Age of Decadence - Interview @ RPGCenter

The RPGCenter has interviewed Vince - the lead designer of Age of Decadence:

Part 1:

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For many years The Age of Decadence seemed like many people's “last hope” for an old-school, hardcore PC RPG, but since then, and thanks to Kickstarter we have titles like Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2 or Dead State. Don't you feel like you've missed the opportunity and lost your niche?

Pillars is a hardcore RPG? Anyway, InXile is bringing TB combat back, making AoD more accessible for people who wouldn't give it a chance otherwise. RPGs take years to make, but only a few weeks to play. There's plenty of room for everyone as the games you listed are all very different.

Oh, so you don't see Pillars as a hardcore RPG? What in your opinion defines a hardcore cRPG then?

Pillars of Eternity is a mass-market RPG, which is understandable considering that Obsidian is a fairly big company and can’t afford to make niche games with limited appeal. Obsidian played it safe and didn’t take any risks there. After all they didn’t make a ‘spiritual’ sequel to games that put Black Isle on the map, did they?

The way I see it, hardcore RPG is challenging to a fault, has no hand-holding, requires commitment to figure out the rules. In the olden days if you can’t figure out the system it was your problem. These days it means that developers failed you.

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Part 2:

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Speaking of inspirations - what's your favorite RPG and how it influenced your work on The Age of Decadence?

If I have to pick one, it would be Fallout. It was one of very few games where the setting is more than just background decorations, quests had multiple solutions, and killing things wasn’t the only way through the game.

This thing about killing not being the only solution actually ties in nicely with the next question: How do you feel about this dichotomy between dialogs (or other text-based interactions) and combat that appears in pretty much every open-ended RPG? Age of Decadence sidesteps parts of this issue by encouraging multiple playthroughs with different characters, but it still feels like civil characters, especially Loremasters, get most of the game in one playthrough.

I wouldn’t say that any character can get most of the game in one playthrough, but loremasters definitely get their fair share of the content.

As for the dichotomy, it depends on the design. Yes, we sidestepped the issue in AoD by focusing on specialists and replaybility, but in the future we’d like to focus on the hybrids (plus for all intents and purposes a party *is* a hybrid), which would call for a slightly different design approach.

The way I see it’s only a problem when you’re offered a diplomatic solution to a problem you can easily solve by killing everyone involved. If you can’t kill anyone you wish, if you can use ‘diplomacy’ to gain what you can’t gain by brute force, then it will work well.

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