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KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,286
I don't know, but here is the first time, Flarechess is flat out lying to the community.

First she indirectly confirms the KS money was misappropriated to develop Underworld Overlord.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1640918469746964166/#c1640918469747083631

A few posts later, she eats her words and tries to spin it as if using the KS money for UO made the development of UA possible:

Flarechess

"Uh no, I'm actually saying the opposite. The UO project bought time and funding for continuing development on UA." (emphasis mine)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1640918469746964166/#c1640918469750663554

UO sold "1000+" copies (next category is 5000+) with a current price tag of $4.89.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.otherside.underworldoverlord&hl=en_US

Come on, Sam. You did a really good job until now. Don't spoil it.
Ah well, it is not as if he is going to lose anything over it. He will just make another name and post again once it becomes obvious the current one is no longer effective. Internet shills abuse the anonymity of the Internet to perpetuate their frauds. Been like that from the day dot.
 

agris

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 16, 2004
Messages
6,760
Heh, it seems my reasoned speculation hit the nail on the head.

My steam post that Flarechess admits provides insight in how the VR game was developed.

agris said:
I don't think this game has been in development for four years, I think it was under two. I think it was made in ~18 - 24 months of development by a group of people inexperienced with the engine and framework they were working with.

Lets look at some facts.
  • The UA Kickstarter concluded early March of 2015
  • Underworld Overlord (their VR game in the UA universe) was released ~18 months after the KS, in December 2016 (link)
  • So from the release of UOverlord to Nov 15th, you're looking at less than two years, making it ~23 months from the release of UO
I suspect that the KS funds and resulting press coverage were leveraged to develop a prototype of Underworld Overlord, their VR game, to pitch to publishers. See: Nightdive's SS1 as another example of this business model. These VR projects are usually heavily subsidized by the publisher, Google and partners in this (Otherside's) case, so that funding was used to start the real development of UA with anticipated Overlord sales also contributing resources. See: inXile's Mage Tale / BT4 development for another example of this business model. Of course, VR hasn't taken off, and the revenue that was anticipated, and thus funds budgeted, to support UA's development did not materialize.

So there you have it, probably two years-ish of underfunded development.

That being said, I'm sure they were following the inXile model and trying to develop assets and pipelines that were as applicable to both games as possible, and I'm sure there was some work done on UA during 2015 - 2016, but Overlord didn't make itself - it took man hours, attention and focus. And It was made by the Boston team.


As an addendum for the skeptical, when I say there wasn't four years devoted to development, I fully recognize that there were feature and art tests made, likely on a part-time basis by a subset of Otherside Boston. I believe there was a token amount of pre-production / thumb-twiddling happening for the first two years, well represented by them asking the community for help designing the lizard-man language, only to have the dialogue system dropped entirely. That's the process and product of dilettantes.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
I don't know, but here is the first time, Flarechess is flat out lying to the community.

She's not lying. VR hardware manufacturers were throwing money at people to develop games for their platforms back then. As agris mentions, inXile did the same thing.
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
Infinitron She says that "The UO project" contributed funding for *UA* and that doing UO made continuing development of UA possible. That's clearly a lie.

Even in an optimistic case (2,000 copies sold and double the current price), UO made just $20,000 in total revenues. That's revenues, not profit.

To develop UO, according to Chris Siegel, Otherside "added team members locally and partnered with another company" including "one ‘inhouse’ designer, another old LGS hand to help lead the design, and a producer."

https://forums.otherside-e.com/t/underworld-overlord-wtf/9171/4

Even with a Google subsidy, OS has lost money in with UO. It did not contribute any funding to the development of UA. It sucked funds (and probably manpower and other resources) out of the UA project.

They used KS money to make UO, which just like UA is a sh*t game no one plays, and now they are sending their CM out to tell backers that it was all in the interest of developing UA which is clearly a lie.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,228
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
Infinitron She says that "The UO project" contributed funding for *UA* and that doing UO made continuing development of UA possible. That's clearly a lie.

Even in an optimistic case (2,000 copies sold and double the current price), UO made just $20,000 in total revenues. That's revenues, not profit.

To develop UO, according to Chris Siegel, Otherside "added team members locally and partnered with another company" including "one ‘inhouse’ designer, another old LGS hand to help lead the design, and a producer."

https://forums.otherside-e.com/t/underworld-overlord-wtf/9171/4

Even with a Google subsidy, OS has lost money in with UO. It did not contribute any funding to the development of UA. It sucked funds (and probably manpower and other resources) out of the UA project.

They used KS money to make UO, which is a typical sh*t game no one plays, and now they are sending their CM out to tell backers that it was all in the interest of developing UA which is clearly a lie.

It's not about how well the game sold. They were paid to make it. It's kind of like what Epic Games do with their store.
 

Efe

Erudite
Joined
Dec 27, 2015
Messages
2,597
UO was a smashing success and is actually still keeping the company afloat with trickling income.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Matt Davey, programmer who joined the Boston team a half year before the release, is no longer working at Otherside: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdavey/

He was promoted to Principal Engineer after the release.

Hey, he updated his resume.

Looks like Boston's unannounced project is using Unreal.

Principal Engineer
Dates Employed Dec 2018 – Aug 2019
Employment Duration 9 mos


Worked with multiple teams on numerous initiatives, including an Unannounced Project and System Shock 3. Providing high-level engineering direction, planning, support, education, mentorship, and staffing advice.

HIGHLIGHTS

Unannounced Project
• Implemented a best-practices custom Unreal Engine 4 build with UGS pipeline support.
• Supported art, design and development team throughout the transition process to Unreal.
• Designed and implemented a multi-game framework with automated testing (TDD).
• Collaboratively designed and developed unique and innovative cooperative multiplayer mechanics.
• Rapidly developed early gameplay prototype in Unity game engine.

System Shock 3
• Wwise [audio] integration development and support; including custom occlusion and obstruction system design with dynamic portal functionality.
• Environmental lighting and mesh renderer optimizations and support.
• Additional engineering tasking.

Miscellaneous
• Developed relations with vendors to support collaborative technology sharing.
• Designed and implemented a multi-stream multi-project perforce infrastructure.
• Designed and implemented a TeamCity CI build system.
• Overhauled office network infrastructure to support future growth (UniFi).

Senior Engineer
Dates Employed May 2018 – Dec 2018
Employment Duration 8 mos

Engaged originally to provide audio integration development and support. Responsibilities quickly expanded to refactoring and owning numerous systems on the project, transitioning into a senior role supporting the team as needed.

HIGHLIGHTS

Underworld Ascendant
• Designed and implemented a post-launch save game system.
• Implemented full world state persistency across all levels in the game.
• Created a dynamic lighting and systems streaming solution allowing for large singular levels.
• Lead performance/optimization strike team.
• Improved quest system/tooling to be more designer centric with improved flexibility and workflows.
• Optimized existing audio integration to prevent runtime hiccups.

Miscellaneous
• Developed a recommended frame budget for use with console and pc deployment targets.
 

BEvers

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 14, 2018
Messages
808
The're still unable to publish the console hotfixes.

August 5 2019 Weekly Update!

Morning everyone!

Sadly, same PS4 and Xbox One publishing build blocker as last week. We received some suggestions from both companies, including re-uploading new sdks, so we’ll be watching loading bars this morning to see if those are ready. Once they are, we’ll let you know when the next console hotfix is out.

On a similar note, the PC hotfix is still lined up to go live when we have the green light from Mac and Linux. So far, QA had just finished doing a rough preliminary pass on the PC version that would set to go live with Mac and Linux, which is promising, and we’re waiting on some of those bug fixes to be pushed through.

On my end, still finishing up that Making of UA DVD. I got more footage of Tim and Will last week with questions I’ve seen throughout the community, and some of which were submitted by Kickstarter backers on Discord. (Obviously not every question can be answered, but I tried to squeeze in as much as I could.)

I’m in Vancouver this week, so my replies are going to be 3 hours later than usual.
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
Community manager comes up with version #3 for why the game launched in a totally broken state (or is it #4 or #5? I lost track).

"I'd also like to remind people how QA works. QA was the MOST aware of the state of the game at each interval, but that does not mean they have control over the launch date. It was the combined fault of poor communication between teams and misunderstandings between multiple levels that allowed UA to ship in November. There were internal misunderstandings about the game's state, we were mildly crunching and exhausted as it was, and we trusted without verifying for ourselves." (emphasis in original)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1640918469746964166/?ctp=2#c1640918469766291125

First it was "we thought the game was ready" then it was "505 forced the launch date upon us." Now it seems to be "QA was aware of everything, but it was all a big misunderstanding."

This has to be another lie because they noted dozens of bugs and broken features in their launch post.


Everyone was well aware of the state of the game in Nov 2018, and if the CM hopes to be a CM elsewhere after OS fires her, she better stop lying to the community now.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
They're right that it's not QA's fault. QA could have(and likely did, considering how many issues there are) reported many bugs that simply went unfixed. Is it the programmer's fault for not fixing them? Again, no. They simply may not have had enough time to fix them.
But let's assume the worst: Even if QA did a terrible job, it's still not QA's fault. Even if the programmers did a terrible job at fixing bugs, it's still not their fault.

Management is the one in charge of making sure people are doing their jobs correctly and keeping the projects on track. It's management's fault for what happened — either through allowing employees to do it, or purposely releasing an unfinished project with unrealistic deadlines.
 

Efe

Erudite
Joined
Dec 27, 2015
Messages
2,597
its backers like lobar that ruined this game.
forced OE to release it in a hurry because of their harassment campaign.
its sad these people lost their job as a result.
 

BEvers

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 14, 2018
Messages
808
its sad these people lost their job as a result.

Apparently it was a mixed bag anyway:

Untitled.png
 

baud

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 11, 2016
Messages
3,992
Location
Septentrion
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
if the CM hopes to be a CM elsewhere after OS fires her, she better stop lying to the community now.

I don't think telling the truth is an important skill for CM. Rather following the party line, putting out fires before they spread too much, doing a bunch of miscellaneous tasks unrelated to CM...
 

Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,286
They're right that it's not QA's fault. QA could have(and likely did, considering how many issues there are) reported many bugs that simply went unfixed. Is it the programmer's fault for not fixing them? Again, no. They simply may not have had enough time to fix them.
But let's assume the worst: Even if QA did a terrible job, it's still not QA's fault. Even if the programmers did a terrible job at fixing bugs, it's still not their fault.

Management is the one in charge of making sure people are doing their jobs correctly and keeping the projects on track. It's management's fault for what happened — either through allowing employees to do it, or purposely releasing an unfinished project with unrealistic deadlines.
Depends. I have seen companies where the techs basically believe that they are too big for the company to fire, and they are right. The company went for a "lean and mean" model and went too lean, so the loss of even 1 guy would be catastrophic for their committed deadlines. The techs understood this, and instead of being the lowest rank in the company, they basically turned into union bitches. Nothing management can do once that hits.
 

Katana1000S

Angrier OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Oct 31, 2018
Messages
145
This Efe person, is either a dedicated shill troll, or absolutely retarded ??

Seriously.

What was most definitely a small part of UA's ruin was the shill beta testers they hired or paid peanuts or even nothing, absolute ball sucking shill testors who were so delighted to be part of something, they would be scared to say a bad word, those fuctards need to be exposed for the lying groveling scum they are.

I forget the individual names, but they surfaced again in their forums later on once the first version was publicly released ... and they did nothing but grovel and plead it was all fine and Rosy, on track and looking perfect, they really did ... if anyone doubts me, go look at their forums where I and other disgruntled customers clashed swords with one of their official beta testers in particular, it was just grovel grovel grovel from him, those morons are in part responsible for this disgusting fraud of a game, if the Devs listen to that false feedback, they start believing it, but it is of course the devs fault for hiring such known shill's too.

Indeed, and after this, it was not long before the Devs started banning and deleting accounts of people who spoke ill of their precious job prospects, not their pathetic game, they had started to realise the gravity of the situation and nobody, not even on steam was buying this bunch of crap in the numbers they had hoped for.

I've done beta testing for both PC software and hardware in the past, have always gave honest feedback and if the devs don't like that, too bad, mostly it was appreciated, but for the dishonest devs of UA, its history now that they took on board dishonest known groveliing beta testers too, these guys really need to hand in their cards (both testers and Devs) and go seek different employment, the lies after lies they told us, the changing of story's and massive contradictions with what they say, these disgusting lying people do not deserve to mess up another classic game series like SS3.
 
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Cael

Arcane
Joined
Nov 1, 2017
Messages
20,286
This Efe person, is either a dedicated shill troll, or absolutely retarded ??

Seriously.

What was most definitely a small part of UA's ruin was the shill beta testers they hired or paid peanuts or even nothing, absolute ball sucking shill testors who were so delighted to be part of something, they would be scared to say a bad word, those fuctards need to be exposed for the lying groveling scum they are.

I forget the individual names, but they surfaced again in their forums later on once the first version was publicly released ... and they did nothing but grovel and plead it was all fine and Rosy, on track and looking perfect, they really did ... if anyone doubts me, go look at their forums where I and other disgruntled customers clashed swords with one of their official beta testers in particular, it was just grovel grovel grovel from him, those morons are in part responsible for this disgusting fraud of a game, if the Devs listen to that false feedback, they start believing it, but it is of course the devs fault for hiring such known shill's too.

Indeed, and after this, it was not long before the Devs started banning and deleting accounts of people who spoke ill of their precious job prospects, not their pathetic game, they had started to realise the gravity of the situation and nobody, not even on steam was buying this bunch of crap in the numbers they had hoped for.

I've done beta testing for both PC software and hardware in the past, have always gave honest feedback and if the devs don't like that, too bad, mostly it was appreciated, but for the dishonest devs of UA, its history now that they took on board dishonest known groveliing beta testers too, these guys really need to hand in their cards (both testers and Devs) and go seek different employment, the lies after lies they told us, the changing of story's and massive contradictions with what they say, these disgusting lying people do not deserve to mess up another classic game series like SS3.
Pretty sure that Efe is one of those people who, if the target of their hate says the sky is blue, they will disagree vehemently. Efe's target happens to be MasterLobar.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Like Efe mentioned, there is plenty of evidence that Ultima overlord is a huge success. In fact, there is mounting evidence that Ultima Ascendant was indeed profitable. One can hope a sequel is in the works.

People like Lubar are ruining it for actual gamers.
 

Efe

Erudite
Joined
Dec 27, 2015
Messages
2,597
i have nothing against him and definitely dont hate him.
if its fine when hes making wild statements... am i not allowed a little bit of fun here?

and certainly sky is not always blue....:argh:
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
Peace, Efe, I don't hate you either. I don't hate the shills. I don't even hate those devs.

In fact, I have to thank them. I would never have had as much fun with a real UU sequel as I had posting on the Codex.
 
Possibly Retarded The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jul 9, 2014
Messages
1,114
Location
Ancient Aliens Spaceship
Its huge discount on Steam now [around 6 euro]. I wonder about buying this game [mainly becouse of my Origin UU I & II sentiment] and add it to my Crpg collection of already around 350 rpg titles. Can someone point me if it's worth it, i mean does story is anywhere near Ultima , how's gameplay. I know there are tons of materials around but to have word from seasoned Codexers is worth more than any internet review .
 

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