GB Feature: The Age of Decadence R4 Preview
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It's been over a year-and-a-half since we last checked out The Age of Decadence, so to give you something interesting to read over the holidays, we've cranked out a two-page preview of the latest R4 build of Iron Tower's turn-based RPG. A couple of paragraphs to start you off:
The other major change since I last played The Age of Decadence is that its character system has been overhauled substantially, though the attributes and skills themselves have stayed mostly the same. Rather than skills fitting into a 100-point scale, now they sit on a 10-point scale instead, and the cost of increasing them goes up as they raise in level, making it a pretty big investment to specialize. This is nice, in effect, because of the way skill checks have been changed. Many skill checks now actually rely on two skills used in combination rather than one, which encourages you to spread your points out a bit, but also makes characters a bit more versatile than they used to be.
Another change is that skill points have been divided up into three kinds. There's general skill points, which you receive for completing quests and are more or less "fixed income" you can depend on throughout the game. There's also civil skill points and combat skill points. These are awarded specifically for making use of either combat or non-combat skills, and can only be spent on skills of the same type. If I have to be honest, I don't really like this change, because it streams characters that focus on combat or non-combat styles into specializing even more. If you play a character centered around using civil skills, then this system makes it even harder to try to train up your combat skills and play a hybrid character, for example. It may be more "realistic" but I can't say it's more fun and ultimately just seems like needless bloat.
