn’t help.

Bioware is the storyteller; they are the Ying to Bethesda’s Yang. Who cares about gameplay? Shut up and listen to the story. Here is an interesting article where one of the good doctors explains Bioware storytelling mechanics:

“…all BioWare stories orbit around the player, who is the center of everything. He even mentioned BioWare believed in the concept of games providing a sort of fantasy fulfillment, allowing you to become your secret dreams and desires.”

Troika, may it rest in peace, focused on the choices and consequences.

Let me give you an idea of what made Troika great. Here are two scenarios, one featuring a regular game idea, and one featuring a Troika game idea:

Regular game idea:

What the player experiences: You were told that the wealthy owner of the Inn can help you find the buried treasure. You walk into a bar. The bartender greets you with a fine “Hello Stranger! Come and enjoy a pint of ale on the house!” You will notice that you when you click on anyone else in the room you get a generic “good day sir”, you certainly can’t attack anyone, and if the game let you fire off an explosive spell, it wouldn’t do any damage in room and no one would notice that anything had happened. You talk to the inn keeper and he says if you give him 10 gold, he’ll give you the map to the secret treasure! So you do.

What the developers were thinking: Well, this has to be this way, right? I mean, the bartender has knowledge that keeps the quest moving along so we can’t kill him. And what if we attacked someone else in the corner of the bar? We couldn’t have that because it would look strange if the people just sat there! And I mean, c’mon, if you can kill this guy, wouldn’t that mean you can kill the others too? Oh plus, our publisher informed us yesterday that we have to take out all the kids in the game because we can’t sell the game in Germany if it has kid killing. Yeah….. killing people in a friendly town is out of the question.

Troika game:

What the player experiences: You walk into a bar. The bartender greets you with a fine “Hello Stranger! Come and enjoy a pint of ale on the house!” At this point, you shoot an arrow through his neck…. he drops dead, the bar maid and most of the patrons freak out and run for the door… You laugh maniacally until you notice some guy in the corner (who happens to be the bartenders’ brother in law enjoying a pint himself) unsheathing his vorpal sword and coming after you with bloody vengeance in his eyes… You kill him too and take his sword. You search the inn and find a key underneath a bottle of whiskey behind the bar. The key opens a lockbox upstairs in his room where you find a map.

What Troika was thinking: Hey, what if I want to shoot the bartender? Yeah, I hate those stereo-typical jolly fat bartender guys. It’ll be more trouble, but we’ll make sure you can get the map some how. For the people in the room, we’ll have them check against your faction and skills, if you attack anyone, they will determine if they are scared, hostile, or unmoved by your actions. If they are scared they’ll run, hostile they’ll attack, and unmoved they will just sit there drinking a beer while all hell breaks loose. Yeah, we should put at least on guy in the bar who’s tough as nails. The tough quiet dude who calmly drinks his beer… The guy you DO NOT want to mess with. Yeah, and if you kill anyone in this inn, the cops in town will attack you on sight. The more neutral shopkeepers will still sell to you, but they will jack the prices up because even they think you are a cold blooded killer.

And then we have Obsidian, but like a college kid, they are still in the experimenting and sleeping with everyone phase. KOTOR 2 was promising. It was a more mature game than the original and it didn’t shove the storytelling in your face. NWN2, on the other hand, tried to suffocate you with a storytelling pillow. Mask of the Betrayer was a fantastic, original, and non-linear game, but the press butchered it because the game tried to make the dumbfucks think. I’m curious to see what Obsidian will do with that spy game.

Also, coudn’t help but notice this lovely quote:

“If you want people to follow your plot,” Ken Levine told the audience, “it has to be really f***ing stupid.”

His words weren’t exactly eloquent, but the creative director and co-founder of BioShock developer 2K Boston got his point across: video games stories aren’t valued very highly. “The bad news is, for storytellers, nobody cares about your stupid story,” Levine said during a packed session at the recent Game Developer Conference in San Francisco.

Where do we stand? We picked up Troika’s ball because somebody has to. While we lack Troika’s talent, we have enthusiasm, so hopefully that counts for something.

DtW: Why is player choice important to you?

Vince: Because that’s what role-playing is all about. An RPG without choices is an adventure game with stats, and since we’re making an RPG…

DtW: How do you achieve player choice? How does that goal influence the narrative?

Vince: I assume the first question should be read as “how do you insert a choice into a story without breaking it?”. The answer is by providing multiple solutions and story arcs, which, by the way, is more logical and interesting than set-in-stone events.

Let’s take “The Witcher” as an example. For storytelling reasons your character is arrested when he tries to enter the city and thrown in jail. In the jail your character is asked to kill a creature in the sewers where he meets an important NPC. That’s the drama- and twist-filled story. It works great in a book format where the reader is following adventures of the main character, but it’s too restrictive in a game where the player IS the main character.

A better design would have been to offer an alternative. Allow the witcher to enter the city via the sewers (after fighting the guards and escaping or after being warned about the ambush as a reward for developing relationship with the villagers) and then run into the above mentioned NPC who will offer you to join him to kill the creature. As you can see, it’s still the same overall story and direction, and the alternative doesn’t require new art assets and tons of development time. It reuses the same situations - the arrest, the creature in the sewers, the knight NPC, the same villagers, and the same sewers, but suddenly you get an important choice instead of a forced situation that you are unable to avoid.

That’s our design “philosophy”, for the lack of a better word.

DtW: How do you get the player involved in telling the story of “Age of Decadence”? Why is player involvement important?

Vince: Because that’s his or her story, not mine. I build the framework and lay down the paths and options, set reasons, motivations, perceptions. The rest is up to you, the player. You pick your path, you decide what to do, how, and why, and you even pick your enemies. There is no designated evil boss dude to kill in order to save the world, but there are plenty of people to piss off who will gladly put you on their shit list. I understand that it won’t appeal to everyone, of course, but they don’t call indie RPGs a niche market for nothing.

DtW: “Age of Decadence” is a huge world with multiple endings and over a hundred quests. How much of the game’s story can a player see on one run-through? How does this compare to other mediums for storytelling?

Vince: No more than 60%. How does it compare? Well, many companies and publishers believe that most people will play a game only once, so they focus on making that single playthrough as memorable as possible, without worrying about replay value. Consider Knights of the Old Republic. First, the “OMG! I’m Revan!” surprise works only once and it tends to overshadow the replays. Second, there isn’t much to replay (unless you really love the story and want to experience exactly the same thing again). Keep in mind, we aren’t talking about the overall quality of the game here, we are talking about the replay value.

We designed the game with replayability in mind. You can replay the game 3-4 times taking different paths, discovering different things, arriving to different conclusions. Almost like playing several different games within the same story arc. Needless to say, we can’t rely on twists and surprises. Instead we focus on the player’s perspective, different ways to progress, and different storylines to follow.

DtW: “Age of Decadence” sounds like a lot of work. Why is it worth it? What drives you to do it?

Vince: What drives us? A lot of things. Riches, glory, possible world domination, but mostly the chicks. I mean, party members of the female persuasion. Everyone knows that girls can’t get enough of indie RPG developers, right? RIGHT?

DtW: Finally, how important is story to game design, for any genre?

Vince: Very important, obviously. Games of all genres can benefit from having a good story, including shooters and real-time strategy games.

[Great Rumbler]

There were actually two things that made Black Isle/Troika games so great: the ability to do whatever you wanted AND some of the best writing to ever grace the medium. I don't expect Iron Tower to nail the latter, but I think they have a good shot at the former if they're Arcanum as their basis.

It's nice to see developers out there, even if they're small time, trying to get back to that style of game-making.

[ToxicAdam]

Looks very promising, but the forums don't give me much hope of a release on the horizon. They have had all kinds of problems just getting a combat demo out the door.

Thanks for the heads up.

[BlueTsunami]

Arcanum had a nice setup of diverging paths. So if the game is anything like that, I'm in.

I also absolutely love the concept they're going for here. The book "A Canticle of Leibowitz" is similar in a sense (a civilization that has survived Nuclear War and has progressed to a Middle Age society).

[demi]

Sounds better than Dragon Age

[drew]

Sounds better than Dragon Age

and yet thats what youre playing right now