Game News Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter Update #34: Funded!

[Infinitron]

Tags: OtherSide Entertainment; Underworld Ascendant

The Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter campaign has concluded, with a final sum of $859,056 gathered from 13,974 backers. In the last day's funding rush, the following stretch goals have been unlocked: the Necrotic Graveyard at $775k, the Companion Creatures and Enhanced Music at $800k, a new mini-stretch goal called the Forsaken Webway at $825k, and finally the Dynamic Music & SFX and Resonant Cave at $850k. You can read about all of those in last night's Kickstarter update. Funding for Underworld Ascendant will continue via the newly opened PayPal store on the game's website, with the option of fulfilling additional stretch goals remaining open until the end of 2015. In the latest Kickstarter update, OtherSide explain what's coming up next:

As our Kickstarter campaign comes to an end, we cannot express enough how grateful we are to you, our fans and our community, for having faith in us, backing us, and helping us mold Underworld Ascendant into the game we all want it to be. This experience has been truly amazing for every one of us, something we will never forget!

Now, moving forward, this grand party will head over to our website, where we will continue to keep you updated, continue to have live events, keep the chatter going on our forums, and have new votes for you to share your voice. Together, we will roll forward with the adventure of bringing Underworld Ascendant to life!

We’re also going to continue to crowd-fund the game, so that we can reach at least a few more of the Stretch Goals that are not reached during this Kickstarter. Moving the funding to our website means that we will now begin accepting pledges via PayPal. For those of you who use PayPal and were unable to pledge during the Kickstarter please head over the our online store and join us at last!

Managing Your Pledge and Add-Ons

Over the next month or so, we’ll receive the information from Kickstarter regarding your pledges and this information will become available in our system. We will notify you when this transfer is complete. We expect this process to take several weeks – we appreciate your patience.

Some time after that, you'll be receiving a backerkit survey from us asking you a bunch of questions such as which add-ons you may have selected, get your address information for sending you any physical goods, and many other questions related to your pledge.

While we know many of our existing backers will wish to up their pledges over the coming months, please do not do so until the backerkit survey has gone out. At that time we will have all the information about you in our database that we need for you to begin adjusting your pledge amount.

If you have any questions about this process, please don't hesitate to reach out to us via our website or forums.

What's Next?

After we here at OtherSide take a few brief moments to collect ourselves and perhaps raise a toast in celebration, it will be right back to work with the continued development of Underworld Ascendant.

The first thing we want to do is outline for you, our backers, just what our outlook is for development through the rest of this year. On Monday we will be posting this outline to all members of our forums. We think this will give all our backers the confidence that we mean it when we say we WILL deliver this game in a timely manner, we WON'T get bogged down in feature creep and this WILL be the best CRPG since the first Underworlds.

In addition, sometime in the next week or so, we will be having our first post-Kickstarter community vote. This time we want to lock down the look of the Lizardmen and we know you want to help us. Stay tuned to our website for information on what the looks we are debating are, and how you can help us determine another important design point in the game!
​

As happy as I am to see this campaign succeed, I feel that I have to say a few things about how it was managed. If I had to describe the campaign in two words, the words I'd choose would be: aggressively incongruent. OtherSide Entertainment had half a year to learn from the very best how to run a Kickstarter campaign for a single player RPG. Instead, they've spent the last month trying in vain to extract F2P MMO dollars from single player RPG backers, with an endless parade of Kickstarter exclusives, tiered Kickstarter exclusives, and stretch goals that unlock tiered Kickstarter exclusives. This misunderstanding of their audience has put a significant portion of them off of this campaign - the long awaited Looking Glass revival which should have been one of the glorious crowning events in the history of the Kickstarter era of gaming. OtherSiders: Your mission now is to prove that you're as good at creating games as you are bad at running a Kickstarter. Those of us who didn't cancel our pledges will surely appreciate it.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Good summary. If mindx2 visits them again perhaps he can hide a few copies of it around the office.

I wonder if Garriott is giving them a lot of advice on this stuff from his SotA experience. Would be funny if all these KS exclusives end up being sold as DLC after release.

Still hope they make a great core game and don't spend too much valuable time on the 723 in-game ks items.

 

[Korron]

I kept my pledge despite strongly considering otherwise. Looks like there's nothing to do now but go full fanboi like CyberP. Strap yourselves in it's time to board the hype train.

The micro transactions in this game will revolutionize digital entertainment.

 

[MicoSelva]

I agree with your points mostly Infinitron. Although I think linking this to F2P MMO bullshit is not correct. They probably tried to employ board game kickstarter model in their campaign - and those projects are loaded with KS exclusives and usually tend to drive every backer's pledge to the max (rather than try to find more backers).

 

[Vault Dweller]

As happy as I am to see this campaign succeed, I feel that I have to say a few things about how it was managed. If I had to describe the campaign in two words, the words I'd choose would be: aggressively incongruent. OtherSide Entertainment had half a year to learn from the very best how to run a Kickstarter campaign for a single player RPG. Instead, they've spent the last month trying in vain to extract F2P MMO dollars from single player RPG backers, with an endless parade of Kickstarter exclusives, tiered Kickstarter exclusives, and stretch goals that unlock tiered Kickstarter exclusives. This misunderstanding of their audience has put a large portion of them off of this campaign - the long awaited Looking Glass revival which should have been one of the glorious crowning events in the history of the Kickstarter era of gaming. OtherSiders: Your mission now is to prove that you're as good at creating games as you are bad at running a Kickstarter. Those of us who didn't cancel our pledges will surely appreciate it.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Great write-up at the end there.

Somebody on some other forum described the campaign as "tone deaf". That sums it up pretty aptly for me.

 

[felipepepe]

I understand it must be frustrating, having Star Ctizien with like 500 billion dollars from selling all kinds of in-game stuff while your "LOOKING FUCKING GLASS STUDIOS 2.0" campaign can barely raise 800k... but they are following the same twisted logic as DRM; they are going hard on those that pay to compensate for those who don't... and we know how well that works.

 

[Infinitron]

going hard on those that pay to compensate for those who don't

Well, I think it would have been a legitimate (if controversial) choice to simply raise the minimum pledges for getting the game up a notch. "Yes, there are fewer backers out there for our game than for other games, so the minimum pledge has to be $30 to compensate."

But it takes some balls to do that - though interestingly, it's exactly what Shroud of the Avatar did.

 

[Zed]

Good write-up .ini-tron.

I didn't even pledge but I was on the fence up until I heard they were asking already-backers to increase their pledges.

I hope the game turns out well. I'll buy it if it does.

 

[Alchemist]

Good assessment Infinitron - I agree with your points about how they botched several things in handling the KS, misjudging their target audience being foremost among them. Hopefully lessons learned before they attempt another one down the line.

 

[Zombra]

going hard on those that pay to compensate for those who don't

Well, I think it would have been a legitimate (if controversial) choice to simply raise the minimum pledges for getting the game up a notch. "Yes, there are fewer backers out there for our game than for other games, so the minimum pledge has to be $30 to compensate."

But it takes some balls to do that - though interestingly, it's exactly what Shroud of the Avatar did.

For whatever it's worth, whenever I see a game KS with a high barrier of entry, I wonder, "Greedy? Arrogant? Or just stupid?" It immediately makes me tune out. It seems strange to me that a video game's target demographic would deliberately exclude all the poor white kids in flyover country. SRR, Wasteland 2, and yes, Broken Age all had a $15 ticket price. I'm not saying it can never work - wow! I just looked at SOTA's numbers - but still, it just seems like bad business. I guess every project is different.

Anyway, I'm glad Otherside didn't go this route as it would have meant my tuning this project out as well. As it is, though I withdrew my pledge, I'm still curious to see whether they can make it good despite the stupid marketing, and will be a potential customer down the road.

 

[stony3k]

Good points. I got the feeling that they may have looked at some non-cRPG KS projects (like SOTA and Star Citizen) for their inspiration. My concern is that if they can so misjudge their audience in KS, how do I trust them not to misjudge the audience for their game.

 

[Vault Dweller]

My overall impression was that they didn't really think it through (beyond the physics driven gameplay) and it showed. Obsidian also started vague, wasted a week, but quickly gained the momentum and started talking design and worldbuilding. Otherside didn't and everything, from the watered down updates and watch us play games! crap to the goals and especially rewards reflected it.

 

[Darkzone]

Although I think linking this to F2P MMO bullshit is not correct. They probably tried to employ board game kickstarter model in their campaign - and those projects are loaded with KS exclusives and usually tend to drive every backer's pledge to the max (rather than try to find more backers).

My current evaluation shows that the events / actions of the past 2 to 3 days brought them nearly nothing. The only thing that seems to had an positive influence was the shout out from Torment update, Crowfall, SotA and Star Citizen (around $70k). All other things have been in vain, if not counterproductive. The 4 dollar raise (between last week and today) of the avg. backer pledge is always present at the end of a kickstarter and many ratios stay quiet conserved even in this case.
Now let us look at the boad games and their Kickstarter, like Conan:
You have two tiers $90 Barbarian and $135 King (Kickstarter exclusive box). Both have the same core and both nearly receive the same add ons, King edition has only very few exclusive content, like King Conan himself with the lion, the 4 heroes with their sheets the 15 tiles and additional skeletons. From 52 added things that are for both boxes are only 9 kickstarter exclusive. No scenario was kickstarter exclusive. Even the companion app was for all free tiers. Both tiers are treated nearly equal despite a difference of $45.

Larian has not made such a shit and neither inXile, Obsidian or HBS.

The crown is really the fucking pets, this is content that is digital, it cost only a copy and paste, but still Otherside want to give it only to the people who pledged $75 and more. I hate pets in games, and i never play with them.
But to treat other people who perhaps do not have so much money (yes like you polacks) and still have pledged to this project, like shit, is a no go for me.

 

[agris]

As happy as I am to see this campaign succeed, I feel that I have to say a few things about how it was managed. If I had to describe the campaign in two words, the words I'd choose would be: aggressively incongruent. OtherSide Entertainment had half a year to learn from the very best how to run a Kickstarter campaign for a single player RPG. Instead, they've spent the last month trying in vain to extract F2P MMO dollars from single player RPG backers, with an endless parade of Kickstarter exclusives, tiered Kickstarter exclusives, and stretch goals that unlock tiered Kickstarter exclusives. This misunderstanding of their audience has put a large portion of them off of this campaign - the long awaited Looking Glass revival which should have been one of the glorious crowning events in the history of the Kickstarter era of gaming. OtherSiders: Your mission now is to prove that you're as good at creating games as you are bad at running a Kickstarter. Those of us who didn't cancel our pledges will surely appreciate it.

 

[Blackstaff]

It's pathetic, but even now I'm still on the fence about pledging. The fact is I would fundamentally love to see them do a great survival/emergent/rpg.

But there is just so many incoherent things in their project, that it seems really foolish to pledge. Like the profusion of kickstarter exclusive objects and the co-op stretch goal ( and other multiplayer stretch goals that they were so eager to do...). Both of these things shouldn't be on the table for me to take them seriously on their will to make a dark and hostile survival game like arx fatalis.

If you go straight in it with a glowing doom armor + 3 and three pals roaming around, what's the fucking point ? And did they seriously think that a meager milion dollars can do both a multiplayer game and an emergent rpg right, without sacrificing one of their audience against the other ?

I will see if they deserve my buckaroo near release now.

 

[Zombra]

It's pathetic, but even now I'm still on the fence about pledging.

Not pathetic. It's perfectly manly and respectable to have two conflicting opinions about the same thing.

 

[tuluse]

My overall impression was that they didn't really think it through (beyond the physics driven gameplay) and it showed. Obsidian also started vague, wasted a week, but quickly gained the momentum and started talking design and worldbuilding. Otherside didn't and everything, from the watered down updates and watch us play games! crap to the goals and especially rewards reflected it.

Well I think their pitch is that they're going to be experimenting to see what works. While Obsidian's pitch was they know works and just want to do it again.

Edit: to Infinitron's point, it's not about the game pitch. It's about how they tried to entice people to give more money.

 

[Sceptic]

Have to say that concluding paragraph in the post took me completely by surprise, considering our argument in the other thread less than a week ago.

Anyway I've ben through the peak of elation and the trough of disappointment and anger, and I don't particularly feel like caring about this either way ATM. If they do manage to make a game as good as the KS was terrible then it'll have the honour of being only the 2nd KS game I didn't pledge to but wish I had. If not, well, at least I have the benefit of no surprises.

 

[Darkzone]

I'm between the bargaining and the depression phase, but after the depression comes the acceptance phase.

 

[CyberP]

I understand it must be frustrating, having Star Ctizien with like 500 billion dollars from selling all kinds of in-game stuff while your "LOOKING FUCKING GLASS STUDIOS 2.0" campaign can barely raise 800k...

IKR

I kept my pledge despite strongly considering otherwise. Looks like there's nothing to do now but go full fanboi like CyberP.

Excuse me? To go full fanboi I'd have had to blindly defend the game/their decisions.

 

[Korron]

I kept my pledge despite strongly considering otherwise. Looks like there's nothing to do now but go full fanboi like CyberP.

Excuse me? To go full fanboi I'd have had to blindly defend the game/their decisions.

But.... But.... You said:

I'm hardest, mate.

Sorry but that's an implicit joining of my super sweet hype train fanboi club 2015. I mean just because I dug through your posts and found some reasonable criticism of the KS and am admittedly using a weak quote to condemn you forever to hell doesn't negate your fanboish ways. The tags don't lie. Look, just like every other KS project, the codex is going to need its loonies arguing that this game was more than just mediocre to pretty good for what it is. I know the plebes will cry tears of blood when they see Paul Neurath's magnum opus. You're already like 75% there, so can I get a choo choo?

 

[Coyote]

As happy as I am to see this campaign succeed, I feel that I have to say a few things about how it was managed. If I had to describe the campaign in two words, the words I'd choose would be: aggressively incongruent. OtherSide Entertainment had half a year to learn from the very best how to run a Kickstarter campaign for a single player RPG. Instead, they've spent the last month trying in vain to extract F2P MMO dollars from single player RPG backers, with an endless parade of Kickstarter exclusives, tiered Kickstarter exclusives, and stretch goals that unlock tiered Kickstarter exclusives. This misunderstanding of their audience has put a large portion of them off of this campaign - the long awaited Looking Glass revival which should have been one of the glorious crowning events in the history of the Kickstarter era of gaming.

Yeah, it seems to me that the campaign was poorly executed in a number of ways:

• Some very basic stuff: launching it at the start of/halfway through a work day in the US/western Europe and moves that reeked of desperation like that e-mail they sent out to backers, the piling on of Kickstarter exclusives, and the shifting around of all the stretch goals in the last week.
• The initial pitch was rather lackluster IMO; if it hadn't been for the names involved, I doubt I would have given that KS page a second glance. They were never able to convey that feeling of infectious enthusiasm the way that someone like Fargo does (hell, in that one early video where they introduced one of the devs, he came across as bored out of his mind), and they only began to really flesh out the unique appeal of the game later in interviews that would likely go largely overlooked by anyone who was less than wowed by the initial pitch.
• A lot of little things throughout the campaign pointed to the lack of a coherent vision. Co-op and the KS exclusives in particular came across as poor matches for a game attempting to emulate the feeling of UU.
• Failure to take their audience into account. Again you can point to co-op and exclusives here: they kept pimping the co-op angle in interviews long after backers made it clear that they weren't interested in it for this sort of game, and the ever-increasing number of exclusives gave off a pay-to-win vibe that would certainly be a turnoff to many old-school gamers (as you aptly put it, "trying in vain to extract F2P MMO dollars from single player RPG backers").

Some of those pitfalls can be traced to methods that were clearly aimed at drawing in a wider audience, but there are some other things that they could have done in that vein that I suspect would have been more productive:

• Sticking to concept art rather than using footage from the unfinished game. As much as some of us would rather back something if it can be demonstrated that the devs already have a working prototype, Kickstarter is all about selling ideas (particularly for industry vets who people already trust to be capable of delivering a finished product). And when you're dealing with crowdfunding, it's much easier to sell an idea if you let people use their imagination to fill in the gaps. Show them an unfinished/early version, and they'll hone in on all the flaws instead, which is exactly what we saw here.
• Pushing the Looking Glass revival angle much, much harder than they did. When I talked to people about this Kickstarter, the reactions typically ranged from "Ultima Underworld? Yeah, I heard it was pretty good" to "Ultima Underworld? Never heard of it". But mention that the developers also had lead design roles in the Thief and System Shock series and many went on to work on Deus Ex, and suddenly they'd be speaking in hushed tones. Even if they hadn't played the games, they'd heard enough about them to know that, holy shit, those are some damn good developers. If, as someone said in the other thread, Neurath is too humble to push that angle, I have nothing but respect for that, but a Kickstarter campaign isn't the time to be humble. If they'd capitalized on the reverence people have for the Looking Glass name as effectively as Obsidian utilized people's reverence for the IE games and Fargo exploited anti-publisher sentiment, it could have helped them quite a bit.

To be clear, I personally prefer their decision not to do either of these things. But both of them are strategies that they could have used to draw in more backers without doing nearly as much to alienate their existing base.

 

[Melan]

Through the campaign, they have struck me as people with a more solid grasp on game design than marketing. That's one reason why I was willing to forgive them the utter stupidity of their KS, and focus on the things they have said in interviews, twitch broadcasts and their forums. The second is that even if the project crashes and burns, I don't mind handing $100 to ex-LGS people as a form of thank you.

But ultimately, I expect this to turn out well. They will probably focus their efforts on interactivity and environmental simulation, and come up with a reasonably clean design. If they also do sound well, the graphics may as well look like something out of a 2005 B title.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

I understand it must be frustrating, having Star Ctizien with like 500 billion dollars from selling all kinds of in-game stuff while your "LOOKING FUCKING GLASS STUDIOS 2.0" campaign can barely raise 800k... but they are following the same twisted logic as DRM; they are going hard on those that pay to compensate for those who don't... and we know how well that works.

Now, I know people don't like to hear this argument around here because "graphics" is welcomed more or less like a dirty word...
But why do you think Start Citizen started racking money so quickly when it was presented? Because space sims are a genre with a market appeal far wider than immersive sims/first person RPGs?

I think that's absolutely not the case. It's because SC looked stunning since the first trailer and they kept building on top of that. It was the return of a (tragically ignored) niche genre at the top of its form. It was Chris Roberts coming back to game development after years and making immediately clear that he was going to aim for the stars once again.
"Look at this motherfucker, look at how good it looks. It's a modern Wing Commander as you dreamed it for years. And it's only going to look better over time" (and let's be clear, I'm not even saying they'll necessarily keep all the promises, I'm talking about the pitch).

With UW Ascendant what we got was a bunch of "veterans" who didn't produce shit in years, suggesting to revive a beloved franchise... and then showing off a "pre-alpha prototype" that looked amateurish and out of date at best. That paired with a bunch of confused messages Infinitron highlighted so well in his comment. They also didn't highlighted that well what kind of size and scope they were aiming for.

"OH BUT IT'S A PROTOTYPE, OF COURSE IT'S GOING TO LOOK BETTER IN THE END. WHY PEOPLE DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THAT?".
Well, everything looks "better" at the end of production, but the question is typically "Better to what degree?" and not always the answer is "To a satisfying one".
Why the hell should people trust someone with an unproven track record?

Now, I know there will be some clueless tool blaming me of "commenting just about graphics" and being a shallow person for it, but what annoys me about the underwhelming presentation is not "having my aesthetic sensibility offended by ugliness", it's the confidence that given the legacy of the franchise this could have been a record-breaking Kickstarter capable of competing with games like Torment or Pillars of Eternity on even ground, if only it was presented better to a general audience.
Instead, they'll have to do with barely going past the minimal funding, because of the misguided assumption that "presentation doesn't matter at this stage".