The Age of Decadence Interview

Iron Tower’s Vince D. Weller took a quick break from working on The Age of Decadence to answer well over a dozen questions about the turn-based CRPG in a new interview over at RPG France.  Both the original English version and a French translation are provided for our convenience:

Now, let’s have a look at this so mysterious title: Age of decadence? What was behind the title choice? Nowadays, what would be the game most likely to be similar to yours? What was the inspiration behind the choice of this quite peculiar background of ancient Rome?

Title? I was reading Glen Cook’s The Black Company and saw this line: “That kind of thing is common here. Conspiracies and assassinations and naked power-grabs. All the fun of decadence.”

It was such a perfect description of the gameworld and in-game events, that we decided to use it as a title.

Similar game? Probably Skyrim.

Inspiration? Mainly, we wanted to move away from the done to death medieval setting and show the player something different. We didn’t want to design idiotic fantasy weapons and spiky armor. Ancient history is incredibly rich and almost chaotic when it comes to different concepts and ideas that were just emerging at the time.

…

After a long period of deep thinking, you have explained that you preferred not to use a financing tool such as kickstarter. Actually, with the game development status such as it is now, it is easy to understand why you do not want to use kickstarter now, but back in 2005, if Kickstarter had been available, would you have used it? Do you think it would have made thinks easier for you, not only in terms of budget but also in term of development time?

No. Some things take time to learn. When we started we didn’t know much. We had some ideas (what RPG gamer doesn’t?), but ideas and experience are two very different things.