Game News Frontiers Released on Steam Early Access

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: Frontiers

The Daggerfall-inspired exploration focused RPG Frontiers has been released on Steam Early Acess recently. I think we were supposed to post about this earlier, but better late than never, right?

FRONTIERS blends the feel of first-person RPG classics like Daggerfall with the relaxing tempo and simplicity of a point-and-click adventure. Discover ancient mysteries, live off the land and fight deadly creatures, all in a beautiful, massive open world.



Key Features:

• Massive open world - go anywhere, any time
• Unique relaxing pace and tone
• An exploration-focused main quest that spans an entire continent
• Simple gameplay - no stats or skill trees to memorize (It barely qualifies as an RPG, really)
• Live off the land - hunt, trap, fish and cook dozens of varieties of plantlife (including hallucinogens!) and a dozen varieties of animal
• Minecraft-style item crafting system
• Dozens of skills to discover and learn, including magic, survival and stealth skills
• Hundreds of shops, taverns, homes, caves, castles and other structures to explore
• A haunting soundtrack for every region
• Full mod support

So it's like Daggerfall... minus the RPG?

Anyway, be sure to check out this bearded video back from November if you didn't see it earlier:

​

What I am personally most looking forward to, is the quests that require you to figure out clues and directions on your own, piecing the necessary information together, instead of just following the quest compass. So I hope the game delivers on that, at least.

You can buy Frontiers for what shows up as 14,99€ for me here. (Which should be a bit less for you US-based Codexers.)

 

[pakoito]

Who's taking the dive for the team?

So it's like Daggerfall... minus the RPG?

I'd play it. No RPG is better than Oblivion/Skyrim's RPG part. Even in Nehrim the treks were more enjoyable than the dungeons.

 

[SuicideBunny]

that is one manly beard

 

[pakoito]

that is one manly beard

Unmanly beard is an oxymoron.

 

[SuicideBunny]

not when it's hipsters growing them.

 

[garren]

Railboy
I think the engine uses unity 4 now, are there plans to switch to Unity 5 sometime in the future when it's fully released?

 

[chiefnewo]

Given the lack of an RPG style combat/stat/growth kind of system, it will really live and die on whether it is interesting enough to explore and the lore and "mysteries" are a good enough payoff. I like the idea of roaming a land and discovering things and exploring ancient ruins and whatnot but they need to be good enough at lore/worldbuilding to make it interesting to discover stuff, not just "I walked 5000 miles and all I found was this block pushing puzzle."

 

[Railboy]

Railboy
I think the engine uses unity 4 now, are there plans to switch to Unity 5 sometime in the future when it's fully released?

Never. The only reason I would consider it is to be rid of Unity's horrible, horrible fps-killing terrain tree bug (you know, the one that every major Unity game with trees has been complaining about since last year, the one that drops 20+fps whenever you turn the camera, not a big deal or anything) which they say is fixed in 5. But they also say they'll be fixing that in 4.6.x, so I'm going to stick with the devil I know.

Do I sound bitter? It's because I'm feeling pretty bitter... I just spent another day dealing with the limitations of their engine. In the weeks since releasing the beta I could have been balancing, modeling, sculpting terrain, reworking puzzles, enriching the game. But no. Years into this project and I'm still implementing basic low level bare-bones streaming into this godforsaken engine. It can't even stream music.

/rant

Every day I thank my lucky stars I didn't make this game more complex than it is now. Unity can handle what I'm going for and in the end I think it's all going to turn out fine, but I can tell it was a near thing.

 

[garren]

Appreciate the honesty

 

[Railboy]

You caught me in the middle of a brutal 8-hour profiling session so the time was ripe for honesty blind rage.

 

[flabbyjack]

I like this guy. He's got brass balls.

The game has a lot of bugs, but the beta reflects the intended scope and ambition of the project.

Optimization is a major hurdle. Do you go down to the level of task priorities and prioritized message routing?




Bugs:

• Do not let 'disabled' buttons close the interaction UI when you click on them (e.g. interacting with the well).

Stylistic things:

• Your game should ooze style, so aim for that.
• Add more 'examine' text. My advice is to plan this out and do it all at once, and never ever have to do it again.
  
• Keep that shit low-magic.
• Pigs eyes glow in the dark. Leave it in! Bugs as a feature, bro. Bugs as a feature. Need more lightsources around the camp.
• Don't give into the temptation to throw away the intro and re-do it from scratch unless there are serious technical
• I would definitely replace the Nightdreamer's face makeup with a full black blindfold, and give her traits of either; honed ability to hear/sense her surroundings, or otherwise some magical second sight so she is not unduly hindered. Just a background/lore thing I think has some nice hooks. Badass. She is also a cock junkie who jumps your bone.

http://youtu.be/Sw5zDgHfDOk?t=8m33s
^ This guy's face looks distorted, definitely creepy though if that's what you are aiming for

Edit: Hey there's another indie game popular on the codex

And for the record, there's a rape attempt in the game and a crisis regarding it. What you can't do is to rape people yourself, which was never the intent in the first place or ever.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

420: the game

 

[naossano]

By exploration, do they mean hiking and watching a bunch of empty sceneries ?
They should find a specific word for that. It doesn't feel exploring if they nothing to explore.

 

[garren]

Exploration means exploration, the word itself does not tell if it is fun in-game. What matters is the side objectives and stuff you find while exploring, and does it feel worth your time to explore the different locations. Of course, I don't know that since I haven't tried the game yet.

 

[FUDU]

This sounds perfect for me.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Simple gameplay - no stats or skill trees to memorize (It barely qualifies as an RPG, really)

What a degenerated piece of shit!

 

[naossano]

At least they don't try to hide it.

 

[GloomFrost]

i am still not sure what are you suppose to do in a huge and empty world Yeah you can hunt and craft for a few hours but then what?? It says hundreds of castles and taverns but without hundreds of NPCs and quests what would be the point to visit them. Also dozens of skills and spells to learn so why not to have proper stats and characters builds?? I am so confused.

 

[UglyBastard]

Looks pretty cool, but unfortunately the lack off RPG mechanics is a turnoff.

 

[Eyeball]

No stats or leveling? ZE-RO interest, then. Should not be mentioning Daggerfall in the sales pitch when it's really more of a better looking Minecraft clone.

 

[V_K]

From what I've read in devlogs and such, there is some character development - skills do improve with use, it just doesn't show the numbers.

 

[sser]

You caught me in the middle of a brutal 8-hour profiling session so the time was ripe for honesty blind rage.

Ha ha ha, b-baka. Gamer girl here - I know, I know, a girl. But pro-tip! (PRO-TIP!!) Don't ever use Unity engine againN! *wags finger* Xenonauts was made in a cave with a box of scraps the Diner Dash engine. DESUUUU

 

[thesheeep]

Yes... open world + Unity is a match made in the deepest depth of hell.
I am kinda glad we write our own stuff in C++ anyway. It may be another year until we have anything showable (hence only doable with some $$ buffer), but instancing, culling, Lua scripting, multithreading and open world streaming is not something I would even want to think about in Unity

Good luck with that, anyway :D

 

[flabbyjack]

Python >> Lua

Lua is a bastard child only fit for WoW

Go back to Brazil, Lua.

 

[thesheeep]

Python >> Lua

Syntax-wise, yes. Python is bootiful.
Lua is rather ugly, admittedly.

But Python is unfortunately one of the slowest languages in existence (as proven by an unlimited amount of comparisons, and also admitted by the developers). It is not meant to be fast, but to be easy to use and very flexible. It is just not fit for work in performance critical applications, not if anything depends on the speed of the scripts.
Like ours - hundreds to thousand of AI agents acting at once, or split into some frames, pretty much all gameplay code in Lua for better modding and faster development. We could do more in C++ and use Python for the little rest, but that would cost more development time and modding capabilities.

I love using Python whenever I can, honestly. But I also happen to work on code that needs to be fast, so Python is a big no-no most of the time. If you just develop some office applications or games with little performance needs, go Python. If you need every little nanosecond, but also want scripting... don't go Python.