KickStarter Underworld Ascendant Pre-Release Thread

[Nyast]

Well.. here's the problem: if they had to ban everybody criticizing the game... they'd be left with almost nobody left ...

 

[Nyast]

It gets better and better. LOLs keep coming !

Community manager:

the factions are represented by mediators. You will not see dwarves elves or shamblers in the game.

 

[Max Heap]

Just like I said...
The factions are only in our hearts & minds. Now that's something I already expected, but this here:

Last, storytelling is also accomplished with VO—you’ll hear a lot more of it in the beginning as we set the context for the game.

...that's just stupid after the feedback they got. People constantly criticized that Typhon/Cabirus wouldn't shut up. Even on the steam forums a guy was asking whether you could turn that off.

Jesus, I hope RatTower does better with Monomyth than this. How some codex rando can crank out more promising updates than a team of industry veterans is a mystery to me at this point.
Monomyth got a working convo system, an interconnected dungeon and (from what I see) a relatively solid RPG system. Either Rats is fucking with us or somebody really messed up OSE's project management over the last 4 years. Cause something doesn't add up here. What on earth have they been doing?

Why all that fuss about the lizard language if there are no conversations? I just don't get it.

 

[Nyast]

Well.. that looks so much better than UA. Shame on them, really.

 

[Zep Zepo]

What on earth have they been doing?

Adding useless stuff like parkour, wall-running, rope swinging and physics (and not added very well I must say).

Seriously the parkour/wall-running shown in the early days sealed the deal (for me) the game will be shit.

Too much wasted effort on bullshit, and not enough on the actual game play.

Zep--

 

[Zep Zepo]

I mean really..how many months did they string people along about dialogue "Help us with the Lizard language!!!"...only to be scrapped.

It's a comedy of errors.

Zep--

 

[Max Heap]

Well.. that looks so much better than UA.

Yeah, also I wanna see that immersive dungeon ecology do this...

 

[agris]

I mean really..how many months did they string people along about dialogue "Help us with the Lizard language!!!"...only to be scrapped.

It's a comedy of errors.

Zep--

This is why I say it wasn't four years in development. I believe there was a token amount of pre-production / thumb-twiddling happening for the first two, well represented by said lizard-man language.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Also, that first video with the fire-monster (put out the torches or some shit, I forget now)..."GUYS! TOTALLY NOT SCRIPTED"

Turns out, it was totally scripted.

Zep--

 

[Zep Zepo]

I think it took 3 years for programmer kid to learn the ins and outs of Unity (and still not up to snuff). Always so proud of his dumb ass experiments into default Unity stuff.

Zep--

 

[Zep Zepo]

Also, didn't they have some debacle where they didn't pay for some tools license along the way? I seem to remember that...

Zep--

 

[skacky]

This whole thing is unbelievable. Unbelievable.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

This had amateur hour written on it from the start. When all your updates for the first 1-2 years consist of showing how you’re dicking around with the engine like an impressionable kid taking its first „game design in unity“ class in coursera, something’s seriously wrong.

Was anybody here really expecting anything else? How accomplished industry veterans could deliver such a fuck up is well beyond me though.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Just like I said...

Jesus, I hope RatTower does better with Monomyth than this. How some codex rando can crank out more promising updates than a team of industry veterans is a mystery to me at this point.
Monomyth got a working convo system, an interconnected dungeon and (from what I see) a relatively solid RPG system. Either Rats is fucking with us or somebody really messed up OSE's project management over the last 4 years. Cause something doesn't add up here. What on earth have they been doing?

Probably down to having a clear vision in the beginning beyond "Milk nostalgia" It's all well and good wanting to make a UU sequel but Arx Fatalis did it's own thing in a lot of ways and the devs knew they were a mid budget team. Looks like Monomyth is doing that. It's not trying to be THE NEXT GREAT INNOVATIVE GAME IN IMMERSIVE RPG DUNGEON CRAWLERS! Whilst simultaneously trying to milk newfish who don't give a fuck. Here's a fool proof plan for a Arx or UU successor that the Codex would like.

1. Have a niche audience.
2. Budget your game for that.
3. Make the game that Niche audience wants to the best of your ability.
4. Profit.

Kickstarter should be great at this. And in some cases it is (especially for board games) but it's all too easy for some pot bellied, balding programmer from the before times to throw member berries at you and claim that they alone were the sole reason that GOAT RPG was great and if you give them funds they'll make the same GOAT RPG but "Modern". Which often means they don't give a shit about the niche audience after taking the money and just want the funds to make their game for a "wider audience". See how the devs behind Phoenix Point are responding to criticism for an example of this in action.

TLDR: Smaller devs with vision are more likely to make good cave clambering game. Old people are bad.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I think this may actually be the worst Kickstarter in terms of project management and technical incompetence. We‘ve seen some bad shit over the years, but this feels like a high-school project. I still can’t wrap my head around what they were thinking.

 

[Infinitron]

We made fun of the System Shock 1 remake devs, but in retrospect they did exactly what OtherSide should have done - realized early enough that they were on the road to nowhere and radically changed direction. This is a game that sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 should have had a Kickstarter update saying "We fucked up, we're rebooting the project and making a low budget retro game".

 

[BEvers]

Some insight from the superbackers:

To my knowledge it has not been announced until recently that none of the factions have a real presence in the game, the only thing I can remember is the email announcing a change concerning the figurine rewards. This is the exact wording from the email informing higher-level backers about the new kinds of figurines that the backers will receive:

Additionally, the 4" tall Faction Figure reward has been upgraded to a choice of:

Cabirus, a major character from the series’ backstory and the player’s enigmatic advisor

Aelita, the roguish outcast, whose blade is as sharp as her wit

Resherak, distant relative of the Lizard Man Ishtass and the overseer of the Memoreum survival lodge in Marcaul

(my italics).

So clearly now it seems that decisions had been made to cut factions, and probably all the other cut content, no later than the start of 2018.

The fact that this information was relegated to an email notification (only sent to those at the respective tiers?) and not as a major announcement made on the main Kickstarter page and in these forums REALLY rubs me the wrong way. I had figured that the change was made because they thought it would be more interesting to make figurines for the lizard men, cabirus, and Aelita due to the later 2 characters being considered major star characters by the Devs and the lizard man because of how popular the lizard men have been on the forums. Factions were indisputably a very major aspect of the game from the Kickstarter campaign. It talked all about them. Even recent updates which happen to mention factions say nothing of them not actually being present. They're kinda featured on the T-shirt and (used to be) the main image on the Kickstarter page.

 

[taxalot]

Finally the SOTA spiritual successor Ultima fans were waiting for.

 

[Nano]

We made fun of the System Shock 1 remake devs, but in retrospect they did exactly what OtherSide should have done - realized early enough that they were on the road to nowhere and radically changed direction. This is a game that sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 should have had a Kickstarter update saying "We fucked up, we're rebooting the project and making a low budget retro game".

Nah. Ultima Underworld represented the absolute top-end of video game technology back in the early 90s. Making a low-budget sequel strips out a lot of what Ultima Underworld was about, IMO.

 

[RoSoDude]

We made fun of the System Shock 1 remake devs, but in retrospect they did exactly what OtherSide should have done - realized early enough that they were on the road to nowhere and radically changed direction. This is a game that sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 should have had a Kickstarter update saying "We fucked up, we're rebooting the project and making a low budget retro game".

Nah. Ultima Underworld represented the absolute top-end of video game technology back in the early 90s. Making a low-budget sequel strips out a lot of what Ultima Underworld was about, IMO.

I take this to mean you think any proper sequel to Ultima Underworld is out of the question then, right? Because there's not a chance in hell we'd ever get a big-budget spiritual successor to a hybrid realtime FPP/RPG dungeon crawler. It was niche then (despite being revolutionary), and it's an even smaller proportion of the audience now.

I'm not saying you're wrong, because this low-budget attempt in Underworld: Ascendant bit off way more than it could chew and doesn't appear to live up to the name at all

 

[Nyast]

I will be streaming an hour of the beta in a few minutes:

https://www.twitch.tv/nyast/

 

[Nyast]

Another failure to complete my quest: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/323795979

 

[udm]

This is why I say it wasn't four years in development. I believe there was a token amount of pre-production / thumb-twiddling happening for the first two, well represented by said lizard-man language.

I don't disagree with what you're saying here, but man, it really boggles the mind how people can just twiddle thumbs for weeks, even months, on end. Holy shit, I cannot imagine the board room having no sense of urgency when weeks just go by like that.

 

[Max Heap]

Another failure to complete my quest: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/323795979

This is outright painful to watch.
The z-fighting, the holes in geometry, the culling, the physics catapulting you into a wall (that was actually pretty funny), the AI, the shader problems (vegetation), the chain physics, the struggle of getting up the stairs.

Forget about making it an Underworld game. Just make it playable.

 

[BEvers]

That enemy AI...

Those combat animations....

Those chain climbing physics (and physics in general)...

And those volcanic fissures OF DOOM seem more like a minor annoyance that throws random "kill enemies with fire" achievements at you. The lizardmen are super entertaining though.

I don't want to know what kind of crunch time the Otherside devs are doing right now. I wonder if they are even capable of fixing all the major problems on display here.