Incline Echo: new action adventure game where the AI learns from you.

[vortex]

 

[A horse of course]

Is it really an action adventure if you're in the same room the whole game?

 

[vortex]

Is it really an action adventure if you're in the same room the whole game?

It's labeled that way https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=681810803

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Banal boring shit.

 

[A horse of course]

They should make it isometric and market it as "tactical TB stealth". Cuckdex would lap it up.

 

[AlexOfSpades]

Interesting premise, but I hope it goes beyond that.

 

[deama]

Interesting...

 

[Daedalos]

Looks worse than death

 

[HoboForEternity]

looks p boring

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Looks pretentious and will most probably suck

 

[vortex]

http://gamecritics.com/elijah-beahm/interview-with-martin-emborg-of-ultra-ultra/

Spoiler

Elijah Beahm: For those who don’t know, what is Echo?

Martin Emborg: Echo is a third-person science fiction adventure for PC and consoles, created by Ultra Ultra.

“After a century in stasis, the girl En arrives at her destination: A palace out of legend, a marvel of the old civilization eons gone, still awaiting its first human occupants. Out here, using forgotten technologies, she hopes to bring back a life that shouldn’t have been lost.”

The experience starts as a character-driven journey of discovery, but as it unfolds it evolves into something altogether more punishing. Gameplay revolves around stealth and sction, as you face off against the strange workings of the Palace.

In Echo everything has consequence: As you try to wield its magical technologies it becomes apparent that the Palace has a will of its own… It studies everything you do, everything you are to use it against you.

The Palace creates Echoes – exact copies of you in every way. They behave like you and only do the things you do. So, the way you play the game shapes your enemy. If you run, soon the Echoes will get faster. If you sneak, they will get stealthier. If you shoot, they will start to shoot back. The game constantly reacts to your every choice and input.

The Palace “reboots” every few minutes, resulting in a blackout. This blackout-cycle is the rhythm at which the “Echoes” get updated with your latest behavior, learning and unlearning from your actions. During the blackout the palace is blind, giving you the freedom to act without consequence. This is the time to run and gun and do all the things you don’t want the Echoes to learn.

The experience is one of being up against your own choices from the last blackout-cycle, giving you a way of shaping the game from cycle to cycle. It is up to you whether you prefer to keep a low profile or if you choose to go head-on and deal with the consequences later – one thing is certain, you need to keep your wits about you as you face the ultimate enemy: Yourself.

EB: How did Echo come to be?

ME: After having worked in the industry for a long time, starting our own studio felt like it was the next natural step forward. Most of us have known each other for a long time, and we’ve always been talking about game ideas over lunch or beers. And so when the idea of starting our own studio started to take shape, there was this entire backlog of conversations ready to be mined and made into reality. But it was only when the concept of Echo materialized out of that ether, that it all came together. It was the strength of the idea that gave everybody the confidence to take the plunge.



EB: Several games have offered the promise of learning from their players, but none have been quite so literal and close to the reality as Echo. How did you go about designing this facet of ECHO?

ME: Lots and lots of prototyping! There was, of course, a lot of ideas and thoughts about how this should work, but you never know if something works until you’ve tried it. Many ideas sound great, but then turn out to be less so in reality, and sometimes it’s the small throwaway things that turn out to be super cool. So we started out with really simple AI stuff, trying to find the fun in this idea. From there it bloomed into crazy complexity, going all over the map — trying ideas and seeing the systems interact, seeing them gel or collide. And then in the end it turned into a process of cutting away the fat, making it cohesive and robust. We’re still tweaking the AI of course, balancing and polishing, and I suspect we’ll keep doing that until we ship.

EB: Story details have been scarce, other than that protagonist En has been in stasis and is on a mission to the Palace with one other person communicating with her via her suit. Can you give us any further details or hints as to why En is infiltrating the Palace? Is she a thief, or is it something more personal? Also, is her companion a suit AI or does she have a partner on her mission?

ME: It is definitely a personal quest: she is there to revive someone who died. The how and why are what the story revolves around. The other main character is the voice of the Ship that brought her there, parked in orbit.



EB: The majority of your team have a history working at IO Interactive on the Hitman series. While Echo is far more fantastical with its gothic-future setting, there’s still a strong element of open-ended gameplay, challenging AI, and precisely balanced stealth. What is it about this approach to game design that draws you to it?

ME: We didn’t mean to make a game reminiscent of Hitman at all, but I guess it’s in our DNA. That said, I do think that the two are quite different. Playing Echo, you start thinking about your choices in a very literal sense because you always have to stay aware of what your enemy is currently capable of, and how your actions will change your situation. So, a gross simplification would be to say that we have one dynamic AI, where Hitman has many different AIs interacting in a clockwork-like system, and that does make for two very different experiences.



EB: What inspired the art direction for ECHO? It seems almost like a hybrid of Chronicles of Riddick and Remember Me.

ME: It’s always interesting with inspiration, because those titles never entered my mind, but I can totally see where you’re coming from! The original spark for the Palace was The Library of Babel by J. L. Borges, which is a very beautiful and haunting short story that looks at meaning in infinity. I would urge anyone who hasn’t read it, to check it out. But of course films like 2001, Solaris, and Memories are in the mix, as well as a myriad of other things, from fashion designer Alexander McQueen to the animated series Aeon Flux.

 

[WhiteGuts]

"ultra ultra"

 

[Mynon]

Looking good...

 

[Mynon]

 

[Joni Odin von Hassenstein]

Is it female protag only? If so: not gonna play.

 

[I'm Big Into Anal]

yes i too must have a penis

for glory

 

[Forest Dweller]

Tentative incline. Just found out about this game. It just came out on PC, and a PS4 release is due in October.

Launch trailer and gameplay demo:

 

[Forest Dweller]

If you're going to merge my thread with a new one, don't give the old thread my thread title.

 

[The Fish]

It amazes me that a game with such solid graphics is priced like a pixel art platformer. It's a two tiered system with the retarded high budget games being £50 with £150 collectors editions leaving small developers in a race to the bottom. I suppose it's just the death of mid size developers.

Given the biggest expense in playing computer games is your time, it's just about the cheapest form of entertainment aside from masturbation and TV, I would've thought it'd be relatively immune to a price collapse. There are many free games which are too expensive, and a good game can offer hundreds of hours in entertainment which is a decent offer at any reasonable price. Maybe it just shows how modern asset production tools and the unreal engine can facilitate small experienced teams, not to mention the heavy asset reuse in this case; the production costs could be low (though there's a lot of voice acting).

The first forty minutes or so are quite boring and consist of slow walking and talking. Aside from that it seems ok, it's certainly stranger and more ambitious in design than you'd get from a big studio. The gun design is cool, like a shit version of Blame's gravitational beam emitter - it kills in one hit anywhere and passes through enemies so you can kill a row of them but you can't spam it. If you fuck up and must resort to using the gun it comes back to bite you later because of the copying npc system. The inclusion of "blackout" periods is interesting and helps the pacing but they're not entirely seamless which is a little jarring. I haven't played enough to know if the system is easily gameable but it makes you think twice about your actions when you're inexperienced. I doubt the gameplay will develop much and suspect that with more experience I'll just be gunning everything down without much worry.

 

[Great Deceiver]

I played this for about an hour and it was nothing but walking and voiceover exposition, very boring. Game does look very pretty, though.

 

[Edward The Mediocre]

This game gives me an intense urge to find clone on clone porn. Preferably in a orgy.

 

[Ezekiel]

Have you played this? Came out last month on GOG and Steam. It's a super futuristic sci-fi in which you try to get past copies of yourself who imitate your actions. A stealth game. After a slow start, I'm enjoying it. It varies between pretty easy and moderately hard. Your gun only has two shots, but they pack quite a punch and can be replenished at recharge stations. Shooting is generally ill-advised. Get grabbed twice and you're dead.

Some early screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/8Tle3

 

[funkadelik]

Paid shill?

 

[Ezekiel]

Ugh... Fuck this place, I'm done. So many edgelords and shit personalities.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Quick Infinitron !