The Age of Decadence October Update

Iron Tower Studios’ development on the long-awaited Age of Decadence continues, and to sum up last month’s changes, Vince D. Weller has cooked one of his regular updates on the subject. This time he goes into detail about changes to the mechanics behind shields, the alchemy system, and improvements to some of the game’s characters and background.

Opinion #1:

[Alchemy] is very situational. In places where you go into one fight followed by another, like the Militiades encounter, the Aurelian Mine, etc… Healing is really useful. In all other circumstances it’s useless. Acid is excellent against heavily armored enemies. But it makes you lose 7 AP (3 to throw, 4 to switch weapons, unless you’re using a one-hand weapon and no shield, which is an unusual combination), takes time to work, needs the throwing skill and is not THAT helpful against multiple enemies. Gunpowder and oil flask have very small range, requiring enemies to be bunched together, although both have interesting effects (oil flask is good to separate enemies and gunpowder can knock people down, it seems). Not only that, but alchemy is a one-time use that depends on the ingredients, while other skills have more stable bonuses.

Overall alchemy can be very useful or very useless and it varies wildly, depending on the encounter. Crafting, for the sake of comparison, feels a lot more consistently useful throughout the game. I’m not saying that I don’t like alchemy, mind you. Quite the contrary, it’s fun to play with and trying to find uses for all those things.

Opinion #2:

It’s most definitely not underpowered, though I think it’s still going to need a bit of polish. Also the actual availability of ingredients in the final game is going to be important factor on its usefulness. I like how all the effects are very minimalistic, but can still completely change the perspective of a combat encounter.

I’ve yet to play a very high (50+) alchemy skill character to know whether you can actually dish mortal damage with things like oil flasks or bombs (by my observations thus far, not really), but the ability to break enemy placement can really change the tide of the battle, especially as they tend to attack you in ideally small, tight formations.

I know I’d love to see more developers being as open about their development processes and the reasons behind their decisions.

Last, as a final word of good news, it sounds like the new R3 version of the game’s demo is scheduled for release within a week or two, bringing with it an overhauled dialogue interface and other changes. We’ll let you all know as soon as it hits.