Dhruin
SasqWatch
The Codex has impressions of the upcoming Age of Decadence demo, with thoughts from three different authors:
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Thanks, Elwro and Lemonhead!In fact, I finished the whole playthrough as a merchant without a single fight. The game felt almost like a choose-your-own-adventure with a great number of various choices, lots of stat-checks, and plenty of content available for specific characters only. I loved every minute of it. As I said, much action is conducted via dialogue screens. And you cannot save during the dialogue. This is a wise choice because it prevents you from almost automatically reloading after a failed stat-check. That check might have happened after a long sequence of dialogue screens, perhaps also filled with stat-checks, which you'd have to repeat. The game's big advantage, which had to be difficult to achieve, is that you really prefer not to reload your game after something goes wrong (excluding being killed in combat, of course). At least in my case, I wanted to stick with the consequences the game provided for me – they were fair and reasonable. And hey, some of my other characters would succeed in that particular task, right? This brings me to the main point: replayability. Judging from the demo, Age of Decadence will be immensely replayable. And at three levels, at that: after finishing the demo as a merchant I immediately wanted to play the game as a member of a different faction, to get a different take on the situation, but also to play as a merchant with a different skill and stat distribution, to check out options unavailable for my original build; but also, which in other games would be ridiculous, to play exactly the same build and simply make different choices! My merchant ended up being a sort of a power behind the throne, facilitating a shift in the power distribution in the region, purely by use of persuasion, disguise, and, of course, money, insulting more than one person on his way but gaining powerful friends, too. But there were both diplomatic and combat-oriented options I steered clear of, leaving them for future playthroughs.
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