KickStarter Underworld Ascendant Pre-Release Thread

[taxalot]

The game with no scripts and the game with no NPC are releasing so awfully close to each others that you probably cannot tell which is which.

 

[Nyast]

Especially for a game with no scripted events

Maybe I'm being dense, but is this just a buzzword? I'd be enormously surprised if U:A doesn't have scripted events. Pull a lever to make something move? That's scripting. Engage a level trigger and an enemy spawns in? That's scripting too. Any interaction with a non-generic result has to be scripted by the game designers. All of the previous games by LGS et al included scripting to add dynamism and surprise to the game world and even enhance the level of simulation. Ultima: Underworld features many levers and switches which trigger specialized mechanisms, such as the secret lever to drain the pond in the Stygian Abyss, unflooding the chamber where the Blade of Caliburn had been hidden. System Shock had all manner of scripted traps and enemy spawns to make it feel like SHODAN was watching your every move and redesigning the station around you to thwart your progress. And so on with Thief, SS2, and Deus Ex.

I know these guys love to talk about expanding the simulation by making everything a generic systems interaction, but it's just not feasible. A bit of light scripting here and there can actually help sell the illusion of a dynamic, reactive world, and is not actually at odds with this kind of game. Without it, level designers are limited to static placements of enemies and a handful of repeated challenges that can be only be constructed from generic game elements like doors, spikes, and platforms. Short of actually building mechanisms and fully simulating their physics with dynamic constraints (which is absolutely infeasible), what's wrong with having a simple lever or switch that just makes something happen somewhere in the level? Nothing, and we already know from the demos that they're in the game. They should just be precise and say "for a game not focused on scripted events", which is straightforward and accurate.

I think they mean "scripted events" in the context of the story. Aka cinematics that conveniently change the state of the world, spawn new enemies, etc..

 

[glass blackbird]

The more it sounds like a trainwreck the more I want to play the thing. Mediocre is the worst possible outcome

 

[RoSoDude]

I think they mean "scripted events" in the context of the story. Aka cinematics that conveniently change the state of the world, spawn new enemies, etc..

Okay, so we are approaching buzzword territory then, where the term has essentially taken on the weight of the mid-2000s AAA game where the player simply walks from cinematic scripted event to cinematic scripted event with minimal player input. Notice how I had to use the actual meaning of scripted event to describe what I meant here, though. That's why this sort of talk can be confusing and unclear.

 

[glass blackbird]

They mean things like how in many games you burn things by having torch and going to the place where it lets you use torch; if instead you code in the ability of things to burn then the player can just set whatever on fire as opposed to in specific ways and prescriptive locations. That's what they mean when they talkk about scripted interactions.

Now, you're right that those too are scripted, but that's the meaning of the buzzword they're using here. Cinematics or specific actions that only work in certain ways.

Also, that often just means a tech demo with no level design. Like, Trespasser and Far Cry 2 work that way and it fucking sucks

 

[RoSoDude]

They mean things like how in many games you burn things by having torch and going to the place where it lets you use torch; if instead you code in the ability of things to burn then the player can just set whatever on fire as opposed to in specific ways and prescriptive locations. That's what they mean when they talkk about scripted interactions.

Now, you're right that those too are scripted, but that's the meaning of the buzzword they're using here. Cinematics or specific actions that only work in certain ways.

Also, that often just means a tech demo with no level design. Like, Trespasser and Far Cry 2 work that way and it fucking sucks

I was actually being more specific, not merely trying to reduce everything to lines of code. A stim and response system for e.g. fire would not fall into "scripting" by my above definition, as the interaction is governed by a general ruleset (in a lot of games fire is scripted, but not here). I'm referring explicitly to one-off triggers and scripts used by level designers to add events and interactivity beyond what is possible/feasible through generic systems. These things shouldn't be dominant in a game in this genre, but they shouldn't be absent either.

Just so we're on the same page, would you say Trespasser and Far Cry 2 are examples of pure scripting, or pure systems in the context of the above? I haven't played either, but it looks more like the latter to me. And yeah, that means that while individual game elements can cover a lot of ground, the world itself can feel rather bland and shallow, like the designers just plopped things in without really designing unique features and events. I much prefer a good mix, like e.g. System Shock 2 where there are a lot of generic game systems (e.g. the AI system, security system, combat system, resource system, RPG systems,) operating at every level of play, but there are also a lot of scripted elements to suit the game's atmosphere and create unique challenges for the player.

 

[LESS T_T]

Director Joe Fielder is on IGN Unfiltered. Here's a preview clip, him as a Boom Blox dev, talking about Steven Spielberg:



Also a bit about Doug Church in between. What a clip.

 

[glass blackbird]

They mean things like how in many games you burn things by having torch and going to the place where it lets you use torch; if instead you code in the ability of things to burn then the player can just set whatever on fire as opposed to in specific ways and prescriptive locations. That's what they mean when they talkk about scripted interactions.

Now, you're right that those too are scripted, but that's the meaning of the buzzword they're using here. Cinematics or specific actions that only work in certain ways.

Also, that often just means a tech demo with no level design. Like, Trespasser and Far Cry 2 work that way and it fucking sucks

I was actually being more specific, not merely trying to reduce everything to lines of code. A stim and response system for e.g. fire would not fall into "scripting" by my above definition, as the interaction is governed by a general ruleset (in a lot of games fire is scripted, but not here). I'm referring explicitly to one-off triggers and scripts used by level designers to add events and interactivity beyond what is possible/feasible through generic systems. These things shouldn't be dominant in a game in this genre, but they shouldn't be absent either.

Just so we're on the same page, would you say Trespasser and Far Cry 2 are examples of pure scripting, or pure systems in the context of the above? I haven't played either, but it looks more like the latter to me. And yeah, that means that while individual game elements can cover a lot of ground, the world itself can feel rather bland and shallow, like the designers just plopped things in without really designing unique features and events. I much prefer a good mix, like e.g. System Shock 2 where there are a lot of generic game systems (e.g. the AI system, security system, combat system, resource system, RPG systems,) operating at every level of play, but there are also a lot of scripted elements to suit the game's atmosphere and create unique challenges for the player.

Trespasser and FC2 have things which are meant to show off pure player-controlled systems (physics and gun control in the former, fire and environmental stuff in the latter) and in both cases they're just sort of a big crutch to try and cover up a bad game. very impressive, especially for the time, and you can mess with the systems to accomplish things... but not at all a replacement for someone actually making good levels and areas. Both those games have cutscenes and stuff too; I was just pointing to them as games clearly built around a tech demo of systems rather than an actual series of design decisions. They figured out how to make some technically impressive interactions and then tried to make a game around them... with awful results.

The ideal is something like Thief 2 where you can play with the mechanics and get around and do things the developers didn't intend, but that's so insanely hard to get right. It seems like that's how they're pitching this game now, but god knows it's not how the gameplay footage I've seen has looked...

 

[ShaggyMoose]

The more it sounds like a trainwreck the more I want to play the thing. Mediocre is the worst possible outcome

Are we talking about Descent to Undermountain levels of trainwreck here?

 

[Safav Hamon]

There's more enthusiasm for this game than this thread suggests. I'm already sold out of keys.

 

[BEvers]

The first publisher-sponsored hype stream has started. Interestingly, they chose a German streamer.

 

[Junmarko]

Interestingly, they chose a German streamer.

Germany lifts Doom sales ban after 17 years

Germans tend to be happy with whatever they can get

 

[BEvers]

Germans tend to be happy with whatever they can get

That argument doesn't work here, because the next sponsored stream is Swiss

 

[sk2k]

No torches?

 

[Infinitron]

Director Joe Fielder is on IGN Unfiltered. Here's a preview clip, him as a Boom Blox dev, talking about Steven Spielberg:



Also a bit about Doug Church in between. What a clip.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/1...t-of-pong-while-filming-jaws-a-ign-unfiltered

BOOM BLOX DEV: STEVEN SPIELBERG SAYS HE PLAYED A LOT OF PONG WHILE FILMING JAWS – IGN UNFILTERED

Steven Spielberg, the iconic director behind films such as E.T., Jurassic Park, and Saving Private Ryan, reportedly played quite a bit of Pong in his day.

In this month’s IGN Unfiltered, Underworld Ascendant creative director Joe Fielder mused about his brief time working alongside the enigmatic filmmaker on 2008’s Boom Blox.

“Spielberg, he came up with the initial idea for throwing the ball and would check in regularly,” Fielder said. “It was great to be able to tell my dad 'Steven Spielberg stopped by my desk the other day.' He's a gamer. He told a story about how he first got introduced to games, when he was working on Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss said 'Oh, come here. You've got to check this out.' He and Steven Spielberg went off and played Pong on one of the piers until the machine was full of quarters and couldn't play anymore. So that was his in for video games.”

It wouldn’t be the last time Spielberg delved into the world of video games. Spielberg had also assisted in the design of The Dig, a mid-90’s point-and-click adventure game, as well as the FMV game Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair. In an appropriate bit of “what’s old is new” Spielberg was eventually tapped to direct Ready Player One, the geek culture mashup film that combined a love for Spielberg’s work as well as countless video game references.

You can hear more stories like this one in this month’s episode of IGN Unfiltered on Tuesday, featuring Underworld Ascendant creative director and former BioShock designer Joe Fielder. Hosted by IGN’s very own Ryan McCaffrey, Unfiltered is a deep dive into the lives and minds of the industry’s biggest names, including 3D Realms’ founder Scott Miller and Insomniac Games’ CEO Ted Price.

Weird.

 

[BEvers]

No torches?

No, there are no torches in the game. You hold glowing crystals instead. They explained that somewhere, but I'm too lazy to look now - I think it's because of the whole fire physics thing.

 

[sk2k]

No torches?

No, there are no torches in the game. You hold glowing crystals instead. They explained that somewhere, but I'm too lazy to look now - I think it's because of the whole fire physics thing.

Uh, oh. No torches because of possible fires? Weird design choice.

 

[BEvers]

Just posting the UA section of this:

Chatting immersive sims, Underworld Ascendant, and communicating options with Warren Spector and Otherside Entertainment

Spector’s next game, Underworld Ascendant, created with Otherside Entertainment, is much more reined in.

“For Warren and I, we have never made a game – or at the least the games we are proudest of – where we didn’t have a bunch of dead ends,” producer Paul Neurath explains. “There has to be some intellectual honesty about it – recognising when you are reaching your dead ends, but also that’s the process and you winnow down to the core of what makes a great game.

“With Underworld Ascendant, it is a tightly scoped game in a lot of ways. There’s not a lot of territory to explore. You’re not going to be wandering for days across the abyss or anything like that. But our hope is that what we delivered was what matters to the players and that deep immersive sim is central and informs everything that we decided on.”

Underworld Ascendant’s lineage is clear. This is from the same school of design as Deus Ex and Thief – a genre that lets players find their own way through each problem, usually in creative ways, and sometimes even in ways the developers didn’t anticipate. Each system interlocks and the rules are consistent, creating something akin to a collaboration between player and creator.

For this immersive sim there are three main pillars: combat, stealth, and magic. All three disciplines can be mixed and matched, or players are free to specialise down one specific route. Whatever they choose, there will be solutions to problems that feel unique to them.

“We said back during the Kickstarter that we wanted you to come up with solutions that we’d have never thought of before,” Spector says. “I thought that was a little bit much, but even the first time we released an early prototype of the game to some of our early backers, they were coming up with solutions that we had never thought of before.

“In that first video that someone posted, they found a way of using ‘Move Wood’ on a crate to create an elevator. We were like: ‘Oh, that’s in the game now’. Every single time we have taken the game out to show people, we have seen solutions we couldn’t have imagined.”

Another player during a PAX demo got through one of the areas using only an 80lb sconce. They picked it up and carried it around the entire level, using it to block enemies and traverse the environment.

The idea behind Underworld Ascendant was to create a pure immersive sim that retained the values of the genre, but also while pushing it forward. This is no easy task with a core team of 14 people, but the developers say that this lack of resources helped keep their ambitions in check.

“The constantly evolving world is an area we have looked at,” writer and director Joe Fielder explains. “We have a pretty small indie team here and we’re up against teams that have hundreds of people. We really saw a lot of larger RPGs have miles and miles of world to explore in a tourist sense, but they can become kind of static over time.

“In our case, we took inspiration from a lot of modern board games that do interesting things, where you have a repeatable narrative and a lot of interesting variation, designer curated.”

“The big touristy games, the way I always describe them is ‘miles wide and their simulations are an inch deep’, which means the gameplay possibilities are limited,” Spector adds. “For us, we’re in the ‘inch wide, miles deep’ game where we may have a smaller tighter environment, but the things you can do are much richer that you are really incentivised to play over and over and over again to see the world differently – not just to see the expanse of the world but to see the impact you can have on the world, which is one of the hallmarks of the immersive simulation.”

The magic system in Underworld Ascendant was also built to add depth to your choices within this evolving world. The runestones are based on the traditional Norse alphabet and you can combine them into nouns, verbs, and adjectives. You get recipes for some results, but many of the most surprising are left for you to figure out on your own. Spells allow you to wield the elements, but they also allow you to manipulate the environment or change the property of items and enemies.

“There’s a couple of areas where we are really trying to push forward more and more to see what immersive sims can do, and innovate when we can,” Neurath says. “In a lot more recent immersive sim games – Dishonored, BioShock Infinite, Deus Ex – those tend to build in A, B C solutions where the designers have built a path through any area. In Dishonored, you can fight the enemy or you can stealth past them. If you choose stealthing, the game will recognise that and give you a different experience. It’s very much the designers laying out that you can do one of those two options. With Underworld Ascendant, it’s much more fluid.”

Otherside is also attempting to solve on of the old design issues that have dogged immersive sims for almost two decades: communicating what’s possible to the player. I personally love the Dishonored series because I know about a bunch of the cool, unexpected things you can do with its tools: a decapitated head, to me, is a grenade – it just needs a mine sticking on it. Otherside hopes to spotlight some of these weird combos in a bid to deter people from trying to run through the game swinging their sword at everything.

“The story in is the settlement of Marchaul,” Fielder explains. “Their entire society is based on trading these unique survival tactics. They reward you for varying your tactics and also they are really focused on having you combine these tactics in interesting ways. The game is constantly pushing you to explore all the different opportunities you have, the side bounties you offer are: ‘Hey, can you fulfil this quest in an interesting way?’. One way might be not being seen; another might be entering into a level without anything in your backpack and just adapting with things you find within the world. We find these are ways we like to play. A lot of the time this pushes you to explore to see what you can get away with.”

Dishonored: Death of the Outsider tried something similar recently, giving players optional bounties within missions that encourage players to try different playstyles. It also stripped out the persistent punishments the series is famous for, in which the world becomes more hostile the more aggressively you play, giving players the breathing room to mess around.

There’s another problem that’s followed the immersive sim genre since inception, however, and it’s one that Otherside is hoping to dodge by branding Underworld Ascendant a ‘dungeon crawler’. Here’s the thing: to a layman, the term ‘immersive sim’ means nothing, and it communicates even less.

“I wish we could come up with something better,” Spector says. “Underworld came out in 1992 and since then we have been trying to come up with a cooler way to say ‘immersive simulation’. It’s pathetic. I’ve been calling them ‘in-sims’ recently, but that’s inelegant, too. After a few years of trying to come up with a term, the best I had was ’emergent RPG’. That’s still kind-of lacking.”

Still, to those in the know, there’s something extremely exciting about that genre definition. While immersive sim elements have been making their way into more mainstream titles – most notably, Zelda: Breath of the Wild – there are very few pure immersive sims being made. A week ago, I didn’t know Underworld Ascendant existed, and now I know there’s a new immersive sim being made by some of the people who helped make the genre happen in the first place. I’m already combining runic spells of my own in my mind, ahead of when the game releases later this week.

https://www.vg247.com/2018/11/13/ch...tions-warren-spector-otherside-entertainment/

 

[udm]

Next thing you know, D&D 5e will be called an "immersive sim on the tabletop".

 

[Nyast]

These guys are out of touch. There are more immersive / reactive / emergent situations in a game like Far Cry, than there is in UA.

It also pisses me off they mention Dishonored ( or other games, really ) as having 2-3 pre-designed rigid solutions whereas UA will be "more fluid". Just watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6APy0Go1psk

 

[Kruno]

This game can be completed in 4 hours.

 

[BEvers]

The UA crew is losing faith in the Kickstarter system

 

[Infinitron]

Sam wasn't even around back then. I'd love to hear from the employees of OtherSide who were there during the Kickstarter just what they thought they were going to be able to achieve with $860k.

 

[BEvers]

Say what you want about 505 Games, but they're not shy to invest in streamers. Two more sponsored videos in the most beautiful language in the world:

 

[Max Heap]

What an odd choice. But it kinda makes sense.

Germans are used to bugged RPGs.
After all they produced some prime examples of that subgenre.

Spoiler

Seriously though, it's probably because PC gaming is very strong in germany. Wouldn't be surprised if marketing targeted poland next.