I can only afford one of them, but I am not sure wich one I should take. Any opinions from people who played both?

If you like BG2 PoE is right up your alley. Turn based combat, party building, character interactions, and good writing. I'm playing it eight now and really enjoy it. I haven't played Age of Decadence, but it's on my wishlist. I'd be interested to hear what other people say about it too.

I have to admit that I never played Baldur´s Gate and it´s successors. I always assumed that there is to much to read and to little to fight. But I love the old Fallout games. The fighting / talking balance is just right. Maybe this helps a bit regarding my rpg preferences.

Well, there is much to read in Pillars of Eternity as well. And personally I found a lot of it too verbose and not that interesting. The writing just wasn't good enough to put up with all those words (and I say that as a big fan of Planescape: Torment, which has probably even more words in it, just arranged in a more enjoyable manner ;) ). Much of the reading in PoE is not mandatory though, and the combat is great. I haven't played Age of Decadence, but from the demo I got the first impression that the combat isn't as much fun as in PoE. I've also read, in AoD you can't expect to defeat everyone and are often better off talking or running, avoiding combat. No idea to what extent that is true or not.

I haven't played Pillars of eternity so can't really compare. I did play Age of decadence, and while the game does have flaws (useless skills, punishing difficulty, and the setting is a bit too cynical for my tastes), the basic concept is really interesting. In some ways it also felt similar to the original Fallout (at least I got that feeling), less so to Baldur's Gate, e.g. you don't control a party, setting is post-apocalyptic, combat is turn-based and you can target enemies' body parts.
It's less "epic" though than either Baldur's Gate or Fallout. A single playthrough will be relatively short (especially so for pure talkers), the emphasis is on replayability and choices. Basically you can live through the same story from many different perspectives. There are at least five or six major factions you can join, and they all provide a very different experience.
There's quite a lot to read in Age of decadence. Its combat is very challenging and may be frustrating at times until you get it. You can also play through the game as a pure talker without fighting a single fight, though that will keep you from taking/completing quite a few quests (I would have welcomed more content for pure talker characters).
It's not for everyone, and you probably should play the demo which the developers themselves have recommended. It's true. If you play a character dedicated to combat, you can however eventually become very powerful and single-handedly wipe out groups of enemies. If you play a talker, you have however to totally avoid combat, and hybrid characters (which are only recommended for more experienced players anyway) definitely can't win all fights.
Personally I found the combat system challenging, but highly interesting, I liked it a lot better than e.g. the combat in Fallout 1/2, you've got surprisingly varied options for a game that doesn't feature magic. It's the best aspect of AoD in my view. Other parts of the game are a bit flawed (e.g. some skills become useless in later stages, some parts don't cohere that well, relatively few quests during a single walkthrough), but the combat system is really good, obviously a lot of work and thought went into it.

Personally I love Age of Decadence but here are two detailed posts from the steam AoD forums that will give you the best idea about the game.

1st:

What Kind of Game Is It?

The Age of Decadence, our first but hopefully not the last RPG, is now available. If you've been following it or playing it in Early Access, you know what to expect (if you did play an earlier version, please delete prefs.cs file from your Documents/My Games/Age of Decadence folder before starting a new game). If you've just discovered it, "stay awhile and listen".

The most commonly asked question is:
What Kind of Game Is It?

It’s a very different game than anything you’ve ever played. I’m sure you’ve noticed that the RPG genre hasn’t really been explored yet and most RPGs follow the formula that didn’t change in 20 years. While there were always games that strayed off the beaten path – Darklands, Planescape: Torment, King of Dragon Pass – such games were the exceptions that only reinforced the rule.

The Age of Decadence is an experiment, an attempt to explore a different direction, taking you back to the PnP roots of the genre. It doesn’t mean that the game is awesome. In fact, there is a good chance that you won’t like it, precisely because we took too many liberties with the established design.

So What Sets The Age of Decadence Apart From Other Games?

1. The Setup

Traditionally, many fantasy RPGs are about killing things, clearing up dungeons, and being a hero. There is nothing wrong with mindless fun and wish fulfillment, but we want to offer you something different. To quote Tom Chick (Quarter to Three's game critic):

"But Age of Decadence wants nothing to do with kobolds, just as it wants nothing to do with Doo-dads of Unimaginable Power. The overarching idea is a crumbling society divided among three noble Houses, each fumbling around in its own version of darkness to comprehend what destroyed the world. That’s the central mystery. It plays out like noir in that you are the detective, piecing together what really happened from differing accounts, all vividly written with clear voices and efficient prose. And like a detective in a noir yarn, you can’t help but become part of the central mystery, effecting an outcome you might not have intended."

The Age of Decadence is not a game about killing monsters or exploring mystical lands, but rather, surviving amid the greed and brutality of your fellow humans and carving out a name for yourself. Good and bad are purely relative. It’s a world of scheming and backstabbing in which your words and actions have the potential to forge alliances and sow discord, and your path is never certain.

You get to play with seven different factions: three Noble Houses and four 'professional' guilds: merchants, assassins, thieves, and the army, all fighting for power or influence; over 100 named characters, over 750 ‘generic’ characters with unique IDs taking part in violent take-overs, assassinations, and power grabs, and over 600,000 words of dialogue: a well-developed and thought through world, believable characters, realistic motivations, but no elves, dwarves, magic, and wizards in fashionable, pointy hats.

2. Combat difficulty

Another design aspect worth mentioning is combat difficulty. It’s a hard game.

Combat difficulty is integrated into the setting. You can’t say that the world is harsh and unforgiving and then let the player kill everyone who looks at him or her funny. The game has to be hard, dying should be easy, and you should have reasons to pick your fights.

You aren’t a powerful hero who can defeat anyone and save the world and it is the difficulty that reinforces this notion. Make the game easier and we’re back to the powerful hero setup. So unless you’re a natural born killer, watch what you say and think before you act or you’ll end up dead before you can blink.

3. Choices & Consequences

Choices are what the game is all about - crafting your own narrative via a variety of choices that alter the story, playing field, and your options down the road. From multiple quest solutions to branching questlines you'll have plenty decisions to make and consequences of said decisions to deal with, which is what makes the game incredibly replayable.

Starting the game as a mercenary and joining the Imperial Guards will give a completely different experience, different quests, different content and points of view than, say, playing the game as a merchant (less buying low and selling high, more scheming and plotting to gain advantages for the guild), a praetor serving a Noble House, or an assassin.

The questlines are interwoven, forming a large, overarching story, so playing the game only once will be like witnessing events from a single perspective, which is limited by default. You will have to play the game several times to better understand what’s going on, piece everything together, and see the full effect of the choices you make.

The Big Question: Should You Buy The Game?

Try before you buy. Even if everything I said sounds exactly like your kind of game, try the demo first. That’s what it’s there for. It gives you access to the first Chapter, consisting of 3 locations and about 30 quests split between mutually exclusive questlines and decisions.

Link

2nd:

AoD: I'm the hero of... What? I'm dead? Already?

So after doing some research, watching some let's plays, and comparing, I decided to buy AoD. Being a huge fan of RPGs, turn based games, and anything tactical, I booted it up ready for an adventure!

I made my mercenary, skilled him with what I thought was pretty conservative (High sword skill, some block, some crit, crafting, and streetwise) and got ready to rain destruction on the land. 5 minutes later, after wildly swinging a sword, I found myself lying in a pool of my own blood, wondering how I ended up here. I never got to finish that thought as I faded into the blackness of death.

Round 2! Some skill adjustments and deciding to let the assassin walk this time. 15 minutes later, surrounded by some generally tough (albeit poisoned) warriors, I pulled a sword out of my liver and once again drifted into the nether.

AoD is tough. What seems like a perfectly normal reaction in an RPG usually ends up with you on the floor, bleeding profusely, moments away from a tragic early death. And while many find this infuriating and way too hard to be fun; I love it!

It is a little infuriating, I'll admit, but the blow is softened by the usually humorous tale of how you end up dying afterword. Often blatently pointing out how taking on 4 armoured professional killers wasn't the smartest idea, and how there were OBVIOUSLY better options which you foolishy decided to ignore investigating. Then you end up nailed to a wall and used for target practice by some less than accurate thugs.

So why do I love it? Because it's real. You aren't Killzor, Conqueror of Boars, Finder of Magical Maces, Scourge of Evil. You're Bob; Brash young man deciding to pick up a sword and try your hand at mercenary work. You understand the pointy end is supposed to go into the bad guy, and that shields are most effective when raised, but that's about it.

This game ditches the standard formula of an easy beginning where the first few fights are against half blind, deaf, one armed bandits trained in accuracy by Imperial Stormtroopers. No, you are against an actual bandit. A man trained to kill, practiced in the art of killing and raiding, and obviously been "on the job" for longer than you've been playing swordsman. And that is real. Not everyone you meet in life is going to be inferior to you, and this game makes that pretty obvious from the get go.

So stop hating the difficulty. Realize that an assassin, even 5 minutes into the game, isn't going to realistically be a push-over. He's trained to kill, and trained to deliver precise blows to your relatively important, squishy, vital organs. The assassin's guild isn't going to send Joe-Bob One Arm to take you out, they're going to send Alistair "100% Critical" Surestab to end your miserable life. And be assured, he will.

So here is your amazing, game winning, free secret tip: Stop making decisions like your ZeusThor, God of Pwnage. Start making decisions like the highly unskilled, lowly trained, combat inept turkey you are. See 3 higly armed bandits, one of which has a crossbow with an bolt big enough to take down a mammoth ready to fire? Maybe you should avoid that fight. Trader offers you a sweet deal if you'll venture with him out into a forest? Maybe that's a little too far from screaming distance to be considered a good idea.

In AoD, you aren't awesome. Even when you choose to be the awesome guy, you are only awesomely geared, and awesomely inexperienced. You're not born a hero, and you aren't going to die like one. You are _______, new adventurer, about as skilled with a sword as you are with a pool noodle in a fight. Expect no mercy, give none in reurn, and never, ever, trust anyone closer than a spear length.

Link

Faced the same choice this sale, but when you frame it as a choice between a Fallout-inspired turn-based cRPG and a Baldur's Gate-inspired real-time with pause cRPG, it no longer seems as tantalizing a choice.

However, the fighting / reading comment and the fact you never played the Infinity engine games make it a bit more complex for you. Now, I've only played a bit of PoE (the intro, basically), but I'd agree with Leroux, the writing just isn't very good. AoD, on the other hand, has been (mostly) a pleasure. However, AoD tries to steer you away from combat, while PoE doesn't. So, point to each? The final consideration is turn-based vs RTwP. (Not really, there's also things like single character vs party, and high fantasy vs low-magic post-apoc and pretty graphics vs not-so-pretty graphics...)

Definitely try the AoD demo.

I wouldn't quite put it that way, if you play as one of the combat-centred characters (mercenary, assassin, thuggish thief), there's a lot of combat in AoD, much of it in the main questline and which can't be avoided.
But yes, I did get the feeling as well that AoD was somewhat inspired by Fallout. It's however a lot darker and more cynical, almost amoral at times. It's one of few games I can think of where playing a selfish bastard is actually the default. You can still do good things and help people (at least occasionally), but it's harder and less materially rewarding. Kind of like in real life :-)

+1 Thanks for posting that. I've had AoD on my wishlist for quite a while, but was never really sure what the game would be like to play. I have to say, I am even more intrigued and interested now, after reading your assessment/review.

Thank you all, guys. After reading your comments I feel tempted by Age of Decadence. I also read some reviews of both games, and it seems the only down point of AoD is the lack of exploring the lands between the cities. So, are there any interesting dungeons or points of interest besides the city states? I mean, it´s not only talking with nobles and killing bandits, right?

If you love the old Fallout games, you'll enjoy Age of Decadence more than Pillars of Eternity.

However you really should get both eventually. Pillars of Eternity is excellent, even the story/lore grew on me eventually, but it does make a bad first impression.

The dungeons are all very "tight." There are a few (not too many) and none are huge sprawling areas. Something no one else has mentioned - I THINK a lot of the exploration in this game comes from multiple playthroughs. I know in reading some stuff after I played, much like in Fallout 2, there were things I totally missed. As in, had no clue they were even there (in Fallout 2 I completely missed like 85% of New Reno - I LOVE this about a game - THAT'S freeform).

So I think the exploration is less about "Let's explore this dungeon, NOW" and more about "Huh, I think this might have played out totally differently if I were a thief or a travelling loremaster." In reality, not only would it have played out differently you probably will tell an utterly different story.

Depending on your perspective, you'll either love or hate this design choice. Luckily, the game is satisfying but not terribly long. It begs a few playthroughs just to see how different things can be. Again, you'll either hate this concept of exploration or love it.

Dungeons are probably AoD's weakest point imo, definitely don't expect any multi-level dungeons that will keep you occupied for hours. You can explore quite a few ancient ruins, but imo those aren't that well-integrated into the main plotline (that is, I find it hard to come up with a plausible reason for many characters why they would even go there), and unless you're playing a character that has invested in lore you can't do that much there. If you have lore, you can however gradually uncover the truth behind what happened during the empire's downfall 400 years previously, that can be pretty interesting, at least during a first playthrough.
But yes, there aren't that many dungeons in the traditional rpg sense. AoD is an indie game by a small team, and at times it just shows that their resources were limited. Which is a pity since the basic concept is really interesting...personally I think, a game with some of the design elements of AoD (the combat system, the complex storyline with its many branches) coupled with elements from e.g. Baldur's Gate 2 (the epicness, controlling a party) could be really awesome.

Won´t happen, I´m not the hater kind of player :) I like all game genres. It´s just a matter of current interest. I played a lot of Serious Sam and Painkiller lately, so I´m in mood for some relaxing exploration and tactical slaughter...

That's where the fun lies to me, provided that the writing (dialogues, lore, everything) is nice & interesting. Of course it all comes down to the balance between blah-blah & action and how much tolerant a player is, but when the writing is of high standards, most of the time it takes to read through it goes unnoticed.

Anyway, I can't really vote since I haven't played AoD, but PoE is a great fantasy cRPG with lots of replayability. As for it's writing, at times is more verbose than it's needed and you get bombed with lore literally from the character generation screen which I found a bit too much to get hold of all that information, but generally it's good -- not Shadowrun-good, but good nonetheless.