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KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

Filthy Sauce

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 26, 2016
Messages
614
I came here to see how this thread is doing. I wanted to see some good old fashion Underworld discussion. Instead, I see someone posted a pic of a twink jerking his cashew sized pee pee. People kept quoting the post, thus spamming the pic of his pee pee jerking. At first I was disappointed... but then I realized it was appropriate.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
This is so weird: https://otherside-e.com/wp/underworld-ascendant-development-roadmap-december-2018/

Underworld Ascendant Development Roadmap – December 2018+

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Greetings, Ascendants!

Today we are sharing our post-launch development roadmap beginning with Update 1, which will plan to go live next week. Our goal is to address the biggest issues brought up by the community and to improve the overall quality of the game.

We have also included our plans for Update 2, which will go live early next year. Further details and timing are outlined below.

UPDATE 1 – Next week (Pending QA Review)
Save system

We’ve completely overhauled Underworld Ascendant’s save game system based on player feedback. The goal is to ensure your efforts as you adventure through the Abyss, particularly during quests, are saved.

Under this new system, you will be able to save your progress anywhere in the game (with a couple exceptions) from the Pause Menu.

When you save a game, you will retain your location in a level, whatever steps you’ve completed toward a quest and all items and equipment you’ve collected in your inventory. Enemy positions, health and more will also be saved.

A full description can be found in the Save Game Details section at the end of this post.

Combat
We have refined Combat to make it more dynamic and responsive and to add more variety to attacks.

First, we are changing the way directional attacks are being handled. Now, every player will be provided with these attacks at the beginning of the game. Instead of using skill points to unlock these attacks, skill points will now make these attacks more powerful.

A balance pass on weapon damage and enemy health has been made with an aim to making combat more engaging, particularly in early levels.

Some initial improvements to AI have been implemented and we have plans for bigger updates in the new year.

Quests and Levels
Many immersion-breaking holes and seams have been removed and levels have more refined and more varied enemy populations.. Pluto’s Gate and Upper Eberus have received a number of enhancements to improve playability and make them feel more “lived in”.

Items
You’ll also see some weapon and loot changes in this update. An item’s wear will now be more apparent, with weapons showing damage wear over time as well as appearing broken when they have reached that state. We improved loot drops in the world as well as weapon availability in Aelita’s shop.

Player Movement
In update 1.03 we made changes to improve player movement. This included the addition of swimming, reduced keyboard and mouse input lag and better transitions into and out of water. Those fixes along with Update 1’s increased base player speed has helped make player movement more responsive and more fluid.

Other Improvements
We’ll give more details in the update Build Notes next week, but some highlights include saved key binding preferences, better visualization of which skills have been learned, the ability to learn skills sooner and more.
UPDATE 2
February 2019

Our overall goal for Update 2 next year is to continue to make the game more interesting, more fun, easier to understand, and more polished. We will continue to improve things like combat, AI and levels. We will also focus efforts on player progression, adding variety to the gameplay and improving the overall player journey through the course of the game.

Most importantly, we will continue to gather feedback from our fans and players after Update 1 to see other areas where we can continue to improve the game.

Here are highlights of what we are planning for Update 2:

Combat and AI
We will continue to make improvements to combat to make it more fun and engaging—please continue to give us detailed feedback as you play! On the AI front, we’re planning to improve behavior, responsiveness, communication to players and navigation. Our goal is to make enemy behavior more interesting and more natural to players.

Meta Game
We are evaluating ways to improve the overall player experience during a full play-through to better communicate requirements to complete the game and also reduce the complexity around what players are supposed to be doing to stop Typhon.

Levels
We will continue to look at improvements to levels, including adding more enemies, environmental storytelling and potentially streamlining the layout of Marcaul.

Quests
Our goal is to make quests more interesting and less repetitive. We are also scoping out improvements to player experience in the beginning of the game through enhancements to Pluto’s Gate and Saurian’s Challenge to expose players to fun gameplay elements more quickly.

Other
We’re looking to continue to make the game easier to understand (aka better tooltip text), improve performance, improve load times, and continue to fix bugs

There you have it, our roadmap for the next two updates. Beyond that, our plans will take shape as we gather more feedback from the community and evaluate the game’s progress. If you have constructive feedback on Update 1, please check out the discussion here.

Thank you!

The Underworld Ascendant Team

ADDENDUM: UPDATE 1 SAVE SYSTEM DETAILS
The following are the current build notes for the Update 1 Save System. Please note that some details may change between now and when it goes live.

You will be able to save your progress anywhere in the game from the Pause Menu.

The new system saves the following:
  • World State
    • Enemies, chests, doors, levers, chandeliers, torches, sconces, braziers, and water level will save their states and location
    • All spawned items (e.g., weapons, food, etc.) including location and position
    • Silver Sapling location and status
    • Enemy Health
    • Enemy status effect with durations
    • Door damage
    • Combustibles will remain lit
    • Gate / Portcullis state (up / down / in transit)
  • Quest State
    • The new system will save and restore the current state of the quest, including the required items and enemies as necessary. If a player saves after finishing objectives, this objective will be saved.
  • Player State
    • Position, rotation, crouching
    • Current health/damage
    • Current Mana
    • Status effects
    • Inventory
    • Hotbar
    • Stash
    • Known spells
    • Faction Favor
    • Influence
    • Completed quests
    • Skills
    • Held items
    • Player session stats associated with level progress (e.g., enemies killed)
    • Existing player stats associated with prior level progress
  • A few things are not saved:
    • Arrows that are not at rest
  • Spells in the middle of being cast
  • Important Notes:
    • Saving is disabled when the player is off the ground or within 15 meters from enemies.
    • We are still working on saving in Marcaul. It currently does not save player position or world state, but does save inventory, stash, skill point changes, etc. in addition to saving quests completed (as a result of Hap sending you to the Midnight Forum), but you will start at the Ring of Portals when you re-load.
 

Sinatar

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Joined
Jan 25, 2014
Messages
569
Funny that all through alpha and beta when backers were bitching about the save system they literally said it would be "impossible" to change it.
 

PhantasmaNL

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Messages
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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria
Funny that all through alpha and beta when backers were bitching about the save system they literally said it would be "impossible" to change it.

That is a standard developer response. When i get an RFC that is more than a quick fix and somewhat complex, i sometimes use 'impossible' or equivalents. I request some time to thoroughly analyze the problem and after that report that, while requiring near superhuman (or Neanderthal if you prefer) intellect and programming prowess, it can actually be done. And who saves the day again? Now can i get that end of year bonus? Thanks alot.

OT, they should have delayed release, do an EA to get some funds and then work on the issues mentioned in the update.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
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Grab the Codex by the pussy
They're putting a brave face on that update, but I have a strong feeling that a lot of those sad sacks will be going from Underworld Ascendant to Unemployed Dependent pretty soon.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Funny that all through alpha and beta when backers were bitching about the save system they literally said it would be "impossible" to change it.

That is a standard developer response. When i get an RFC that is more than a quick fix and somewhat complex, i sometimes use 'impossible' or equivalents. I request some time to thoroughly analyze the problem and after that report that, while requiring near superhuman (or Neanderthal if you prefer) intellect and programming prowess, it can actually be done. And who saves the day again? Now can i get that end of year bonus? Thanks alot.

OT, they should have delayed release, do an EA to get some funds and then work on the issues mentioned in the update.
that's what interns are for
that and sending them to get you food from a fastfood place 20 miles away
 

Big Wrangle

Guest
Can't wait for the Frankenstein experiment that will be Underworld Ascendant: Stygian Edition.
Buy Arx Fatalis
 

ADL

Prophet
Joined
Oct 23, 2017
Messages
3,682
Location
Nantucket
I've only played 40 minutes of this but what I played was decent. Is this salvageable with updates? I mean it wasn't offensively bad with the hardware overhead to stablize the awful performance and it's not like there's too many immersive sims being made these days.
 
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Shackleton

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Can we just hurry up and get to the next page already? Every time I open this thread from alerts the spoiler isn't quick enough and I get the eye bleach of Razortwink sitting there holding his little chipolata.

:abyssgazer:
 

fantadomat

Arcane
Edgy Vatnik Wumao
Joined
Jun 2, 2017
Messages
37,087
Location
Bulgaria
Can we just hurry up and get to the next page already? Every time I open this thread from alerts the spoiler isn't quick enough and I get the eye bleach of Razortwink sitting there holding his little chipolata.

:abyssgazer:
Hahaha hate to break it to you,but we are already on the next page,you must be ignoring quite a lot of people to be on the same page as razorcunt and his little saber. Unless you mean the quote.
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
Sawyerite
Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,656
Professional Videogame Content Outsourcing Closer to Home. Austin, TX and Monterrey, MX.

Contracting their art to Mexicans working for cheap, guess it had to be done with their budget. :lol:

If more game industry chumps lose their jobs to Mexicans, then good, they deserve it.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Yeah, no way they could produce the game with the depth and detail he describes in this video with the money they raised, it was all a pipe dream.
Average programmer on the US costs 85000 dollars on a year of work, even if they cut corners and hired a bunch of mexicans, if those mexicans work on the US, they will still cost alot even if a bit less than a decent programmer and they might not have been worthy anyway as a bad programmer is worse than no programmer at all. Those 900.000 dollars they got was enough to pay 8 people working on a project for 1 year, assuming zero other costs (not realistic at all) just to simplify things and 8 cheap mexicans may not be worth 2 decent experienced programmers.

Even assuming they got enough money from a publisher for one more year of development, 2 years of work for 8 or so people working full time, not counting temporary contributors, they didn't have what it took and or should have re-scoped the project o be realistic on 2 years of work for 8 or so people or do game development outside the US (what brings alot of other challenges).

Here on Brazil, a programmer costs more or less 12000 dollars a year, of course, the biggest challenge is to find people with experience on video games as our gaming industry is really, really small and Brazil is definitely a third world country with all the nice third world problems but it could be done but that would mean 2 years very far from home but the end result would be a really nice Ultima Underworld 3, probably a very buggy Ultima Underworld 3 but at least not the joke that Underwolrd ascendant was. I bet Bulgaria is as cheap if not more cheap than Brazil, Ukraine too, the average monthly wage on Estonia is 1500,00 euros (could be wrong, didn't research alot on this so take it with a grain of salt) and with access to first world luxuries. I have no doubt that CD Projekt wouldn't be able to do Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 on the US.

Sorry guise, the reality is that Owlbear delivered the massive incline that Pathfinder was because of ruskies wages and Phoenix Point is moving well because of eastern europe wages, if the developer was promising the moon and the sky but planned to do all this comfortably on California and didn't get millions and millions of dollars to pay the astronomical californian costs, he was a fool, an idiot, an irresponsible or a charlatan, on any case, shouldn't be trusted with money.
 

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