KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

[Max Heap]

Marcaul also had quite a bit of content cut as it seems.
There are some hints at an alternative ending and if you have the sun key (the last one) and double jump you can get to a secret door beyond the chasm to the left of the city entrance. But the room behind is pretty much useless:

Spoiler

Oh and if you are wondering about DLC and where all the stuff went you saw in earlier versions of Marcaul, there is a closed gate in the east:

Spoiler

You can't get through it, but you can squeeze yourself through that slit in the wall. The game then says "Region Discovered: Mediator Area". However I couldn't find a way to actually get in.
So I could just look at it from above and below:

Spoiler

So... yeah... probably factions DLC.

 

[Max Heap]

The most bizarre part about this is: There is a teleporter room with I believe 7 teleporters.
Which for me kinda implied these will open up during the game and you'll hop in here and there doing missions.

But they completely abandoned the teleporter room as well.
Instead it is one teleporter and one mission in the midnight forum.

This is both nonsensical and hugely disappointing given the successful history of the Ultima series with such concepts.

• Every (?) Ultima had moongates (or the serpent gates).
  
• Underworld had the grand staircase (not complete, but at least it had contiguous levels).

I don't want to play a fragmented set of levels, I want to explore the Abyss...

Well don't worry about that... cause even the minimized concept I thought would be in, was scrapped and replaced with something simpler.

 

[bataille]

I'm not an authority on these things, but I think that mil bucks has paid with hilarity well enough. Condolences to the scammed and thanks for the spectacle!

 

[Zombra]

I often see devs say something to the effect of, "we have no more keys to give away!", so obviously there is a limit on giving shit away.

I certainly can't think of an incredibly obvious reason developers would say this all the time.

 

[Latelistener]

This is surreal. 0 reviews and 10 ratings on Metacritic along with 150 ratings on Steam. Some unknown indies receive more attention. Where are those 13,987 backers from Kickstarter?

 

[Max Heap]

I was half expecting that to be honest. In fact I'm surprised it got 150 steam ratings that fast.
The game has like 700 followers on twitter, which is basically zero marketing reach.

Also prior to release, the codex was pretty much the only place really discussing the game.

Spoiler

The devs read here too

Edit:
Also i take everything back about empty bottles.
I found some next to a loaf of bread with a texture saying "deprecated" :D
Both in the boss battle area

Oh and about that last boss battle

Spoiler

You don't even have to jump into the chasm. Its enough to just get killed by some monster to trigger the ending cutscene. Still breaks though.

 

[BEvers]

Video review incoming?

 

[Old Hans]

This is surreal. 0 reviews and 10 ratings on Metacritic along with 150 ratings on Steam. Some unknown indies receive more attention. Where are those 13,987 backers from Kickstarter?

seriously. ive been hunting around various forums and no one is talking about it. I searched for the game name on twitter and there is practically zero talk. Its like the only people who know this games exists are on the codex

 

[Hines]

The difference between what these fellas accomplished in 1992 versus in 2018 is...
http://www.infinitelooper.com/?v=6sh_DY28wl4&p=n#/1103;1117

 

[grimace]

What a lot of these industry veterans forget or forget to mention is that all of the internal infrastructure they used to create the classics, all the pipelines, aren't there anymore. They can't just go from 0% to production, they basically build a company while making a game, which is a bit different from just making a game

I believe this to be an important factor in the failure of UA.

Don't forget you also had to pay Waldo Spectrum (and team) for 4 years of sitting on his/their collective asses. Oh, and pay that dumb hack who wrote a book for them.

Has Tracy Hickman made any public appearances to discuss his work on the novels for Underworld Ascendant and Shroud of the Avatar?

 

[LESS T_T]

I assume they didn't actually spent 4 years in active development. They did some mucking around with the engine before starting to look for a publisher, which took them months if not years. Somebody posted here about one of the developers being involved in some other game in the meantime I believe? Anyway, nothing about this game indicates that it spent more than several months in production.

Here's my take. OtherSide mucked around with the engine and released the initial prototype in November 2015, just eight months after the Kickstarter. At the time that was pretty promising - we thought they were on the right track.

I guess what they were hoping is that this would be enough to land them a publishing deal, but it wasn't. So they....just kept on working on the game on their own, trying to bring it to an advanced enough stage where a publisher would finally bite. Because the team was small, this took a very long time (21 months from prototype to pre-alpha, which is when the 505 Games publishing deal was announced).

We know that a lot of time during those 21 months was spent (fruitlessly) trying to nail down the game's art direction, something that would have been important for getting a publisher onboard. But it would be interesting to know what else happened during that period. Because this game really does make more sense if you discard those 21 months and count just the 8 months from Kickstarter to prototype and the 15 from pre-alpha to release.

For people who want to look into this, my newspost history might be useful: https://rpgcodex.net/tags.php?id=1514

Also that their Lead Engineer and "Technical Co-Founder" Jeffrey Kesselman left them in July 2016.

 

[Latelistener]

Its like the only people who know this games exists are on the codex

Why the hell they even partnered with 505 then?

 

[Vault Dweller]

I doubt you know, Infinitron

You're full of hot air and butthurt most of the time.

Valve is not a devs personal bandwidth and key charity. And I often see devs say something to the effect of, "we have no more keys to give away!", so obviously there is a limit on giving shit away, even, presumably, kickstarter keys.

Zep--

I don't know about a limit but we've requested and received over 7,000 keys (direct sales, GamersGate, covermount deal with PC Guru, etc) without any complaints or questions. I assume that people who participate in successful bundle deals get tens of thousands of keys from Steam.

My guess is that Steam benefits from giving away keys as each activated key is a new or returning player.

 

[agentorange]

Another example of what the mid-game levels are like:

It looks like one of those fake games you see in advertisements for "game development schools." We need more graphics on level 10!

 

[Haba]

This is surreal. 0 reviews and 10 ratings on Metacritic along with 150 ratings on Steam. Some unknown indies receive more attention. Where are those 13,987 backers from Kickstarter?

Trying hard to forget ever backing this fiasco?

 

[PhantasmaNL]

I get the impression that the bulk of the money was wasted on Art Direction and experimenting with physics gimmicks. There seems to be no one with a practical and concrete vision of what was being aimed for, and the direction or leadership to work with a single focus towards that goal was also missing. Something you expect to be offered by the Industry Veterans.

Seldom i have seen a gaming studio self destruct in such a fashion. It is fascinating and sad (for the regular grunts doing the actual work) at the same time.

 

[Child of Malkav]

Serious question: is this game moddable?

 

[taxalot]

Serious question: is this game moddable?

From what I read : Unity = almost zero moddability.

 

[Gord]

Just like I complained about the lack of an interconnected dungeon, instead we got full-retard teleporters, and I claimed it would kill immersion. The official answer was "don't worry, we have ideas, we're working on the grand staircase to link the levels together". Then a week before release, they admitted there would be no grand staircase.

The most bizarre part about this is: There is a teleporter room with I believe 7 teleporters.
Which for me kinda implied these will open up during the game and you'll hop in here and there doing missions.

I suspect that's a leftover from the days when they still were hoping to make a proper interconnected (and likely persistent) dungeon.
Maybe Marcaul was always planned as a kind of hub (or at least became that eventually) and each level would have one portal connecting to Marcaul for quick access, on top of other connections with the other levels.
That's not such a bad thing to do, either. But obviously with the structure being the way it is now, that whole thing became redundant/useless.

And honestly, with the way the game is right now, I'm kind of grateful we don't need to walk back to the teleporters every time we activate a mission, but get one right in the midnight forum...

 

[Curratum]

Is there a level called the Resonant Caves in the game?

I was looking through stretch goals again. Underswamp "new area" is really a level using the assets from the first, with a few more hanging vines.
Is there anything that might be the resonant caves?

 

[Nyast]

Just like I complained about the lack of an interconnected dungeon, instead we got full-retard teleporters, and I claimed it would kill immersion. The official answer was "don't worry, we have ideas, we're working on the grand staircase to link the levels together". Then a week before release, they admitted there would be no grand staircase.

The most bizarre part about this is: There is a teleporter room with I believe 7 teleporters.
Which for me kinda implied these will open up during the game and you'll hop in here and there doing missions.

But they completely abandoned the teleporter room as well.
Instead it is one teleporter and one mission in the midnight forum.

Why the hell is there a teleporter room?
You get out of missions there as well.

Why not just appear in the midnight forum again?
Why wander around the whole damn city first?
Why is the midnight forum closed until you claim your reward?
What the hell is happening in that program code?

I think that was a good move. Hear me out: in the alpha/beta backer builds, the teleporter to mission wasn't in the midnight forum, it was indeed on that 7-teleporter circular stone room at the entrance of Marcaul.

Marcaul's layout was also quite different. You see the NPC female lizard at the entrance of Marcaul that validates your missions ? Well in previous builds it was in another area, similar to the midnight forum, but at the other end of the map.

The amount of walking and back-tracking when you accepted missions was quickly annoying. So they redesigned Marcaul and where the teleporter open. In terms of gameplay I think that's a lot better.. but now, the original place with the 7 teleporters makes no sense anymore..

 

[Nyast]

So, I somehow trick Valve into letting me "sell" my shovelware on their platform.

I manage to sell 10 legit copies and give away 100,000 self generated keys.

I doubt Valve is letting that happen.

Zep--

There are limits, but they're pretty high. You're not supposed to hit them for generating Kickstarter keys. But for sure you can't generate a million keys without Valve's approval. I think they're batch based and getting a new batch might require approval, but the limits for one batch is quite high.

 

[Nyast]

You can't get through it, but you can squeeze yourself through that slit in the wall. The game then says "Region Discovered: Mediator Area". However I couldn't find a way to actually get in.
So I could just look at it from above and below:
So... yeah... probably factions DLC.

No, as I just mentionned above it's just their lazy level design which they changed over and over again. What you're seing here is the old beta area for the "mediators", basically where the 4 lizardmen representatives ( the female one at the entrance of Marcaul, and the 3 for each faction they put around her ), were standing.

 

[Nyast]

I suspect that's a leftover from the days when they still were hoping to make a proper interconnected (and likely persistent) dungeon.
Maybe Marcaul was always planned as a kind of hub (or at least became that eventually) and each level would have one portal connecting to Marcaul for quick access, on top of other connections with the other levels.
That's not such a bad thing to do, either. But obviously with the structure being the way it is now, that whole thing became redundant/useless.

In the first alpha backer build ( June ), they forgot ( yup, they confirmed it ) to remove an option in the menu, which allows you to go back to Marcaul ( which at that time, wasn't possible in "normal" gameplay ). So we could see what they were attempting to do "unofficially" with Marcaul.

I actually criticized it at the time, cause it was a huge linear corridor.. but, god, if I had known. It was still much better designed than what we have today. It looked like an attempt at a real city. There were ( empty, ofc ) buildings and side areas everywhere. It felt like a more natural layout for a city. I think they were still trying, at the time. Once the beta hit, Marcaul had been cleaned of any interesting layout and essentially had become this circular forum that we have today.

 

[Gord]

I wonder how much more work was wasted on things that never made it into the final product.
Then again, just quickly putting some basic map together is probably not that much work until you start filling it with content and polish it.