KickStarter Underworld Ascendant Pre-Release Thread

[V_K]

Hopefully the final game will allow solving puzzles with less jumping.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Couple nice little easter eggs there in the standard Star Wars guy death scream and the fact that BC is the rune combo for fire. (BC Quest for Fire).

You abused the box jumping there. Why not eh, it was working for you. I imagine though that they will refine and curtail the one hammer fits all. I saw some balls and other items you didn't really touch. I bet you could build some sort of device with some of those. Lots of room for replay for you on that.

Over all pretty interesting peek into early 'improvisation'. Definitely sandbox IMO. I didn't see anything scripted there other than events (such as catching fire, feeezing, levitating, etc.) on objects when certain conditions are met.

DawnrazorDCLXVI you mentioned set peices. Can you elaborate? I saw staged puzzles in Nekot-The-Brave's video, such as reach this ledge, get over the lava etc.

 

[Jedi Exile]

Seems like they know what they are doing.

 

[Ash]

Hopefully the final game will allow solving puzzles with less jumping.

Git gud fag. There's nothing wrong with FP platforming, especially if there's lower body awareness.

 

[LESS T_T]

Interview with Nuerath on tactical combat, physicality of the environment and factions: http://www.pcgamesn.com/underworld-...orld-ultimas-successor-20-years-in-the-making

When discussing first-person fantasy games, these days you’d be hard pressed to avoid talking about The Elder Scrolls. Yet, for all their ambition, for all the things they do right, they are still laden with rather pedestrian combat. With conflict being such an important part of Ascendant, what approach are Neurath and his team were taking with the action in order to avoid the mashy, sometimes thoughtless brawling and spell-flinging of Skyrim?

“We don't want it to be a button mashing game. This is an RPG, so your decisions as a character, how you develop your character and your abilities are central,” says Neurath. “It’s more tactical… if you focus on fighting skills, you'd have a package of skills and abilities that would include some fairly straight-up weapons and combat skills, you'd have different types of weapons like swords and defensive manoeuvres, but also what we're calling agility class manoeuvres that give you extra moves and abilities that aren't strictly a weapon strike or defence, but allow you to get a leg up during running combat.”

This ‘running combat’ is an exciting prospect, evoking the kinetic, leaping, swinging duels of Errol Flynn. The halls, chambers and caverns of the Stygian underworld are designed for travelling fights, with verticality, places to climb and crawl and jump, where traps and doors and ledges give players an edge just as much as a sharp sword. It’s the swashbuckling school of fighting.

Neurath emphasises the physicality of the environment; it’s a character you’ll be interacting with, a place you’ll become intimately familiar with.

“From the Underworlds through System Shock and Thief, one of the things we did that was very distinctive from a lot of games today was we created these very close and richly interactive spaces. You could reach out, there were things you could move or shift, or levers you could pull, or things you could jump on or swing on and ropes you could climb, there was a lot of rich interaction with the space around you, then you use that space and those kinds of interaction as part of solving any challenge or riddle you were faced with.”

Like fighter-type characters, magic users will be able to take advantage of the environment, using spells to move objects around, manipulate the path of an enemy and paralyse them so that they get stuck in a trap. Speaking of traps, tricky, deadly devices will pepper the Stygian Abyss, creating fatal threats for both players and their enemies. And these are serious business. When you see a blade falling from a ceiling or a gory, spiked, spinning number, you’re not just seeing scripted animation with a small set of predetermined outcomes; you’re seeing a device with gears and systems and guts you can interact with and affect in myriad ways.

“We actually construct [traps] in a way that might work if you really had a dungeon and traps,” explains Neurath. “There's a column with spikes on it [referring to the demo that you can watch above], it's spinning, it's on a track and it moves back and forth with a force and springs. So, for instance, as you've seen it going back and forth in the corridor, you can take a big log or something hefty, jam it against the wall and stop it swinging back and forth and pass under it freely without any risk of getting hit by it. Or you can jam it and there's this monster that wants to get onto the other side, so you can unjam it just in time for it to nail that creature. So you can use traps both ways. You can think about ways to disarm or to get an edge on a trap then use that trap against a monster.

The impact of traps, as well as weapon strikes, is determined by physics. Ascendent moves away from pen-and-paper conventions, so damage is no longer calculated by dice rolls and the like. The type of weapon or trap, the force of the swing, the wind up, the environment – this is what determines damage. If a boulder falls on your skull, there’s no set number of HP it takes off. How far it’s fallen, its weight and size, all the things that would have an impact in the real world have an impact in the Stygian Abyss.

The end result of the liberating amount of interactivity and the realistic physics is the ‘Improvisation Engine’. Ascendent is all about experimentation and uncovering unconventional solutions to problems, and not just puzzles, but anything from combat to crossing a river. There could be ten or 20 ways to solve a problem in a room, varying in difficulty, and each is as valid as the others.

Neurath hopes that, by offering so many solutions – so many that the team is certain that players will end up doing things that the developers never even anticipated – Ascendent will tempt people back for more, once they’ve finished the game for the first time. A magic user is probably going to come up with different solutions from a melee fighter, giving new life to each encounter.

It’s not just the Improvisation Engine that lends Ascendent replayability, though. Three big factions dwell in the underworld – Dwarves, Shamblers and Dark Elves, who have actually come from the world of Shroud of the Avatar, Richard Garriott’s in-development MMO – and players can choose which one to ultimately support, altering the trajectory of the game. Supporting one faction over another won’t make enemies out of the other factions, Neurath notes. There’s an uneasy tension between them, but they aren’t in an all-out war. The things players do to win favour will have a tangible impact on the world, however, even altering the ecosystem of the Stygian Abyss.

“Seeing how your actions change the world I think is very powerful,” Neurath tells me. “We have subterranean rivers that run in sections of the Stygian Abyss and you'll have the ability to change the course or open up gates and flood certain sections, and that's going to change the geology or physiology of that section, so creatures that don't deal well with water and flooding will be pushed out and creatures that like the water are going move in. You'll change the ecology, the setting, and that has repercussions.”

And the rest is about Kickstarter and the certain fabulous crowdfunding consultants.

 

[V_K]

Hopefully the final game will allow solving puzzles with less jumping.

Git gud fag. There's nothing wrong with FP platforming, especially if there's lower body awareness.

Of course. Just as there's nothing wrong with 2-step dancing or cover shooting.

 

[Irenaeus II]

Just as there's nothing wrong with 2-step dancing or cover shooting.

 

[Darkzone]

Judging from the prototype this has still a long way to go, but "The Long Dark" was also not that good in its prototype stage (in early beta it was very good) and now it is very good received and has sold over 460k copies, despite it is still in EA on steam.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

The set pieces kinda disappear when you travel into the playground, I think the beginning is the only part that rail roads the player in one direction.

I managed to get my framerate up by 7-10 fps, so I'll record some of my own solutions in time.

I hope to get an interview with Paul Neurath on video one of these days.

Don't pity the laptop. It has done me well.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

Hopefully the final game will allow solving puzzles with less jumping.

Git gud fag. There's nothing wrong with FP platforming, especially if there's lower body awareness.

Of course. Just as there's nothing wrong with 2-step dancing or cover shooting.

First-person platforming needs more love.

 

[Maxwell's Demon]

I haven't followed this game's development at all, but watching that prototype in action gave me a strong impression of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic's single-player demo. I played the fuck out of that demo before release.

 

[Old Hans]

Footage.

I haven't seen a framerate like that since I tried to play Everquest fullscreen back in the 90s.

 

[catfood]

I haven't seen a framerate like that since I tried playing Ultima Underworld back in the early 90's. Now I'm all nostalgic.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'm not seeing anything bad in this alpha. Quite the contrary.

What I AM seeing though, is a LONG development time ahead. I'm not sure what release schedule they have, but I'm calling it now that this game won't be out until Q3 2017 at the very earliest.

 

[Viata]

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

Q3 2016, actually.

 

[Infinitron]

Even the Kickstarter page says Q4 2016.

It'll probably be delayed to 2017, question is how far.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

IIRC UW and many other LGS games had relatively short bake times - 18 months was it?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

IIRC, UUW had something closer to 2 years of baking, but we're only nitpicking about a couple of weeks at the most about whether it's 18 months or 24 months.

My "projection" for Underworld Ascendant is based on:

# Experience (30 years of it)
# Gut feeling (something I've learned to trust over all those years)
# Seeing how other Kickstarter projects fare (sad but true)

I don't doubt in any way that Otherside can pull this off - but getting the extra time needed can make a WORLD of difference. Case in point - read the original Readme.txt that comes with Star Control 2. 9 months extra development time turned a fairly barebones resource management game/space combat game into an iconic legend.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

Nice signature. Unkillable Cat.

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

They are outsourcing, Chris made it pretty clear it was simple what they were doing.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Nice signature. Unkillable Cat.

How I wish I could claim that as my own. But I can't.

The truth is, that sig is a "remix" based on the Gothic:Arcania review done by Darth Roxor

The bottom line of his review was pretty much what I put in my sig...because it was too applicable.

 

[Melan]

All but the best planned Kickstarter projects are late. That is a fact of life, and anyone who contributes should acknowledge it. This project will be late. The prototype shows they are testing various basic subsystems, but not committed yet to release a textured, functional little corner of the Abyss - which is what the prototype should have been.

 

[Morgoth]

Those are ex-LGS folks. You can bet your ass there will be delays since these people always had a different approach to game development. And I applaud them for that.

 

[Melan]

I kinda expected this, but bigger: