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KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
4 months and 2 updates after launch:

Do NOT buy this game - it's TRASH

Couldn't agree more with the professional reviews.

It's a pile of trash and one of the biggest let-downs for a 20 year sequel in well, 20 years. It's so glitchy it's hard to believe. I would die for so reason, constantly. Just bumping a wall in a way they didn't foresee. Insane.

My stash inventory was wiped by the game at least 5 times, countless perks didn't trigger, quests would break 50% of the time having to quit and re-gain them, not to mention how klunky the engine, movement and combat are.

Game also ran like crap on a newly built top of the line system. I run everything else smooth as ice on ultra on a 2k monitor.

There's what, 4 enemies total and and 3 NPCs total? What a joke. 2 are basically stationary, one for skills one for garbage equipment, the other talks to you about quests, barely.

I never even figured out what putting aether cores in that machine did. Seems to have no real effect besides a sound effect. Great design right there!

There's no story-line npcs to talk to, get quests from, etc, just the main one that magically appears one level down each time you finish a main quest.

The game world is about as generic and robotic as you can imagine. There's NO life to it. Here's a maze, spawn in some enemies, and boom, there's each level in a nutshell. I NEVER got factions to work no matter how many faction quests I did.

50% of the spells I created, I never figured out what they did. There's only one ranged offense spell, and it's garbage.

Chests are glitchy as hell, pop up text on items obscures each other's little windows (how hard would this be to fix??? - I'm a principal SE, so, easy!), same text shows 1/2 way off my screen. Talk about amateur coding and design.. Level loading blares sound for a couple seconds every load, and a million other glitches. Those things that take the mana cores around the game, almost all of them were broken and didn't open.

I could go on an on... I agree with all the 1/5 and 1/10 reviews. Frustration and disappointment is all this game truly offers.

Also, my game ended per-maturely when it wasn't supposed to, and then it wiped my saved game away with autosaves, so BOOM, uninstalled. F this♥♥♥♥♥♥

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1848072002761647072/
 

Sacibengala

Prophet
Joined
Aug 16, 2014
Messages
1,098
This piece of crap is on gog yet? Fixed? At least playable? Or these suckers are announcing systemshock 3 with this massive stain and nothing will be done about it?
 

Curratum

Guest
They got turned down from GOG, for obvious reasons. Not fixed. Playable is a stretchy term.
 

Shadowfang

Arcane
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
2,002
Location
Road to Arnika
Shadorwun: Hong Kong BattleTech
Incline of GOG.

I would have loved to see this game as a legitimate successor of Ultima Underworld. I played it for the first time back on 2014 and despite it's age it still left a good impression on me.

Good thing the indie scene left me more games than I have time to play. I have a considerable backlog and can afford to be picky.

Is there anything like this in the making?
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
As a backer, perhaps most bothersome is repeatedly being treated like a complete idiot. Latest example (on the issue of new types of creatures):

If only we had more water for the Lurkers to swim around in :’(

The current list of creatures we’re looking at need to make sense for the Abyss layouts, be flexible, and have different behaviors from the prevalent Skeletons.

https://forums.otherside-e.com/t/march-19-weekly-update/9987/4

If only we had more water... :oops:

YOU GUYS ARE GAME DESIGNERS. YOU CAN TURN A PUDDLE INTO AN OCEAN IN AN INSTANT.
 

Nyast

Cipher
Joined
Jan 12, 2014
Messages
609
What's funny is that they don't need to change anything. There are plenty of areas with water in the levels. Rofl.
 

Katana1000S

Angrier OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Oct 31, 2018
Messages
145
Decided to give this train wreck of a charade of a stupid game one last look today ... I paid for it, want my moneys worth ... fat chance I know.

So fresh install on Steam, because it was crash city last time, fresh install and was surprised to see my old saved game there, saw older saved games were there too, decided to start again though ... to be sure, to avoid patch glitches ... so, off we go into the Abyss once more (if only) slightly different intro, but still pure crap gameplay ... I did about 15 minutes and was needing a break ... thought OK, time for a save, lets see if the save system finally works now ... came back no more than 15 mins later, went to resume gameplay and my controls were reversed ... before when I used W on keyboard it was fine but then made me go backwards, same for side to side stuff A should be slide left, D should be slide right ... it was other way around... spent ages in control menu ... nothing was making a difference ... also the screen resolution dropped down to silly levels, am lucky enough to own a high powered rig, its built for intense flight simulation, DCS ETC, I7 8700K @ 5 GHz, 32 GB ram, Titan X pascal 12 GB and 4K monitor ... absolutely no problems with anything else, but this stupid game could not hold the resolution, it kept going down to default resolution stuff.

Stuck at it though, got my 4K res to stick, was getting somewhere and guess what? it crashed to desktop ... bang, just like that.

Whatever these arseholes do, wherever they may roam after this I will make a point of exposing their lying cheating ways as regards UA and for sure point folk away from SS3 too.

Its my considered opinion these people are nothing more than rotten crooks, out for a fast buck and now they want to try same with SS3.

Jail these people ... jail them!

Make an example of them!
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
It is also clear by now why they lied about the true state of the game all the way to release. Starbreeze had a cancellation option. They had to wait as long as possible and skim as much money as possible from Starbreeze before all the incompetence and mismanagement at OS Boston comes to light.

They were afraid, Starbreeze would ask inconvenient questions, so they kept the UA scam under the rug for as long as possible --- or more precisely until 505 said enough is enough.

Btw, 30-day reviews are down again to "mostly negative" (33%). But of course all those positive reviews popping up right after Update 2 that pushed that number to 75% were all legit, right?
 

thesheeep

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 16, 2007
Messages
9,939
Location
Tampere, Finland
Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Torment: Tides of Numenera Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
But the philosopher kings in the Ivory Tower are still happy:



This sort of thing is such a cop out.

The reason why people can claim "hey great ideas are easy, I have heaps of them!" is because they don't have to prove that they're good ideas. Most of the time they're just not.

Well, it's not really a cop out, is it? A cop out from what?
Good ideas ARE much easier than good executions. Also, the "idea" of a game is usually a pretty high-level thing, a concept that fits on two sheets of paper max. I'm fairly sure their idea for UA wasn't nearly as bad as the product turned out.
Something like how save games are done is more of a detail and part of the execution, if you ask me. It is not usually a core concept of the game.
 

Max Heap

Arcane
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
617
So what happened to those stretch-goals? Especially the content relevant ones...

I know the underswamp is in. So is the "intelligent" Lizardman race. Without those the game would have significantly less content (or NPCs).
But what happened to the "Resonant Caves"? I believe via paypal pledges they should have even reached the Necroplis stretch-goal.

Not that I expect anything, but any word on that at all?
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2010
Messages
3,524
But the philosopher kings in the Ivory Tower are still happy:



This sort of thing is such a cop out.

The reason why people can claim "hey great ideas are easy, I have heaps of them!" is because they don't have to prove that they're good ideas. Most of the time they're just not.

Well, it's not really a cop out, is it? A cop out from what?


It's a cop out by not having to take responsibility. Because execution has so many external factors it's easier for people to accept something was poorly executed because it doesn't necessarily reflect on them. You can't do that with ideas so it's about having to accept your own mistakes. Or pretending that all ideas are easy and effortless and only matter in execution. Good way to deflect responsibilty too.

Good ideas ARE much easier than good executions. Also, the "idea" of a game is usually a pretty high-level thing, a concept that fits on two sheets of paper max. I'm fairly sure their idea for UA wasn't nearly as bad as the product turned out.
Something like how save games are done is more of a detail and part of the execution, if you ask me. It is not usually a core concept of the game.

Sure having a good idea is easier than executing it. Usually it is, yes. But you can't execute something and make it turn out brilliant when it's a fundamentally bad idea.

Ideas are big and small, they're dreamy and they're practical, they're technical and they're intuitive, and they're good and bad. You can try to split hairs on where an idea ends and where the execution begins but this example was a bad idea for the game, period. Can't pretend they just failed to execute. There are hundreds of such examples out there
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
Community manager reveals UA budget was in the neighborhood of $5-6 million.

Shock3's original budget was around $12-13 million from Starbreeze [...]. UA's total budget has been less than half of that.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1848072002772540554/#c1769259642860738259

If I remember correctly the KS was ~ $700k and the game has probably generated revenues of $250,000 (optimistic estimate) --- and there is the updating and patching since launch plus the upcoming console version, which OS admitted they are paying with management/owners own money (probably the $3.5 million series A stock sale last autumn).

UA cost 505 and OS a massive amount of money.
 

Nyast

Cipher
Joined
Jan 12, 2014
Messages
609
But in whose pockets did that money end up ? Certainly not the Unity intern that coded the entire thing. Neither the artists that made the plastic floating lizards.
 

Nyast

Cipher
Joined
Jan 12, 2014
Messages
609
The numbers don't even add up. If UA took $6M over 4 years for 15 full-time developers, each developer would have been paid an average $100K/year.

We know for a fact that they put the project on hold for half that time, and that less than 15 devs worked full-time on it, and the salaries certainly didn't amount to $100K/year.

Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
The numbers don't even add up. If UA took $6M over 4 years for 15 full-time developers, each developer would have been paid an average $100K/year.

We know for a fact that they put the project on hold for half that time, and that less than 15 devs worked full-time on it, and the salaries certainly didn't amount to $100K/year.

Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.
Did you include hookers and blow in your calculations?
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
I take "less than half" as "not half, but close to half". If it was one-third or one-fourth, one wouldn't say "less than half", right.

If we take the lower bound for SS3 ($12 million), it's reasonable to assume "less than half" means something in the range $4.5-5.9 million.
 

MasterLobar

Angry OtherSide Refugee
Joined
Feb 17, 2019
Messages
358
Location
Killorn Keep
Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.

Good point...doesn't really add up. But some further expenditures I could think of:
- Office space in Boston for 10-15 people (I'd say at least 100k a year)
- Software, hardware, licenses (h/t lukaszek)
- Travel expenditure
- Support staff and other overhead costs (legal advice, personnel management, accounting etc.)
- External services (e.g., the UI and inventory symbols were procured from an external provider)
- Expenditures for marketing and sales
- Employee benefits (social benefits, insurance etc.)

And perhaps the average salary is closer to 80k. I don't think Tim Stellmach works for 60k and the higher folks, Game director etc., won't either.

So let's say 10 x 80k for 3 years makes $2.4 million plus rent and the other stuff...could well be close to 4 million.

Also note "budget" doesn't mean that all the money was necessarily spent.
 

Nyast

Cipher
Joined
Jan 12, 2014
Messages
609
That's why I talked of average. There's no doubt the executives and main engineers got a higher salary than that. 100K or above.

But then you've got a bunch of artists ( none of which that seemed particularly experienced ), QA testers ( lol ), etc.. Certainly their salary wasn't 80K+ too ? That'd be far above industry average.

It didn't feel like they did a lot of marketing on their own either. Wasn't that 505's job ? Unless 505 expenses were included in the budget ( that'd make no sense, the way he talked about it was about the development budget, not what third-party companies had spent ) it can't amount to a high number.

Software, hardware and licenses costs are spread over many years, can't amount to much per year either ( at least relatively to salaries ).
 

BEvers

I'm forever blowing
Joined
Aug 14, 2018
Messages
808
Having also worked at Dragon's Eye Productions, I can say that the programming team and web development team were almost all volunteers also. There was very little managing, and quite a bit of polite asking. But I will admit, it looks good on a resume.

Apparently he was one of the few paid employees on Furcadia:

Untitled.png
 

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